Important email marketing metrics you should be keeping track of

Periodically analyzing metrics gives you an idea of how well your email marketing campaign and the steps you need to take to improve your results. However, with so many metrics available, it can be confusing to decide which metrics will prove to be useful.

Let us have a look at the most important metrics B2B marketing companies should pay attention to -

• Open rate – Tells you whether or not your subject lines are working out

• Click-through rate – Tells you how much your target audience is engaging with your emails

•  Conversion rate – Tells you whether or not your target audience is taking the action you want them to

• Bounce rate – Tells you whether or not your emails are getting successfully delivered to a recipient's inbox

• Unsubscribe rate – Tells you whether your target audience is finding your emails relevant and useful

Based on your email marketing goals, you can also keep a track of other metrics such your subscriber list growth, overall ROI and number of leads generated.

How to Become a Social Selling Specialist

The concept of social selling is not new, however, marketers tend to forget that it is not about selling your product or service at all. Rather, the ultimate goal of social selling is to engage your customers and develop long-lasting relationships with them.

The correct social selling practices give a humanized touch to your brands so that your customers and target audience can relate to you, encouraging more engagement and lead generation and overall brand awareness.

Let us have a look at some tips to help you excel at social selling and successfully practice it as a part of your B2B digitalmarketing strategy -

Update your professional profiles

As social selling focuses on brand and customer communication, it is natural that they will visit your business profile to know more about you as a brand. In such cases, incomplete or outdated profiles will contribute to a negative first impression.

Thus, the first step for successful social selling is to dust up your profiles from top to bottom. Include a professional photo, and update your bio to include things that will be useful for your target audience such as who you help, what problem are you solving and how.

It would also be useful to include case studies or testimonials from your previous clients so that new prospects will find it easier to trust you.

Share useful content

Of course, any social media strategy is incomplete without content. Create and share useful content that adds to the knowledge of your target audience, engages their attention, and above all provides business value. Such content will generate more encouragement in terms of likes and shares, leading to increased brand awareness and visibility.

Encourage communication to drive engagement

You cannot rely solely on sharing content to generate engagement. Participating in relevant group discussions and forums, responding to or leaving your own comments will give you the opportunity to directly engage and communicate with your target audience in a meaningful conversation.

Don't push for sales right from the start

Remember, as we mentioned before, social selling is not about selling. Do not try to make them purchase when you are just starting to converse with a new prospect. Instead, exert yourself to understand their business challenges and helping them find the right solution. This way, the prospect will be more likely to remember and turn to you when they are finally ready to purchase.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

5 Digital Marketing Trends We Are Looking Forward to in 2021

Quick as a flash, 2020 is rapidly approaching its final few months and 2021 is already looking around the corner. As always, it is time to look into the future and see whether the digital marketing trends can help you plan the strategic positioning of our businesses for the new year.

AI-powered chatbots

It is estimated that around 75 to 95% of customer queries will be taken care of by chatbots by 2022. Today, most consumer prefer to forego any human communication and demand an instant answers to their queries through live chats on websites.

An AI-powered chatbot will not only provide instant answers, but can also learn continuosly to provide a deeper answer to improve customer satisfaction.

Voice search marketing

More and more people are using smartphones and /or virtual assistants. It had been predicted that 50% of all online searches will be attributed to voice activation, and this number will only stand to increase in the near future.

Thus, optimizing your website for voice search can help you drive more traffic and improve your customer service, lending you an upper hand over your competitors.

Hyper-targeted advertising

Customers have grown insensitive to, and are even annoyed, by the constant barrage of irrelevant advertisements. They are more responsive to the advertisements that are relevant to them or address a very specific business challenge. Thus, personalization will continue to be important for engaging customer attention and bring relevant leads to the mouth of the sales funnel.

Augmented Reality (AR)

Immersive technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) have already taken firm root in the digital marketing strategies of several brands; but, the use of AR has been few and far in between, especially for B2B brands.

However, the new decade has brought signs for more inclusion of AR. B2B brands can use AR to give immersive product demos and show them exactly what the product could do for their target audience, leading to a vastly improved customer experience.

Messaging apps

An increasing number of marketers are using messaging apps like WhatsApp to stay in touch with their customers and target audience. Using messaging apps will increase the chances of your message getting read, and reduce the possibility of spam as your customers would have willingly given you their number themselves.

A digital marketing company can help you strategize and execute a campaign that includes the latest trends that are in line with your business and marketing goals.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How to use social proof for B2B conversions

A new restaurant has opened in your neighborhood, but so far you have been reluctant to try it out. But, when your friend comes to you with a rave review of the place, you are finally convinced and even eager to give it a go.

This third-party endorsement by a peer of influencer is nothing but social proof, and is a favorite tool of B2B marketing companies to boost their sales. Let us see different ways in which you can leverage social proof for your own business -

• Include customer testimonials and reviews on your website and third-party review sites

• Listing the names of big-shot clients on your website

• Using industry influencers to spread the word about your brand

• Listing your awards, recognition's and certifications on your website

• Publishing case studies that highlight your most successful endeavors

• Show off statistics such as a high user or subscriber count

Single Opt-in vs Double Opt-in: Which is the best for your email list?

When you are making efforts to grow your email list, you will have to make a choice between using either single or double opt-in for getting subscriber permission to send emails. If you cannot decide, let us have a look at what exactly both the terms mean and weigh their merits against each other.

With the single opt-in, a person will only have to subscribe once through your sign-up form to start receiving your emails. On the other hand, double opt-in requires the person to re-confirm his subscription through a confirmation email.

The advantage of single opt-ins is the reduced number of steps on the part of the user, contributing to a simplified user experience. It will also enable you to build your list in a shorter amount of time.

However, the additional step of double opt-in reinforces that the user is serious about receiving your emails, and you can be sure that the email id is valid for maximum inbox deliver-ability. Thus double opt-ins can enable you to build a cleaner mailing list and act as the founding stone of a greater conversion rate.

Both of these options have their own merits. Your choice will depend on your overall campaign goals and priorities. You can contact a digital marketing company if you need help in strategizing and executing effective email marketing campaigns.

How to detect and deal with content scraping

When you are creating content for digitalmarketing, duplicate content is an issue that will always have to watched out for. Even if you are painstakingly creating original content for your website or blogs, there is a chance that another malicious website will steal or scrape your content without your knowledge and use it as their own. 

What's worse, if you aren't a well-known or high-authority website, Google might flag you for duplicate content by mistaking the scraper website for original.

The simplest ways to detect content scraping is search for your blog titles or content on Google, or use trackbacks or Google webmaster tools to detect if you can find possible scrapers that have a lot of links pointing to your website.

Let us see how you can deal with content scrapers -

•  Add many internal links as they will remain intact during content scraping, and will bring you audience from the scraper website

•  Contact the website owner and ask them to remove the duplicated content

•  File a complaint through the DMCA

•  Require a login to access your website to deter scraping, as they will have to leave an identification behind

How to prevent your emails from landing in the SPAM folder

You have worked diligently on your email marketing campaign, and have spent precious time and efforts on crafting personalized emails that you are confident will generate the expected response. But, after all this, what if your emails do not even reach the recipient's inbox?

Let us see some tips using which you can achieve maximum inbox deliver-ability -

•Ask your subscribers to whitelist your email address

• Get permission to send emails through option forms

• Avoid using purchases mailing lists

• Send relevant emails with clear subject lines, so that you do not get marked as spam from the recipient's side

•Avoid the use of risky words such as 'free' or 'promo' that might get you caught in the spam filters

• Use clear and recognizable From field names

• Clean up your mailing list periodically for unsubscribers and invalid email addresses

•  Get S/MIME certificates for your personal or company email address to increase your trustworthiness

•Give an option for the recipients to unsubscribe from an email itself

Use a trustworthy email automation platform that can take care of email validation and unsubscribers in real time

How Can You Effectively Track and Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

The importance of a sound email marketing campaign cannot be stressed enough. Reports have shown that emails can generate an ROI as high as 3800%. However, to get this promsing ROI, you need to keep an eagle eye on the performance of your campaigns and adjust your strategy wherever it might be found lacking. You can do this by tracking the right metrics.

                             

Let us have a look at what these metrics are, what they indicate, and how you can turn them into useful insights -

Open rate

This metric indicates the percentage of subscribers who have opened your email, out of your total subscribers.

If your open rate is low, this is a strong indication that the subject lines of your emails need your attention. A relevant, attention-catching subject line will ensure that your emails get opened. Of course, the problem might be that you are sending emails at a time when your prospects are too occupied or busy to look through them.

To improve your open rate, test out different subject lines and research the best times to send out emails based on the behavior of your target audience.

Click-through rate

This metric indicates the percentage of subscribers who have clicked on a link you have placed inside your email. This is a vital metric as it represents how inclined your subscribers are to take further action (such as subscription or direct purchase) through your emails.

If it is low, you will want to examine whether the anchor text you have used for the link is compelling enough for them to click, and whether it is placed in a position where it is easily visible to the reader.

Bounce rate

This is the percentage of the total emails sent which were unable to successfully reach the intended recipient.

In some cases, the email can bounce to due a server or other technical problem at the receiver end; however, it could also bounce due to an invalid or non-existent email. Thus, you need to carefully validate your subscriber list before sending out emails to prevent a high bounce rate.

Unsubscribe rate

This is the percentage of your subscribers who have opted out of receiving any further email communication for you.

A high unsubscription rate is definitely undesirable. There can be many factors responsible for unsubscription such as irrelevant/low-quality content, too high frequency of sending emails, and so on. You can simply send out a short survey to the unsubcribers to find and remedy the root cause, in order to reduce this occurence.

Of course, it can be quite difficult to execute a campaign and manually track these metrics. Using an email automation software will help you improve your campaign efficacy and get detailed, periodic analysis so that you can have more time to focus on your business strategy. You can also engage the services of a digital marketing company to strategize and execute creative email marketing campaigns on your behalf.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Effective ways to improve your email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is reputed for fetching one of the highest conversion rates amongst all the digital marketing channels. Yet, many marketers are faced by low open rates, click-through rates and a growing list of unsubscribes. 

Let us have a look at some of the most effective ways with which you can improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns -

• Segment your email list according to a specific criteria such as interest level, job title, geographical location, etc., to increase relevancy of the email

• Write precise, straightforward and compelling subject lines to improve your open rates

• Leverage customer data to send personalized emails to improve click-through and conversion rates

• Make sure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices

• Have clearly defined Call-to-Actions in a prominent place to improve click-through rates

• Test different types of subject lines, content and layouts to find out which of them are best preferred by your audience

• Ask your subscribers for their feedback on what kind of emails and content they would like to receive from you

4 Effective Ways to Engage Organic Traffic on Social Media

Painstakingly optimizing your website for search engine optimization to increase ranking and organic traffic is a rewarding, but slow, process. Rather than waiting for your target audience to search for a relevant query to land on your website, you can actively engage your organic traffic on social media platforms.

                                                

Let us have a look at some of the most effective ways for B2B marketing companies to increase their organic reach on social media -

Create and share content that matters

When you perform keyword research for creating content, do not only select keywords that you want to rank for. They would not help you much if your audience is not searching for them. Sharing content created around keywords that are more preferred by your audience will help increase engagement on their part.

Employ social listening

Knowing what your target audience or even existing customers are saying about industry-relevant challenges or their business requirements will give you an idea about the kind of posts you need to publish to catch their attention.

Actively engage your audience through messages

Publishing relevant content is not the only activity you can perform on social media platforms. They are essentially avenues of meaningful communication. Join forums or discussion threads that deal with a topic relevant to your brand or the solution you are offering. You can even directly send messages to a highly relevant prospects and strike up a conversation to understand their pain points before introducing your solution.

Use Facebook lookalike audiences

Facebook allows you to create lookalike audience, i.e., create a set of people that have very similar business interests to your existing customer base. You can serve this lookalike audiene relevant paid advertisements, to that you have a greater chance of engagement and subsequent conversion.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How Can You Nurture Warm Leads Into SQLs Through Email Marketing

Marketers often make the mistake of becoming too complacent when they qualify a lead as warm. However, most of them are nowhere ready to buy or even be classified as a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). A lack of active nurturing or communication on your part can cause them to fall through the cracks in your sales pipeline, leading to lost sales opportunities.

Studies have shown that companies that are good at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads. Email marketing proves to be a remarkably effective strategy for nurturing leads by allowing you to stay in touch with the leads and engage in meaningful, personalized communication.

Let us see some tips on how B2B marketing companies can use emails to nurture warm leads into SQLs -

Segment your mailing list or leads

Perhaps the best advantage of emails is the facility of personalized communication it offers. Of course, you cannot spend hours on creating individual emails for every lead, but segmenting your leads will prove close enough. Doing so will allow you to send out emails that are absolutely relevant and relatable to your leads, prompting a more favorable action on their part.

Map your emails to the buyers' journey

Knowing where a particular lead is at in the buyer's journey is crucial for effective lead nurturing. This will give you an idea of the kind of content you need to create for your next email. The main stages of a typical buyer's journey are -

• Awareness – Buyer realizes that they are facing a particular problem or challenge, and need a solution

• Consideration – Buyer is researching various options that can potentially solve their problem

• Decision – Buyer has chosen a solution or is considering the best option among the available solutions

Use an email automation software

There are a lot of considerations involved in an email marketing campaign other than creating content and designing emails. From validating emails and keeping an eye on the subscriber list to tracking the results of the campaign, it is a lot of work to do manually.

An email automation software will help you reduce the tedious manual work and provide detailed reports of your campaign, so that you focus on refining your strategy for maximum results.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Tips for social media storytelling

Using storytelling in your social media marketing strategy lets you form a human connection with your customers, and generate engagement far more than any cold advertisements and facts you might otherwise throw at them.

Here are some tips to help you make the most of this powerful technique -

Share your own personal experiences
Your own personal experience, from which you can deliver an inspring takeaway, will both entertain and educate your followers.

Leverage User Generated Content (UGC)
UGC is a powerful way to get customers to tell their own stories and making them feel involved with your brand, while simultaneously increasing your credibility.

Use visual content
Using videos or a series of images will uplift your story more than just using plain text. The combination of imagery, music and speech will truly keep your followers immersed in your story.

You can get in touch with a digital marketing company for effectively executing storytelling as a part of your social media strategy.

Key factors that influence B2B purchase decisions

B2B marketing companies are often puzzled by the buying decisions of their target audience. Sometimes, even promising leads do not complete their journey to the final conversion. Naturally, with the complex nature of B2B sales cycle, the involvement of multiple decision makers and typical high investments required, a complete understanding of consumer decision-making process is not possible. 

However, understanding the factors that can influence their buying decision can help you shape your marketing strategy accordingly. 

The most prominent factors include -

•  External factors like fluctuations in money market, change in government policies and behavior of competitors

•  Whether or not your potential customers feel that they have an urgent need to act

• Present financial condition of the organization

• Interpersonal conflict among key decision makers

• Individual factors like social status or age of decision makers

3 alternative search engines to Google

Google might be the undisputed king of search engines, but due to privacy issues many users have moved on to other search engines. Digital Marketers will do well to take these alternatives into account, as they will face much less competition to rank and draw traffic on them.

Here are some of the most popular alternatives to Google -

Bing

Considered by many as the most popular search engine after Google, Bing is easy to use and offers many features similar to that of its main competitor.

DuckDuckGo

Favored for the privacy it offers, coupled with a clean interface and minimal ads.

StartPage

Another search engine which values user privacy, StartPage does not track or store user data, or serve ads based on browsing behavior.

Key benefits of Email Marketing

Chances are that you have heard a lot of talk about email marketing being dead. However, statistics show that more than 59% of marketers consider emails to be their biggest source of ROI.

If you are not already including emails as a part of your digital marketing strategy, here is why you should start doing so -

Improves personalization

Emails enable you to send targeted content to a very specific group of your customers or audience. Sending the right message at the right time can greatly increase your lead flow and conversion rate.

Helps strengthen customer relationships

Communication with customers is very important for inspiring brand loyalty. Emails let you stay in touch with them, without being intrusive.

Helps increase website traffic

Using compelling CTAs, you can use emails to drive traffic to your website, social media accounts, blogs, or any landing pages you have created.

Is cost-effective

Email marketing will cost you much less compared to traditional marketing channels like print and radio advertisements, even if you are investing in an email automation software.

How to deal with duplicate content issues

Duplicate content can seriously harm your SEO, and can even cause your website to be penalized by Google. Even if you remove the possibility of duplicacy through manual actions, there are certain technical issues that can lead to duplicate content.

These technical causes involve URL issues (www, http, https etc are considered different even if they are point towards the same page), different session Ids stored in the same URL, etc.

Here is how you can avoid duplicate content through such issues -

301 redirect

Informs search engine which URL is the original one, and links duplicate versions to it.

Domain

Set a preferred domain to avoid URL issues.

Rel=canonical

Informs the search engine that the URL in question is the copy of original

What is the need of marketing automation?

To truly succeed at digital marketing in the present day, you need to consistently nurture your prospects and customers with a highly personalized approach. However, when you have a large number of leads pouring in, and have existing customers waiting in the wings, paying equal attention to everyone will no doubt put a lot of pressure on your sales and marketing teams.

Thus, marketing automation tools can help you optimize the time and efforts of your team by automating tasks that are periodically repeated, such as email marketing, and publishing social media posts. Not only this, but these tools can also provide useful insights and quantifiable metrics that will help you improve your marketing campaigns and customer service.

Plus, they can reduce the possibility of human error. For instance, you might be sending messages to an invalid email id. Email automation tools automatically validates the email ids in your subscriber list and removes the invalid ones, so that your list remains clean and updated.

Thus, with the reduction of manual efforts and the advantage of useful insights, marketing automation tools can greatly help you reduce sales cycle times and increase ROI.

How to increase customer retention

While many business owners rightly channel all their efforts into roping in new customers, very few of them take customer retention seriously. However, customer acquisition can be 5 times more expensive than customer retention.

Let us have a look at some effective ways you can improve customer retention and loyalty -

•  Delight loyal customers with rewards and offers

•  Send personalized follow-up messages

•    Analyze customer purchase pattern and behavior to identify customers who are at a risk for leaving, and make suitable offers to prevent them from doing so

•   Take customer feedback and act on it seriously

•   Invest in CRM tools for improved customer service

As your existing customers are more likely to purchase from you than new ones, it is of paramount importance that you take steps to retain them. Customer retention, combined with customer acquisition can greatly increase your profits.

5 Best Career Opportunities in Digital Marketing

As more and more businesses are getting onboard the benefits of digital marketing in increasing brand awareness and conversion rates, there is a huge demand of skilled specialists in the various areas of this discipline.

Let us have a look at some of the many career opportunities that are available in digital marketing -

Digital Marketing Manager

This position is suitable for someone who has a solid, hands-on experience in executing digital marketing campaigns. As a digital marketing manager, you will be responsible for planning, developing and overseeing the execution of the overall digital marketing strategy for a particular campaign.

Content Writer

As a content writer, you will be responsible for drafting engaging content on various topics and in different formats such as blogs, emails, social media posts, newsletters, etc. Majority of organizations do not even demand a specific degree for hiring writers, as long as they are skilled and have a good grasp on the language.

SEO Expert

Increasing the online visibility of their website through Search Engine Optimization is a top priority for many business owners and digital marketers. Thus, SEO experts who can combine their knowledge of the way search engines work with various online keyword research and website analysis tools are in huge demand.

Social Media Executive

Social media marketing is an important part of any digital marketing campaign. Organizations are always on the lookout for social media executives who are familiar with the nuances of various social media platforms. They will be responsible for publishing suitable posts on all the platforms relevant to their organization.

Graphic Designer

From social media posts and emails to blogs, every piece of content needs an engaging visual to uplift it. So, if you are good at designing and using photoshop tools, the field of digital marketing has a huge opportunity for you.

Along with these, UX Designer, video editor, PPC marketing manager, search engine marketer, content marketing manager, and copywriter are some other opportunities in the digital marketing domain.

How to Draw Traffic from Search Engines Other than Google

Google might be the major player in driving organic traffic to your website, but you cannot disregard the credibility of other search engines for effective digital marketing.

Even if your website is currently faring well in terms of ranking and traffic, there is no telling when it will get adversely affected due to a core update from Google. It might take a long time to for your website to recover from a major update. In such cases, you can continue to draw traffic from other search engines until you mitigate the cause of drop in Google traffic.

Also, as majority of businesses focus on Google, you will face less competition on the alternate options. Let us have a look at these options, and how you can draw from them -

Bing

Bing focuses on verbatim keywords, i.e., it'll show results for the exact keyword a user has searched for. As with Google, keyword stuffing will not work, but placing optimized keywords in title tags, meta descriptions and introductory paragragphs will help ranking.

Bing is more lenient than Google when it comes to mobile-friendliness. As long as your content is of high quality, you can rank well even if your website is not mobile-friendly.

As Bing gives importance to page authority, your older pages can bring more traffic here than on Google.

DuckDuckGo

This search engine may not yet be as sophisticated as Google and its many ranking factors, but they are similar in many aspects.

Intent-based keywords, sound technical SEO, relevant and useful content, and quality backlinks are they key factors to draw organic traffic from DuckDuckGo.

YouTube

With the number of active users in billions, YouTube is a great source to drive traffic to your website. The volume of traffic will depend on the quailty of your videos, and how well you optimize for keywords in the video title and description.

Conclusion

When it comes to SEO, it is more than risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Other than Google, search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo and YouTube can prove valuable sources for increasing your traffic. You can take help of website SEO services to make sure that your web pages follow the guidelines for the major search engines and draw increased organic traffic from them.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.