Business efficiency should be a top priority for every single company on the planet, whether it’s a public or private organization.

Because it really doesn’t if you’re an ecommerce brand, brick and mortar operation or a tradesperson, if you don’t run your company efficiently then you won’t get the most out of it.

Indeed, it could be more serious than this — you might not just make less money than you could, you may generate less capital than you need to be able to survive.

Tracking tools record data that you can interpret and use to spot areas of your company that are being run inefficiently.

There’s a huge number of tools you can choose from and a wide array of areas of your business you can use them on. We’ve highlighted four examples:

• Time tracking tools
• Website tracking tools
• SEO tracking tools
• Fulfilment tracking tools

While this doesn’t run you through every step of a business, it does take you on a logical journey — from putting the foundations in place to getting your products to your customers.

We explain how you can use each of these tools, providing specific examples and demonstrating the value they offer to your business.

Time tracking tools: for employee efficiency

The foundation of a good business is ensuring that tasks are completed efficiently.

Whether you sell products or services, the price you charge customers is informed by the amount of work it takes your business to give them what they want. If it takes too long then your profit margins will slip.

This means if your workers take too long to complete their tasks then it could be hugely damaging to your company. Time tracking tools are a great way to ensure tasks are completed at a good speed and this is how you can use them.

HourStack is our example tool. While it’s not the only one on the market, it’s routinely held up as one of the best time tracking tools. It allows you to create tasks and assign them to projects. For example, you could have a ‘payroll’ task and assign it to the ‘finance’ project.

Your employees can add tasks to their HourStack profile then record how long each one takes. The image below shows you how this looks in practice:

Credit: YouTube

You can then review how long these tasks are taking and if a project is running over budget. This helps you to promote greater business efficiency in a few important ways:

• You can make sure you assign the most efficient people to specific tasks
• You can see if you’re under or overcharging for the products/service you sell
• You can spot any training gaps or opportunities to make internal promotions

As we explained, HourStack is just one example of a time tracking tool you can use. The point, though, is that if you want your employees to complete their work efficiently then you must review how long it’s taking them to finish their tasks.

Website tracking tools: for customer efficiency

Almost no modern company can operate efficiently without a website.

There are expectations to this but they’re becoming increasingly rare, particularly at a time when many traditional brick and mortar organisations have had their operations suspended because of coronavirus.

But to be an efficient business you need to do more than just get a website online. You need to then manage how your customers interact with it. If you don’t then you may find your company is guilty of two major customer inefficiencies:

• Time, resources and money is wasted on things your customers aren’t engaging with
• Opportunities are missed to provide your customers with things they really want

Credit: PublicDomainPictures

Website tracking tools help to avoid this wastage and spot these opportunities. This is because they show you how your users interact with your website, which they do by providing the following information (all of which is available through Google Analytics):

• Users: the people who are visiting your website.
• Sessions: the number of interactions a customer makes.
• Bounce Rate: the % of people who depart your site without interacting with it.
• Session Duration: the length of time an individual spends on your website.
• Active Users: who is on your website at this exact moment in time.

You can then apply this information to make more efficient use of your time. We’ll now walk you through one such instance where it can be useful.

Let’s say you run an ecommerce fashion brand. You might find that lots of people visit a specific clothing item page. They spend a significant amount of time on the page but sales for the item are low.

From this information, you can interpret that it’s something that interests people but they need a little more convincing to buy it. You can then review similar items and compare the results.

If you find one item is selling at a better rate than the other, you can look at the differences between the pages. You might find that it’s as simple as one having a different CTA button to the other. If this is the case then you can make your sales process more efficient by tweaking your strategy and introducing high converting CTAs.

This is just one example of how using website tracking tools can promote greater business efficiency and it might not be immediately relatable to your company. The takeaway from this, though, is that by interrogating the data behind your website you can find ways of setting it up more effectively.

SEO tracking tools: for ranking efficiency

All digital businesses need to have an appreciation of SEO.

If you have a website and it’s part of your sales channel then you need people to visit it when they’re searching for solutions to their problems. It’s not enough for them to just arrive at it because they already know it exists, as this restricts your visitors to existing customers.

People search for solutions to their problems by entering questions into search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. These search engines then provide answers to these questions in the form of websites and web pages. If your website isn’t one of the first your prospective customers see, then they’ll visit a competing business instead.

The point we’re making here is that it’s really poor business efficiency if you’re not positioning your website to attract new customers. The way you can avoid this efficiency is by employing SEO tactics and using associated tracking tools to monitor their effectiveness.

SEO tactics are broad, diverse and can be complex. With this in mind, we’ll let one of the industry experts (Matt Diggity) fill you in on them:

We’ll jump back in now and explain how you can use tracking tools to support your tactics.

There are a huge number of tools you can use to track SEO tactics. Ahrefs is renowned as being one of the finest tools because it provides a huge range of data and is really user-friendly. We’ll run you through just one of the ways you can use it to track the SEO tactics you use.

Returning to our earlier example of an ecommerce fashion brand, we’ve highlighted how Verge Girl could use Ahrefs’ tracking features — the suggestions we make are ones you can use for your own website.

We start by dropping the Verge Girl homepage into the Ahrefs Site Explorer. Once it’s loaded, we then head to the top pages for Verge Girl. This is what we found.

Credit: Ahrefs

Our observation is that almost all (97.2%) of its traffic is coming from the homepage and its top keyword is Verge Girl. This is exactly the example we spoke of earlier, with Verge Girl’s customers almost all arriving at the site specifically because they searched for it and not because it featured in a SERP (search engine results page).

So, we took the URL of the page with Verge Girl’s third-highest amount of traffic. The reason we picked this page is that its top KW is in position 11 — a decent rank but far enough off the top spot to vastly reduce the chances of users visiting it, which suggests the content is underperforming.

We then dropped the page into the Ahrefs Site Explorer to analyze its top organic KWs (setting it to Australian, as Verge Girl is an Australian brand). This is what we saw:

Credit: Ahrefs

Our observation from this is that Verge Girl should optimize this page for a wider range of related KWs that it’s currently ranking for, particularly “cami” because this has a monthly search volume of 1,100. It could then track the results through Ahrefs by checking in on the page and seeing how its rankings have changed. Ahrefs does this for you — the ‘position’ column indicates the change in position, with those in green going up and those in red going down.

As we said, this is just one tool and just one way of using it to track SEO rankings. The important thing is that using SEO tactics to rank for the terms your target audience is searching for (not just your brand name) is a really efficient use of your business’ time. Why? Because it can win new customers for your company.

Fulfillment tracking tools: for an efficient conclusion

Fulfillment is the final stage in business but it might just be the most important.

The reason for this is that it’s the moment when your business delivers on its promise to customers, whether that’s a product or a service. It’s when you solve the problems your customers are experiencing.

Suffice to say then, it’s essential you ensure you keep your promises to your customers, and using fulfillment tracking tools is how you can do this. This is because these tools allow you to see where your deliveries are and if they’re getting to your customers in the agreed timescale.

There are two types of tracking tools you can use:

• Courier monitoring: for third-party distributors.
• Telematics tracking: for in-house fulfillment.

It might be that your company uses only one of these two types of delivery and needs just one tracking tool to guarantee your customers receive their orders.

Using couriers is a great way for companies to keep costs under control (you don’t need to buy your own vehicles). However, the downside is if the couriers make any errors with the delivery then it’ll be your company that suffers reputational damage.

Employing in-house deliveries lets you stay in control of your fulfillment process, as it’s your drivers taking goods to your customers. However, the con is that you need to handle the associated costs of ensuring your vehicles and drivers can fulfill your orders.

Credit: Flickr

The benefit of using courier monitoring tools is you get a live record of where your couriers are, what these people are doing, and how effectively they’re working. You can see if your products are arriving on time and if the money you pay these companies to handle fulfillment is being used efficiently by your business.

The good thing about telematics tracking software is that you know where your drivers are at all times. This offers the same benefit as courier monitoring of knowing if they’re on track to get your goods to your customers. There is an additional benefit to telematics software that you don’t get from courier monitoring tools. Telematics also tells you how your staff are using your vehicles because it records the following data points on driving behavior:

• How quickly your employees drive
• How sharply your staff take corners
• How harshly your workers brake

This information you get from telematics tracking software can be really helpful for business efficiency because it allows you to spot bad driving habits. These habits can lead your vehicles to experience wear and tear, meaning you need to pay for repairs and replacements. This could save your company considerable sums of money in the long run.

We’ve not highlighted any examples of companies offering specific courier monitoring or telematics software. However, there are lots available and the one(s) you select isn’t really the point. The point is that each of these tools can help you ensure your orders are fulfilled efficiently, reducing the threat of reputational damage to your business that comes from unhappy customers.

Time, website, SEO, and fulfillment are all areas of your company that benefit from the employment of time tracking tools, with each (in its own way) being a way you can promote greater business efficiency.

While you may choose to use different tools and might employ them slightly differently, we recommend that you take our methodologies on board and introduce them into your business at the earliest opportunity. Doing so could both save and make you money.

The post How To Use Tracking Tools To Promote Greater Business Efficiency appeared first on OmniKick.

Whatever you decide to sell, you need your own website, and there are several ways to build a great one. The first option is to address experts in the field who will develop a website according to your requirements. This method has its advantages in the form of reliability and high-quality results (depending on the chosen service provider, of course), but there’s one huge drawback – high cost. However, there is another option – to create a website independently via a dedicated online service.

There is a huge variety of top website builders. Our list includes only those that may be of interest from a practical or introductory point of view. To compose this rating we have tested more than 20 website builders and selected the best services, which for many years have taken leading positions on the market and remain in steady demand. Any of the presented solutions can be safely used in real conditions, as we have verified by personal experience.

A detailed description of each service will help you choose the right one to develop your own website for your business. But first – the basics.

What’s a Website Builder?

A website builder is a special online service, which you can use to create a professional website. Such builders are designed to make it easy for novices and pros alike. They are equipped with extensive functionality, which allows detailed construction of the site on the development stage.  

Most website builders do not require special design skills or experience. All you have to do is to follow the guidelines and tips of the service.

Website Builder Pros 

• Website builders are popular for a reason – they greatly simplify and speed up the process of website creation. We have described the main advantages of these services below.
• Website builders make the development process simple and fast. This is the main reason to use these services to create your own site for eCommerce.
• Advanced services allow you to create a website of almost any kind. Apart from a professional eCommerce website, you can also build a landing page with basic information about your company, product, or service. You also have the opportunity to create a professional corporate portal for business. 
• Various online stores and blogs that contain a large selection of thematic and classic templates are also very popular. You can quickly find a suitable basis for your future website. In addition, ready-made templates can be modified and complemented with different sections, features, menus, widgets, etc. 
• Most high-quality website builders can work with sites of large volume, which can be built from scratch or upgraded with individual components, e.g. videos, text, graphics, apps, etc.
• Your website data is stored on a third-party hosting service, so you will have constant access to it from any device. In addition, some services allow you to transfer sites from one service to another.

Website Builder Cons

• As a result of development, you will most likely get a website with a rather template look. The design may not look unique. However, this can be avoided if you add your own details to the template at the stage of creation.
• Modifying your website is only available via the service used to build it. Sometimes, website building services do not allow you to transfer your site from one hosting service to another. As a result, you will have to pay regular rent so that your resource will continue to function. Some services provide the opportunity to change hosting but for a certain fee.
• Since website development services restrict access to editing certain parts of the code, you may have problems with promoting your website. This is due to the fact that you will not be able to introduce software modules, plugins, scripts, etc. However, to promote your site, you can still use built-in paid functions.

How to Choose a Website Builder for Your eCommerce Business

When choosing a website builder, you can be guided by a variety of reasons, e.g. your friend recommendations, online reviews, ads, etc. However, you need to have a clear understanding of what your business needs. If you have just a few products, then you need one solution, if you have many goods, it’s quite another. Much depends on your product/service characteristics. Additionally, keep in mind your tech-savvy skills.

Let’s take a closer look at the criteria for evaluating online shopping platforms.

Here’s what questions and points you have to consider:

1. Cost per month. If the cost of hosting the site will eat up the lion’s share of profits, then why would you need such an online store at all? There are free, conditionally free, and costly platforms on the market – plenty to choose from.
2. Is there a free trial period? This question matters because you do not want to buy a pig in a poke. Suppose you pay for a year in advance, and then you find that the functionality is not suitable for your business or find it difficult to manage the site. If there is a trial period, you can check it all from the get-go.
3. Does the site provide any bonuses at registration? It’s clear that each bonus is just a “lure” (who else but you know), however, sometimes, such bonuses are quite attractive, and can save you a penny (e.g., a free domain).
4. Is it easy enough to create a website yourself? Does the developer site take care of installation, software updates, hosting, and SSL security to leave you more time to implement your ideas?
5. Can you use your own domain? Your website address must be attractive. If you are given a third-level domain like “clothes.buy.com” at registration, where “buy.com” is the address of the site itself, it’s not really attractive.
6. What about tech support? The support team must be caring, experienced, accessible, and quick to respond by phone or in live chat. Ideally, you should have a personal manager that you can ask anything. If there is only a chat room with a bot, it’s obviously not good. You’re going to have to either solve problems yourself or wait a long time to get real help (and sometimes, there are situations where procrastination is fatal). Alternatively, if it’s still an AI-helper, then it should be able to help you with design, successful block placement, color palette choices, etc. 
7. How many templates? Are they any good? You want your site to be beautiful and unique, not like your competitor’s online store, right? So you need to look for a platform with a large selection of quality templates. It’s great if there will be about 200 templates or more.
8. Comprehensive visual editor. If you build a personal website manually, the visual editor must be clear and easy to use. Usually, reputable website builders have convenient drag-and-drop editors – you just have to set simple settings. If nothing is clear, or you need some help, then it’s easier to make a stand-alone site.
9. An ability to create custom modules. This is important for those who have an expert developer on standby, or for those who know how to code themselves. If you want to make a truly custom site for yourself, pay attention to this.
10. Can you build a full-fledged online store on the platform, with all the features you need?
11. Is there any external integration with various online services and tools? 
12. Are there product comparisons, analytics tools, forms, counters, event schedules, online chats, customer databases, etc.? 
13. Will your site be easy to find in Google? This will make things much easier for your customers.
14. What payment methods can you add to the site?
15. How easy is it to change prices on the site? Is there a bulk price change? Can you set up promotions? If you can’t provide customers with up-to-date prices, it will affect both sales and your brand status.
16. Further search engine promotion. This includes creating CNCs, convenient filling of meta tags, and adding content to the site.
17. Can you use your own hosting provider? Sooner or later you will want autonomy. However, creating a website from scratch implies new expenses. If you can move your site from the builder to your hosting, it’s just great! You will be able to test the niche via the builder, and once your sales go up, you can move your resource to a separate hosting.
18. Is your future website going to be optimized for all mobile devices automatically? Will it look great on every screen?

Also, the functionality requirements can be specified in the specifications.

Now you know what aspects you need to consider. The question is: what website builder to choose for your eCommerce site?

We have reviewed a few of the best website builders available on the Web to create a professional online store with minimal effort and cost. Read on to find out more!

Top 9 eCommerce Website Builders

The following services are optimal to use when developing standard websites, including online stores. These website builders are distinguished by a wide range of tools and simple functionality. 

Get acquainted with the best website builders on the Web by studying the information below.

PrestaShop 

PrestaShop is among the most popular and well-known online constructors to develop online stores. PrestaShop has incredible features that help create a product of almost any type and scale. It’s especially recommended for novice entrepreneurs with small and medium-sized businesses.

The site supports 70 languages, which is another reason for its popularity. Also, the service is equipped with 120 built-in extensions and offers more than 300 different functions. In 2010 and 2011, it was the number one service provider in the competition for the best e-commerce applications.

PrestaShop is a free eCommerce platform, perfect for those who start running an eCommerce business from scratch. This is due to favorable offers for customers, e.g. basic functions are free of charge, and you will only have to pay for additional extensions (themes, modules, templates, etc.). PrestaShop offers security, for your personal data, flexibility, more than 600 features, and over 5000 templates/themes to choose from.

You can pay for the final product directly after the evaluation of the final design, structure, and modules. If you are not satisfied with your new online store, you can go through the process of creation anew.

There are a few disadvantages, as well. PrestaShop heavily loads the server, so third-party hosting is recommended. Also, the cost of the service can be too high for some. This is due to the fact that most of the users are in the U.S. and Europe.

You can download the basic set of the builder from the official store.

Weebly 

Weebly service is insanely famous in the U.S. With the help of this website builder, you can create any kind of website: online stores, portfolios, landing pages, blogs, etc.

The platform offers a large selection of built-in widgets, which allow you to create a professional website designed to your liking, literally piece by piece. In addition, you don’t need to have any tech skills to use this feature. The simplicity of the interface makes it understandable for any user.

Weebly contains an extensive range of design layouts (paid and free). You can find them by choosing the desired category in the menu. Moreover, the platform offers additional features like online store management, statistics, product import/export, advertising, and marketing tools.

The main drawback of the service is its high prices and transaction fees for sites built on it. Store maintenance costs start from $12 per month. You can find more information about prices on their official website.

Wix  

Wix is one of the most popular online platforms to build and edit online stores, portfolios, blogs, communities, personal business one-page sites, studios, institutions, etc.

The simplicity and functionality of the service make it popular among users around the world. In addition, this service allows you to develop even large professional websites with a lot of elements. All this can be done without any programming skills.

Additionally, if you have enough experience in this area, you can use their visual editor (Velo) to add custom functionality and interactions using Velo APIs and enjoy serverless coding in both the front-end and backend. 

Wix has great AI for web design. In other words, the service can independently build an online store according to the specified requirements with minimal intervention in the process.

This site contains more than 500 design templates for users to choose from. In addition, the platform offers about 200 solutions and services to promote and expand your own brand.

The overloaded interface of the service slightly reduces its demand among users. but the popularity of Wix remains stable for many years.

Also, a significant drawback of Wix is that it does not provide statistics on website visits and has some difficulties with SEO optimization. Many people are confused by the advertising embedded in the sites, which can not be removed even when buying a paid tariff. The basic eCommerce plan will cost you $17/month. This includes secure online payments, price plans, regular payments, user profiles, personal domain (1-year free), ad-free experience (no Wix ads), continued data import, 5-hour video storage, 75$ for commercials 24/7 support, etc.

Webflow 

This online platform with a flexible CMS can be used to build a professional, custom eCommerce store, custom blog, portfolio, and other types of sites. You can experience the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a 100% visual canvas. The exceptional functionality and simplicity of the visual editor allow users to work with it even if they have no programming skills. Also, Webflow allows creating web pages with a number of blocks (columns, forms, lists, different animations, sliders, etc).

You can choose a free plan that includes two full sites (with 50 elements each). However, this does not include the development of an online store.

Webflow contains a large number of free and paid templates of different designs. There’s a huge library of video tutorials, courses, and guides. Advanced users can also take advantage of the code export function.

A disadvantage of Webflow is its costly price plans and 2% transaction fees, which are quite high when compared to other similar services. There are a few compatibility problems with browsers. For example, you are guaranteed to be able to use the created sites only with Google Chrome while stable performance with other browsers such as Firefox and Safari is questionable.

You can create an ordinary one-page site or a website for free by using the appropriate plan. If you choose their Standard plan to create an online store, you’ll need to pay at least $29 per month. The plan features include custom checkout, a customizable shopping cart, product fields, email customization, integrated CMS (for blogs), PayPal support, and automatic tax calculation. There’s also Google, Facebook, Instagram, and MailChimp integration and a custom mode. You can find more information about prices and features on the official website.

Shopify 

Shopify takes the leading position in popularity and prominence among online store builders. This platform is optimal for building sites of different sizes. It offers wonderful responsive and customizable themes, as well as all the eCommerce and point of sale features to run your business.

Shopify is trusted by 1,000,000 businesses worldwide and perfectly adapted for EU and US users to make the most of their websites. You can connect Facebook, Amazon, and Pinterest accounts to your online store to significantly expand your sales area. Shopify offers a single dashboard to manage your orders, shipping, and payments.

Shopify’s functional and well-thought-out visual editor makes the service a reputable platform for building and modifying full-fledged eCommerce websites. At the same time, you don’t need to put a lot of effort to create a marketplace from scratch.

Shopify offers users a list of paid and free modules from the official store. For your convenience, the service has separate categories and built-in tools that help you create and analyze digital marketing campaigns. In addition, when building, you can choose a suitable template from dozens of suggested options, which is Shopify’s significant advantage.

Also, the service offers a lot of efficient tools for SEO and advertising promotion of your developed online store. 

Tilda 

Tilda is on the list of well-known versatile website builders with a wide range of functionality and a wide variety of high-quality designs. This service allows you to build websites in a modular fashion. The total number of pre-designed blocks is 550. 

With Tilda, you can create online stores, company portals, sites of organizations, landing pages, portfolios, blogs, personal pages, and presentations.

Tilda allows you to quickly and easily build online stores of large size – expect a huge variety of templates. You can also build your website from scratch using Zero Block (visual editor), as well as add videos, widgets, etc to your existing site. Tilda allows you to connect your own domain to any of their projects, which are automatically optimized for all screen types. 

In addition, Tilda makes it possible to create catalogs, portfolios, and product pages. Once developed, these projects are easy to edit using a set of tools and can be integrated with Google Analytics, MailChimp, Trello, UniSender, Slack, and others. Additionally, the designer offers great indexation and customizable SEO settings for every web page.

It may be not the best service for building a really complex website, but do you really need one? Even Adidas uses their services! Try Tilda for free or grow your project with premium features (e.g. your own domain connection) from $10 per month. 

Mozello 

This builder belongs to the range of free services for creating websites. Mozello’s main specialization is the development of online stores, business pages, and blogs.

The service contains 48 high-quality design layouts (including paid ones). Each of them is structured by site type and can be customized. You can also edit the created product manually using Javascript, HTML, or CSS.

A significant advantage of Mozello is its dashboard, which is fully adapted for ordinary users. 

With Mozello you can actually create a fully-optimized website with a convenient catalog in 20 minutes! No coding skills required! Your new website will allow you to sell automatically 24/7, accept payments, and take advantage of customizable delivery options. Moreover, you can also expect powerful marketing and SEO features, multiple language support, and a convenient shopping cart. You can also expect reasonable prices.

One of the disadvantages is the impossibility of bulk import of products. This makes Mozello unsuitable for large-sized online stores. Also, the service does not have a built-in drag-and-drop editor function, which can lead to time-consuming site creation.

The service has a rather modest choice of extensions and modules, and the text formatting can be confused. The same goes for uploading images.

Furthermore, Mozello does not support all payment systems, which makes it difficult for users to place orders in online stores.

Bookmark 

Bookmark is a well-known cloud-based web design service for creating online stores and landing pages. The service stands out among others thanks to a powerful AI-based editor, AIDA. This allows you to create and customize an online store or another website without much effort. All you have to do is to specify the main requirements for the final product. After completing the questionnaire, AI selects the best option for the structure of the site, based on the specified data. In addition, at this stage, the service provides a few suitable design templates.

The site builder has a large library of themes and videos (over 1.5m) which you can use to design your own website. Bookmark has a built-in eCommerce engine, making it easy to create a large online store. Multilingual localization is available (over 50 languages available). Powerful marketing and SEO tools of the platform will help you promote your website and increase sales.

Bookmark has a few disadvantages: inconvenient manual one-page site building, sort of unreadable fonts in the Bookmark editor, and fairly high plan prices.

Site123 

Site123 is known for its simplest functionality and useful free features. This service is optimal for developing an online store, landings, blogs, or business-card sites.

This platform is in high demand among users with no coding or design skills. In addition, novice entrepreneurs can build an online store with this service without much effort and money.

There’s a simple visual editor that is easy to work with. When developing a site, you can also choose if it’s going to be a one-page or multi-page project. In addition, users have the ability to add modules to specific pages. And the built-in application store has a large number of different plugins, e.g. analytics and marketing tools, live chat, etc.

The service automatically selects the best design templates for your website subject. Customization tools are also available to change the layout, style, fonts, menu options, etc. Site123 is equipped with a multilingual localization, which has more than 20 languages.

Users highlight several disadvantages starting with the limited functionality and ending with rather monotonous built-in design templates. In addition, there is no opportunity to edit layouts manually. The third disadvantage is a fairly low bandwidth limit (up to 5 GB for a paid plan). But these disadvantages all fade in the background of what this service can actually provide for your business. You can use Site123 for creating small and medium-sized stores.

Summary

Currently, there is a large range of online website builders. Therefore, users try to choose the service that offers good conditions and is characterized by convenient and simple functionality. In addition, the selected CMS must meet the requirements and perform 100% of the tasks.

To create a website, we recommend using free services first, e.g. Site123, Webflow, WordPress, etc. If these sites are not enough, you can take advantage of a free trial period using one of the paid services mentioned above.

It’s advisable to create online stores using professional website builders with CMS and eCommerce modules. 

Your choice should be based on your business goals and the characteristics of your future online store. The best website builders for trading platforms are PrestaShop, Webflow, and WIX.

The post Best eCommerce Website Builders appeared first on OmniKick.

Whatever business niche you are in, there are always experts that lead the way. These experts are known as influencers. They have clout with other people within the niche. 

Depending on the niche, influencers might have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. And the best part here is that these influencers can persuade their followers to buy any kind of product/service. 

In other words, a single endorsement from an influencer can skyrocket your sales drastically. 

That’s why every business owner wants to build a partnership with niche-related influencers. 

In this guide, you will find out how to benefit from influencer marketing and increase your sales with the help of influencers organically. 

Let’s start!

The Essence of Influencer Marketing 

As you already guessed, influencer marketing is all about building a partnership with niche-related influencers that would help you promote your product or service.

As a rule, influencers have two significant characteristics:

• People follow them immensely

Have you ever thought about why people start following future influencers?

Because influencers create useful high-quality content. And share it across popular web-platforms. People have free access to the content. They consume it and decide whether they like it or not. 

Eventually, if they like content, they start following this content creator across social channels or by subscribing to the newsletter on a website. The more people follow this expert, the more chances this person gets to becoming a niche influencer. 

Especially, the representatives of startups are curious about exploring new strategies. They want to know how to build their business, even if it is a non-profit startup. 

For instance, one of the most notable influencers in the SEO industry is Rand Fishkin. He has over 440K followers on Twitter only.

Keep in mind this nuance and always verify the number of followers a certain influencer has.

• They are true leaders and people tend to listen to them

First of all, don’t confuse “influence” with “popularity.” There is a huge difference between these two notions. If a person has just an army of followers, that would be “popularity.” But if this very person persuades these followers to take any action – that would be “influence.”

Is Influencer Marketing Truly Effective?

You wouldn’t read this post if influencer marketing weren’t effective. Thus, let’s review the benefits of influencer marketing right off the bat. 

• It is all about persuasion – nothing more 

If one person can persuade a group of people to take some action (to buy anything), it would be an example of psychological manipulation. Therefore, there is no need to find some techniques that would allow affecting people’s behavior. Just know the following psychological triggers:

• Influencer authority. It should be mentioned that influencers are those people who know what they do. They are always sure of what they say. As a result, they inspire respect and other people follow them. 
• Social proof. Influencers are popular and have lots of followers/subscribers. It is a sign that people trust them. Thus, you will trust the influencer as well.
• Affinity. You know that people prefer to help those individuals they like. Hence, there are more chances that a niche-related influencer will be more likely to understand your issue than the people outside the niche. 
• Law of reciprocity. It is a well-known fact that people try to pay back what they receive from others. The influencers suggest content that is a kind of a guide to other people who build a business. 
• Commitment. By clicking “like”, “share”, “follow”, and “subscribe” people show their commitment to the influencers. In other words, if you click “like” you agree with what the influencer says. 

To sum up, any influencer is a master of persuasion. 

• It takes lots of time to reach the top – but you don’t need that

It won’t be a surprise if you know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. He is one of the most famous influencers in the niche of entrepreneurship. He has 2.99M subscribers on YouTube. And over 2.4K videos recorded.

Do you imagine what it takes to become as popular as Gary is?

Yes, it might take years to repeat the success. Likely, you don’t need to do this hard work from scratch. You don’t need it because you can build a partnership with the influencer and promote your business using the power of persuasion the exact influencer has. 

• Consumers don’t trust businesses, they trust people

We understand the purpose of the ads companies run here and there. We don’t take companies’ promotions too seriously. We try to ignore all this stuff. 

Instead, we believe what our friends say about various products and services they use. We lean towards a user experience straight from the horse’s mouth. 

Hence, people will listen to the verdict of a live person rather than a brand itself. 

How to Start Doing Influencer Marketing

What does organic influencer marketing mean?

Organic influencer marketing is marked by building friendly relationships with the influencers who become the advocates of your brand/product/service. These relationships give you an opportunity not to pay money for spreading the word about your brand but having it promoted free of charge. 

So, how to find the influencers related to your niche and start doing organic influencer marketing? 

• Start with identifying your target audience 

Despite the fact that the number of followers people have is an influencer indication, you shouldn’t go off the deep end with this.

To get you a better understanding of this aspect, review the next few examples of niche-related influencers.

The first influencer is a rock-star Ozzy Osbourne AKA “Prince of Darkness.” He has 5.3M followers on Twitter.

The second influencer is a well-known SEO expert and marketer Neil Patel with over 383K followers on Twitter.

How do you think who would be the right influencer to build a connection with? (taking into account that you own a marketing agency.)

You are correct. Neil Patel is the right influencer to build your relationships. He will help you promote your agency so far. While Ozzy Osbourne with his 5.3M followers is out of your niche. Even if he promotes your agency, you won’t get as many potential leads as you could working with Neil. 

Why?

Because it is not organic influencer marketing we are talking about. 

To conclude, you must make sure your potential influencer deals with your target audience. And if you know nothing about your target audience, you should create a buyer persona for the business you run. Plus, don’t forget to keep an eye on customer analytics that will help you understand your target audience behavior better. 

By having the data you need, you can start identifying the best influencers to work with. 

• The influencers to choose from 

Since you are aware of who the representatives of your target audience are, it is time to find niche-related influencers. 

It should be mentioned that influencers are split into three main groups. Let’s review them:

1. a) Small fish

This type of influencer represents experts with a small audience that follows them. These influencers have just stepped into the game and have less traction within the niche.

1. b) Big fish

This type of influencer represents experts with a wide audience. If you make a deal with these experts, make sure that their endorsement will impact your business.

1. c) Sharks

True influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers. They really can create a buzz around your business. They are super-stars, celebrities, and gods of the niche you are working in. It is quite hard to reach them out. But the game is worth the candle. 

When you build a list of influencers to work with, make sure it consists of the representatives of each of these three groups.

• How to find influencers

First and foremost, you should know what channels influencers use to communicate with the audience. These channels are:

• Social media 
• Blogs
• Communities
• Podcasts

Now, let’s see how to find these channels.

1. a) Online conferences

Online summits and conferences are the events that influencers attend regularly. Even now during a COVID-19 pandemic, there are tons of streams that host different experts across various niches. 

If you know at least one influencer from your niche, you can find out where this person participated at the conferences. Everything that you need to do is to take the influencer’s image and click a “Search Google for Image” option. 

Afterwards, add a query “conferences” in the search box.

By having the suggested conferences you can discover more influencers to connect with.

1. b) Curated lists

Influencer marketing is not a brand-new wave of promoting your business. And you are not the only person who is exploring this field. 

Taking the above said into account, there are already compiled lists of influencers that you can find on the web. Go to Google and type the following query:

“top {niche} influencers” 

And voila, rip the benefits.

By the way, you can use this search command to find whatever “top” information you need. Just replace “influencers” with what you are looking for – podcasters, bloggers, etc. What’s more important, if you practice affiliate marketing, you can find dozens of affiliate programs in the same way.

1. c) Marketplaces

Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing industry. Therefore, there are various marketplaces available on the Internet that connect business owners with influencers. 

You can find these marketplaces on Google easily. Here are a few examples of them: Influence.co, Followerwonk, etc. 

• Connect with influencers and build strong relationships

Keep in mind that organic influencer marketing takes lots of time before the influencers start working with you.

You need to attract their attention and show your loyalty. And give them something that would bring any value to their brand, business, or personality. 

Don’t dare to ask whatever you need in return. Take your time and you will see the best moment to ask. 

How to give value to the influencers?

1. a) Influencers want engagement – give it to them via content

It is not a secret that influencers are content creators. Doesn’t matter what types of content they create. They want their blog posts to be read, podcasts to be listened to, videos to be watched. 

Help them with this!

Read, listen and watch. Be an active consumer of the content they produce. Comment it, say what you like/dislike, share on your socials. 

Sometimes these experts ask their audience’s opinion or ask for help. Don’t neglect this. It will be your first attempt to attract their attention. 

1. b) Suggest your help (literally)

Influencers work on different projects all the time. You can help them by adding some useful information. Plus, if you own a blog or a podcast, you can invite them to share their story. Everyone likes getting some additional exposure. 

Other than that, you can help with publishing their content by repurposing it into other content types. 

For example, you can create any kind of visual content, like a flowchart with the help of a flowchart maker tool. This would illustrate the same topic in a different visual way. And don’t forget to point out the source this information has been taken from.  

To Sum up 

Influencer marketing is a powerful weapon for promoting your business. The thing is that you must know how to use it correctly. 

This guide has introduced to you the basics of influencer marketing. While there are many other ways of working with influencers. 

If you have never tried influencer marketing in your practice, you should start doing it right now!

The post Everything You Need to Know About Influencer Marketing appeared first on OmniKick.

As a B2B marketer responsible for running a long sales cycle, it’s critical you nurture your audience with relevant and useful messages regularly.

Traditionally, marketers have used email and social media as their main communication channels. In recent years, a new technology has risen to compete with these traditional methods: we are talking about push notifications.

If you want to learn more about how you can leverage the power of push notifications for your B2B business, this article will show you why you need push notifications and how to get started with your first campaign.

Why you need to use push notifications in your B2B marketing strategy

A push notification is a type of message that shows in a user’s browser or mobile device, which they receive after signing up for the company’s notification messages. 

Throughout this guide, you will see that push notifications work similarly to a traditional email marketing campaign. In a sense, the only difference between the two is the medium in which you send your messages; the strategy to approach both channels is similar in almost every way.

Despite its similarities, a Digital Commerce 360 survey found that 72% of businesses find mobile and web-based push notifications to have an equal or greater ROI than email.

Push notifications are a great addition to your B2B content marketing stack, as they complement your other marketing channels, such as paid advertising, email, and social media.

You can use push notifications to communicate with your audience at every stage of the sales cycle. Your push notifications must remain relevant and useful for your target audience consistently to increase your marketing campaign’s effectiveness.

Some experts say push notifications are the future of marketing automation because they allow companies to send more personal and direct communication with their target audiences. In fact, most push notification platforms will enable you to send messages through messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Gmail, and Messenger.

How to create push notifications for a B2B brand

Step #1: Define your goals

Before you can start using push notifications for your B2B company, you need to decide how you want to use them. To do that, you need to define your goals.

As a communication channel, push notifications serve multiple purposes:

• Promoting new content or offers: You can update your subscribers to receive your latest content as soon as you publish it. The same goes for every time you launch a new product or service.
• Offering discounts: If you want a quick boost of sales, push notifications will help you provide discounts to your subscribers.
• Reminding customers about abandoned carts: Abandoned carts are one of the best opportunities to increase sales for an ecommerce business. You can use push notifications to message customers who abandon their carts to recover your lost sales.
• Notifying users about product updates: You can message your users about new updates that improve on your existing software tool along with any other company news.
• Promoting a lead generation campaign: You can retarget your leads with push notifications to continue with their nurturing.

After you have defined a goal, you will have a much easier time defining your target audience, which you will use to determine your push notifications’ targeting options later on.

Step #2: Define your push notification type 

After you decide on your goal, you need to think about the type of push notification you will use. There are two options you have available:

• In-app push notifications: These are notifications users receive on their phones, both when using it or in the lock screen (which means that the user can see them without having to open the app).
• Web-based push notifications: These notifications appear in the user’s web browser.

In-app push notifications show more targeted messages related to the app itself. As the name suggests, you can only use them if you have an app.

Web-based push notifications allow you to bring your subscribers back to your site. Since the messages aren’t context-sensitive as with in-app notifications, you can use this type of notification for any of the five options shown in the previous step.

If you don’t have an app, then your only option is to use web-based push notifications. In the rest of this article, we will assume that’s the case.

Step #3: Build your push list

Just like you need to build an email list for your email marketing efforts, you need to build a push list by offering a free, valuable gift to your visitors. The goal is to entice them to receive your push notifications on their browser voluntarily.

The gift you use will depend on the goal you defined in the first step. For example, to build a push notifications list to promote new content, you can offer your visitors a special ebook. Alternatively, you can offer them to send them the latest content updates, although that option is overused and not as effective as providing a unique offer.

One way to find the best gift to offer your visitors is to reverse engineer your goal. For example, if you want to send new product offers to your list, you can give them a discount for a first purchase, which will drive conversions in the future.

After you define an offer, you need to define the pages you will show your offer on. As a rule of thumb, the closer your offer is to your conversion goal, the better. For example, if your goal is to get readers to check your newest content, show your offer in your blog pages, which is where your readers are.

Finally, define the triggers that will cause the push notification to appear. In the previous example, the trigger would be a blog page visit. You can also use other triggers, such as time on site, number of sessions, and more.

Step #4: Write your push notification

Writing your push notifications requires a great dose of copywriting skills. A push notification is closer to an ad than to a social media message—you need to sell your offer, even if it’s free. 

There are several elements you must use to write your push notification messages, each one requiring special attention. You need to make sure every aspect is aligned with your goal and offer to increase your chances of success.

• Headline: The headline is the most important part of your notification because it’s what defines whether a user will read the rest of it and take action on your offer. As David Ogilvy once said, “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
• Description: The messages caught the visitor’s attention; the description closes the deal. Use short sentences with action words that persuade your users to take action. Consider using emojis, which have been shown to increase open rates by 85%.
• Hero image: A hero image adds context to the message, increasing its appeal. A great hero image also increases the chances a user will see your notification and read it. Pick an image that fits your headline and offer.
• The landing page’s URL: Show the URL of the landing page you are sending your visitors to. Most likely, that will be your blog, checkout, or product page.
• Call-to-action (CTA): Your CTA defines the action the user must take to receive the promoted offer. It must also align with your goal—e.g., “Finish Checkout” for an abandoned cart notification, “Read More” for a top-of-the-funnel content piece, and so on.
• An icon: The icon should show your brand’s logo, so the user immediately knows who’s messaging them. Alternatively, you can use an attention-grabbing image similar to the hero image you used.

Length is a key factor that affects your click-through rates (CTR). A study by Upland found that the shorter the message, the higher the CTR. While this study doesn’t suggest making your messages unnecessarily short, you shoulcruciald compress your messages in the shortest space possible to increase your CTR.

When writing your push notification messages, leverage all your buyer information in your favor. Doing so will increase their relevance, thus increasing the perceived value the users receive. For example, if you know your buyers are time-strapped executives, use scarcity; if your buyers have small budgets, use discounts; if you target existing customers, promote your loyalty program.

Whenever possible, use the triggers defined previously to personalize your message further, like showing the products to users who abandoned their carts.

Source

Time is another key factor you must weigh in your push messaging strategy. For an abandoned cart, that would be anywhere from an hour after the visitor left the site to a day, at most.

New subscribers often respond better to push notifications as they aren’t used to reading them; after a while, they may develop “banner blindness” and ignore them. Therefore, your push strategy should send the most important messages while the subscriber is still “fresh” and send the least important ones after a week or more has passed.

Step #5: Send your push notifications

After you have written your push notifications, you need to define the timing and segments you will send them to.

You must get the timing right, as you want to send your push messages when your subscribers are active online. When you are getting started, send your push notifications when you send your emails and social media messages. Eventually, you can run tests to find the right timing (more on this later).

You also need to segment your audience properly, which will increase your messages’ CTR and conversion rates. There are several segments you can use, the most common being:

• New subscribers: These are the subscribers who signed up recently. Each push platform has its own time range to determine this factor; 30 days is the most common.
• Engaged subscribers: These are the subscribers who have clicked on a recent message. Make sure you take the content they have engaged with to improve your messages even further.
• Operating system: Each operating system—Android, Windows, iOS—has different demographics and restrictions. You can use this information to target your messages appropriately.
• Browser: Each browser has its own limitations and user bases, which you must consider in your messaging.
• All subscribers: Be careful when you use this segment because not everyone will find your messages equally relevant. You should only use it when promoting a popular offer such as a time-sensitive discount or breakthrough company news.

To identify the best segments for your push notification strategy, analyze your goal and users. You want to target a segment that best fits your campaign objectives.

Step #6: Run an A/B test

Your push notification campaign will always need refining, both in its messaging and its targeting. You can do so by running A/B tests regularly. Testing your campaigns will improve your marketing strategy as you will learn new ways to write your push notifications that improve your KPIs. In fact, after running an A/B test, the Chicago Tribune experienced a 56% increase in their open rates.

To run an A/B test, you first need to define what you want to improve. Check your data and see what’s not working. It could be your impression volume, open rates, your CTR, your conversion rates, etc. Define a benchmark, and think about the potential cause. Then, define a set of tests to fix the cause.

For example, if you see low open rates, you could test new headlines, new hero images, new times, and more. You can test almost everything related to your push notification campaigns, including:

• Segments
• Headline formulas
• Colors
• Hero images
• Offers

Run the A/B tests by implementing the changes, and keep track of the results. As you see your changes improve your results, implement the changes to all your campaigns accordingly.

Wrap up

Push notifications are a new marketing methodology that will improve the way you communicate with your target audience. With the help of an omnichannel platform like OmniKick, you will be able to send better messages, reach new audiences, and build stronger relationships with them. It’s time you try it so you can make the most out of this novel opportunity.

The post How B2B businesses can harness the power of push notifications appeared first on OmniKick.

Most eCommerce brands know that two statistics matter when it comes to business success: user acquisition and conversion rate. Knowing how to convert website visits into successful purchases is essential and warrants a more in-depth approach. 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process marketers use to improve the shopping experience – and drive specific KPIs (key performance indicators), such as sales. Without CRO, growth can stagnate, leaving brands without actionable next steps, even if many visitors are coming to the site. 

Today I’ll share several CRO tips eCommerce websites can use to improve conversion rates.

“CRO is the most important marketing activity because it makes every visitor exponentially more valuable” – Rand Fishkin.

What is a Conversion?

It’s good to start here because it’s not uncommon to have misinformation about what a conversion is or isn’t. A conversion is any key performance indicator (KPI) that the brand finds valuable. That can be a sale or something else entirely, but conversion doesn’t happen unless we optimize for it.

Here are some typical conversions for eCommerce brands.

• A sale is won.
• The prospect adds a product to the wish list.
• The person adds a product to the cart.
• Email subscription.
• The user shares a product or page on social media.

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete the desired action after visiting a website.

The Average eCommerce Conversion Rate

The average eCommerce conversion rate is between one and two percent. However, it’s possible to increase conversion rates beyond those numbers with CRO.

The objective of CRO is to understand what persuasion tactics and type of content will convince more customers to buy from the brand, furthering the website’s goals.

CRO focuses on the following.

• It aims to increase the motivation of visitors.
• Providing users with a better user experience
• Producing more engaging and relevant content

The Fundamentals to Increasing Your Conversion Rate

The best gains from CRO occur when two things are met: the eCommerce website receives lots of traffic and revenue. The ideal traffic number is at least 100,000 visitors, and one percent of that should be conversions. However, most websites do not receive that kind of traffic. Yet, sites on the low-end can still benefit from CRO by doing things in a certain way.

The obvious thing a website can do is gain more traffic to increase conversions. But gaining more traffic to a website won’t result in measurable improvements unless the site nails all the other important conversion factors. Even if the website has the best copy imaginable, a distasteful design can drive potential customers away quickly.

I’m not suggesting that having great copy and increasing traffic isn’t important because they are top on the list. Rather that when it comes to eCommerce, other on-page factors matter as well.

Additionally, CRO doesn’t apply to eCommerce brands alone, and any website, commercial or otherwise, can benefit from it. CRO makes your existing website traffic and customers a greater asset by making favorable actions more likely to occur.

Advanced Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Now, for some actionable CRO tips that you can start implementing today. 

While the following tips are useful, don’t assume all will work for a website – take the specifics of the business situation into account before applying anything.

1. Remove Impediments and Add Motivators

Generally, when we can increase the attractiveness of our website and offer, more visitors will convert. However, that’s never the case when there are too many impediments or obstacles. For example, people shouldn’t have to register for an account to checkout. 

Nike removes the obstacle of creating an account to shop by offering guest checkout.

With guest checkout, the customer only provides the necessary information for payment and delivery.

Another example of an impediment is shipping prices. If a customer feels the shipping price is too high, the person may not complete the transaction. While eCommerce brands can’t do much to influence the cost of shipping, there are other ways to diminish this obstacle, such as offering free shipping when the order value reaches a certain amount.

To motivate consumers to shop, we need motivating factors (aka motivators). For example, every time I’m interested in a product on Amazon, I always click-through to read consumer reviews.

Social proof is a proven way of motivating customers to buy or convert. However, many online stores still underutilize it. That’s because many do not have a system for collecting reviews. 

Ecommerce brands that want more customer reviews should create a system that solicits feedback from customers — for instance, sending an email to customers four days after the product delivery. Brands can also incentivize customers to provide reviews in various ways, such as offering a small discount on the next purchase. 

2. Use Video to Showcase Product Features

Video can clear up confusion and better showcase the features, including the benefits of a product – especially for complex products where the potential for confusion is high. Plus, people naturally gravitate toward video content as it’s an easier medium for conveying ideas.

While producing high-quality videos requires time and money, the potential long-term payoff is worth it. Aside from describing how a product works, eCommerce brands can get more creative with product videos.

Here’s a great example from Nine Line. In less than 30 seconds, the brand conveyed the product benefit humorously.

Whether videos are a must-have will depend on what’s being sold. For example, a gym equipment web store can benefit greatly by using video, but a website that sells audiobooks doesn’t necessarily require one.

3. Suggest Additional Products to Customers Before Checkout

Motivating customers to buy additional products is challenging. However, with some careful planning and a well-placed call-to-action, a website can increase its average order value.

Brands can customize or add-on a cross-sell system or acquire an eCommerce solution that already has cross-selling capabilities built-in right out the gate. For example, WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform that comes with cross-selling capabilities. The feature works by suggesting related products based on what the customer already has in the cart.

An example of a brand that cross-sells well is the REI co-op. The company suggests items in a popup that appears after users hit the ‘Add to Cart’ button.

4. Apply Color Psychology

Colors can convey different meanings, emotions and affect moods. However, according to research, it’s not all cut and dry. 

Our personal preference, upbringing, experiences, culture, and other elements determine the effect a particular color has on us. So even though colors can impact marketing outcomes, specific colors can’t evoke universal emotions. For example, we can’t say that blue makes everyone feel a brand is trustworthy.

Instead, think of applying color psychology in broader ways by predicting what is best based on the products and target audience. Here are some studies to help drive the point home.

• A study titled The Interactive Effects of Colors found that choosing appropriate colors for a brand can add immediate value through perceived appropriateness. That means the colors have to match the products being sold.
• Another study, Exciting Red and Competent Blue revealed that colors greatly affect purchasing intent since colors can impact consumer perception. In other words, the ‘personality’ of a brand is influenced by colors.
• Our brains respond better to recognizable brands, making color even more significant when creating a brand identity. 

The color appropriateness as it relates to the product being sold is more crucial than any particular color.

5. Test Multiple Options

An eCommerce brand’s conversion rate is undoubtedly based mainly on how attractive the sales pages are to potential customers. That’s why brands must test several ideas or options concerning sales pages.

Companies can use experimentation software, such as Google Optimize 360 to save time, eliminate guesswork, and help hit those conversion rate optimization goals. With the right experimentation software, almost anyone can conduct thorough multivariable experiments and get the results required to make informed decisions. 

Testing is a critical aspect of growth that we should not overlook. With proper testing, brands can determine which online experiences perform better with users, allowing the business to make data-driven decisions and ensure positive impacts. 

Without testing, it’s impossible to know how effective any implemented changes are – correlation isn’t causation.

When applied consistently, testing can improve user experience, increase conversion rates, and even raise conversion values – happy people tend to buy more stuff.

If one is unsure about the website’s aspects to test out, start with the most critical sections or pages. Test aspects that facilitate sales or lead users to become customers, such as the checkout experience.

6. Use Email to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Most eCommerce brands want to reduce shopping cart abandonment, but few know where to start. A shopping cart abandonment occurs when customers add items to the cart but never complete the transaction. 

Every year trillions of dollars are left on the table because of incomplete transactions. A study of various industries found that over 80 percent of online shopping orders were abandoned.

One way of reducing cart abandonment is to send personalized emails – something Omnikick allows brands to do well. A great abandoned cart email has the following things.

• An attention-getting subject line.
• The email copy is great, short, and sweet.
• It provides a clear call-to-action (CTA).
• The email has good imagery.

Here’s an example from Bearsville Soap Company.

Img credit: ActiveCampaign

Think about what the audience would respond to and act accordingly. For example, creating a sense of urgency may be appropriate depending on the target demographics. The brand can offer a one-time coupon that is only valid for 24 hours.

When done right, email marketing is a powerful tool for eCommerce.

7. Experience Personalization

Customizing every shopper’s experience can improve customer experience, sales, brand image, and loyalty. That’s why the most successful eCommerce brands (e.g., Amazon) religiously use customer experience personalization. 

The moment a user logs into Amazon, the person is greeted with personalized links and offers based on past experiences. Mega eCommerce brands continuously collect data used to personalize experiences, keep customers engaged, and nurture relationships.

With eCommerce personalization, brands can show tailored offers or messages to customers based on historical data, such as behavior, shopping preference, links clicked, etc. For example, an eCommerce website can show specific products related to a customer’s last purchase or particular promotions as they browse web pages.

The possibilities are enormous, and eCommerce personalization is no longer out of reach for many companies. Brands can use AI-driven eCommerce personalization platforms to personalize the customers’ shopping experience – from discovery to the optimization of the user journey to purchase.

When businesses can continuously make customers feel happy and welcome, revenues tend to increase.

8. Get Heatmap or Session Recording Software

One way to see what people are doing on a website is to use session recording or heatmap software. Right now, HotJar is probably the best tool in that regard as it offers heat-mapping and session recordings.

These tools can help understand how users interact with websites on a high-level. 

• Heat-mapping software will show brands where people click the most along with cursor movement and scroll-depth details. 
• Session recording is an invaluable tool used to analyze consumer behavior in real-time. Recordings are typically stored so site owners can watch each one or some whenever convenient.

If any company wants to get down to the root cause of low conversion rates, a session recording or heatmapping snapshot can lead to sound conclusions.

The Relationship Between CRO and SEO

CRO goes hand-in-hand with SEO (search engine optimization) as both complement each other. SEO brings in organic traffic, and CRO ensures the brand makes the most out of it. Further, brands can use CRO research results to base SEO efforts and vice versa. 

Think of CRO as an SEO multiplier. The improvements made via CRO can improve SEO outcomes, and the same goes for when targeted traffic is increased through SEO. Regularly applying CRO and SEO creates a positive feedback loop for the eCommerce brand.

Here’s a quick look at how that happens.

• CRO increases revenue from the current website traffic.
• SEO increases the current website traffic.
• The brand is now making more revenue than it did before.
• The cycle continues as CRO and SEO continue to lend to the brand’s success. 

Start Now

The best action is to consider all of the conversion rate optimization tips laid out here, make necessary changes, and test assumptions. That way, your organization is more likely to come out victorious, with higher conversion rates. 

However, CRO isn’t a magic bullet. It may take months to gather enough data through research and analytics. Plus, like SEO, CRO is never truly complete because there’s always something that can be improved. Lastly, while smaller sites can benefit from CRO, websites with more traffic will benefit the most.

The post Advanced Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for eCommerce Brands appeared first on OmniKick.

Social media marketing is the trend these days and almost every business is doing it. From small startups to huge organizations, everyone is hopping on the bandwagon of making a strong social media presence. This has increased the competition between brands on social media 

According to Statista, 91.9% of U.S. businesses use social media for marketing and promotions. But it’s a hard pill to swallow that if you aren’t improvising on social media, you are way behind in the game.

Social media demands experimentation and improvisation!

In the world of technology, marketing is a lot of art. It involves taking creative risks and following your gut to build your business’s social media strength. But often marketers end up receiving the bad end of the deal. This can happen when you are a beginner at social media marketing or are too focussed on the right tricks that you avoid common pitfalls.

In this blog, I have talked about the common social media marketing mistakes to avoid when building a marketing strategy for your business. Let’s dig into them one by one and prepare you to create a fault-free social media marketing strategy.

15 Mistakes To Avoid While Creating A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business

1. Discarding a social media marketing plan

It is said that if you want to succeed, creating a plan will induce your progress and define your pathway. This goes for social media marketing as well. If you want to achieve success on your social media platforms, creating a social media plan beforehand will give you a sense of direction regarding where things are moving. 

Firstly, understand your possibilities of scope. Moving forward, come up with a set of objectives you want to achieve, maximum and minimum budget frame, and a plan that induces actions. With this, it’s also important to know who you are talking to and what you want to communicate otherwise you are just driving on a straight road not knowing where it leads.

And as they say the building is only as strong as its foundation, your social media performance also needs a strong foundation that you can create through a social media marketing plan. 

Source

After this video went viral and touched the peaks of their benchmark, Old Spice changed its old social media tactics and embraced their new personality (hippie) that was liked more by the audience.

2. Assuming your audience is everyone

Would you give an alarm clock to a toddler or baby bath products to an old man?

No, right?

Because it would be of no use to them. Similarly, your social media stories and posts should also target the audience that can be or is already interested in your product/service. There are billions of people on social media platforms but not all of them fit into the list of your target audience.

To know who fits into that list, you need to create precise buyer personas. This should include their age, gender, demographics, interests, occupation, buying preferences and other vital information. According to that, fine-tune your brand voice so that your target audience can relate to your brand.

On social media platforms like Facebook, their inbuilt Facebook analytics can help you derive the demographics of your existing audience. This can easily boost your marketing efforts on Facebook and if you need more, this Facebook marketing ebook will guide you further.

For example, if you have an ecommerce store where you sell architecture related products, you need to research what architecture students and professionals are looking for to create more personalized content. You can’t sell architecture products to a non-architect user, no matter how creative you get!

3.  Failing to engage in conversations

Social media users are not looking for a one way experience; that’s the whole point of social media. They are seeking connections, conversations and interactions and as a brand wanting to succeed on social media, you need to give them the same.

Your single conversation can turn a user into a follower, and a follower into a customer. So, make a habit of replying to all the comments and enhance conversations through your content. Infact, having a conversation with your followers can make them trust as well as interact with your brand more.

Moreover, on social media platforms like Instagram, you can make their algorithm like you through a lot of comments on your posts. This is why it is recommended to never leave a comment dead on your social media posts, positive or negative.

The most simplest comments can also be turned into conversations and impact the audience. And that can happen only when you reply to all the comments like Netflix did.

4. Buying followers

This might sound tempting at first but can take a toll on your social media marketing success. First of all, buying followers is against the guidelines of every social media platform. 

Secondly, you are only paying for your social media platform to lose its essence because when you make a post, the more people like and comment on it, the more the algorithm prioritizes it as a good post and shows it to more users. But when you have fake followers that won’t respond to your post, it will be seen as content that isn’t useful, educational or entertaining by the algorithm. This decreases the overall solidity of your social media content.

Ads like this can tempt you instantly but all you have to remember is that you are chasing conversions and not your followers count. Because imagine that you notice a social media profile with 15,000 followers on Instagram, and when you scroll through their posts, you only see 50-100 likes. 

What will you conclude?

Either you will suspect fake followers or you will derive that the content is not good enough. Either of them doesn’t set a positive brand image. So be mindful of every action you take on social media and analyze its impact before taking it.

5. Relying too much on automation

If you are targeting humans, it shouldn’t always be with a machine. Your brand persona thrives on the human touch and when you rely too much on automation tools, you lose it.

Social media automation tools exist to help social media marketers, not to replace them. Imposing all the work on tools can make your brand sound impersonal which can result in reduced impact on the audience.

Because as a marketer you think of ways to delight, inform, entertain, and educate your audience while an automation tool doesn’t do any of that. Also, one should never deploy a social media automation tool to send auto direct messages because when you are having a conversation with your audience, it has to be personal that can develop a real connection.

If you are thinking about or already schedule the same posts on all the social media platforms then it’s time that you are definitely receiving the short end of the stick without even realizing it.

Users receive content differently on each social media platform. For example, infographics work well on Pinterest while on Instagram, it’s advisable to convert the infographic into a carousel post for better visibility and readability.

Infographic on Instagram with lower readability

Infographic converted into a carousel post

6. Using irrelevant hashtags

Hashtags are like a spot where brands and users from a common interest come together and explore. They play a crucial role in finding people of common interests and also to find potential audience for your brand.

Also, including hashtags in your post can help categorize your content but there is a thin line between using hashtags and using irrelevant hashtags. Instead of looking for hashtags with more audience, you should make SEO analysis to find hashtags that are relevant to your industry or content.

A single false step in using hashtags can lead to presenting a negative brand image in front of a large audience. Let me explain this to you with an example.

This particular hashtag #WhyIStayed talks about domestic violence and is a sensitive topic. DiGiorno Pizza used this hashtag as a marketing move and made fun of it which was deeply criticized by the audience and eventually, they had to delete it and apologize to their community.

This is what a wrong hashtag can do to your brand!

7. Treating all social media platforms the same

Every social media platform has its own set of advantages that you can make the most of. But before that, you need to know that the audience on each platform is different and they are expecting different things from each of them.

But wait, do you really need all the social media platforms for your social media marketing?

Ask yourself, ‘Does my business need to be on all social media platforms?’

For example, if you are a B2B company, LinkedIn (business-related and social) will be more beneficial to you than Pinterest (creative and personalized). Now when you have listed the social media platform your business will be at, try to know the audience on each one of them. Dig into what they are expecting from specific platforms. 

Are they expecting more videos on Instagram?

Are they looking for informative content on Facebook?

As soon as you start deriving these answers from experimentation, your social media marketing strategy will start moving in the right direction.

8. Not tracking analytics

To be up to date with your social media marketing strategy, you need to know the areas of improvement. And to know the improvement areas, you need to know the exact numbers behind your existing social media marketing strategy. These numbers include reach, impressions, engagement, conversions, etc.,

Insights into the past and present social media performance can play a huge role in improving the future of your business on social media. And, analytics is the catalyst to run businesses on social media platforms with constant improvement. With social media analytics, you can easily measure the quality of your audience, quality of engagement, post’s popularity, etc.

You can begin with using inbuilt analytics features on the social media platforms and to dig deep into your analytics, there are a bunch of social media analytics tools that you can use.

Preview of Facebook inbuilt analytics

Preview of Instagram inbuilt analytics

9. Avoiding, deleting, counterattacking negative comments

A negative comment is how you look at it. If you look at it as sheer criticism, you won’t be able to change that. If you choose to neglect it, it will only harvest more negative emotions. If you choose to delete it, you are just losing on a chance to improve and provide good customer service.

58% of tweets about negative customer experiences are still going unaddressed by companies on social media and this is never going to help your business. Instead, you can leverage the situation and uplift your customer service quality and build trust within your brand community.

Let me put it straight. Responding to the negative feedback can convert a complaining customer to a loyal customer. If you receive a negative comment, have a conversation with them on the same thread and after a while take it further to their personal inbox or an email.

This will not just make the customer happy but also show your audience that you care about your customers enough to respond and provide them solutions. 

Cuckoo’s Bakery is a fine example of how negative comments or feedback on social media should be dealt with.

10. Creating faceless content

Your target audience are humans, right?

And, humans can trust humans more than businesses. No matter how creative marketing messages you craft, the power of a human face on your marketing effort is undefeated.

Imagine two kinds of businesses. First is a business on social media with a bunch of posters and videos to promote their business without a single human face. And the other one is where their social media content involves testimonials, DIY videos, behind the scenes, etc. with human faces in all of them.

It is certain that the audience will relate more to the second company’s social media content. So now when you are creating a social media post or replying to a social media comment, don’t talk as a corporate machine instead, personalize it to address the user in a better way. 

For example, the following content is informative, and helpful but what more can be added to it is a human face that can make the audience relate to them more. Showing a face/s in your social media marketing can get your audience’s trust sooner than usual.

11. Making your content all about yourself

Social media is called ‘social’ media for a reason. As a business, it’s not a place just to promote your business without keeping the audience in mind. You have to be sociable because with the increasing number of businesses on social media, people are almost tired of promotional content.

There is no secret formula for this. You should divide your strategy according to the 80/20 rule to avoid a social media marketing mistake. According to this rule, 80% of your social media content should cater to the interests of your audience and should be shareable i.e., surprising facts, statistics, user-generated content. While only 20% of the content should be about your brand that inspires the audience to learn about your business and persuade them to follow your call to actions.

I am not denying on sales content because of course that is your social media goal. Only thing that you have to keep in mind is to be subtle with your promotional content like Oreo.

12. Not posting regularly

If you want to be a part of your audience’s life, you need to show up for them as much as possible. You can’t simply post twice a week and complain about not getting engagement or conversions.

Remember, consistency is the key!

There are thousands of brands that are sprawling to increase engagement and to stand out, you shouldn’t miss a single chance of getting noticed by the audience.

The best way to do that is by working on a social media calendar backed by a strong strategy. You can also utilize social media calendar tools and schedule your posts beforehand. This will make sure that you are consistent on social media and you will also have a greater impact on your audience.

Moreover with a social media plan, you will be able to analyze your progress and improvement areas better. But often in the rush of posting constantly, businesses end up posting non-valuable content. Posting regularly is impressive but not until the content is impressive as well.

Content calendar features of SocialPilot tool

13. Not integrating your paid and organic social media strategies 

With the increasing number of businesses and users on social media, organic content’s reach is not reaching many people as expected. Doesn’t matter if you made an interesting post, there are chances that it might not even reach the audience’s feed.

The primary goal of most of the businesses is to service and delight the existing customer through organic content and get new eyes on the business through paid ads. The integration of both can result in increased growth of the business and if you aren’t integrating it yet, it’s time to start it right away. This is how you can attempt to integrate it.

• Boost your best organic content
• Optimize all your posts (A/B testing)
• Match your organic content audience with your paid content audience
• Use retargeting ads
• Don’t pay for all the promotional posts
• Automate your posts
• Use social media analytics tools to know if any campaign needs to be readjusted

14. Not uploading videos on social media platforms

With the skyrocketing number of users and businesses on social media, the engagement rate of images and text-based content is overtook by videos.

Fact Check:

The average engagement rate on Facebook video posts is 6.13%, which is a higher engagement rate than any other type of content on Facebook. 

People looked at videos five times longer than static content.

If you aren’t integrating video in your strategy, you aren’t far away from declined growth due to this social media marketing mistake.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram are driving themselves more towards video content. Especially after the release of Facebook Live, Twitter Live, Instagram Live and Instagram Reels, the audience wants to be surrounded by video content. 

Videos on social media don’t just hook the audience’s attention but also drive more conversions if you create an optimized video with a proper call to action.

Look at how IKEA promoted their anti-slip mat in such a subtle manner through a video on Instagram.

Source

15. Sharing only your content

Marketers often feel that sharing curated content doesn’t fulfil their primary goals i.e., sales, revenue, conversions, etc. But what they don’t realize is the power of diversified content. Your existing audience might get bored of your content over time and more importantly, your content will always be in the predicted zone.

What you can do to surprise your audience is share content of other businesses, influencers, etc. This will show that your business cares about providing information and not just about getting customers. To attract customers, businesses can easily embed Instagram Reels on website.

If you get lucky, they will also share content from your social media page which can increase your brand awareness and get you more followers.

It’s a wrap

Though marketing has come a long way from traditional to social media marketing, the primary objective of it remains the same – to get more people to know and buy your product/service. 

As we have entered the era of social media marketing, there is not a single formula to social media marketing success instead, it’s a journey of experimentation. There are already too many things to do around marketing and it’s certain how mistakes can be made unknowingly. 

I hope after going through this blog, you will be able to avoid these social media marketing mistakes when creating your strategy.

After all, your social media presence is only as strong as your strategy!

Happy Social Media Marketing!

The post 15 Mistakes To Avoid While Creating A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business appeared first on OmniKick.

We’ve put together six effective list cleaning strategies below to help you keep your list filled with only the most engaged subscribers.

What is Email List Cleaning?

First, let’s cover the basics. What even is email list cleaning? 

In layman’s terms, email list cleaning is the process of regularly going through your email list contacts to ensure that you’re only sending emails to interested and engaged audience members.

This often includes removing outdated subscribers who no longer exist, users who haven’t opened emails in awhile and irrelevant contacts who simply aren’t going to buy from your business.

Why is Email List Cleaning Important?

A large email list is simply a vanity metric if those subscribers aren’t actually opening, reading and taking action in your emails. It’s better to have a smaller list of fully engaged subscribers than a large list of people who don’t care about your brand.

You also don’t want to send emails to old accounts and cause any bounce issues, or get spam complaints from people who don’t even remember subscribing.

This is why it’s a good idea to regularly update your email list – you’ll improve your open rate and your click-through rate, seeing metrics that actually matter to your bottom line.

Plus, most email marketing platforms require you to pay per subscriber. Why pay to send emails to people who aren’t paying you?

How Often Should You Clean Your Email List?

You might be wondering how often you need to be putting these email list cleaning into play. Luckily, this isn’t something you typically need to take care of each month.

While it does vary depending on your list size, industry and target audience, you’ll likely want to go through and clean up your list every six months or so.

A good rule of thumb is simply to pay attention to your email stats. It might be time to do a good scrub of your email list if you start to see analytics like your open/click rates and email deliverability drop.

Effective Email List Cleaning Strategies

Now let’s dive into the real reason you’re here – learning about these hyper effective email list cleaning strategies that can help improve your email stats and increase subscriber engagement.

1. Do a deep dive through your email list.

The very first thing you need to do is take a good look at your email list and bulk remove subscribers based on certain criteria. You can use filters in your email marketing software or handle this manually if you have a smaller list. 

Plus, you can always use tools to import CSV into Google Sheets and make the whole process easier to manage.

The criteria we recommend checking out includes the following.

Remove duplicate emails.

You don’t want duplicate emails to take up multiple spaces in your email marketing provider, costing you more money, so it’s smart to start by removing any duplicates you find in your system.

Check for obvious email typos.

If gmail is spelled “gamil,” you can probably safely assume what the real email address is and delete or edit it in your system. 

Be on the lookout for similar typos that you can tell lead to incorrect or fake email addresses and remove those from your list to help boost open rates and deliverability. You can also use email verification to check if an email is valid or not.

Delete bounced emails.

Check which emails have regularly had your newsletters bounce and remove all of those from your system. If they’re not receiving your content, they don’t need to be on your list.

Get rid of role accounts.

When we say role accounts, we mean the ones that begin with something like team@, contact@, admin@, info@, etc.

These likely aren’t going to a person’s actual inbox, and if they are, they’re not going to a person who’s interested. Many people input these email addresses as a placeholder to download lead magnets, so it’s a good idea to just remove them.

2. Send a re-engagement campaign.

Maybe your audience is just getting a bit of email fatigue, and they need the right perk to reel them back in again. By sending out a discount, free trial offer, exclusive content or something similar, you might be able to grab their attention and get them re-engaged with your brand.

All you need to do is create a segment of your list based on the last time a subscriber has opened one of your emails and ensure your subject line is as eye-catching as possible.

Using their name, including sad face emoji or sending subject lines like, “We miss you!” are all great tactics to try. You have to see the power of a targeted email campaign like this to really believe it, but it can work wonders for re-engagement.

And if you’re tracking their behavior and still not seeing some of your subscribers take the bait, it’s time to just remove them from your email list and move on.

3. Ask questions.

Another great way to work to re-engage subscribers is by sending engaging, personalized content that would help to engage and entice interested audience members.

Many subscribers might still be interested in your brand and plan to buy eventually, but are overwhelmed by the emails they receive and need more personalized content to grab their eye and get them to open your emails.

There’s a variety of different types of emails you could send to really pull subscribers in, like a poll, a “click this button if” option, asking for feedback, an AMA, giving your audience communication options and more.

Make sure that your email content is always top-notch and extremely relevant to your audience so that subscribers who do want to become or remain customers will regularly open your correspondence.

Understanding how to send emails that make your audience take action is key. If you lose audience attention immediately upon entering their inbox, your strategy isn’t working.

4. Send another opt-in.

If you haven’t touched your list in awhile, or if you’ve segmented out a list of subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in months, it’s a good idea to send out an email requesting another opt-in.

This helps ensure you don’t continue sending content to people who absolutely aren’t interested or who don’t remember subscribing and could potentially mark your emails as spam, giving them the option to immediately opt out of receiving future emails and content from your brand.

Anyone who truly wants to stay subscribed will be happy to click to opt in for your list again, bringing your business back to the front of their mind, and hopefully re-engaging them.

You can also pay attention to your existing opt-ins and landing pages to ensure you remove any with low quality traffic and new leads coming in. This also helps warm up old leads and get them re-engaged.

5. Create multiple newsletters.

Give your audience the option to choose the types of content they want to see, especially if your business covers multiple facets.

You can do this by creating landing pages based on different segments, taking advantage of chatbots or giving users the ability to select the type of newsletter they’d like to receive in your initial welcome email.

Then you can easily create different segments and lists by using an email marketing platform like Right Inbox or Avada.

Some brands that take this approach section out their newsletters based on the different topics they cover, while others will offer a daily digest, weekly newsletter or even monthly update, based on how often they want to hear from your brand.

Many ecommerce email strategies do this to perfectly segment out their email content and it’s a great way to keep your audience happy and engaged.

Plus, offering more landing pages can help to boost your SEO and make link building even easier. So, win-win.

6. Take advantage of email marketing automation.

Want to stay up-to-date on your email list cleaning without having to worry about these more manual strategies? You can easily do so by utilizing your email marketing automation software.

Set rules on your subscribers based on their level of inactivity and create trigger-based emails or rules that will help you regularly clean out your email list and remove inactive subscribers without ever having to lift a finger.

This is a great way to send re-engagement campaigns, opt-in emails to inactive subscribers or even just to remove subscribers who haven’t responded to either campaign.

All you need to do is create an automation campaign based on a specific trigger one time, and then each time you have a subscriber meet the conditions, your software does the rest.

Email automation can sometimes seem overwhelming, but this beginner’s guide should help you feel ready to start setting up some automated campaigns.

Start Cleaning Your Email List

Start utilizing these six strategies for cleaning your email list and ensuring your subscribers stay engaged and interested in your content. Watch your open and click rates improve, as well as your email deliverability.

The post 6 Effective Email List Cleaning Strategies to Improve Subscriber Engagement appeared first on OmniKick.

With mobile devices, you’re always connected to the web everywhere you go as long as there’s internet connectivity.

As a marketer or business owner, you should care about mobile because it’s where consumers spend the majority of their time online.

Write short headlines

Writing for mobile takes the writing challenge to a new level.

Every word counts. Every word should be readable and engaging in any screen size the user chooses.

Have “mobile” in mind when writing headlines.

According to numerous studies, the ideal title length is 55 characters.

When you visit the sites of top web publishers, you’ll quickly notice their headlines are short.

Most of their headlines are under 55 characters.

Shorter headlines are also good for SEO. It means Google won’t cut off any part of your title.

For example, when I entered the keyword “travel hacking,” into Google, below are the titles of sites that appeared in Google search results.

These sites are within Google’s limit of 50 – 60 characters in the title tag.

The common reason why writers use long titles is to oversell their content. Don’t do that as it could make people lose trust in your content.

Therefore, write your headlines with very few words.

Write short sentences

It’s harder to read on mobile than desktop.

Why?

Because it’s difficult to focus on mobile.

Mobile users have tons of apps vying for their attention all at the same time. So, it is almost impossible to be on the same web page for too long.

Users constantly receive notifications from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, etc.

A quick look away from your page could mean they are gone forever.

You need to keep people on your website to have any chance of turning them into customers.

Write short sentences.

Short sentences are fun to read on mobile.

Long sentences are not. They put web readers to sleep.

Here’s an example of a long sentence:

“Your content is a big part of providing the journey a person needs to help self-diagnose whether or not your solution is right for them.”

And here is it after being rewritten into two short sentences:

“Content is a major deciding element for prospects. Their search for solutions goes through your content.”

Which one is easier to read?

I’m sure you’ll choose two short sentences.

Write short paragraphs

According to Jakob Nielsen, founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, people don’t read web pages word for word. Instead, they scan.

Nielsen did a study to find how well people read on the web.

His study found that the average web users read 20% of the web page during their visits.

Web users are bad readers because the web itself is filled with distractions.

Humans have short attention spans. The average human attention span is 8 seconds, which is shorter than a goldfish.

A goldfish is believed to have an attention span of 9 seconds. Keep in mind that goldfish are known for being highly unfocused.

To compete in the mobile world, you need to say it quick and say it well. The good news is, you can achieve both in short paragraphs.

Short paragraphs encourage reading.

Let’s assume you’re presented with 2 articles. One has long paragraphs, and the other has short paragraphs. Which one will you choose?

I bet you’ll pick the article with short paragraphs.

Top publishers like The Guardian and New York Times are now instructing their writers to create short paragraphs to enable their sites suitable for mobile.

Short paragraphs make your page has lots of white space. And lots of white space promotes reading.

Replace long words with short ones

Here are the two rules I follow for simple writing:

1. Don’t use two words where one will do
2. Don’t use long words where short ones will do

These rules are even more important in the mobile world.

Some writers use long words to show they are smart or educated.

If you want to convert browsers into buyers, you’ve got to build trust and credibility. You don’t achieve that by using big words.

Write in plain words people use.

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain

When you use big and long words, no one understands your messages. Therefore, no one buys your product or service.

Stay away from words like utilize, synergy, feckless, facile, and other pompous words.

Avoid long words like simplification, demonstrating, vocabulary, and de-escalate.

Use easy instead of facile.

Use limit instead of de-escalate.

Use grow instead of accumulate.

Use start instead of initiate.

There’s also another situation where writers use two words where one is possible.

Examples are:

Afford an opportunity instead of allow or let.

At this point in time instead of now.

In a timely manner instead of quickly or promptly.

Short words allow web users to read your content with speed and understand your points.

Below is a complex sentence filled with long and big words:

“It is impossible for one to adequately assess the worth of a volume merely by examining the covering.”

Here’s a rewrite of the above sentence using plain words:

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

The rewrite is easy to understand.

Before hitting “Publish,” make sure you double-check each word you use.

Are there places you used long words where short ones are possible?

Are there places you used big words where plain ones are possible?

Are there phrases where one word is possible?

Double-check!

Long words won’t sell your product or service on mobile. Use everyday words instead.

Use a lot of images

If you’re marketing anything online and want growth and engagement from mobile web users, you need images. Lots of them!

Images help you capture and keep attention in the mobile world.

Image sharing network, Instagram has over 400 million daily active users.

They’ve been a rise of images on the web over the past years. The reason is down to the incredible growth in the adoption of mobile devices.

Why should you use lots of images?

Research shows that people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and a whopping 80% of what they see and do.

Images fall into the category of what people see, of course.

As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

You need images to help people recall your brand on mobile.

Embrace minimalism in your website design

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A perfect mobile design is required to succeed in digital marketing.

The perfect mobile design contains nothing but your content and your call-to-action.

Mobile users are easily distracted.

So, as soon as they land on your site, you want them to focus on your message and take action. You remove any unnecessary elements that may prevent them from doing these.

That’s why you need a minimalist web design.

Over the past years, we’ve seen different design trends.

There’s one design concept that has survived for ages.

It is a minimalist design.

Today, the minimalist design concept is more important than ever because people find it extremely difficult to focus on anything on the web.

With a minimalist design, you help people focus on the vital information you want them to read and the actions you want them to take.

For example, as soon as you open Airbnb’s site, they show you a message that asks you to act. Nothing else.

There’s little time to waste on mobile. That is why successful marketers adopt the minimalist design concept. It helps them get web users to take action within a few seconds.

Get a responsive design

Designing for mobile is more challenging than desktops and laptops.

Most desktops and laptops have the same screen size. That can’t be said of mobile.

There are various mobile devices with different screen sizes.

Another issue is that most mobile devices’ screens (smartphones and tablets) can be viewed in portrait and landscape forms.

There’s a perfect solution for this:

Simply get a responsive design.

Responsive design can adapt to any screen size.

Your website has to be usable on every mobile device out there.

With a responsive design, your website will automatically adjust its look to any future device with a new screen size.

Don’t just get any responsive design. You need a design that loads your website with extreme speed.

Getting a responsive design also means you don’t have to create separate sites for desktops and mobile devices.

A positive mobile experience for users will surely boost your sales and revenue.

Design for touch on mobile

Mobile devices are operated with touch. There’s zero need for a mouse.

Because most mobile devices have tiny screens, your website should be designed in a way that it accommodates fingers and thumbs.

Mobile users should recognize your call-to-action buttons at first sight. There should also be enough space around buttons to help them stand out and appear finger-friendly.

For example, you can quickly see that HubSpot’s “Get Started” button is a link. There’s also enough space around the button to make it finger-friendly.

Your website call-to-action buttons should look like that too.

Conclusion

By optimizing your content and site for mobile, you’ll get more customers from mobile devices.

According to a study published in Media Post, consumers start researching products on mobile, and 78% buy within a day.

Mobile is very vital to e-commerce.

Thanks for reading and please share this article with your network.

If you have questions, I’d be happy to answer them in the comment section below.

The post The Complete Guide to Designing Your Content and Website for Mobile appeared first on OmniKick.

What you may not know is that a single sales lead can send massive leads to your business.

A single sales lead can provide that much-needed feedback that will enable you to improve your product (or service) and provide high-quality support.

A single qualified sales lead can connect you with industry influencers and partners that will boost your business even further.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business.

Any business that finds it difficult to generate regular leads will stagnate, and may eventually collapse.

After reading this article, and using the powerful tips you’ll learn from it, I foresee that your business will thrive even in the face of tough competition.

Let me introduce you to 17 smart ways to drive massive sales leads to your business.

1. Interview Influencers

An important marketing strategy is beginning to emerge in the age of ad-blocking technology:

It’s called Influencer Marketing.

Influencer marketing is exploding at a fast pace.

Influencer marketing is the quickest way to prove your business credibility and increases your chance of attracting a lot of new leads.

Interviewing a big name could do wonders for your business.

When you interview an influencer, you introduce yourself to a larger audience, and the doors of leads begin to open to you.

Your interview could be a blog post, a SlideShare presentation, or a video.

Most big names are more accessible than you think.

You can connect with influencers through their favorite social platforms. You can also reach them through their emails or contact form, which can be found on their websites.

Make sure the topic of your interview is based on a common problem most of your prospects have.

2. Write, Publish And Sell Books

It’s widely believed that only people who want to pursue careers as authors could write and sell books, but that is a wrong notion.

Book publishing is another way to get your name and business out there in front of prospects.

In today’s world of content marketing, marketers must start thinking and acting like book publishers to get attention.

For example, Ramit Sethi is widely known as a top personal finance blogger today, but he was pretty unknown before he published his book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

His book earned the world’s attention and got him featured on ABC News, CNN and WSJ.

For example, let’s say you run a pool construction business in California.

How can you use book publishing to get leads?

You could write a book about the lifestyle of pool owners in California where you interview pool owners in the state and ask them to share their wealth secrets and some wonderful life lessons.

This may not sound like the nicest book idea, but someone who’s looking to build a pool in the state would definitely want to read a book like this. That exposes your name and business to potential customers.

You could write a book about various pool exercises.

You could write a swimming guide.

You could write a guide on how to throw an amazing pool party.

You could also write a book about related topics like home cleaning and decoration.

Note that your purpose for writing a book isn’t to promote your business, but to educate potential customers.

People don’t want to be sold. They want to be informed.

So write your book from a neutral perspective and give actionable insights.

Then use your author’s bio to promote your business.

Before you know it, you’ll start getting calls from prospects asking you about your products and services.

3. Speak At Conferences, Trade Shows, And Industry Events

Neil Patel revealed that he was able to lock PokerStrategy.com into a $1.2 million contract when he spoke about online marketing at an online gambling event.

To Neil, speaking at conferences is the best way to land highly qualified clients.

But here’s something important you may not know about Neil:

“To gain exposure for Crazy Egg, I would apply to speak at conferences and discuss whatever topic the conference organizer wanted me to talk about… even if it wasn’t related to analytics.

Instead of asking the organizer to pay for my travel expenses or to provide me with a speaking fee, I would kindly ask them to make Crazy Egg a sponsor of their event.

Sponsorships didn’t cost the conference a dime, and it provided us with an additional exposure that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”—Neil Patel

Web celebrities like Chris Brogan, Mari Smith, Neil Patel, and Gary Vaynerchuk are able to further enhance their personal brands and businesses because they speak at a number of events every year.

You’re probably thinking that you suck at public speaking and you know nothing special to talk about.

Everyone once sucks at public speaking. Everyone once doesn’t have a clue about what to say or how to say it.

In his book “How To Talk To Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: The Secrets of Good Communication,” Larry King said he messed up in his first speaking engagement.

Speaking is a great way to build buzz for your business and get high-quality leads even your biggest competitors can’t get.

Depending on the industry you are in, you could be picking up $10,000 per speaking engagement (though it takes time before you can start earning that much).

While speaking would attract wealth and valuable connections into your life, your business would benefit the most from your speaking engagements.

People will associate your name with your company. And if the organizers are charging at least $1,000 per ticket, you can expect to meet clients who could offer you multi-million dollar business deals.

4. Create And Distribute Infographics

Top brands like Google, Wimdu, MoveHub, and Samuel Windsor are masters when it comes to infographics.

These companies have been able to generate a lot of buzz around their businesses using the power of infographics.

There’s a reason why people love sharing infographics:

They are easily digestible visual contents.

Infographics are more engaging, accessible, persuasive, fun, and easier to recall than any other content type.

No wonder infographic is the most shared content type on the web:

Infographics are also 30 times more likely to get read than a text article which is the top reason why you should be using them to generate leads for your business.

5. Create A Free Software Tool

This could be one of the most powerful, yet under-used lead generation strategies for getting thousands of high-quality leads per month.

The good thing about this strategy is that you only have to create that special tool once and keep promoting it (and watch as other people start promoting it for you).

And then sit back and relax as thousands of leads start coming to you.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a perfect example of what I’m talking about here.

Screaming Frog is a digital marketing agency based in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

Their digital marketing services range from search engine marketing, SEO, link building, pay per click (PPC) management, content marketing, social media, etc.

The agency offers a free tool called SEO Spider which does a host of things like finding broken links, discovering duplicate contents, analyzing page titles and metadata, and more.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool receives hundreds of mentions and backlinks every month from authority websites. That sends thousands of monthly visitors to the Screaming Frog website and some of those visitors would definitely become clients of Screaming Frog.

For example, below is a screenshot of a recent mention of Screaming Frog on BloggingCage, a blog that receives 154,000 monthly visits according to SimilarWeb.

HubSpot also has a free tool called Website Grader which helps you analyze how strong your website is.

You’ll have to enter your website address along with your email address if you want to receive the Website Grader analysis – that automatically turns you into a lead, of course.

Go Smart Solar created a tiny app that helps potential customers get estimates of the cost of installing solar panels, the amount of solar power they’ll generate, and how much money they’ll save in the long run. The tool will only increase the number of leads the business gets on its website.

6. Get Highly Dedicated Leads With Webinars

The success of every marketing strategy you implement is not only measured by the number of visits it attracts but also the quality of the leads the campaign generates.

Webinars are hard to beat when it comes to lead generation.

Webinars represent a “live” content that is both dynamic and interactive.

Webinars provide a richer and more memorable experience for your audience.

With webinars, you teach, you inform, which would surely delight most of your webinar attendees.

You’re like a live presenter answering real questions during your presentations.

Webinars offer you a better opportunity to influence your audience in a unique way, which increases your chances of capturing and turning them into highly qualified leads.

According to Neil Patel, he was able to generate 518,399 visitors and 16,394 leads from 77 webinars!

7. Hack The Press

The most talented marketers are those who can get into the press at will.

Getting press coverage could spark a major positive turnaround for your business.

For example, Allen Burt was able to land his startup in big publications like WIRED, NY Times Travel, and The Huffington Post Travel.

And guess what happened next?

Allen’s startup was able to generate its first few thousands in revenue. In fact, their landing page has a sign-up rate of 30%. That should tell you that traffic from relevant big publications are willing to convert if you 0ffer the right product or service that solves their problem.

Here’s one of the emails Allen sent to get press coverage:

PR is just one of the few lead generation techniques that don’t scale because they are only so many angles you can pitch a journalist. But PR can give you that big boost you need when you’re just starting out, or still small.

Paul Graham says it best:

“One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale . . . startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going.”—Paul Graham

8. Guest Blogging

No, I’m not talking about spammy guest blogging.

I’m not talking about guest blogging to get backlinks for the purpose of ranking high on search engines.

I’m talking about doing strategic guest blogging to grow your business leads. Yes, guest blogging is very effective for that.

For example, Buffer used it to get its first 100,000 users within 9 months.

Jeff Goins managed to get 10,000 subscribers within 18 months through guest blogging.

Your guest post has to be great if you really want to get high-quality leads through it.

Many website owners publish low-value guest posts on low-value blogs and expect to get some leads from that. Guest blogging doesn’t work that way.

Your guest post has to be very high in quality.

The primary purpose of your guest post should also be to generate emails, not tweets.

Which one is more valuable to you?

100 tweets or 100 emails?

I’m sure you’ll go with emails because that’s what matters.

People who are subscribed to your email list are more likely to become customers than people who just tweeted your blog post.

9. Answer Questions On Quora

Recently, I contacted Leonard Kim to ask if Quora is still effective for driving traffic and leads.

His short answer got me hooked!

In a recent article Leonard published on Medium, I could see that he still regards Quora highly.

Here’s how Quora changed Leonard Kim’s life in his own words:

“Before Quora:  Leonard was a joke who failed at everything in life.  He had a reputation that made women run for the woods, because no one wanted to be seen around him.

After Quora:  Leonard rebuilt his reputation and changed out his network with graduates of Ivy League colleges, business professionals, Angel Investors, startup founders, and the most brilliant people in the world.  Oh, he ended up raising money and paid gigs too.”—Leonard Kim

Now I strongly believe that Quora is not only a great place to drive high-quality leads, but also to connect with people who could connect me with the right people.

Here are some Quora discussions I want to jump into right now:

Answer questions that are relevant to your business on Quora. For example, if you’re an insurance broker, you could answer questions about insurance plans and other related topics.

10. Newsjacking

There was news that my favorite soccer club was about to fire its manager. Then I saw this on my Twitter Timeline while watching the trend unfold:

Interesting, right?

Ryanair got my attention. It even got my mention here just because it took advantage of a developing trend – that’s what newsjacking is all.

Newsjacking means taking a related or unrelated developing trend and making it relevant to your business.

Newsjacking is not always on Twitter. It also works if your business has a blog.

You could submit your blog to Google News and be one of the first sites to write about developing trends while connecting it with your business.

Google News always favors sites that are first to break major news. Your site would receive thousands of visitors from Google News as a result.

How you tie the traffic back to your business is now up to you.

Here’s a bad example of newsjacking:

Here’s a good example of newsjacking:

11. Video Marketing

Video is not the next big thing. Video is now.

You’re missing out if video marketing is currently not part of your marketing plan.

Most social media sites have now fully integrated video into their platforms.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others.

The amazing thing about this development is that these social sites let you share short videos that get a lot of attention on social media.

Even a big brand like Walmart is using short videos to keep consumers interested in their products.

Here’s a work of genius on Facebook from HubSpot, a marketing software company I really admire:

Videos like this attract attention on social media, and people are ready to share stuff like this when you ask them.

And you know the result of that?

It draws more eyes back to your website, which means more leads!

12. Email Marketing

Research from Experian states that $1 invested in email marketing yields roughly $44.25 return for marketers.

Which marketing channel could generate a high ROI close to that?

The answer is none!

Email marketing should be integrated with every marketing tactic on this page.

I believe lead generation and email marketing are intertwined.

Actually, someone becomes a lead only after they give you their email address in exchange for something beneficial like an ebook download, e-course access, or webinar registration.

Your job as a marketer is to continue developing your relationship with that lead (someone who has given you his or her email address) and keep selling to them as long as they are interested in the products and services you offer.

13. Participate In Forums

Forums are the first place many smart people look when they want to find someone competent.

No wonder Glen Allsopp of ViperChill got his first breakthrough job from a forum.

Even during the early months of his personal marketing blog, Matthew Woodward was able to generate above $6,000 each month just by posting on the TrafficPlanet, WarriorForum, and BlackHatWorld forums.

He even got banned from WarriorForum because of excessive promotion.

Marketing his blog on forums and actively collecting leads from his blog gives him the luxury to work from anywhere and travel the world.

14. Blogging

Blogs are natural lead generators.

After you’ve given a visitor an amazing content they want, it is important that you collect their contact information like their email addresses to connect further and deeper with them.

It’s highly recommended that you combine blogging with some lead generation tactics that I’ve listed on this page.

According to a study conducted by HubSpot, marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

There are a variety of ways you can collect leads from your blog.

You could offer free guides or personalized reports through your blog.

You could offer the visitors of your blog exclusive access to a piece of content you have.

You could use your blog to promote your upcoming webinars just like KISSmetrics is doing on their blog:

You could also use your blog to conduct surveys or quizzes and release the report to gain valuable backlinks and traffic from authority websites.

There are too many ways blogging can be useful to your business.

Blogging is more than just a lead generation channel – you can use it for anything.

Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream published an article on Inc. where he talks about how his company gets thousands of B2B customers.

It comes to me as no surprise that blogging is the key secret to Larry Kim’s company success.

15. LinkedIn

It’s hard for me to talk about marketing and not mention LinkedIn especially when your business is B2B.

I can’t recall how many times I’ve met marketers who told me LinkedIn is a lifesaver.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

My LinkedIn profile is far from perfect, but if you’re interested in getting leads on LinkedIn, you should have an attractive profile that makes people want to connect with you on the platform.

You have to be very active on LinkedIn if you intend to get something out of it.

For example, you should connect with anyone that might be a perfect client you’re looking for.

As you grow your connections on LinkedIn, you’ll automatically start driving leads to your profile instead of the other way round.

LinkedIn Groups are my favorite.

Join active groups where most of your prospects hang out.

Make unique and valuable contributions to the groups and people would start noticing you on the platform.

If you’re in the marketing niche, for example, you might want to join this interesting discussion:

The more you take part in discussions like this, the more people will start noticing your profile and want to connect with you.

The more connections you make, the higher the leads you get from LinkedIn.

16. Co-Marketing

I like this co-marketing definition from Webopedia:

A partnership between two or more companies where both companies jointly market each other’s products. For example, a company who manufacturers video cards may partner with a game software company, and both companies will market each other’s related product.

Many new marketers struggle to get leads and they forget one of the most powerful marketing strategies ever:

Co-marketing.

Think about it:

What is that one thing you have that businesses in complementary niches want right now?

It could be a skill.

It could be some valuable contacts you have access to.

It could be anything, but it should be something you think someone in one industry or niche wants so bad right now.

You could reach out to these people and give them what they want while asking for something you need so bad right now: leads.

For example, if you’re a web designer, it could be that a non-profit organization has a website that’s poorly designed.

What if you help them create an attractive web design, and then ask for a credit and link to your website, and some referrals?

As you can see, it’s a win-win deal for both parties.

For example, I stumbled upon the site of Take A Kid Fishing (TAKF) Foundation based in North Carolina.

The non-profit organization supports disadvantaged youth and children with special needs throughout Eastern North Carolina, by hosting an annual day-long coastal fishing adventure.

Scrolling down to the site’s footer, I can see that the website was designed by Ian Cartwright.

Who knows, Ian may have designed the website for free in hopes of getting free marketing from the footer.

I’ve witnessed many other co-marketing campaigns like HubSpot partnering with the LinkedIn Sales Solutions team to create an ebook about social selling.

17. Networking

Maybe I saved the best for the last.

Networking is my favorite lead generation technique.

When you’re just starting out, leveraging your current network is the best thing to do.

I’m a big believer in the below idiom:

A known devil is better than an unknown angel.

Whether you’re starting a new business or finding a new job, your current connections are the best place to start from. It doesn’t matter whether people in your current network are good or bad.

I rate Bryan Harris as one of the most talented lead generation experts I have ever known. He’s pretty good at building a massive email list.

Bryan always advises his students that their first goal should be to acquire their first 100 email subscribers.

Guess how he asks them to achieve that?

He tells his students to contact their friends and family and simply asks for their emails.

It could be through a text, a phone call, or an email message.

Maybe you know 100 people in the real world. Those people should be your first email subscribers.

Those people could be your mom, dad, siblings, high-school friends, neighbors, ex etc.

You can even ask those 100 people to invite 2 more friends to join your email list.

Before you know it, you’ve acquired 300 strong email subscribers.

Here’s how Bryan built his first email list:

Yes, it was through a Facebook post and only 26 people joined his email list.

He asked them to pre-order his course on making explainer videos.

Guess how much he made from those pre-orders alone?

$800!

As you can see, Bryan generated his first sales from his network.

Today, Bryan could make $10,000 within 24 hours because of his big email list.

But he started from somewhere, right?

Conclusion

By using the tips in this article, you’ll be able to get high-quality leads that will increase your revenue.

And don’t forget, you need to collect visitors’ email addresses on your website to gain even more leads.

Use OmniKick to start collecting emails today. Start your free trial today.

The post The Best Ways to Get High-Quality Business Leads appeared first on OmniKick.

This is one of the toughest marketing questions.

But this article will break down all the complexities that surround this question.

Many companies have this one BIG issue with SEO:

They can’t figure if they are losing or making money from their SEO campaigns.

Do you know what these companies do?

They rather spend their marketing dollars on paid search because it allows them to track their ROI easily.

But that’s a big mistake.

What these companies (including you) may not know is that SEO provides the best long-term results.

SEO will continue to drive revenue for months after the campaign has ended.

Sam McRoberts is one of my marketing mentors.

McRoberts strongly believes that anyone who wants great returns from SEO should invest in it like Warren Buffett invest in stocks.

I echo his thoughts:

“If you pick a bad set of stocks, you might lose money. If you sell the stocks too late, you might lose money. If you sell too early, you might lose money or even leave money on the table. You have to pick good stocks and hold them for just the right amount of time, just as you have to pick the right keywords and target them for the right amount of time.

You simply can’t approach SEO with a short-term investment mentality. If you’re looking for a quick hold-and-flip, that isn’t SEO. If you want to know with some measure of statistical certainty what your ROI will be over the next quarter or year, that isn’t SEO. If on the other hand you’re willing to invest for the long-term, if you have a long-term vision and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to reach your end goal…that’s SEO.” – Sam McRoberts

I want to make this very clear before we proceed:

If you’re looking to generate ROI within a quarter or six months, then SEO is not the perfect marketing strategy for you.

But if your goal is to dominate your entire niche and become the market leader within the next two years, then SEO is for you.

The amazing thing about SEO is that it has the power to affect each stage of the buying cycle.

So back to our question:

How can you measure the ROI of your SEO campaign?

Most people measure the ROI of their SEO campaign in actual dollars, which I think is very wrong.

I don’t mean it’s bad calculating your SEO ROI in dollars.

Before you do that, there are some metrics you have to track.

Your SEO ROI should never be measured by one metric alone like revenue.

Because of the complexity of SEO, you’ll need to rely on the combination of 11 key metrics.

1. An Increase In Non-Branded Organic Search Traffic

There are two kinds of keywords:

1. Branded keywords
2. Non-Branded keywords

Branded keywords are those phrases that contain a brand name or some variation of it.

Search users who type in branded keywords are already familiar with the brand within the keyword.

For example, when someone types the keyword “Michael Kors Lexington Watch” it indicates this person is already familiar with the Michael Kors brand.

Searchers who use branded keywords already have a brand or product in mind.

On the other hand, is non-branded keywords.

A non-branded keyword doesn’t contain any website, brand name, or some variation like a misspelling.

For example, when someone types the keyword “watches for men” or “best watches for men” into Google, it indicates that they don’t have any brand in mind, and just still in the research stage.

One of the goals of your SEO campaign is to increase your brand exposure to people who are typing those non-branded keywords that are related to your business.

Unfortunately, in 2013, Google stopped providing us with keyword data.

This development means you can’t track exactly what branded and non-branded keywords are driving the most traffic to your web pages.

But there’s good news:

You can still remove branded keywords from your organic search traffic report in Google Analytics.

(I assume that you’ve already installed Google Analytics on your website).

Inside your Google Analytics dashboard, you’ll see a link on the left side that says Acquisition.

Click “Campaigns.”

Click “Organic Keywords.”

To remove branded keywords from your “Organic Traffic” report, click “Advanced.”

You’ll see something like below.

Select “Exclude” and type in your branded keywords in the white box.

If traffic from your non-branded organic search is rising, it shows your SEO campaign is moving in the right direction.

2. An Increase In Branded Organic Search Traffic

Don’t get confused yet.

This may sound like the opposite of #1, but it’s not.

It’s very important that you’re tracking your branded organic search traffic too.

It’s the only way to know if your SEO campaign is moving your brand in the right direction.

Like I said earlier, SEO affects each stage of the buying cycle.

Here’s how:

If someone discovers your brand through a non-branded organic keyword search, it means they have now come in contact with your brand.

In fact, you can conclude that they are now familiar with your brand.

Someone who discovered your brand through a non-branded organic keyword search may decide to go back to Google and learn more about your product or service.

This time, this individual may type in a branded keyword that is related to your business.

I may decide to go back to Google and type a branded keyword like “Nicholas A. Parr. Looking at the below results, you can see that Google presented me with branded results of this law firm.

It’s important that you’re tracking your branded organic traffic.

Searchers who are typing keywords that are related to your brand are closer to buying your products than searchers who type non-branded keywords into search engines.

Tracking your branded organic traffic is as simple as tracking your non-branded organic traffic (in the steps given in number one).

You’ll only have to select “Include” and type your brand name in the white box.

If your branded organic traffic is growing along with your non-branded organic traffic, it indicates your SEO campaign is helping you build your brand on search engines which would certainly have a big positive impact on your revenue.

3. An Increase In Total Organic Search Traffic

This is where you’ll combine your branded organic traffic and your non-branded organic traffic together.

If your overall traffic from search engines isn’t increasing, then your SEO campaign isn’t working.

Traffic is the #1 marketing challenge.

I haven’t met any marketer or website owner who says he or she is receiving too much traffic.

Even the biggest websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are always looking for more traffic.

Google bought YouTube because it wants to grow its business.

YouTube turned out to be one of the best buys by Google, and in the tech world.

Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram because it wants web users to keep coming back to its platform.

Yahoo, Amazon, AOL, and Microsoft are always looking for the next web property that will keep more web users on their platforms.

These widely successful web businesses would continue to make smart acquisitions in the future because that is the only way they can stay at the top.

Any website owner that says he or she is receiving too much traffic would surely be out of business soon.

The same is true for search engine organic traffic.

You can never have enough of it which is why you must continue investing in SEO and ensure that your SEO campaign is bringing in more web users to your website.

A perfect SEO campaign will definitely take some time before you start seeing any tangible results.

But it’s also important that you implement the right SEO strategies.

If your SEO campaign isn’t generating more visitors every 3 or 6 months, then it’s not working.

Here’s how the traffic graph of a great SEO campaign should look like:

Not like this:

4. An Increase In The Numbers of Keywords That Drive Traffic To Your Website

Keywords are an important aspect of search engine optimization no matter which niche you are.

When you make use of the Google search engine, for example, that phrase you put into that search box is a keyword.

I’m feeling a little hungry right now so I typed the keyword “fried chicken recipe” into the Google search box.

You’ll see that the first two results have the exact keyword “fried chicken recipe” in their titles.

Google is hiding keyword data. There’s nothing we can do about it. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t know when the keywords your web pages are showing up for are increasing, or decreasing.

I’m a big fan of Ahrefs, a powerful tool I use to track my keywords.

Ahrefs has a nice feature called Site Explorer which I like to use to see how many keywords a particular web page is ranking for.

For example, I took this Moz’s page about search engine ranking factors and put its web address into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Ahrefs tells me that this page is currently ranking for 2,600 keywords on organic search which sounds good.

As you can see above, this article from Moz ranks for a lot of keywords and receives organic traffic of 2,000 visits from those keywords in the last month.

If the keywords your website is ranking for are increasing, it shows your site is getting stronger on search engines.

The more keywords a web page can rank for, the harder it’ll be for a competitor to knock it out of the organic search.

If your site is ranking for more keywords, it shows your SEO campaign is heading in the right direction.

5. An Increase In Ranking Positions In Organic Search

If you’re not ranking on the first pages of search engines for your target keywords, you won’t get the traffic your site deserves.

Ranking positions are one of the most important metrics you should be tracking to determine if your SEO campaign is working.

Ranking #1 for a high-traffic non-branded keyword could increase your revenue by over 30%.

According to a study conducted by Chitika, the #1 listing on Google’s organic search results receives 33% of the traffic.

The #2 listing receives 18% of the traffic, and the traffic only degrades from there:

You want to ensure that your web pages are ranking between #1 to #3 for their target keywords before you can consider your SEO campaign a success.

It’ll definitely be tough to crack the #1 position for some of your keywords, but it matters a lot if you’re really serious about increasing your revenue.

Many people are hardly ranking on the top 3 for most of their keywords, then you’ll hear them complaining that SEO is not working, or isn’t worth the investment.

If your web pages are still buried deep down on organic search results for your target keywords, it will be wrong to judge your investment in SEO at this time.

Do all it takes to rank on the first pages and let’s see if SEO is really worth the investment.

I use Google Search Console to track which of my web pages are ranking on the first pages of Google for their keywords.

Inside your Google Search Console dashboard, click on “Search Traffic.”

Then click “Search Analytics.”

You’ll see something like this where you can track the ranking positions for each keyword in Google search results.

6. An Increase In The Number Of Pages Visited

What’s happening on your website is also an integral part of your SEO campaign.

Many people focus too much on the external factors that affect rankings and neglect the internal factors. This is wrong.

Ignoring those internal factors could be hurting your SEO campaign when you expect it to be improving.

If search users visit your pages and leave, that’s not a good signal you want to send to search engines.

You have to make sure your visitors are not only visiting your pages from search engines, but they are also clicking through to other pages on your website. This sends a positive signal to search engines. It tells them that your content is meeting their user’s expectations.

One important metric you should be paying attention to is the number of pages per visit.

Google Analytics will give you this important data.

Inside the Google Analytics dashboard, click “Audience” then “Overview.”

Take a look at Pages/Sessions:

An increasing “pages per visit” will surely have a positive impact on your revenue. It’s also a sign that your SEO campaign is producing fruitful results.

7. An Increase In Visit Duration

The amount of time visitors spend on your website is another indicator of whether your SEO is successful.

Your site might be receiving a high number of visits, but those visitors are useless unless they spend a good amount of time on your website.

There’s no industry benchmark for the number of times visitors should spend on your web pages.

You can only judge using the contents on your web pages.

For example, if the contents of your web pages are thin, then you shouldn’t expect visitors to stay very long on your website.

You should put more interesting content on your website to keep visitors on your web pages for a very long time.

If people are spending more time on your web pages, then you can expect them to become customers.

It would be difficult to convert a visitor who had only spent less than 20 seconds on your website.

You stand a better chance of converting a visitor who had spent 4 to 30 minutes on your website. You can even expect such visitor to tell their friends about your website.

The more time people spend on your website, the more they’re likely to buy your product.

Inside your Google Analytics dashboard, click “Behavior,” then click “All Pages.”

You’ll see the URLs of every page on your website.

Then click on the page you want to track.

After clicking on the page, use the “Secondary dimension” to track the time duration of traffic from each source.

This is where you’ll see the average time duration of traffic from each search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc).

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Click “Advanced.”

Step 2: Click “Acquisition” then click “Source.”

You should have a list of referrals that are sending traffic to that page.

What you want to do is look at the time duration of various search engines’ traffic to your site.

You should expect your revenue to increase if this metric is high.

8. Low Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is another important metric you should watch before you measure your actual ROI.

If your bounce rate is high, then your SEO campaign hasn’t done a good job.

Many people commit the mistake of measuring their ROI before the bounce rate, which I believe is a big marketing mistake.

A high bounce rate is another sign that shows visitors are not really happy with the contents on your website.

Don’t expect to convert visitors into customers when most of them are quickly bouncing off your pages.

Getting your site’s bounce rate is easy in Google Analytics:

Click on “Audience,” then “Overview.”

You can also drill down to find the bounce rate across user types, individual pages, etc.

9. An Increase In Inbound Links

Inbound links are the lifeblood of SEO.

Links serve as votes for your website.

The more votes your website gets, the stronger it will perform on search engines.

Your SEO campaign should be driving in links. This is very important.

If your SEO campaign isn’t driving new authority links to your website, then you can’t completely call it a success even if it increases the bottom line.

A web page without many inbound links can easily be knocked out of the first page of Google at any time (that is if it’s ranking there at the moment).

The only way to solidify and protect your rankings is to ensure that your pages are gaining new backlinks.

Without that, a competitor who is willing to gain more high-quality backlinks can easily overtake you in search engine results for your target keywords.

Pay attention to the number of those new links as it protects your business future income.

Ahrefs is my favorite link research tool.

For example, this Moz page currently ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword “SEO tools.”

When I put its web address into Ahrefs, it showed that this page gained 16,000 new backlinks from 156 domains in the previous month.

Despite this Moz page ranking on the first page for its target keyword, you can see that the page continues to gain more links to keep it on that first page.

Without those new links, this page can easily be knocked out of Google’s first page for “SEO tools.”

Always keep this statement in mind:

Getting to the first page of Google is hard. Maintaining that ranking position is even harder.

Your competitors are always building more links in order to overtake you on search engine results. The only way to stay ahead of them is to continue gaining new authority backlinks.

10. An Increase In Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors arriving at your website through search engine results who perform your desired action, for example, buy a product or service, contact you, or any other website goal.

Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of your SEO campaign success.

The higher your conversion rate, the more successful your SEO campaign is.

There are different ways you can track conversion.

You can track conversion based on when a visitor fills a form, visited a page, or contact a live representative right there on your website.

Google Analytics allows you to track your site’s conversion rate.

All you need to do is set-up your conversion as destination goals in Google Analytics.

To set up a destination goal, simply click on “Admin” located at the top of your Google Analytics dashboard.

The next thing you have to do is click on “Goals” which is underneath the “All Web Site Data” column.

Click on “New Goal” to set-up your conversion trigger.

As you’ll see on this page, there are different kinds of conversion goals to choose from.

After setting-up your conversion goals, you’ll be able to see it inside your Google Analytics dashboard.

Just click “Conversions,” then “Goals.”

Here’s how it looks like when your site visitors start hitting your conversion goals:

If conversions are increasing on your website, it shows your SEO campaign is doing a great job.

11. An Increase In Revenue

Revenue is the most important metric.

It’s more important than conversion and every metric that has been mentioned on this page.

But most people often jump straight to measuring their SEO campaign in actual dollars without paying attention to other metrics given on this page.

I recommend you pay attention to all the above metrics before you think about revenue.

Sometimes, your SEO campaign might not even be achieving the right results for you to even consider it a success.

It’s after your SEO campaign is successful should you consider measuring its actual return on investment.

For example, let’s say your SEO goal is to get 50,000 monthly visitors within the next 6 months.

Let’s assume your SEO goal was achieved within that time-frame, and it looks like the ROI doesn’t justify the investment.

What you may not know is that those 50,000 visitors might not even be relevant to your business. Those visits may be coming from unrelated keywords that are bad for your site’s conversion goals.

So, it’s bad to judge your SEO investment at this point because the visitors aren’t relevant.

But if the visitors had been relevant to your business, then it’ll be wise to judge.

So measuring your SEO ROI without considering the first 10 metrics given on this page is totally wrong.

Here’s how to measure your SEO ROI:

Actual SEO ROI= (Total E-commerce revenue through SEO – Cost of running the SEO campaign).

To be honest it’s difficult to get the actual ROI of your SEO campaign.

Why?

If you run a physical store, for example, some search users may land on your site and decide not to buy your product there (or hit any of your SEO conversion goals). They may rather visit your physical store and buy the product.

Such sale may not be recorded as an SEO conversion when it’s, in fact, an SEO conversion.

This is also the case when a search visitor decides to visit your site directly at a later convenient time.

Such visitors would be recorded as direct visitors when in fact they learned about your site through SEO.

So, it’s hard to track your SEO ROI.

But you should expect a great SEO campaign to have an overall positive impact on your brand (assuming you also have a great product or service people want to buy).

Conclusion

To further improve your SEO ROI, you need to collect visitors’ email addresses on your website. And how do you do that? Use OmniKick. OmniKick is a powerful popup tool for collecting email addresses. It’s free to get started today.

The post SEO Campaign: The Complete Guide To Measuring Your SEO ROI appeared first on OmniKick.

Consumers feel much more comfortable these days giving sites their credit card details.

So, if you’re planning to start an ecommerce business, you’re not alone. There are lots of people doing the same right now.

But you need a solid ecommerce business plan. Without it, you’ll be setting your business up for failure.

You can launch your own ecommerce store within a few minutes. You don’t need to be a proficient internet user. Tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Etsy make it easy for anyone to launch their own online shop.

If your goal is to make a serious income from your online store, you need a plan. If selling online is a hobby to you, then you probably don’t need a plan. You can use online tools for project planning.

The web is full of stories of entrepreneurs who started online stores at the comfort of their homes.

A mother and son founded Blu Kicks, an online sneaker store, and today it’s one of the most successful stores hosted on Shopify.

By applying what you’re about to read, you’ll create a plan that future-proof your ecommerce site.

Why do you need a business plan?

Formulating a solid ecommerce business plan may take some time. It may take a few days to put a complete plan together. If your business is big and the products or services are complex, it may take a few weeks to create a great plan.

Many find the process boring and time-consuming.

Here’re the four reasons you should create a plan before you start an ecommerce business:

1. You’ll know the do’s and don’ts before you begin
2. You’ll know if the business would be sustainable
3. You’ll know what you have to do to make the business successful
4. You’ll realize what you know and what you don’t know

Step 1: Create a One-Page Business Plan

Create a one-page business plan using the business model canvas.

Note that this is just a one-page business plan that helps you learn about your business. It’s a good place to start when creating a business plan.

I’ve heard from some people who simply didn’t proceed to step 2 because they thought that they can’t do it. If you’re excited doing this first step, that positive energy will take you to step 2.

Here are the different sections of the business model canvas:

• Partners: Who are the key people you need to build a successful ecommerce business?
• Activities: What are the actions you need to take for your business to be successful?
• Resources: What are the key things you need for your business to be successful?
• Value Proposition: Why should prospects do business with you rather than your competitors?
• Customer Relationship: What is the key thing that will be the most important in your customer relationships?
• Marketing Channels: How and where would people discover your business?
• Customer Segments: All customers aren’t the same. How do you divide customers into different sections?
• Costs: What are the things you need to spend money on to generate income for your business?
• Revenue Streams: What are the different ways you’ll make money?

All the above shouldn’t take you long to complete.

Here’s a perfect example of a business model canvas.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

You only need to complete this step to have a clear picture of how the business works. You’ll also know if it’s something you want to do.

There are three questions you must answer before proceeding to step 2. Don’t write weak answers. Write emphatic and convincing answers.

So, here are the three most important questions:

1. What needs are you satisfying?
2. What are the actions you need to take for your business to be successful?
3. Why should prospects do business with you rather than your competitors?

The first question wasn’t part of the business model canvas. But it’s an important question you must answer before you move to the next step.

Note that you should answer these three questions outside the business model canvas.

The next two questions are part of the business model canvas. The canvas may not have enough space for you to answer them in a detailed way.

Because they are so important to the success of your business, it’s time to think and write thorough answers.

If you struggle while trying to answer these questions, you may want to do some research online. Or maybe, speak to a few people who know some things about the industry.

Once you’ve completed answering the above three questions, it’s time to finally move to step 2.

Step 2: Create a Traditional Business Plan

In step 2, you’ll create the real business plan that reveals everything you need to know.

The plan you create at this stage is the ultimate plan. It’s the plan you’ll use to seek out funding or loans if needed. It’s the plan that will give you an edge over competitors who don’t have one.

Don’t skip this step because it’s as important as step one.

There are six sections you must include in your traditional business plan.

Section 1: Write about your company

This first section should include everything anyone would want to know about your company. Include everything here.

Don’t think that you have nothing to write about. There’s a story behind everything.

Where did you get the idea for the business? Why are you starting the business? What’s your personal story?

Write everything here.

Write your mission and vision statements. Include boring details like your business structure and the date you established the business.

People are always interested in these details. It makes them feel they’re dealing with a real company with history. It helps you start believing in the long-term future of your ecommerce business even when you’re yet to begin selling.

For example, Moz shares their history and vision on their About page.

Here are more ideas for what to include in your company’s about section:

• What kind of product or service do you sell?
• What’s your industry?
• Who are the people in your team?
• What are your short and long-term goals?
• Is your company a sole proprietorship, limited liability company (LLC), or corporation?
• What date did you establish your business?

For example, Circle Surrogacy has one of the best about pages I’ve ever seen. They use their about page to tell the story of the founder, the team, and a few of their clients. They went even further by using the about page to address objections potential clients may have.

Section 2: Write about your market and competition

This is another important section that requires a lot of details. You may need to do some research into your market, or industry and the competition.

Write everything you need to understand your market and competition.

For example, what’s the demand like for the kind of product or service you intend to sell?

If the market is already saturated and you plan to go niche, you need to explain how you want to market in that niche.

I’m a big fan of going niche when starting. It helps businesses focus on winning a small percentage of customers and satisfying them well with quality products or services.

Explain if there’s enough prospects in that niche. If there isn’t, you may want to move to other niches, or you combine two niches.

For example, if you cater to stay-at-home moms and there isn’t enough market for that, you may want to expand to stay-at-home dads.

For example, Nerd Fitness started with a niche. They focused on nerds and gamers who want to become fit.

Write as much as you need to know. You don’t have to use the correct words the first time. Don’t try to make each sentence perfect. You can come back and edit it later.

I use Microsoft Word or Google Docs for this. I’ve met people who write their plans on paper. Do what works for you.

I’ll like to introduce two analytic tools I use for this section to help me learn further about the market and competition:

1. PEST analysis
2. SWOT analysis

PEST analysis helps you recognize political, economic, social, and technological factors that may affect market growth or decline in the future.

SWOT analysis helps you detect strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that may be present to your company and competitors’.

Do PEST analysis first because it represents bigger factors that may affect SWOT.

Below is an explanation of each factor in PEST analysis:

• Political: Recognize politically motivated factors that may affect your business. Examples are government policies, competition regulation, trade restrictions, consumer protection laws, etc.
• Economic: Recognize economic forces that could impact your ecommerce business success. Examples are industry growth, seasonal factors, international trade, international exchange rates, monetary policies, etc.
• Social: Recognize social attitudes, behaviors, and trends that may impact your audience. Examples are customer service, the environment, leisure, family size, lifestyle trends, etc.
• Technological: Recognize how technologies can affect the way you make, distribute, and market your product and service.

The below is a PEST analysis template:

SWOT analysis is a powerful analytic tool that helps you develop your business strategy and position your company effectively.

Below is an explanation for each factor in SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: These are the positive characteristics that give your ecommerce business a competitive advantage over competitors. Examples of these are brand and reputation, patents, location, story, etc.
• Weaknesses: These are issues that reduce your competitiveness and require improvements. Examples are lack of skills, funds, expertise, aging infrastructure, inflexible workforce, etc.
• Opportunities: These are the reasons why your business is likely to grow. Examples are new markets, new technology, changes in government policy, etc.
• Threats: These are issues that might prevent growth and competitiveness. Examples are new competitors, political change, environmental conditions, etc.

Doing PEST and SWOT analysis will help you better position your business for positive and negative events. By using these analytics tools, you’ll be able to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, and deal with threats before they become a problem.

Here’s an example of a SWOT analysis template:

Let me give you a real instance of a business that uses PEST and SWOT.

An ecommerce business that heavily relies on Facebook ads for sales would pay attention to Facebook’s data privacy scandals that are generating a lot of publicity.

There’re reports that the US congress may soon introduce some privacy laws.

The owner of the ecommerce business may want to position their store to rely less on Facebook.

As a smart business owner who uses PEST and SWOT analysis, it means it’s time to invest more in other marketing channels and strategies that won’t be adversely impacted by privacy laws.

Section 3: Create a marketing plan

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that helps you organize, execute, and track your marketing strategy over a given time period.

A single marketing plan can include as many marketing strategies as you want. I highly recommend that you have five or more marketing strategies when creating your business plan.

You can try two or three at each time to discover the ones that give you the best return on investment (ROI).

A marketing strategy describes how your ecommerce business will accomplish a goal. It includes the campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software you’ll use in the process.

For example, let’s say you want to use YouTube marketing as a marketing strategy. You’ll include the kind of video content you’ll create, how and who will produce them, how you’ll promote your videos, make sales from the videos, and more!

Each marketing strategy must contain complete information about its process.

Determine the KPI (key performance indicator) you’ll use to measure the success of each marketing strategy.

If you’re doing YouTube marketing, your KPI could be YouTube views, likes and comments.

(youtube-marketing-key-performance-indicator)

Have a clear goal for each marketing strategy. What do you want to achieve with it?

It could be more sales. More YouTube subscribers. Or, more email subscribers.

Each marketing strategy you plan to execute should have a budget assigned to it. Not spending more than that budget is key to making your marketing plan work.

After assigning a budget to each marketing strategy you want to execute at a time, calculate the total marketing budget and put it at the top of your marketing plan. That reminds you how much you’re willing to spend each day, month or year on marketing.

If you have five marketing strategies, with each one costing $500 per month, then your total marketing budget would be $2,500 per month.

Section 4: Write a full description of your business operations

Here’s the section you describe in full detail, the day-to-day operations of your business.

In this section, you should fully explain how many employees your ecommerce business need and the role of each one. If you’re a solo entrepreneur like many new ecommerce owners, make clear your everyday tasks.

Write how your Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, etc. would be like. What do you do each day?

How do you create, promote, deliver your product or service?

What are the things you need in place to make your business run smoothly?

How long would it take to create and deliver each product or service?

How do you collect feedback from customers and integrate it into your product and service?

What’s your plan for dealing with a major increase in demand from customers?

Include every detail about your business operation in this section. Keep in mind that you don’t have to write the perfect sentence at first. You can edit everything later.

This section is crucial for both the short and long-term operations of the business. Dealing with it upfront will help your business run smoothly and stay organized.

Of course, you can always come back to this section and add or remove some information.

Ecommerce business owners who don’t outline their business operations and tackle issues before they arise often feel stressed out in the beginning. Everything becomes unexpected and overwhelming.

It’s when they start dealing with orders, customer complaints, product creation, etc. that they realize the business is understaff or overstaff.

Section 5: Write every detail about your business finances

This is where you create a budget for your business.

Write how much you plan to invest in your business idea.

List and calculate all the expenses.

By now, you should know if the business can be profitable. Know the profit of each unit of product or service you sell.

Note that this financial section isn’t the same as accounting. Some people tend to confuse it with accounting

There are two reasons you need to write this section:

1. You’ll need it when you want funding from venture capitalists, angel investors, or even smart family members. They want to see that your business will grow quickly so that they can make profit. Any bank will also want to see these numbers to be sure that you can repay the loan and interest.
2. You’ll need it to really understand your business. The information in this section will help you project how the next 3, 6, 9, 12 months would be like financially for the business.

These are the steps to detailing your business finances:

1. Start with a sales forecast: Project your sales over the next 1 – 2 years. Have a sales forecast for each month.
2. Create an expense budget: You need to know how much you’re going to be spending each month.
3. Develop a cash-flow statement: This statement should show how dollars will move in and out of your business.
4. Income projections: Use the numbers you put in your sales forecast, expense budget and cash flow statement to make income projections.

Section 6: Outline how you want to measure your success

Creating a business plan doesn’t guarantee that your ecommerce site would become successful. But at least, it does tell you when something is wrong or right with your plan.

By creating a business plan, you’ll quickly detect when things aren’t happening as expected. Then you can make the decision to quit or fix things.

Having a well-formulated business plan tells you when positive things are happening. It lets you celebrate small victories as you continue to build your business.

Create a timeline of the things you want to happen.

Where do you expect to be with your business in the next year or two?

Put that in the business plan.

And that’s it. You’ve completed your ecommerce business plan.

It’s time to start launch it.

Before you leave, I’ll like to introduce you to OmniKick. OmniKick is a popup builder. Use it to create amazing popups that’ll help you collect customers’ emails on your site.

Ecommerce stores that use a popup technology like OmniKick convert more visitors than those that don’t.

It’s free to start using OmniKick. Sign up today.

The post Ecommerce Business Plan: How to Write a Plan That Works appeared first on OmniKick.

In this article, you’ll learn the only ecommerce email marketing tips you need to know to sell more products or services on the web.

Here are they:

1. Send Abandoned Cart Emails

According to a study by the Baymard Institute, 70% of shoppers abandon their carts. Abandoned carts cost online retailers about $260 billion in revenue each year.

You lose money when you don’t send abandoned cart emails.

When you do, you’ll get some customers to complete their purchases. Some ecommerce stores revealed that their revenue increased when they send abandoned cart emails.

Shoppers abandon their carts for various reasons.

Sending an abandoned cart email gives you a second chance at gaining some new sales.

Nanoleaf, a company that sells personalized lighting sent emails that helped 30% of its abandoned carts convert into product sales.

Research by Bluecore shows that cart abandonment emails have the highest average conversion rate (2.63%) and click-to-conversion rate (21.78%) of any triggered ecommerce email.

Two Types of Abandoned Cart Emails

Here are the two types of abandoned cart emails you should know:

1. Abandoned Cart Email Series
2. A Single Abandoned Cart Email

1. Abandoned Cart Email Series

These emails are reminders that span across a few days after a customer abandoned their cart. Some retailers send reminders over 2 – 5 days.

Don’t make your series last more than a week. A customer who abandoned their cart 7 days ago has probably moved on. Maybe the customer had bought from a competitor. Or, the customer isn’t interested in buying again.

Each email in the series should be interesting. Each email should offer the customer something special.

2. A Single Abandoned Cart Email

This is a single email that encourages the customer to complete their purchase. Some ecommerce businesses usually send this email after a day.

Should you send a single abandoned cart email?

It depends on the complexity and price of your product or service.

If the price of your product is between $50 – $50, sending a single abandoned cart email might make sense.

But if you’re selling a product that’s worth $100 – $500, shoppers might hesitate a bit more. Therefore, it makes much sense to send an email series in this case.

2. Send Promotional Emails

Great promotional emails convert customers right away. Their job is to sell to the customer. You should see some sales after minutes and hours of sending a promotional email.

Below is a promotional email from Teavana, a tea company based in Seattle, Washington. Teavana offers their customers 30% discount if they buy in less than 24 hours.

This type of promotional email work. Customers know that they must buy within a specific period to qualify for the discount.

Got a new product your customers will love to have?

Send a promotional email announcing the product. Make it easy for customers to buy by offering them discounts, free trial or money-back guarantee.

Use the announcement email to highlight what customers will get from the new product or service. Explain the problem it helps them solve.

Get your customers thinking about the problem. Present the product as the solution.

First access promo emails are another form of new product promo emails most software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses use. Because you’re a subscriber, a company could grant you early access to their product or service for a fee.

Even a store like Nordstrom is sending early access promotional emails to its customers.

Holiday emails are also another form of promotional emails that work.

Ecommerce email marketing is more effective during holidays. It’s a period when many shoppers expect to receive some special offers in their emails.

According to research by Yesmail, most consumers open emails from businesses during the holiday season.

3. Segment Your Email Subscribers

You need to appeal to each subscriber. You can’t do that without email segmentation.

You need to segment subscribers based on their interests, needs, previous purchases, actions, and more.

You can segment subscribers into tens or hundreds of categories.

How to Segment Your Email Subscribers

Data from MailChimp shows that businesses that segment their email lists enjoy:

• Higher opens
• Higher unique opens
• More clicks
• Lower bounce rates
• Lower abuse reports
• And lower unsubscribes

Customer Segmentation can also be done on the basis of how the customer spends time on their website. For example, buyguide.ae which is a product recommendation site in UAE value customers more if they spend more time on particular pages of their site.

It does not matter how many pages the visitor sees on the site, what’s important is that did she spend 5 to 10 mins reading the in-depth buying guide. If she did, she gets flagged for the High Buy Potential segment.

So how do you segment your email subscribers?

1. High Average Order Value Customers

High AOV customers are your most valuable customers. They spend more on average than every other group on your email list.

Put them in a separate category.

You can further segment them into sub-categories.

For example, some high AOV customers buy monthly. You should ensure that you’re sending them valuable offers at the end of each month.

If you sell different products on your ecommerce site, some of your high AOV customers buy a lot of products together. Recommend these products together when you send them marketing emails.

Some of your high AOV customers buy all the products they need at once. They buy occasionally, and they buy BIG when they do. Offer them all the products they need and sweeten the deal with some additional offers they may not be expecting.

Recognize the different buying behaviors of your high AOV customers and target them accordingly.

2. Discount Customers

This group of customers only buy when you offer discounts on items. I also call them discount shoppers.

They rarely buy at the normal price. That’s because they always want to save money.

Put this group of customers in one category.

Discount shoppers are valuable customers to your business. They may tell their friends about your business.

Start a refer-a-friend program that makes them qualify for discounts. They’ll be happy to send some friends to your business, mention your brand on social media if it means they will get 50% discounts.

You can also start a loyalty program where you offer customers free products and discounts when they spend up to a certain amount on your products or services.

3. Exclusivity Buyers

Exclusivity buyers are different from High AOV customers. Exclusivity buyers are interested in new and exclusive products.

They aren’t interested in discounts. Yes, discounts are everywhere online these days, and almost everyone likes them. But few people don’t. These people are exclusivity buyers.

Every email list has a few exclusivity buyers. You can sell more to them too.

To convert exclusivity buyers, you need to offer them exclusivity – something they treasure most. Give them early access to your products or services.

4. Send Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails

Up-sell and cross-sell emails make customers buy more from you.

Up-selling means selling more expensive products or services. It also means selling upgrades or add-ons.

Cross-selling means selling different products or services to the same customer. The products could be unrelated to each other.

Ecommerce businesses have been using up-selling and cross-selling to boost their sales for a long time.

Up-selling and cross-selling are even more effective when combined with email marketing. Sending up-sell and cross-sell emails will increase your ecommerce store’s average order value.

3 Types of Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails

There are three types of up-sell and cross-sell emails you can send to your email subscribers.

1. Email Receipts

It’s highly recommended that you send your customers receipts after buying your products. A receipt let the customer knows that payment was received and processed.

Consumers consider email receipts one of the most important messages in their emails.

In most industries, the average open rate for emails is 17.19%. But email receipts have an average open rate of 70.90%.

Email receipts also receive more engagements, 8.93% compared to 2.70%.

You can use your receipts to up-sell and cross-sell. Customers open and engage with them more than regular emails.

2. Product Follow-Up Email

If someone has bought your product, they may be interested in buying similar or related products.

Send them a follow-up email thanking them for purchasing. Ask for reviews and use the opportunity to promote your other products.

You may include products people frequently buy together with the products they had bought.

3. Category Follow-Up Email

If you run a large ecommerce store where you sell hundreds of different products, it’s likely that products are grouped into categories.

A customer who bought a product from a category may be interested in buying other products in the same category. You can send a follow-up email promoting products in the same categories to customers.

Amazon uses this email marketing tactic.

For example, if you buy a mattress on Amazon, they may send you emails promoting nightstands, dressers and bed frames because they are in the same category.

5. Send Re-Engagement Emails to Past Customers

Some customers have stopped buying from you. Maybe, the last time they bought was 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 months ago. Don’t give up on those past customers.

According to Harvard Business Review, it’s anywhere from five to twenty-five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

Customer acquisition has become harder and more expensive than years ago.

It’s easier to win back previous customers than new customers who haven’t heard of your business before.

You’ve already spent time and money on past customers. You’ve given them several promotions. You’ve made them feel special in the past. You can still win them back if you do the right things.

You have their email addresses. Maybe their phone numbers too. Perhaps, you know their buying habits.

You can customize your promotional offers based on information you have about them.

Send previous customers some re-engagement emails. Here are the top three re-engagement emails:

1. Win Back emails
2. Replenishment or Renewal Emails
3. Life Events Emails

1. Win Back Emails

Send customers a friendly email telling them how much you’ve missed them.

Email marketing is a great way to re-connect with customers.

Make sure you include a discount as a bonus for buying from you again.

Include a link to opt out in case previous customers don’t want to receive emails from you again. Some previous customers may not need your product or service anymore.

2. Replenishment or Renewal Emails

If customers can only use your product for a specific period or number of times, there’s nothing wrong reminding them to buy again.

You can’t use some products forever. For example, I buy body cream, shampoo, and toothpaste every thirty days. An email that reminds me to buy again at the end of each month will help me order faster.

If you sell products or services where customers have disabled automatic renewal, you can send them emails asking them to renew.

3. Life Event Emails

Some ecommerce stores collect the birthdays of their customers.

They do this to offer customers some special deals on their birthdays. You should celebrate your customers’ birthdays with them.

It could help you re-convert some customers who may have stopped buying from you. Their birthdays give you an opportunity to reach out to them again and put some smiles on their faces. Offer them unbelievable discounts, free shipping, free products, and maybe some handwritten notes.

I love brands that contact me on my birthday.

6. A/B Test Your Emails

The first email message you send to your subscribers won’t be perfect. But you’ve got to start doing email marketing if you’re serious about increasing sales and retaining customers.

While there’s nothing like a perfect email message, you need to continue to improve your messages to generate more sales.

And how do you do that?

The answer is A/B testing.

There are many things you can a/b test in your email marketing campaigns:

• Subject lines
• Email copy length
• Content type
• Personalization, or no personalization
• Visuals
• Design style
• Tone
• Calls to action
• Button vs. text
• Button copy

Learn from each a/b test you conduct.

7. Don’t Wait Until the End of Checkout to Collect Emails

Many businesses wait too long to collect emails of shoppers on their sites. Don’t make that mistake.

As you know, emails are the most important assets your ecommerce business can have. You can always reach potential customers and convert them when you have their email addresses.

Collecting emails early during the checkout process will help increase the abandoned carts your business can recover from.

I recommend you start collecting emails as items are being added to the carts. You can also ask for emails early while customers are reviewing their shopping carts.

If a customer has given you their email before failing to complete the sale, it’s easy to bring them back to your site.

Conclusion

After years of selling online, I’ve learned that email marketing is the most powerful medium for ecommerce businesses.

Email has been around for decades and will continue to be. I advise that you invest more in email marketing than any other channel.

Do you want to start collecting emails on your ecommerce site starting today?

Sign up for OmniKick. Our software will help you collect emails of visitors and customers on your site. Sign up for a free trial today.

The post The Only Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips You Need To Know appeared first on OmniKick.

There’s no such thing as love at first sight when selling online.

The purpose of lead generation is to get a visitor to know you and your business. You want to assure them that they can trust your company to help them solve their problems.

You also want to assure them that you sell the best products or services. That you’re better than the competition.

First, I’ll like to make this clear:

Your site should be receiving some reasonable amount of traffic before you start thinking of leads.

Trying to collect leads on a site that barely receives traffic is worthless.

If you have an extremely low-traffic site, your time is better spent getting traffic than collecting leads.

Tony Ho Tran of the I Will Teach You to Be Rich (IWT) website shared how a single page on the site generated 50,000 leads.

That may sound good to you, but this is a site that receives a lot of traffic daily.

So, it’s easy for IWT to get 50,000 leads from a single web page. It doesn’t you can achieve the same result or something even close.

If you have the amount of traffic IWT receives, maybe you can even receive more leads from your landing pages.

Let’s assume your site has some good amount of traffic. How do you generate lots of leads?

Engage with your audience

If you maintain an active blog and write about topics that are related to your business, there’s no doubt that people who need your products or services visit your site.

There are lots of other blogs online. You should know that these people also visit other blogs and websites.

To make prospects pay serious attention to your site, blog, and brand and like it enough to give you their emails, you need to engage with them.

Almost every business online is doing marketing. We all want customers. Only a few businesses engage with their audience.

There’s a reason why:

While engagement is rewarding, it’s also time-consuming and tedious.

You can’t automate real engagement with your audience.

Respond to comments and mentions on social media

Sony Corporation is one of the well-known brands. They have a Facebook page for the brand.

Their Facebook fans, who are from various parts of the world comment on Sony’s posts on Facebook.

Even though the Sony brand is well-known, the brand has a team that responds to every comment made by fans on its Facebook page.

Sony has realized that engagement is key to winning customers online.  A local business should do the same thing. For example, Nicholas Parr, a Baltimore personal injury lawyer uses respond to comments on his Facebook page.

When someone comments on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn post, make sure you respond to them.

Responding to social media users when they comment or mention you, is the key to building a relationship with them. For example, Elville and Associates, a Maryland estate planning and elder law firm responds to comments on Facebook.

It helps you gain their attention. They feel appreciated. They like your brand.

All comments may not deserve a response. But try to respond in some way. Even a GIF will do.

How does this help you get more leads?

A lot of your customers are on social media.

According to Statista, there are 2.62 billion social media users worldwide in 2018. This number is expected to hit 3.02 billion users in 2021.

Social media is a great place to start and nurture relationships with potential leads both before and after they visit your site.

If you have a good relationship with someone on social media, they are more likely to join your email list.

Facebook Retargeting

If someone visited one of your web pages and didn’t act, you can reach them again through Facebook retargeting.

Facebook retargeting is a smart way to engage with visitors who didn’t act on your site.

You can set up a retargeting campaign in your Facebook Ads Manager.

Here’s how it works:

Facebook gives you a code to install on your site.

Once the code is installed, Facebook will record each visit a Facebook user made on your site.

It means Facebook knows when a Facebook user visits your website.

Facebook allows you to target Facebook users who visited your site or viewed a particular page on your site. You create ads that reach these people on Facebook.

There are other ways to use Facebook retargeting to target Facebook users, but I like the idea of retargeting people who visited specific pages on your site.

When someone has visited a particular webpage, it’s easy to retarget them because you know what the page is about.

For example, let’s assume that you are a small business marketing agency based in Texas like Digiboost, and someone visited your webpage about web design.

It means the majority of prospects are small business owners or operators who are interested in web design.

You can create an opt-in that offers them an ebook that tells them what to know before hiring a web design agency.

You can also collect testimonials from happy clients who are based in the same city as the prospect. Create a page dedicated to testimonials and ask for prospects’ email addresses.

Then use Facebook retargeting ads to reach these visitors again. A relationship coach for men like Karen Brody may use Facebook retargeting ads to collect emails of prospects who had visited her website.

By doing this, you’re engaging with prospects without being annoying.

I highly recommend retargeting for local businesses, especially the ones that spend ton of money on Google Ads. You can retarget those customers who didn’t take any action the first time they visited. For example, a pest control service in Baltimore like On The Fly Pest Solutions can retarget their visitors.

Create an opt-in offer that’s related to each content

On the HubSpot’s blog, each blog post has an opt-in offer that’s related to the content on the page.

For example, they published a post titled, “Selling on Instagram: How to Use Instagram’s Shoppable Posts.”

At the end of the blog post, they offer a free ebook titled, “Instagram for Business in 2018.”

Each blog post published on your blog should have an opt-in offer that’s related to it.

Imagine you just finished reading about Instagram marketing on a blog. You’ll love to read an ebook that tells you more about Instagram marketing.

Now, imagine another scenario where you read about Facebook marketing and the opt-in offer is an ebook about Instagram marketing.

You don’t care about Instagram marketing. You want to learn more about Facebook marketing.

HubSpot has collected hundreds of thousands of leads on its blog using this lead generation tactic.

Turn your site into a powerful lead magnet by creating opt-in offers that are related to the content on the page.

A popup technology like GrowthFunnel makes it incredibly easy to collect leads on your site.

Simplify your site’s design

Your website is where you collect leads.

If your site is difficult to use, prospects are unlikely to give you their contact information.

How do you ensure that your site isn’t difficult to use?

The answer is simple:

Eliminate anything that gets in the path of conversion.

Drip IV Lounge is a offers IV Nutritional Therapy in San Antonio. The website is simple and focused on one thing: converting visitors.

Your goal when someone visits your site is to convert that person into a lead.

If your site is hard to use, it turns people away. Instead of helping you convert visitors into leads, then your site does the opposite.

Geekdom Media is a media company the publishes podcasts and books on personal development and business. Their website is very simple and focuses on collecting emails.

The design is the first impression

When a potential client lands on your site, your first goal should be to make the prospect stay longer.

Don’t rush into trying to make the visitor convert into a lead immediately. You’re better with leads that know what your business does.

People who have spent enough time and read many pages on your site are better than people who spent less than 10 seconds before dropping their email addresses.

According to a study conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, they found that the longer visitors stay on your site, the less likely they’ll leave.

And what makes visitors spend longer time on your site?

Good design and content.

It starts with design. The design is half the battle.

The design is the first thing. Content is what follows.

The design makes the first impression of your site.

If the design is ugly, visitors won’t stay long even if you have great content.

The best way to beat the competition and collect more leads is to make visitors stay longer on your site.

Then you need an exceptional opt-in form to make visitors fill in their contact details.

When you visit the Armored Group’s website, the first thing you see is a stunning picture of an armored vehicle that blends with the design of the site. So, if you’re on the site to buy armored vehicles, the site will surely make you stay longer on the site.

For example, Krisztina Toth is a freelance web developer and designer who works remotely.

She has a stunning site design.

Because of her attractive website, there’s no doubt that she’ll get more leads.

Make your design so simple and appealing that an 11-year old can use it.

Complex site design will only make you lose potential customers.

For example, the design of Kayako is simple. The illustration will capture your attention immediately as you land on the site.

When I see a startup struggling to convert leads, the first thing I look at is the site’s design.

Does it help visitors stay long and convert? Or, does it make them lose interest in the site even before they see the opt-in form.

Ensure that the design makes prospects spend more time on your site. Because the more time they spend, the easier it is for them to give you their details.

Collect names and emails early in the checkout process

If you’re running an e-commerce site of any size, you know that emails are very important.

Top e-commerce businesses like eBay and Amazon live off emails.

Even top social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn depend on emails to keep web users coming back to their sites.

When you have a potential buyer’s email, it helps you gauge his/her interest in your product.

For example, you can send prospects email messages to remind them of their abandoned shopping carts.

If they don’t open your emails, it shows they might have moved on.

If they open your emails and don’t buy, it could be that they are still deliberating on the purchase.

According to Baymard Institute, 69.89% of shopping carts are abandoned. That means about 70% of potential sales are lost.

You can’t recover all these lost sales, but you can recapture some of them. You need emails to do that.

Many marketers leave emails at the end of their shopping cart flow. They collect emails when it’s time for shoppers to make payment.

This is the wrong way to design your shopping cart checkout.

You should collect contact information very early in the checkout process. For example, Earth Class Mail collects emails early on their sign up page.

The below image best illustrates how to create the perfect shopping cart process.

Email offers you the greatest opportunity to convert visitors into customers. You’re closer to making someone a customer when you have their email than on social media, or even your site.

So, ensure that you collect email early in your shopping cart process.

Most shoppers don’t complete the checkout process before they abandon the page. However, when you have their email addresses, you can always reach out to them again.

When trying to sign up egg donors, the first and only thing Circle Surrogacy asks for is the email address. Nothing else. Once they have your email address, they can send you a message that instructs you to continue the process. This ensures that no potential donor is lost because of a long and boring form.

Conclusion

Prospects want you to engage with them.

They want you to create offers that are made just for them.

They want your site to be easy to use.

And finally, they also want to be able to engage with your brand through emails.

A vast majority of web users want to receive promo emails from brands.

According to a study, 96% of people earning $75,000 – $99,900 would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with.

The same study also found that 92% of people earning $100,000 or more would like to receive promo emails.

By following the steps outlined above, you’ll build a brand and site customers want to give and receive emails from.

And also, don’t forget that you need GrowthFunnel to collect even more leads on your site. It’s free to start using GrowthFunnel today.

What other methods have you used to turn your brand and site into lead magnets?

The post How to Turn Your Site into a Powerful Lead Magnet appeared first on OmniKick.