Email Marketing Strategy

“Let’s put out a newsletter” It’s so simple, right?

Email marketing is a powerful tool for driving traffic, boosting sales, and building relationships with your customers. There are 4 billion daily email users, and over the last 12 months, 77% of marketers have seen continued increases in email engagement. In fact, more than 80% of small to mid-sized companies use email marketing to acquire and retain their business.

Despite its massive potential, and the fact that it is more relevant now than ever before, many businesses still struggle to make the most of their email marketing campaigns. This can stem from a range of issues, from a lack of understanding to the use of outdated strategies. Planning and executing consistently effective email marketing content can become a major source of frustration and squandered time.

Left unchecked, it can even permanently affect your email deliverability. Webolutions’ approach to email marketing strategy differs from other agencies. Our data-driven solutions have helped thousands of clients gain a competitive edge in their industry and enable them to grow and thrive. We work with our clients at every step of the process, from research and strategy to implementation and optimization.

In this article, we discuss four strategy mistakes that are quietly killing your email marketing efforts. By avoiding these common pitfalls and employing an experiential marketing strategy, you will ensure your email campaigns are successful and achieve their maximum potential.

1 – Quality Over Quantity – An Email Marketing Cautionary Tale

If you have a distribution list of 10k contacts, but only 859 of those people ever open your email, you’ve actually only got a distribution list of 859 (with an additional 9k+ of unengaged dead weights that are progressively destroying your email deliverability). So while on paper, a larger list may seem more appealing, there’s no benefit in sending recurring email campaigns to stagnant contacts. This practice is most commonly referred to as sending graymail.

Graymail can harm your email deliverability because it encourages contacts to unsubscribe and mark your emails as spam. Even lackluster enthusiasm amongst your audience can seriously damage your sending reputation. When marketing emails drive open rates lower than 15%, it sends a message to email service providers that your domain is sending spam, increasing the likelihood that all your future emails will be automatically moved to the recipient’s spam or junk folder.

This is by far the most common mistake being made, but also one of the easiest to correct:

• Avoid sending graymail and only send marketing messages to people who have previously expressed an interest in hearing from you. Ensure that you’re regularly removing unsubscribes and contacts with stagnant engagement. By simply eliminating the unengaged individuals from your distribution, you will immediately improve your email performance.
• Automate this by creating a Sunset Process for engagement and regularly purging the contacts that aren’t interacting with your emails. To do this:
• Create a filter in your CRM or campaign software that shows you:
• The last recorded open of any email you have sent is over 90 days ago
• Or, if the contact has opened 0 of the last 6 consecutive marketing emails you have sent them

If a contact falls into this filtered group, they can be considered ”Unengaged.”

• You can create a suppression list based on this filtered list, preventing them from being included in future emails from this campaign.
• This new list segment should then also trigger a strategic recapture campaign to re-engage with them one last time and confirm if they have a continued interest in receiving the subscription.
• If not, give the contact an opportunity to leave valuable feedback on why they lost interest.
• If they respond positively, they remain an active recipient of that distribution and their engagement status is restored. Those who remain uninterested or unengaged are removed from the campaign’s distribution list until they resubscribe.

Dropping unengaged contacts from marketing lists can seem like a precarious proposition to many marketers. But in the long run, when you’ve properly segmented your audience and focus primarily on engaged contacts, you will reap more actionable performance data and preserve the quality of user experience you want your audience to associate with your brand.

Read our article: 5 Email Marketing Problems

2 – Make Substance your Standard

Consistency is crucial, but for recurring publications, be careful not to fade into the background by letting your publication become stale or repetitive. Providing fresh content is important because it keeps readers engaged and encourages them to continue reading. You want to generate that buzz and leave your audience anticipating the next distribution. Giving your audience something to look forward to not only makes them more likely to open and engage but strengthens your brand’s “authority” in readers’ minds over time.

You can do this by ensuring your content is relevant and valuable. Guarantee to your audiences that by having subscribed to this publication, they are going to be receiving valuable insights and exclusive content.

Remain on theme but try a/b testing a variety of content types, find your sweet spot for ongoing structure, and cultivate the interests and engagement of your subscribers. Make a point to regularly review your campaign’s performance and structure, looking for trends and opportunities for optimization.

6 Examples of High-Performing Email Content

The following content types typically help generate interest in your newsletter:

Blogs – Blogs are a wonderful way to build a newsletter audience because they provide fresh content that readers can access on a regular basis. By having a blog, you can easily highlight new products, updates, and valuable content that encourages readers to subscribe to your newsletter. Additionally, blog posts can be easily shared on social media platforms, which can help to draw more attention to the content and encourage more people to subscribe to your newsletter. Make sure you have actionable CTAs on the blog post the email redirects to. Additional website visits are great, but conversions reign king.

Case studies – Case studies are another terrific way to show the impact of a product or service in a real-world situation. By showcasing success stories through case studies, newsletters can demonstrate the value of an offering to potential customers, as well as inspire current customers to consider additional ways to use the product or service. Case studies also provide a means for sharing innovative ideas, processes, and best practices, which can help readers become more successful in their own businesses.

Polls – Polls are a great way to engage your newsletter audience and get their feedback on important topics. They can give you valuable insights into your readers’ preferences, opinions, and thoughts, which can help inform your content creation and marketing strategies. Additionally, polls can be a fun and interactive way to keep your readers engaged and coming back for more.

Company culture or team spotlights — These features show your business’ authentic side and humanize your brand. New hires, anniversaries, achievements, and community outreach provide great sources of material to highlight your team members and their accomplishments. This the content writes itself and elicits trust and loyalty among your audience.

Third-party content – Third-party content can be a powerful addition to newsletters because it can provide fresh, varied and labor-free content that is not just coming from the same source. The most immediate added benefits to using this kind of content can include:

• Increased Reach: Using third-party content in marketing newsletters provides the opportunity to reach a much wider audience than your own content can. This is beneficial because it allows your message to be seen by people who may not have otherwise come across it.
• When you publish your recurring publications, like newsletters, make sure to publish it on LinkedIn as well. Now that third-party content can be tagged, and your organic lead-gen posts are seen by all the audiences following those sources. You compound your reach and potentially your organic conversion rates as well.
• Don’t dual-publish? Although not dual publishing is a missed opportunity, you can still post an organic preview of your newsletter as a post. Link a redirect for audiences to subscribe, and in the post itself you can tag those third-party sources if you include a snippet from that added content in your post.
• Establish Authority: Including third-party content in newsletters can help establish your brand as an authority in the industry. By sharing content from other sources, you are demonstrating your expertise and knowledge.
• More Engagement: When people see content that they find interesting, they are more likely to engage with it. This can lead to more clicks, shares, and conversions.
• Increased Traffic: Sharing third-party content can also lead to increased traffic to your website. This is especially true if you link to the content in the newsletter and people click through to read the full article.
• Remember, if you are dual publishing as part of your LinkedIn organic lead-gen strategy, tagging third party content extends the reach of that publication, which potentially increases the conversions, and traffic from link engagement.
• Cost-Effective: Using third-party content in newsletters is a cost-effective way to reach a larger audience. It’s also much less time consuming than creating your own content.

Trending industry news – Including trending industry content in a newsletter is beneficial because it allows your readers to stay up to date on the latest developments within their industry. This ensures that your readers are always informed and engaged in their industry, and it also provides them with valuable information that they can use to make informed decisions. This will also attract new readers to your newsletter, as they will be drawn to the timely and relevant content.

3 – Failure to Track and Adapt

Standard KPIs like open rates and click-through rates are well-known critical data points for any email campaign. The benefit of recurring distributions like newsletters is that you are able to extract profile data points you can use to optimize your campaign’s performance and conversions.

A/B Test Your Headlines – 35% of email recipients open an email based on its subject line alone. Your subject lines should always be clear and concise. Shooting for a max character limit of 60, try to evoke an emotional response with action words, questions, or merge field personalization.

The following are examples of effective email subject techniques:

• Ask a question: “Is Your Marketing Strategy Missing Something?” Questions presented in a subject line will pique the curiosity of a reader. People are inherently pre-disposed to seek resolution when presented with a query.
• Create a sense of urgency: “Expiring Soon Act Now!” If the content is time-sensitive, like an approaching event or a limited offer expiring soon, include that information in the subject line. Create a sense of urgency and encourage your subscribers to take action before they miss out. The fear of missing out is a powerful emotion, and by leveraging that instinct you can increase your open rates and boost conversions.
• Use personalization: “Carlo, did you know?” Subscribers are 26% more likely to open emails with personalized subject lines. When you take the “perceived” time to personalize content, messages, and subject lines to the recipient, it makes them feel known and seen. Merge data and past engagement can help you easily personalize mass distributions, tailored to the recipient.
• Refresh Underperforming Content Types — Over time, you will begin to see which content and topics are more effective in your campaigns. Use this information during regular reviews to leverage more effective content and conversion drivers in future newsletters.

4 – Missed Opportunities and Tactical CTAs

The best CTAs encourage engagement and generate urgency but remember that not every paragraph needs a sales pitch. Create a balance in your campaigns. For instance, newsletters should be roughly 90% informative and 10% promotional. This is where “direct” and “indirect” calls to action come into play:

• An indirect, or transitional, CTA is designed to build trust with potential customers by offering a lower-risk option that eases them into doing business with you. Lead magnets work especially well on these. An effective indirect call to action will help draw in potential customers, deepen your business’s relationship with them, and encourage customer loyalty.
• A direct call to action is a phrase or sentence that encourages the reader to take immediate action. Examples of direct CTA’s would include “Sign Up Now!” or “Get A Quote.”

In either case, a call to action should never just go on and on. Ideally, restrict CTA copy to 2-5 words, and always make sure to emphasize the value proposition.

There are several diverse ways to structure your CTAs:

• Include a benefit: Why should the reader take action? Be clear about what they get out of clicking your link. Examples might include “Save time with our free download” or “Discover new ways to succeed.”
• Add urgency: Urgency can help motivate users to take action. Use phrases like “limited-time offer” or “last chance” to create a sense of urgency.
• Add a sense of exclusivity: Let the user know that your offer is exclusive and that they should act now to get it. Use phrases like “exclusive access” or “be the first to know.”

Increase Lead Generation and Improve Your Marketing ROI with Email Marketing

When done correctly, email marketing can be the basis of your digital marketing strategy. To maximize the impact of your campaigns, it is necessary to build and maintain a quality email list and create content that resonates with your audience. This includes using captivating subject lines, clear and concise messages, and optimizing your conversions through data analysis.

Remember to regularly evaluate your strategy and make data-driven modifications to create emails that drive traffic and increase your sales. Avoiding the four mistakes outlined in this article is a great starting point for creating a successful email marketing campaign. By employing an experiential marketing strategy and getting help from an experienced agency like Webolutions, you can ensure that your email campaigns will maximize their potential and help you reach your business goals.

Webolutions Can Elevate the Success of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Crafting effective email marketing campaigns is part art and part science. When your efforts utilize industry best practices and leverage data to continually refine your campaigns, you’re much more likely to achieve your desired results. This level of performance typically requires assistance from an expert who understands the nuances of email marketing. At Webolutions, we have you covered.

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. During this time, we’ve provided our clients with the comprehensive marketing services they need to grow their business. Our email marketing strategies reflect years of testing to ensure we’re able to maximize the ROI on your efforts.

You’ll also benefit from our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach, which is focused on growing your business faster, smarter and easier. Our unique approach to marketing involves a collaborative journey where we work with your team to identify what is special about your company. This allows us to determine your industry leading market positioning, allowing you to stand apart from your competitors.

Based on your market positioning, we’ll craft an email marketing strategy that provides an irresistible customer journey that will engage your audience at every stage of the funnel, helping you nurture your most qualified prospects until they become leads. Every campaign is data driven, allowing us to make adjustments as needed to improve your results over time.

Contact us today to find out how we can help improve your ROI on your email marketing efforts. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 4 Mistakes Quietly Killing your Email Marketing Performance appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

The abundance of information available online has transformed the way people research the companies with which they do business. Today, most people are between 67% and 90% through their buying process before ever contacting a product/service provider. This means most people are spending a great deal of time researching their purchase on their own and are relying increasingly less on a sales team to provide the information they’re seeking.

For this reason, it’s crucial that you are on a buyer’s radar long before they’re ready to speak with you. Your website is the primary way to reach potential customers while they’re researching the products and services you provide. As a result, your website has become the single most important lead generation tool at your disposal.

Simply building a beautiful website isn’t enough to generate the quality B2B leads you’re looking for. It’s also important to optimize your website for lead generation. The following tips will help you leverage your website to its full lead generation potential.

Evaluate the Performance of Your Current Lead Generators

Before you can make improvements to your lead generation strategy, it’s important to understand what is and isn’t working with your current efforts. You can use a tool such as Website Grader to assess the performance of your existing lead generation sources, such as your landing pages and calls to action (CTAs).

In addition to receiving information on the performance of individual lead generation sources, you can compare the performance of different items to gain insights on how to make improvements. For example, if you discover that one of your landing pages has a 2% conversion rate and another landing page has a 9% conversion rate, you can look at the differences in the ways these pages are structured and make adjustments to the lower performing page so that it more closely mimics the more successful page.

You should also look at analytics data regarding landing page visits and CTA clicks to determine which of your offers are generating the best results. This will allow you to create new offers that are similar to your highest performing ones.

Optimize Each Stage of Your Lead Generation Process

Once you understand how your current lead generation items are performing, you can make efforts to optimize the different stages of the process to convert leads at a higher rate. This involves going through your lead generation steps with a fine tooth comb to make sure they are all aligned and providing a seamless journey for the user.

For example, if we were to include an offer on this blog, it should relate to lead generation since that is the focus of this blog, and that is the type of information the reader is seeking. If the offer on this blog took you to a landing page focused on building you a new website, it wouldn’t be aligned with the needs of the reader and would be less likely to convert.

It’s important to create a compelling conversion path that continues to drive your website visitors towards your end goal, which is filling out a form and becoming a lead. By optimizing this conversion path, you can increase the likelihood that your visitors will actually fill out the form.

Make sure you evaluate the following key components of your lead generation conversion path:

CTAs

Your calls to action should be created in a way that makes them stand out and clearly communicates the desired action you’re trying to get the reader to take. Test the following elements associated with your CTAs to determine the best approach to improve conversions:

• Colors – Having a CTA with contrasting colors from your website will help it stand out more.
• Shape – Do round CTA buttons convert better than rectangular buttons with your audience?
• Placement – What is the best location for your CTA on the page to maximize clicks?
• Language – Sometimes the way you word your CTA can impact conversions. Test different language such as “Free Consultation” vs. “Talk to Us” vs. “Get a Quote” to see if one of these converts at a higher rate.

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Landing Pages

Your website CTAs, social media pages, paid ads and email marketing CTAs will direct people to a dedicated landing page related to the item they are interested in. Optimizing your landing pages is a critical component to your ability to generate leads from your marketing efforts.

Landing page content should be simple, clear and direct. It should provide the reader with a compelling reason to provide their information and an explanation of what they’ll receive in exchange for their information (not just the offer, but the benefits this offer will deliver).

In general, the more landing pages on your website, the better your chances of successfully generating leads. According to a HubSpot survey, businesses with over 30 landing pages generate seven times as many leads as businesses with five landing pages or fewer. The reason for this is simple – when you customize your landing pages for the specific needs of the people visiting them, you’re more likely to turn these people into a lead. This level of customization requires the creation of a large number of landing pages.

Forms

Your form is the final stop along the conversion path. You can’t generate a lead unless you capture the person’s contact information, and your form is the tool used to accomplish this. In general, forms with fewer fields to fill out result in higher conversion rates. For this reason, we recommend streamlining your forms so that they ask for only the essential information your sales team needs to start building a relationship with the lead.

Add Forms and Other Lead Generators to Website Pages Generating the Most Traffic

Your landing pages aren’t the only places where a form can serve as an effective tool to improve your lead generation.

Virtually any page on your website that receives a high volume of traffic provides a great opportunity to capture the reader’s contact information. This includes high performing blog posts that receive a large number of views and shares.

You can evaluate your analytics data to determine which pages and blogs on your website are generating the most traffic. Once you identify these pages, update them to make sure they include a way to entice the reader to provide their contact information. This may involve:

• Adding a contact form that allows the reader to request a consultation without leaving the page
• Adding a CTA for a lead magnet such as a gated content piece that will provide valuable information in exchange for the reader’s contact information

Include CTAs on Your Home Page

Your home page is often the first place people will land when they visit your website. It needs to be engaging to catch the reader’s attention, keep them on your website and make them want to learn more about your business. But it also provides an important opportunity to engage visitors and drive them farther down the marketing funnel. You can accomplish this by adding several compelling CTAs to your home page.

Since your home page resides at the top of the marketing funnel, the CTAs you include on this page should be geared towards individuals who aren’t necessarily ready to make a purchase. Your goal is to simply engage these people and start building a relationship that can eventually result in a sale once they are ready to make a decision. Some examples of effective home page CTAs include:

“Subscribe to Our Newsletter”

People at the top of the marketing funnel are usually in the early stages of their information gathering process. Therefore, they are likely to be most receptive to offers that require minimal effort or commitment on their end, but still offer value to them as they research their purchase.

As a result, “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” offers are often an effective CTA to include on the home page. Make sure your newsletter is providing helpful information on industry trends, product benefits, and other items that may help them as they work through their purchasing decision. You can then review your email marketing data to see which individuals open these informational emails, allowing your sales team to follow up with them to build a relationship that turns them into a true lead.

“Sign Up for Our Webinar”

Some people prefer to consume information in written form, while others prefer to watch videos or participate in webinars. If your team has the resources to create webinars, this can provide a great lead generation opportunity for your home page.

Place a CTA on your website directing visitors to sign up for your upcoming webinars. Make sure to include the following information:

• Date of the webinar
• Time of the webinar
• Subject matter being covered
• Any credentials of presenters that may entice visitors to sign up

“Free Trial”

Free trials are a great way to provide individuals with a low pressure way to demo your product or service without committing to a purchase. This also allows you to compile the contact information for leads who are currently evaluating your offering.

Add a CTA to your home page that allows individuals to try your product for free for a limited amount of time. Make sure this CTA includes a form where you can capture the lead’s name and email address. You may also want to subscribe these people in an email series that provides helpful tips on how to get the most out of your product as they work through their free trial. When the trial has concluded, your sales team should follow up with each lead to discuss potential next steps in using your product as a paying customer.

Develop and Implement a Strong Content Marketing Strategy

A strong content marketing strategy is critical to your ability to generate leads with your website. When you develop and implement an effective content marketing strategy, it will help you improve brand awareness, establish yourself as an industry thought leader, drive traffic to your website and generate quality leads.

In order for your content marketing strategy to be effective, it must address the pain points experienced by your target audience and provide the solutions they’re seeking. In other words, the needs of your audience should drive the content you create. It should be engaging, compelling, and highly informative.

Your blog should be one of the central components of your content marketing strategy. Each post you create provides an opportunity to do a deep dive into a specific aspect of a topic, giving your audience targeted information that enhances their understanding of the overall subject matter. These deep dives also allow you to demonstrate your subject matter expertise, which will help you build the trust necessary to convert your audience into leads as they move down the marketing funnel.

When constructing your content marketing strategy, keep the following items in mind:

• Make sure you’re creating content that engages people at every stage of the buyer’s journey
• Be strategic about where you want to take visitors from each page so that you can move them further down the marketing funnel
• Customize the CTAs on each page and blog to ensure they optimize your ability to continue moving your audience down the funnel
• Include a balanced mix of informational content and lead generation content
• Convey your brand messaging consistently throughout all content you create
• Publish new content consistently to keep your audience engaged and improve your ability to generate quality organic SEO traffic

Webolutions Can Help You Generate More B2B Website Leads

While your website is one of your most effective ways to generate leads, it takes a sophisticated understanding of digital marketing strategies to ensure you get the most out of your efforts. It’s not enough to simply implement the tactics discussed above. To truly improve your website’s lead generation ability, you need to make data driven decisions that tailor your lead generation strategy to the specifics of your industry and your audience. At Webolutions, we can help you transform your website into the powerful lead generation tool you need.

As Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994, Webolutions has extensive experience helping businesses in a wide range of industries maximize their website’s lead generation capabilities. We’ve developed a transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach that helps you grow your business smarter, faster and easier. This unique approach is critical to our ability to drive the quality leads you need to thrive over time.

You’ll participate in a collaborative, expert led journey focused on highlighting what makes your company special and unique. As part of this journey, we’ll also perform detailed market research to determine what strategies your competitors are using to stand out in the marketplace. At the end of this process, we’ll craft your industry leading market positioning to help you stand out from your competitors, and we’ll develop the important brand communication elements necessary to tell your story to your audience.

This information will drive your lead generation strategy to ensure you maximize your ROI on your efforts. All of our tactics and recommendations are data driven, allowing us to identify how well we’re meeting your success metrics. This helps us make adjustments over time that will continuously improve your lead generation results, allowing you to experience your desired business growth.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. During this consultation, our expert lead generation consultants will review strategies that will help you capture more qualified leads.

The post How to Generate More B2B Leads with Your Website appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Lead generation is a critical task for every business. You need quality leads to expand your customer base and achieve consistent, sustained growth. But lead generation isn’t a straightforward process. As marketing tactics become increasingly sophisticated, lead generation strategies have become more challenging to execute effectively.

When developing and executing your lead generation strategy, there are important items that must be addressed to ensure you achieve your goals. The following guide will help you optimize your lead generation strategy to hit your goals and ensure you’re providing your sales team with quality leads that can turn into the types of clients that will help you grow your business.

Set Business Lead Generation Goals

Before you can develop your lead generation strategy, you must understand what you’re trying to achieve. Your lead generation goals should align with your overall business growth objectives:

• What are your company’s desired growth projections?
• Are there certain segments of your customer base that are more valuable to focus on than others?

Set Your Lead Generation Goals

When developing your lead generation goals, it’s always best to focus on quality over quantity. High quality, sales-ready leads are much more likely to convert than generic leads consisting of prospects that may not be truly interested in your products/services or that may not have the budget to take advantage of what you have to offer.

By focusing on qualified leads, you can streamline your efforts and get a better return on your investment. A qualified lead possesses certain characteristics that your team believes will either make them more likely to convert into a customer or more likely to generate your desired level of revenue per customer. Once you determine the criteria for your qualified leads, you can more effectively target this audience with your marketing efforts.

In many instances, you’ll be able to reduce the number of leads you need to generate per month by focusing on qualified leads. For example, if your conversion rate for qualified leads is 20% and your conversion rate for general leads is 10%, you’ll be able to generate the same number of new customers with fewer leads when your sales team is primarily speaking to qualified prospects. In addition, if these qualified leads generate twice as much revenue as non-qualified prospects, then you can achieve your new customer revenue goals with half the number of sales.

Establish Your Lead Generation Metrics

In order to improve your lead generation results and hit your goals, you must have a way to measure the performance of your efforts. This requires establishing a series of metrics that will help your team track their success over time.

Some good lead generation metrics to track include:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Cost per lead (CPL)
• Customer lifetime value
• Cost per marketing lead by channel

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This refers to the amount of money you spend to acquire a new customer. This cost may include advertising expenses, salaries for your marketing and sales teams, market research costs, and any other financial expenditure associated with the process of bringing on new customers.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

This measures the amount of money spent in your marketing campaign to generate a new lead for your sales team to pursue. The cost per lead can vary based on the marketing channel used to generate this lead. For example, the cost per lead may be different for paid search ads (PPC) than Facebook ads. In addition, the cost for each of these may be different than the cost per lead generated by organic SEO.

Knowing your cost per lead helps you determine whether you’re apportioning your marketing budget properly throughout each channel in your campaign to achieve the best ROI.

Customer Lifetime Value

This metric lets you know how much revenue an average customer will generate over the lifetime of their business relationship with you. Knowing your customer lifetime value will help you make important decisions regarding the monetary resources you invest in acquiring new customers vs. retaining existing customers.

Cost Per Lead by Marketing Channel

Most lead generation strategies leverage multiple marketing channels to achieve their goals. But not all marketing channels will deliver the same results. Your cost of acquiring a lead may vary significantly from channel to channel.

Understanding the variance in these costs will help you focus your efforts on the channels which bring in the most quality leads at an affordable cost. Without knowing this figure, it’s very hard to understand which marketing channels deliver the best value to your business.

Optimize Your CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is an extremely valuable tool for your business. A CRM manages all of your relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. If you’re still tracking this information with a spreadsheet, we highly recommend that you upgrade to a CRM as soon as possible.

Tips to Generate Business Leads

When fully optimized, your CRM is a powerful tool that can help you maximize your ROI on your lead generation efforts. To get the most out of this software, you should take the following steps:

• Automate inbound lead qualification to ensure your sales team is pursuing the highest quality leads you’ve generated
• Set up your CRM to track the key data points which separate qualified leads from other leads
• Automate the process of passing new leads from your marketing team to your sales team
• Periodically review old leads to identify potential missed opportunities

Leverage Your Existing Customers for Referrals

Often, happy customers can be a powerful lead generation tool. They can offer a more objective assessment of the customer experience you provide than is possible from your internal messaging. They can speak to the quality of your products/services, the level of customer service you provide, and help prospects understand what to expect when they work with you. They also provide their colleagues and other contacts with a trusted source of information.

For this reason, leads generated by customer referrals deliver a much better ROI than leads generated by other marketing channels. Referral leads:

• Convert 30% better than leads from other marketing channels
• Have a 16% higher lifetime value
• Have a 37% higher retention rate
• Are 4 times more likely to refer other new customers to your brand

Creating a referral program is an easy way to get your existing customers to spread the word about your business. As part of this program, reward your customers with a discount if they send a new prospect your way.

Optimize Your Lead Generation Content

As part of your marketing efforts, it’s important to create content specifically geared towards lead generation. This may include:

• Lead Magnets – High quality, high engagement content that your audience can access in exchange for their email address. This may include guides, eBooks, case studies, reports, cheat sheets, templates, free trials, checklists, or any other material that may help your audience address their pain points.
• CTAs – Creating compelling calls to action (CTAs) that are strategically placed throughout your website will help increase the number of visitors who take your desired action. Whether your audience is being asked to download a lead magnet, sign up for your newsletter, schedule a consultation, or sign up for your webinar, these are powerful tools to generate leads.
• Landing Pages – Landing pages are an effective tool that will take the people visiting your website and convert them into leads. These landing pages are where your audience will arrive when they click on a CTA associated with your lead magnet. The more landing pages on your website, the better. Businesses with over 40 landing pages generate significantly more leads than businesses with only a few landing pages. The reason for this is that creating multiple landing pages for each lead magnet provides you with more opportunities to convert your audience.

The best way to ensure you’re maximizing the effectiveness of your lead generation content is to perform a content audit. As part of this audit, evaluate:

• Consistency – Your messaging should be consistent throughout all lead generation content pieces and include talking points explaining what makes your products/services valuable and unique.
• Appeal – What’s in it for your audience? To convert more leads, your content should communicate the most appealing benefits that will create a transformation in your audience.
• Keywords – Your content must contain target keywords which will be used by your audience to find a solution to their pain points and/or locate the types of products/services you offer. Make sure to conduct keyword research to ensure you’re focusing on the right phrases.
• Headlines – Make sure your headlines, email subject lines and lead magnet titles are engaging and communicate the value provided by the content.

Drive Traffic to Your Lead Generation Content

Once you’re confident that your lead generation content is optimized for conversions, it’s time to put effort into making sure this content is found by your target audience. There are a variety of methods to drive traffic to your lead magnets, and the right solution(s) for you will depend on your overall lead generation strategy.

For example, if your lead generation campaign relies on paid search, you’ll want to identify the right PPC campaigns to target your desired audience. On the other hand, if you’re looking for organic traffic, you’ll need to:

• Create a series of SEO-focused pages and blog posts that will help you rank well for your target keyword phrases
• Develop a backlink strategy to drive links to your lead magnets from external sources
• Promote your SEO content on social media to ensure your content reaches a wider audience and gets shared by people who follow your pages (a large volume of shares will typically have a positive impact on your search rankings)

When trying to drive traffic to your lead magnets, always refer back to your buyer personas to ensure you’re using the content types and traffic sources that align with their interests and preferences.

Utilize Lead Scoring and Nurturing Tools

As we discussed earlier, not all leads are created equal. To maximize the ROI on your lead generation efforts, it’s crucial to focus your energy on qualified leads. In addition, you need to take steps to increase the likelihood these qualified leads make it all the way through your sales funnel and become new customers. This is accomplished by scoring and nurturing your leads.

Lead scoring makes it easier to prioritize leads based on whether they are considered qualified. When using lead scoring tools, you have the ability to identify the important factors to use when evaluating the quality of leads. These may include:

• Purchase readiness
• Sale amount
• Annual company revenues
• Expected customer lifetime value

Lead scoring can help you focus your efforts on the qualified clients that are most likely to help you grow your business. However, not all of these leads will be ready to become a customer. Therefore, it’s important to implement lead nurturing strategies that will ensure you continuously engage these prospects and move them farther down the sales funnel. While there are a variety of tools that will help you nurture leads, the most effective approach is to use your CRM to manage this task.

Utilize Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques

Even when you take all of these steps, there will always be room for improvement over time. All lead generation strategies require ongoing adjustments to ensure you’re getting the best ROI on your efforts. Therefore, it’s important to leverage conversion rate optimization techniques that will help you identify the most important and impactful adjustments to make to your strategy.

Conversion rate optimization is a process used to increase the percentage of conversions you achieve from your lead generation efforts. This process involves testing the different conversion elements on your website, landing pages, CTAs, and email marketing content to identify what’s working most effectively and what needs improvement.

There are a variety of conversion rate optimization tools available to help you continuously improve the ROI on your efforts. You should also invest in an A/B testing tool to complement your conversion rate optimization efforts.

Optimize Your Sales Process

All the steps discussed above are designed to help you generate more leads, and more importantly, ensure you’re generating the qualified leads necessary to grow your business. However, these leads won’t do your business any good unless you’re able to turn them into paying customers. To get the most out of your lead generation efforts, you’ll want to devote time to optimizing your sales process as well.

In most situations, the sales process involves an extended journey. Each point in the journey provides an opportunity for your team to build trust with a lead, convey the transformation they’ll experience from your product/service, and get them more engaged with your business. However, each point in the journey also has the potential to create a moment for the lead to lose interest and either stall in the funnel or drop off completely. Optimizing your sales process will help you avoid this pitfall.

To make sure your sales team is equipped to make the most of each opportunity along the journey, you need to constantly evaluate your process and provide coaching to your sales team. Record your sales calls and listen back to them with your sales team. Highlight areas in the call that went well and areas where your sales team failed to answer questions confidently or stay on message. Make updates to your sales script based on the issues you identify when listening to these calls, and provide your sales team with any support necessary to improve the effectiveness of these calls.

Webolutions Can Help You Improve Your Lead Generation Efforts

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. For nearly three decades, we’ve been providing comprehensive marketing services to help our clients reach their goals and enjoy greater success. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been developed with your success in mind, and it allows you to grow your business faster, smarter and easier.

This unique approach to marketing leads you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about your company. As part of this journey, we’ll establish your industry leading marketing positioning to clearly differentiate you from your competitors. This information will drive every aspect of your marketing campaign, and it will allow us to craft a customized lead generation strategy that provides an irresistible customer journey geared towards increasing conversions.

At Webolutions, we believe every decision regarding your lead generation strategy should be dictated by the data. To ensure we’re providing the best ROI on your efforts, we’re constantly A/B testing your lead generation strategy and recommending the improvements necessary to improve your results over time.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post How to Hit Your Lead Generation Goals appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Your marketing efforts are critical to the success of your business. They are the primary way to connect with your audience, grow your brand and establish yourself as a trusted industry leader. However, these things don’t happen on their own. It takes a well planned, cohesive marketing strategy to ensure your precious resources – both financial and manpower – are used wisely and maximize the return on your investment.

We’re firmly in the fourth quarter of the year, and this is the time to conduct annual planning. While it’s important to invest the time in an annual plan that addresses your overall business goals, you also need to create a specific annual marketing plan that will help you achieve these overarching business initiatives. Ideally, this plan should be finalized and ready to go at the start of January so that you can hit the ground running next year. In order for that to happen, you need to begin your annual marketing planning now.

At Webolutions, our purpose is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. This drives everything we do for our clients, and it has compelled us to go beyond simply providing marketing services. In order to ensure our efforts generate the best possible results for our clients, we actively engage them in an annual planning process each year which helps them crystalize their goals for their marketing efforts. This plan then forms the blueprint for our ongoing recommendations as the year progresses.

In order to better understand what is involved in annual marketing planning, we recommend reading the following article from HubSpot:

5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan

Key Takeaways from this Article

This article breaks down the process of creating your annual marketing plan into three parts:

• Outlining your marketing plan
• Creating your marketing plan
• Creating a marketing plan timeline

While there is significant overlap between the components of these parts, it’s beneficial to examine each one separately.

Outlining Your Marketing Plan

The more granular you get in your marketing plan outline, the easier it will be to create and implement this plan. In addition, having a strong outline will provide important guidance regarding the metrics you should use to assess the success of your efforts.

Your marketing plan outline should include the following elements:

• Business summary – A summary of your organization that includes your company name, where you’re headquartered and your mission statement.
• Business initiatives – This should focus on specific initiatives related to marketing as opposed to big-picture company initiatives.
• Customer analysis – Conduct some market research to build your buyer personas (a fictional description of the traits associated with your ideal customer).
• Competitor analysis – As part of your market research, evaluate your primary competitors to more clearly understand what they do well and potential opportunities for you to provide value to your customers/clients that they do not.
• SWOT analysis – Conduct a deep dive into your business to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strengths and weaknesses should focus on internal items specific to your company, while opportunities and threats should focus on external items related to the state of the world today.
• Market strategy – Based on the legwork completed in the previous steps, create a plan for how your business should compete in your market. This can include items such as product/service mix, price, process, and more.
• Budget – Determine how much money your company is going to dedicate to the marketing team in order to pursue the initiatives and goals you’ve established in this outline.
• Marketing channels – Identify the marketing channels you’ll use to publish the content that will educate your audience, convey your brand story, and generate leads.
• Financial projections – Based on the budget you set and the marketing channels you choose, you can develop financial projections that establish your expected ROI for your marketing efforts. While these won’t be 100% accurate, they will provide a useful guide to measure your results against over the coming year.

See our article: How to Get Your Marketing Budget Approved

FREE Annual Planning Consultation with a Webolutions Expert

Since 1994, we've helped literally thousands of businesses locally and nationwide to achieve their business goals. From Annual Planning to Differentiating Brand Development and from Enterprise Website Design and Development to Business Performance Intelligence Systems, we're here to help you thrive. Connect with Webolutions, Denver's leading digital marketing agency, for your free consultation with one of our experts.

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Creating Your Marketing Plan

This article outlines a 5-step process to creating your annual marketing plan:

• Conduct a situation analysis – Use your SWOT analysis and your competitor analysis to develop a clear understanding of your market positioning. As part of this process, identify what you can offer that gives your company a competitive advantage and make you stand apart from others in your industry.
• Define your target audience – Use the buyer personas created during the outline phase to understand what your ideal customer wants. This information can be used to help you define your goals (to be created in the next step).
• Write SMART goals – You can’t improve the ROI on your marketing efforts without a clear understanding of your goals. Use the information generated from your situation analysis and defining your target audience to create SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. The SMART goals you establish will be used to identify the best tactics to achieve these goals.
• Analyze your tactics – Once you’ve defined your goals, determine which marketing tactics will most effectively achieve these goals.
• Set your budget – Before you begin implementing the tactics identified in step 4, you’ll need to set your budget for each tactic. This budget should include the time, financial resources, assets, and manpower required to implement the tactics in your marketing plan.

Creating Your Marketing Plan Timeline

Since this is an annual plan, you need to establish a timeline for implementing the different components of this plan. This allows your team to understand all appropriate deadlines for the projects, campaigns and events associated with your marketing plan. If you prefer greater granularity, you can break up this timeline on a quarterly basis.

When creating deadlines for the components of your marketing plan, make sure to:

• Estimate how long each task will take
• Account for holidays and other special events which may impact the ability of your team to complete these tasks

As you work through the tasks in your plan, track the time it takes to complete them. This will allow you to compare the actual time to your time estimates to determine how accurate your estimates are. If necessary, you may need to adjust some of your upcoming deadlines to reflect the actual amount of time these tasks have taken to complete.

Use Pre-Existing Templates to Organize Your Efforts

The article also provides several marketing plan templates you can use as you work through this three-stage process. Using one of these templates may help you stay organized and ensure you don’t skip an important step in the process.

Additional Resources to Help You Understand How to Conduct Annual Marketing Planning

We recommend the following articles to further expand your knowledge of how to conduct your annual marketing planning. Many of the tips you’ll find in these articles are similar to the takeaways from the HubSpot article, but when taken together, they can help give you a deeper insight into how to approach this process.

• How to Create a Winning Marketing Plan
• 6 Steps to Simply Build Your Annual Marketing Plan
• Developing an Annual Marketing Plan for the New Year

Putting this Information into Practice

Creating an annual marketing plan can be a daunting process. The key to navigating this process is to take it step by step. By working through all the components listed above in sequential order, you’ll compile the data necessary to understand your goals. This will then help you identify the right tactics to include in your plan.

Let Webolutions Help

At Webolutions, we provide comprehensive strategic marketing services to help your business grow and thrive. We leverage our exclusive Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach when working with our clients on annual planning. This unique approach leads you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about your company. As part of this journey, we will work through the components of the marketing plan outline to understand your specific goals and the best way to position you as an industry leader.

Based on these goals, we’ll recommend a tactical strategy to best use your resources in order to convey your brand story, generate more leads, and grow your client/customer base. We’ll also set up Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards which provide up-to-date data regarding the performance of your marketing efforts in an organized, visual, easy to understand format. This data will help us make any adjustments as needed over the course of the year to more effectively achieve your goals.

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story to life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

To speak with one of our experts about how we can help you implement a successful annual planning rhythm for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Annual Planning Consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post How to Create an Annual Marketing Plan That Will Grow Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

This process is referred to as the customer journey. It starts with gaining awareness of a brand and includes many steps before the purchase is made. Optimizing this customer journey is crucial to your ability to attract new customers and retain existing ones. You need to tailor these journeys to the specific experiences of your audience, and you must continue to nurture a relationship with them from the moment they become aware of your brand until well after they’ve become a customer.

While this process may be complex, it is an important tool for modern marketers. Without compelling customer journeys which respond to the specific needs and pain points of your target audience, you will find it challenging to stand out from your competitors, much less keep up.

At Webolutions, we’re driven by our purpose: To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. We live this purpose in everything we do for our clients. One of the ways we empower our clients to thrive is by helping them create engaging journeys that will deliver a powerful experience throughout every stage of the buying cycle, allowing our clients to not only stay top of mind for their audience, but eventually convert them to customers once these people are ready to make a purchase.

In order to better understand the essential components of creating a compelling customer journey, we recommend reading the following article from Harvard Business Review:

Competing on Customer Journeys

Key Takeaways from this Article

This article outlines four critical components necessary to build compelling customer journeys:

• Automation – This refers to the digitization and streamlining of steps that used to be performed manually to ensure smoother, more consistent implementation. When done effectively, automation utilizes back-end functionality to create an engaging front-end experience that gets delivered to your audience at the precise intervals you specify.
• Proactive personalization – While your target audience may have a variety of qualities in common, no two people are motivated by the exact same triggers. Effective journeys will take the information gained from prior interactions with an individual and customize their experience to create more engaging interactions in the future.
• Contextual interaction – Customer journeys follow a linear path. You must take the cues and knowledge you have about a person’s current place along the journey and use this information to continue driving them towards the next interactions you want them to engage with. By driving your audience forward through the journey, you can strengthen their experience at every stage and improve overall engagement.
• Journey innovation – If you want to nurture a long-term relationship with a customer, you will need to provide them with new sources of value over time. You can gain the insights necessary for this new value by experimenting with variations in your journey. Conducting A/B testing to compare alternate versions of content, designs, and delivery methods can help you to better understand which solutions resonate best with your audience.

Each of these components are interconnected and when implemented properly, increase the likelihood of drawing in your audience and converting them to long term customers.

The Importance of a Dedicated Journey Specialist

Creating compelling customer journeys is part science and part art. It takes a creative flair to identify and understand what will engage your audience and motivate them to take action. However, you must also continue testing and refining your strategies to ensure your journeys are creating the powerful experience that will hold your audience all the way through their buying cycle. To ensure this process is handled properly, it’s crucial to have a dedicated specialist managing your customer journeys.

If you are a very large company with the resources to handle this in-house, you may want to consider hiring a dedicated journey specialist (or potentially a team of specialists if warranted). However, creating an in-house position simply isn’t feasible for many organizations. Fortunately, these journeys can be managed by a marketing partner. Most of the top digital marketing agencies offer customer journey services and have specialists to help you craft the compelling journeys that will address the unique needs of your audience.

Additional Resources to Help You Understand Customer Journeys

We recommend the following articles to further expand your knowledge of how to create compelling customer journeys that will grow your business:

• How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map – Discover the important role a customer journey map plays in effectively implementing your journeys, as well as how to create these maps.
• How to Analyze (and Improve) Customer Journeys – Discover how to leverage analytics data to better understand the impact your journeys are having on customer experiences at every point in the buying cycle.

Putting this Information into Practice

Creating compelling customer journeys is a complex process, but well worth the effort. Most businesses, regardless of the industry they are in, face an extremely competitive landscape. When you implement well optimized customer journeys that keep your audience engaged every step of the way – from the start of their buying cycle through their time as a loyal customer – you will create a competitive advantage that allows you to more effectively grow your customer base and maintain their loyalty over time.

The first step in creating compelling customer journeys is to understand your audience. What are their pain points? What messaging will resonate with them? How do they process information? What are the steps they go through as they evaluate solutions to address their needs? This information will help you map out the framework for your journeys.

Let Webolutions Help

At Webolutions, we have extensive experience creating compelling customer journeys for our clients. We work with businesses in a variety of industries, and we understand the important components required to optimize your journeys for your unique audience.

When we start working with your business, we will engage your team in a Market Positioning process. This guided discovery journey will help you understand the real transformations you create in order to establish your true marketplace differentiation. At the end of this process, we’ll provide you with a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that helps you to more effectively connect with the needs of your target audience. We’ll use this information to craft compelling customer journeys that will create an amazing experience for your audience throughout every stage of the buying cycle.

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.

Our specific areas of expertise include:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

To speak with one of our experts about how you can create an amazing customer journey for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a free customer journey evaluation. During this 60-minute introduction, we discuss your audience, your specific customer benefits, share ideas and insights, and help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Creating Compelling Customer Journeys that Grow Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Advantages of an Amazing Customer Journey

A customer journey can take place through any type of engagement channel including online, live interactions, over the phone, by mail or any combination of these. It can be more effective when this occurs via omnichannel engagements.

Let’s start by looking at some of the many advantages of creating an amazing customer journey and how this can truly catapult your sales:

• Increased Sales Velocity

An amazing new customer journey facilitates the seamless flow from preliminary customer interest through the decision-making process and the completion of a sale. It comfortably addresses key questions, instills confidence, educates, builds optimism and excitement, and provides a frictionless, pleasurable path to complete a purchase.

• Increased Customer Retention & Spend

After enjoying an amazing new customer journey, creating an amazing existing customer journey accelerates your overall brand experience momentum. Customers want to have an amazing experience with you. When you continually deliver, you will increase customer retention rates and generate increased spend on future purchases.

• Increased Referrals

By delivering a consistent, amazing customer journey, you will not only enjoy increased sales from your existing customers, but you will also create an army of active evangelists for your brand who will joyfully refer you to friends and business colleagues.

Salesforce reported that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products. For many companies, competitors offer a similar product or service. A unique, amazing customer journey can become your business’ competitive advantage.

Steps for Creating Your Amazing Customer Journey

Here is an eye opener for most of you reading this article. Your business is already creating a customer journey. All your customers have come to expect this from you. The question is, are you doing this with the intention required to make this amazing? We have outlined the steps below:

1.   Clearly Define Your Customer

The key to any amazing interaction is to understand your audience. To create an amazing customer journey, you need take the time to understand:

• Who are they demographically and sociologically?
• Why may they have an interest in your product or service?
• What experience do they have purchasing/using your product or service?
• What questions or concerns do they have about making a purchase?
• What are the most important factors they’ll consider in their decision making?
• What are your competitive product or service advantages?

2.   Understand Your Customer’s Expectations

We live in an ever-evolving world where your potential customers can order a new shirt in the morning, with a few clicks on their phone, and it will be delivered to them that evening before dinner. When you are considering what your potential new clients might expect from interactions with your business, you should not only consider your industry, but other influences which may impact their expectations.

Statistics show that if someone isn’t contacted within an hour after filling out a website form to request information, there is an 80% less chance of that inquiry resulting in a sale.

There are many ways to better understand your customer. Two of the easiest methods are:

• Ask Them

Never before have your customers been more willing to share with you how you can do a better job for them. After you make a sale, ask new customers what they enjoyed about the customer journey and how you can improve this. They will tell you.

• Interaction Analytics

Use your website to gain intelligence about the content visitors view, how they engage, where they leave, the questions they ask and more. You can also use information from your CRM (Contact Relationship Management) system to test email content, texts, and other communications to measure interest levels and engagement.

3.   Map The Touchpoints

Every point of contact is an opportunity to create a more amazing customer journey. The first step in developing your journey is to create a current journey map. Simply understanding the customer journey isn’t enough. It’s best to visualize this complicated journey using a diagram that you and other employees can refer to as a resource. This is where designing a customer journey map comes into play.

Create a list of all the interactions your customer might have with you. These might include:

• A paid ad
• A search engine listing
• Your website, your calls to action and offers, and your landing pages
• Your social media channels
• Other websites where you are listed
• A phone inquiry
• Walking into your business
• Chat
• A call with a salesperson

Document insights about how your potential new customer might be experiencing each of these touchpoints. What do they want to achieve? What do they want from you? What are their questions? What are they feeling?

Next, take a step back and document the experience you are creating at each of these touchpoints. Look at this from your customer’s viewpoint:

• What is being said?
• What is being communicated?
• Are you providing what they want?
• Are you addressing their concerns?

One of the most common issues we see is that companies tend to talk about themselves and all the great things that they can do. However, customers are looking for information about the specific benefits they will receive from an engagement with you. They want to understand the experience they will have. Are you just telling them what you can do or are you helping them to imagine all the benefits they will enjoy by purchasing from you?

Are you doing anything amazing? Is your current experience working towards creating an amazing customer journey or is it working against you? Unless you’ve taken the time to consciously create this journey, you will find multiple areas for improvement.

4.   Identify Opportunities, Prioritize and Implement

Using your customer journey map, your new understanding of your customer, and the current experience you are creating at each touchpoint, you are ready to begin identifying improved customer journey opportunities.Some of the most common ways to improve your customer journey include:

• Personalization/Customization

To create an amazing customer journey with personalization and customization, you need to have a CRM where you store customer information. This allows you to aggregate new or existing client data for use in improving your customer journey. Using a system like this allows you to store customers’ names, their interests, the products they’ve purchased, their birthdays, their challenges, their goals, and any other information that might be important to creating your journey. This information can then be used to trigger, personalize and customize all of your communications. This helps establish/build a relationship and shows that you care.

• Messaging

Your communication voice, tone, vocabulary, and overall message are critical elements to creating an amazing customer journey. Do your customers feel they are being sold or do they feel they have a connected relationship with a company who cares and who helps them enjoy a better life? Review what you are saying and how you are saying it. Are the images you share focused on you and your product/service, or do they depict your customer enjoying the benefits they desire? Are you addressing their specific questions and needs? Are you making it as easy and enjoyable as possible to do business with you?

• Give Them Control

Everyone feels better when they have control. Some of the ways you can provide control to your customers to create a more amazing customer journey include:

• Provide self-service options on your website or via an app. Allow them to see orders, check shipping, see the progress of the order, look up information, create a list, schedule an appointment, or whatever provides them with a better experience.
• Provide FAQs to help address common questions. This shows that you understand what they may want to know and that you are a company who has the experience and desire to help them enjoy a better experience.
• Let them control pricing. Some car companies let you build your own car. The customer is in complete control of what they select. This empowers them to make the decisions vs being told what something is going to cost. If you can give your customer this type of control, it creates a better customer journey
• Let them choose how they would like to communicate. Do you provide chat? Can they use an AI robot? Can they request a phone call, email, or text message? Making these types of options available puts your customer in the driver’s seat and enhances their experience with you.

Once you’ve identified your opportunities to create better customer journey, prioritize these. By understanding your customer, select the top two or three things that you can implement which will create the biggest impact. The key is to get started and have a plan for how you are going to implement. Define each touchpoint and exactly what is going to happen. Set a timeline, assign responsibilities and ensure these improvements get completed. Then, identify the next set of initiatives in order of impact.

5.   Create Standards and Systems

As you shape your improved journey map, it is critical to create and document your communication standards and the associated systems. This documentation allows you and your team to set up a review schedule, visually see the full journey, understand exactly what is supposed to happen at each touchpoint, and identify future enhancement opportunities.

These standards and systems are critical to the ongoing delivery of your amazing customer journey. As you hire and train new team members, everyone must understand the importance of this objective and their specific role in its delivery.

6.   Continually Evolve and Enhance

Creating an amazing customer journey is not a one and done exercise. Your customers’ needs and expectations continually evolve. Your competitors are also working hard acquire greater market share. Keep your pulse on your customer needs and continuously identify new opportunities to enhance your customer journey. This attention and commitment will allow you grow into a recognized market leader.

Customer Journey Creation FAQs

Q: Are there templates to create a journey map?

A: Yes. Here is a link to 144 customer journey map templates

Q: How do I know what customer journey enhancements create the biggest impact?

A: The fastest way is to ask your new and existing customers. Give them a list of three or four options that you are considering and ask them to prioritize them. They will appreciate you caring about this and asking for their feedback.

Q: This seems like a lot. How can I simplify this?

A: The easiest way to simplify creating an amazing customer journey is to segment your journey into shorter experiences and then prioritize the development of these in order of potential impact. Some examples of shorter experiences are:

• A paid ad to a website landing page and filling out form.
• Your journey for welcoming and onboarding a new customer.

Get Started Today

Creating an amazing customer journey takes intention and commitment. It does not happen overnight. The sooner you begin taking these steps and implementing small changes, the sooner you will have created something amazing. Share this goal with your team. Get their feedback and ideas. Tie the creation of this to your company core values and specific mission goals. As you practice, you will develop improved systems and your progress will accelerate. Choose one area in which you believe you can improve and get started enhancing this today.

Summary

Creating an amazing customer journey can catapult your sales to a whole new level by:

• Increasing customer referral leads
• Building a stronger, more recognized brand
• Increasing new customer close rates
• Increasing customer retention
• Increasing existing customer repeat sales

If you have customers, your business is already creating a customer journey. Are you going to do this with the intention required to make this amazing?

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life throughout all experiences, allowing them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Our specific areas of expertise include:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how you can create an amazing customer journey for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a free customer journey evaluation. During this 60-minute introduction, we discuss your audience, your specific customer benefits, share ideas and insights, and help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Catapult Your Sales – Create an Amazing Customer Journey appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Business Strategy

Regardless of the specific product or service your company provides, you are in the relationship business. You need a steady stream of clients in order to be successful. While it’s important to continuously expand your client base, it’s equally crucial to keep your existing clients. These people are already working with you, and generating ongoing revenue from these individuals is an important way to grow and thrive over time. In addition to generating ongoing revenue, happy clients can help you build your business by referring new clients.

While providing quality products and services is essential if you want to maintain existing clients, it is not enough. Many of your competitors also likely provide quality work, and one of the main ways to differentiate your business from them is by building relationships with your clients that make you indispensable to them. This will ensure they keep coming back to you for years to come.

We recommend reading the following article to gain a deeper insight into how to create these indispensable client relationships:

11 Ways to Build and Maintain Strong Client Relationships

At Webolutions, we live this as part of our core values every day. One of our values is We Care About People. We actively seek opportunities to delight and bring fun and excitement to others. This ethos of caring and bringing delight to people every day has been crucial to our ability to cultivate indispensable client relationships. We take the time to get to know our clients on a deeper level, allowing us to truly understand their needs and goals. This relationship building carries over into everything we do for our clients, helping us achieve significantly better results than would be possible if we neglected to cultivate these relationships.

Key Takeaways from this Article

This article focuses on 11 important actions your business should take to cultivate an indispensable relationship with your clients and maintain these relationships for years to come:

• Focus on timely, efficient communication
• Maintain positive energy in all client interactions
• Treat your client as a person, not just a source of revenue
• Share information that will help your clients understand what you do and that build trust with your team
• Express your opinions honestly and respectfully
• Exceed client expectations with the work you deliver
• Understand your client’s goals and objectives for their collaboration with you
• Communicate using language and an approach that aligns with each client’s unique style
• Remain humble in all interactions and respect the fact that your client is an expert in their field, just as you’re an expert in your field
• Use project delivery tools that will increase the level of professionalism associated with your work
• Look for opportunities to go above and beyond for each client

For a more detailed discussion of these tips, please read the full article.

Free “Creating Irresistible Client Relationships” Discovery Session

To speak with one of our consultants about creating indispensable client/customer relationships for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, contact us to request a free “creating irresistible client relationships” discovery session. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand these steps, share ideas and insights, and help you start outlining your plan.

Contact Us

Additional Resources to Help Improve Your Client Relationships

The tips highlighted in the featured article are some of the most important steps you can take to cultivate indispensable client relationships, but there are many other ways you can supplement these efforts. We encourage reading the following articles to gain some additional insights that may help you strengthen these relationships:

• 11 Actionable Ways to Build Client Relationships that Last
• How to Strengthen Relationships with Your Clients

Using this Information

Most of the tips highlighted in these articles are relatively straightforward to incorporate. That being said, there are certain additional steps you can take to help make sure your entire team internalizes this behavior in order to cultivate stronger client relationships:

• Prioritize a commitment to developing client relationships in your hiring practices – Certain people are innately driven to build relationships, while others are not. Make sure the individuals that join your team have the type of personality that is conducive to cultivating relationships.
• Make relationship building a part of your core values – Every member of your team should be living this value each day.
• Look for moments to highlight successful client relationships – Share positive feedback from your clients with your team. Choose to highlight feedback that focuses on the ways in which they value their relationship with your team to reinforce this behavior.
• Model this behavior by nurturing relationships with your team – One of the most important aspects of relationship building is that it must be authentic. It’s extremely hard to cultivate authentic client relationships if you don’t build similar relationships with your team. Make sure you show them you care and value them, so that they go the extra mile to do the same with your clients.

Let Webolutions Help

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.

Our specific areas of expertise include:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

To speak with one of our consultants about creating indispensable client/customer relationships for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a free “creating irresistible client relationships” discovery session. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand these steps, share ideas and insights, and help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post 11 Essential Steps to Create Indispensable Client Relationships appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

At the February 20, 2019, Webolutions Executive Roundtable, we brought in businesses and non-profit leaders to discuss the impacts of effective client/customer retention in order for them to better identify their audiences and journeys.

Keys to Customer Retention

Before businesses can start engaging clients, attendees said it’s vital for leaders to establish trust with customers. And trust starts internally with an engaged staff. Webolutions started the discussion with mentioning that in order to build leads and references, Denver companies and non-profits must grow their business within. “This has tremendous impacts on customer-client retention,” said one attendee, noting that when the staff conveys a sense of value in the office, that sense of value gets replicated in client engagement. “Make sure your team is educated.”

In addition conveying that sense of value, attendees also agreed that effective customer engagement is also about presenting a story transformation to the client. “When clients get better, sales grow,” said one executive. Webolutions brought up how the company implements strategies from the book Building a Story Brand for its businesses and clients. The key takeaway with applying these techniques to customer engagement? Denver leaders can get clear on their messaging and convey a successful client transformation.

Technology and the Changing Landscape of Consumer Behavior

So what are executives doing to implement these transformations? The short answer: Researching their audiences and embracing new technologies — carefully. Attendees agreed that researching the buyers’ journey and how they interact with businesses boosts engagement. One executive in the IT noted that it’s impossible to identify every single changing trend in technology and instead suggested that Denver leaders identify the most common disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, specific to their industry. Another Denver-area leader who works in the municipality industry noted that she has researched the evolution of consumer behavior and how interviewing local businesses face to face has allowed her to improve communication with her clients.

Discussion then flowed into the ideas that if leaders do not embrace these technologies, their businesses could be stranded. For example, Webolutions brought up how successful real estate agents are learning to embrace Zillow vs. agents who ignore the power and capability of this technology. With the ever-changing landscape technologies, including artificial intelligence and online advertising, Denver-area business are getting creative — and analytical — when it comes to client engagement.

Tracking Engagement and Retention

In a recent study, 58% of executives reported that they have no formal client engagement program, while 60% were unsure how many clients they’d lost within the past year. While tracking retention rate can get a bit tricky, Webolutions suggested the Customer Retention Rate (CRR) Formula to Denver-area leaders as a method to better identify how effective they are at keeping their customers during a specific period.

E = # of Customers at the End of the Period
N = # of Customers Acquired During the Period
S = # of Customers at the Start of the Period

In addition to this formula, non-profit executives have mentioned identifying their net promoter score as a way to measure how their messages are connecting with their audiences.

But tracking retention is only half the battle. When it comes to keeping these retention numbers up, Denver-area businesses have had to get creative with engaging their audiences. For example, one government official has used surveys via NextDoor and offered those who complete the survey a $10 gift card. Another executive have implemented a policy called “No Client Left Behind” where the staff gather for weekly meetings to brainstorm ways to keep all clients engaged and aligned

Whether it’s doing the math to identify customer retention or finding fresh, energetic ways to keep clients engaged, Webolutions concluded the discussion by saying that staff, clients and customers all need to buy into the retention experience. “We are all on this journey together.”

The post The Changing World of Effective Client Engagement and Retention appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.