To scale your business, as an entrepreneur, you need to know how to market your products and services effectively. 

There might be challenges down the road, but growth is possible as long as you use the best growth hacking tactics.

To reach a massive audience, you need to adopt various growth hacking strategies. Although most of these tactics have been there for a few years now, they still play a crucial role in helping a modern-day business scale. 

Most entrepreneurs look for various growth hacks and scale quickly by garnering thousands of customers that would eventually help them boost their revenue and sales. 

For instance ecommerce email marketing is often used to grow the conversion rates, win back abandoned carts and nurture leads.

What is Growth Hacking?

Before we start, let us first define what growth hacking is. In a nutshell, it is an experiment-driven technique that determines the most effective ways to scale your business. 

The process itself is a mix of development, design, marketing, data, analytics, and engineering. 

The primary reason why this process is called growth hacking is that when you find a solution or a hack, it is a cost-effective and innovative method to achieve growth instead of following traditional practices.

Who is a Growth Hacker?

A growth hacker is someone creative and original. The primary goal is to implement innovative and creative strategies that would see to it that businesses can get and retain their customers. 

Additionally, a growth hacker could utilize a variety of methods to achieve his goals like SEO, email marketing, content marketing, reverse engineering, and viral marketing. Growth hackers could be growth marketers, as well. But take note that growth hackers could never be defined simply as marketers.

A particular formula that growth hackers follow is Growth + Product = Impact.

Powerful Growth Hacking Strategies to Try

To help you reach your full potential, you could leverage the following growth hacking strategies that could help you expand and increase your profits sharply.

Build a brand

Your customers should feel different each time they visit your ecommerce store. If you can accomplish that, then you have a brand. 

Remember that e-commerce is not just all about your startup’s name, logo, or design. It is also about the impression you make. 

Branding is crucial when it comes to selling products online, and branded products will always tend to sell better than non-branded products. 

Not branding your products means that there is absolutely no way for people to distinguish you from the rest of the competition. Not being distinguished means that you lack long-term profitability. 

Always be on the lookout for fresh branding ideas. There are lots of companies and startups that are working on building their brand right now. If you could be inspired by their ideas and turn them into your own, the better.

Remember that most consumers do not have relationships with products. Instead, they are loyal to brands. So, it is time to hack growth via branding.  

Design a Conversion-Driven Homepage

Your e-commerce site’s homepage is one of the most important parts of your site, so you should design it carefully and wisely. 

Apart from that, the message found on your homepage should also detail why customers should want to do business with you. 

The design of your homepage should be able to grab your audience’s attention, inform them about the products and services that you offer, and contain the most compelling call-to-action. 

Additionally, your home-page should also have the following:

• A compelling and highly powerful marketing message.
• A user-friendly layout and design.
• Highly informative copy.
• Highly relevant and attractive images.

Also, placing pictures of people on the homepage can have a positive impact on your overall conversion rates. 

Create More Quality Content

Most ecommerce businesses focus on creating content for their social media accounts. 

However, social media only cover a small part of the sales funnel. 

More and more businesses are creating content. But that also means that fewer and fewer people would actually get to see your content. So, how do you stand out with the help of content marketing then?

Create more content. But not just any kind of content. You must focus on creating quality content.

What does that mean, exactly?

Well, it simply means that your content has managed to achieve more views than average. For instance, your typical blog post would receive a thousand views. Any content that falls within the 2,000-5,000 bracket falls to what they call “quality” content. 

Users also get to decide what type of content is valuable to them. If it is valuable to them, then it means that the content is high-quality. So, study all your top-performing content. What are the elements that made it stand out? Then, apply the things you learned in your new content. 

Also, remember that your content should also help you achieve your business goals. Maybe you want to collect more emails or more sales in your online store. Your content should be focused on achieving this goal. 

A lot of people fail to realize this, but creating quality content is one of the most powerful e-commerce hacks. People are more likely to pay attention to your brand if you are creating quality content.  

Reduce Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

If customers keep adding products to your cart, that means they are interested. But if they refuse to proceed with the purchase, then there might be something wrong.

You have to identify what the problem is and then fix it. 

Abandoned carts have always been a major issue with e-commerce stores. So, to reduce your abandoned cart rate, you have to go with a growth hack. 

Also, keep in mind that there are three kinds of visitors. 

• Water. These people need your product and want to buy from you. Those are the types of people that you need. 
• Stone. Web visitors who will never complete an action. They’re the ones who are not quite sure what they want. 
• Clay. These are people who want your product. The main difference between them and Water is that they still have unanswered questions. They’re not entirely convinced whether or not they should make a purchase. 

Therefore, achieving 100 percent conversion rates is completely impossible because various kinds of buyers visit your store. 

Offer Free Shipment

To extend a hand to your customers, what do you need to do? Well, you could consider taking off the shipping charges of your products. Over time, your website traffic will increase, leading to higher conversion rates in your store. 

Also, instead of trying to do everything on your own, you could also partner with a reputable order fulfillment services company that will help you streamline the order fulfillment process much more effectively.

Use Exit-Intent Popups

Being an online seller, you’ve probably spent a lot of your waking hours on how to drive more people (and traffic) to your online store. But are you doing your part to catch them before they completely disappear from your site?

The trick here is to use exit-intent popups — these help capture website visitors who try to leave your site without buying anything. 

The main goal here is to make them at least change their minds by offering a tempting discount to your products and services or at least try to capture their emails that you could nurture later on in your sales funnel. 

Send a “Buy Again” Email

While a lot of businesses are hyped up about getting new customers, your previous customers are as valuable. They are twice as likely to place items in their carts, decrease your bounce rates, and convert twice as much as your regular customers. 

A great retention strategy is to send them a “buy again” email 10-15 days after they made a purchase. You could send them another email that would invite them again to make another purchase. 

You could also put a link to the product they bought last time, or other links to related products.

Improve Your Website Speed

On a website, speed is everything. The average customer will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s the main reason why Facebook and Google are both to fixated about speed. 

Your website’s speed and its user experience are some of the primary factors that determine your online store’s ability to sell. No one wants to be stuck waiting for a site to load or trying to navigate a poorly designed site. 

A/B Test Your Product Pages

One of the most common growth hacks is running A/B tests on your product pages. Through trial and error, you could quickly know what’s growing your business and what’s hurting it.

So, A/B test your product pages because this is where the sales happen. Make a couple of tweaks in the text, design, and images of your pages, then make the necessary adjustments to improve your sales.

Summary

Growth hacking is not easy. It certainly is not easier than conventional methods. But what’s great about it is that it is more effective.

In today’s highly digital landscape, it is one of the best ways to help you rise to the top and succeed. So, do not hesitate to practice these new growth hacking strategies.

For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can earn a revenue of $44. Given this high conversion rate, it’s no wonder why most marketers invest in this channel. 

Apart from being an effective revenue-generator, email marketing also allows businesses to connect with prospects on a more personal level. Plus, it’s highly accessible. Whether you’re targeting users who spend most of their time on their mobile devices or desktop computers, you can almost guarantee that they will open the email you sent. That is, if you create a compelling campaign.

But creating email marketing campaigns is not only about writing good subject lines. If you want to come up with emails that will increase your ROI, follow these tested and proven steps:

1. Know the Numbers

On average, consumers who come to your site and make a purchase via an email link spend 138% more than other customers. If you’re running an e-commerce website, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue if you’re not regularly sending email newsletters and promotions to your customers. 

According to a report, half the world’s population was already using email in 2018. By 2022, experts predict that this number could rise to more than 4.2 billion. This 2020, make it a point to increase your email marketing efforts and see your ROI rise up at the end of the year.

Statistics That Prove Email Marketing Boosts Your ROI

Emails drive revenue in more ways than one. These statistics further prove that a marketing campaign is not complete without compelling emails that convert: 

• 7 out of 10 users in the U.S. prefer that brands contact them through email. If you want to reach your customers, reach them right where they are.
• 95% of consumers check their email every day. check their email at least once a day. Want to increase your open and click-through rates? Create email marketing campaigns that drive your customers to convert.
• Marketers consistently ranked email as the most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. There’s a reason behind this statistic: email marketing is a great revenue stream. Given the growing number of email users in the world, this channel is clearly not going anywhere soon.
• With a consistent 4,400% ROI on email marketing, email marketing is worth investing in whether you are a small or large business owner. 

2. Identify the Types of Emails You Should Be Sending

There are plenty of types of emails and the ones you should be sending depend entirely on your brand’s goal. Before you proceed with crafting professionally designed emails and asking your content marketer to create compelling copy, take a step back and ask yourself these questions:

• What do I want to achieve with this campaign?
• When is the right time to send these emails?
• Do I have enough subscribers on my email list? 

Once you’re ready to distribute emails to your list, decide which type of email you should send. Here are five examples to serve as your guide:

• Welcome Email – Welcome emails are a way to thank a subscriber for taking an active interest in your brand. You’re bringing a new member into your list—be sure to keep your tone warm and inviting to make your new subscriber feel at home with your brand. 

• Email Newsletter – In a report, 40% of marketers say email newsletters are critical to their content marketing success. Keep your customers engaged by regularly sending email newsletters to them know about your events, updates, promotions, and more. 
  Before proceeding to create newsletters, however, make sure your subscribers give you explicit permission to regularly send emails. Skipping the opt-in feature will hurt your brand. Apart from risking being blacklisted, you will risk violating the CAN-SPAM and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if you do not use the opt-in function properly.

• New Product Announcement – When done correctly, new product announcement emails can be an exceptional driver of revenue. But just because you’ve got a list of interested customers, doesn’t mean you must stop putting effort in creating this type of email. 

Remember that the goal is to build suspense around your new product or service. Include compelling images or other media to spark a desire to try your new offers. 

Videos are also a great way to tease a product. In fact, 86% of online marketers already using video content to boost their sales and profit. When incorporated in email marketing campaigns, videos can boost click-through rates by 200-300%. Just make sure to keep it no longer than two minutes and include the word “video” in your subject line to let your customers know what’s to come. 

• Testimonial Email – Nothing speaks credibility than testimonials or case studies. Make it easier to gain your customers’ trust by presenting videos where your satisfied customers talk about the many benefits of working with you. 
  Don’t rely purely on text-based emails. Given that humans are visual creatures, you can use a mix of both compelling images and a short video to present social proof. 
• Survey Email – Survey emails are an effective way to collect valuable information from your already interested audience. It also shows them your sincerity in improving your products and services, which helps in gaining their trust.
  You’re asking your customers to spare their time to help your brand. In return, it will make them feel better if you include incentives for taking your survey, such as discounts on future purchases or codes to enjoy free shipping.

3. Know When to Send Your Emails

Based on an analysis of over three billion emails, here are the best and worst days to send emails:

Best days for email marketing

• Best day for highest email open rates: Thursday
• Best day for highest click-through rates: Tuesday
• Best day for lowest unsubscribe rates: Sunday or Monday
• Best day for highest click-to-open rates: Saturday
• Best day for lowest bounce rates: Monday

Worst days for email marketing

• Worst day for lowest email open rates: Sunday
• Worst day for lowest click-through rates: Sunday
• Worst day for highest unsubscribe rates: Wednesday
• Worst day for lowest click-to-open rates: Monday
• Worst day for highest bounce rates: Friday

Recognize the three Ingredients of a Compelling Email

Follow these tips for crafting the best email strategies:

1. Base: Relevant Content

Relevant content is the base of any great email marketing campaign. Remember that 72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement. When done right, your emails can boost your ROI in ways you never thought possible.

Make sure to always include valuable information, discounts, recommendations, or any content your subscribers will love when crafting your marketing strategies.

2. Mixer: Personalization

Personalized emails generate a median ROI of 122%. If you want to boost your open rates, make your subscribers feel involved and welcomed by addressing them using their first names. 

While it might have been different in the past, even the cheapest email newsletter services can now personalize your emails, while also costing less. So there is basically nothing stopping you.

But personalization doesn’t just mean you need to include their name on the subject line. You can integrate their location, behavior, and past purchases to attract their attention and drive them to act.

3. Final Touch: Automation

Given that 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, it’s safe to say that automation elevates any campaign to become a more efficient revenue stream.

By sending time- or action-triggered emails, you’re reaching your customers right when and where they need you most. 

For more tips on how to write persuasive emails, check out Triggerbee’s article about the psychology behind what makes people click and buy.

BONUS: How to Increase Your E-commerce Brand’s Open and Click-through Rates

If you’re an e-commerce business owner, here are tips and tricks that will absolutely boost your email opens and click-throughs:

• Drive Urgency With a Countdown Timer in Your Email – “Hurry!”, “Act now! Limited offer only!” Do these phrases sound familiar to you? If so, it’s because most marketers use this trick to drive their customers to act fast. 
  Creating a sense of urgency is a great way to tap into your consumers’ motivations. Make it clear to your customers that they’re missing out on something if they don’t buy your product or subscribe to your service. And what’s a surefire way to drive urgency? Creating a countdown timer. Check out the sample below:

• Incorporate Videos in Your Emails – Video is now one of the most in-demand forms of marketing. It’s easier to digest, can be accessed whenever and wherever consumers want it, and ideal when targeting people with on-the-go lifestyles.
  It’s also worth mentioning that 64% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product online after watching a video. If you want to catch your customers’ attention, create killer yet short videos highlighting your new products. It can be a form of a teaser video, explainer video, or even a social proof video. 

Summary

It’s no secret that email marketing drives conversion better than other channels. If you want to attract the right audience, personalize your communication approach, and automate your campaign to send time-, behavior-, and action-triggered offers, email marketing is the way to go. 

In recent years, we have seen a growing number of B2B marketers embrace account-based marketing (ABM) as one of the leading B2B lead generation strategies. A big part of its growth is that ABM is the perfect strategy for wading into slowly over time.

It doesn’t require a full commitment initially, but most companies that dedicate themselves to it over a period of time find that their results far surpass traditional B2B lead generation strategies. ABM is the perfect complement to traditional systems, allowing you to build a long-term lead generation platform that helps you to land bigger B2B deals more reliably using data-driven strategies to further relationships.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing is a strategy that focuses on engaging with a specific set of target accounts. Those accounts should be ideal clients — meaning that they have a direct and obvious need for your product and can benefit from its use.

In ABM, your accounts are companies, not people. The strategy allows you to align both your sales and marketing teams and focus your resources on engaging those accounts and landing deals.

Put simply — account-based marketing allows you to streamline your lead generation and marketing efforts and treat companies as accounts, instead of the individuals that work within them. When you engage an account through ABM practices, you are likely engaging several different people within the company, instead of only engaging with one individual.

This strategy allows you to secure deals more quickly, and at higher revenues that traditional B2B marketing and sales strategies. In ABM, your teams work together to identify key prospect accounts that would be a good fit for your product(s), and then you custom tailor your approach toward winning their business. It’s a much more intentional approach than typical “spray-and-pray” lead generation strategies that have become so common.

Source: Drift

Why ABM Stands Above Other B2B Lead Generation Strategies

There are many reasons why B2B companies are embracing ABM as one of the premier B2B lead generation strategies. The practice’s ability to let you hone in on your best possible clients and engage with them effectively leads to shorter sales cycles, larger deals, and better relationships with your customers once the agreement is in place.

A few of the reasons why ABM has picked up so much steam among B2B companies in recent years include:

Engage Buying Teams in Full

Source: Sales Manager Now

With buying teams growing (today the average buying team is made up of five different people in B2B sales deals), it is more important than ever that you engage with several people inside of the companies that you are selling to. Each person within that company has their own concerns, needs, and opinions that must be catered to throughout the selling process. An HR leader won’t have the same concerns as a marketing executive, and both would share opinions that may be radically different from a CTO.

Focus On the Best Opportunities

Account-based marketing allows you to hone in on the best opportunities. With more marketing and sales teams feeling pressure to deliver revenue growth to their companies, ABM gives them the tools that they need to engage with buyers that provide the highest opportunity and highest-value accounts. By defining the accounts that you will pursue early in the process, you can focus on the accounts that provide you with the best possible opportunities. You can filter your efforts by focusing on the accounts that have the most discernible need and required budgets for your product.

A Personalized Approach

Because ABM asks that marketing teams define the different targets that they will be pursuing, it allows them to create an approach that is custom-tailored to that account’s specific needs. By going into new engagements with materials that are personalized to their businesses’ needs, you can position yourself as a true solution to the biggest problems that they are experiencing. The insights gleaned from an ABM approach allow you to create content and messages that resonate with your target audience and speak to their biggest concerns.

This personalized approach doesn’t just mean a higher ROI for your sales and marketing teams, it also means a better experience for your customers. Buyers prefer to engage with companies that understand their needs and take previous conversations into account when interacting with them. By serving your leads with targeted content and messages, customers will develop deeper relationships with sales reps when they begin to engage with them, and have a higher level of appreciation for the process as a whole. Happy customers make for happy sales and marketing teams.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

For decades companies have placed a lot of focus on how they can get their marketing and sales teams to work as a cohesive unit. You’d think it would be easy — ultimately both teams have the same goal (driving more revenue) — but traditional methods mean that their goals often do not align and in some cases even compete with each other.

ABM is the perfect complement to sales teams. Because many sales teams have been using an account-based approach for years, using the same approach in your marketing can help to create a more consistent journey for your buyers and keep both marketing and sales teams on the same page. This is a huge benefit to both teams because they become allies in each other’s missions. 84% of businesses using ABM say it delivers a higher ROI than other strategies.

How TriggerBee Can Supplement Account-Based Marketing Efforts

TriggerBee is an excellent tool for account-based marketing teams and sales professionals. Gaining a deeper understanding of the actions that your target accounts take on your website and the content they interact with.

TriggerBee allows you to make data-driven decisions and identify companies that are already visiting your website. Not only does this help you to generate B2B leads, but it gives you more insight into the accounts that you are already targeting. It’s the perfect complement to B2B lead generation strategies for account-based marketing, helping both sales and marketing teams to strengthen their messaging and speak to the biggest concerns of their target accounts.

In recent years, we have seen a growing number of B2B marketers embrace account-based marketing (ABM) as one of the leading B2B lead generation strategies. A big part of its growth is that ABM is the perfect strategy for wading into slowly over time.

We live in an automated world, and businesses are constantly finding new ways for automation to reshape areas of their business that had previously been accomplished by hand. A.I. is transforming the way that marketing and sales tasks and strategies are handled, allowing companies to provide a personalized experience that results in a better trip through the sales funnel for prospects.

One of the areas that is ripe for automation is in the prospecting and sales cycle processes. In B2B, it’s rare to experience a customer that does not go through a process of some sort. In fact, less than 2% of B2B customers do not travel through a sales funnel before making their final purchasing decision. In B2B buying, it can take months and many touches before a single customer makes their way through the funnel. This means that companies need to find ways to automate prospecting and keep their sales pipeline filled at all times.

Luckily, there are a number of strategies that customers can use to automate their prospecting and improve engagements with customers as they make their way through the sales funnel. Prospecting and qualifying leads can be a time-consuming task. In fact, many sales reps spend between 30% and 40% of their week on prospecting.

Automation can help you to not only increase the number of leads generated but speed up the prospecting and qualifying process for your sales reps as well. It frees up their time to focus more on closing sales than simply trying to keep the pipeline filled, which benefits a business in many different ways.

Some of the different automation strategies that companies can use to increase their B2B sales leads and connect with more prospects include:

Cold Email Automation

Cold calling is as old as the telephone itself for generating sales and leads for B2B companies. While cold calling is still a popular method, we have seen a rapid uptick in the number of companies that use cold email for B2B lead generation in recent years. A number of automated tools have made their way onto the market that have simplified the process and made it so that any company can reliably use cold email to generate B2B sales leads.

Prospecting Tools and Databases

Before you start sending cold emails, you need something even more important: people to send them to. Modern prospecting tools ContactOut and Apollo make this part of the process almost effortless. They help you find, verify, and manage contact information for potential customers, while also giving you insights that help personalize your outreach.

Email Identification Tool

You don’t want to email “[email protected]” for companies that you are interested in working with — especially if you want to get a response. You’ll need a tool that can help you to reliably look up and find the right the decision-makers that you need to speak with at any organization. Popular tools for identifying emails within companies that are out there today include Hunter, Snov.io, and FindThatEmail. They all work a bit differently from each other. Snov.io also provides the ability to look up the email address of profiles on LinkedIn through their Chrome Extension.

Email Verification

Once you identify the email of the person that you would like to reach out to, you then need to verify the email to ensure that it does not bounce. Having too many bounced emails can negatively affect your sending domain and harm the deliverability of important business emails. Make sure that you use an email verification tool to verify all emails before sending them.

Cold Email Campaign Automation Tools

Lastly, you’ll need a solution that will help you to automatically personalize and send your emails to your targets. There are numerous tools that allow you to import contacts, personalize the emails that you send, and automate multiple follow-up messages, removing the prospect from the campaign if they respond to the email.

One popular tool for cold email campaign automation is Mailshake, which connects directly to your Gmail or GSuite account. There are numerous other tools out there that can achieve a similar effect, but very few that can plug directly into Gmail in the way that Mailshake can.

Social Media Automation

Social selling is all the rage today, and for good reason — it gives sales reps a reliable way to develop rapport with prospects without them feeling like they are being sold to in every interaction. By 2021 there will be more than 3 billion worldwide social media users. Despite its popularity, social media usage continues to grow with each passing year.

Content that is shared by employees and representatives receives 8x the engagement of content that is shared through branded company channels. But, that doesn’t mean that individuals can’t use social media automation in the same way that brands could.

One way to automate social media and social selling is through the monitoring of social networks. Tools like LeadSift monitor all relevant discussions that take place on different social media platforms, forums, and comment sections around the web. You can use this monitoring to connect with interested prospects that are discussing solutions that are similar to your own.

Collect More On-Site Data

To generate more B2B sales leads, you don’t necessarily have to look toward outreach or off-site third-party data to connect with your prospects. In fact, more B2B companies should be leveraging the data that they are able to collect on their own website to identify interested prospects.

Using Triggerbee, you can turn your customer’s digital footprints into profit. It helps you to collect actionable data that helps you to identify what people within different companies are visiting your website.

Triggerbee gives you the insights that you need to approach prospects in a way that takes into account the content that they have engaged with and speaks to the biggest needs of their company. This data includes how they came to your website, what topics they expressed the most interested in, and what steps they have taken while visiting your website.

Automating this kind of data collection can help your marketing and sales teams go into conversations with prospects with more (and more accurate) information than they otherwise would. Conversations flow more naturally as you can immediately hone in on subjects that matter to your prospects and address concerns that they have expressed through their actions.

Automation Lets You Focus on Core Tasks

Over time, automation will become a necessity in prospecting and generating B2B sales leads. For now, companies that embrace automation are ahead of the curve and have a leg up on the competition.

The more time and effort that you put into building out your automation processes and tools now, the more it will pay off in the long-term. Automation allows you to focus on your core tasks while more mundane tasks are handled through your automated systems.

We live in an automated world, and businesses are constantly finding new ways for automation to reshape areas of their business that had previously been accomplished by hand. A.I. is transforming the way that marketing and sales tasks and strategies are handled, allowing companies to provide a personalized experience that results in a better trip through the sales funnel for prospects.

Running an excellent sales program is mission critical to any business. Every owner is aware of this – but in recent times, it’s become almost impossible to dedicate the time and energy it takes to act on that knowledge.

Personal contact, great customer service, consistent follow-up, and getting a “feel” for the market almost sound like fantasies amidst the screaming pace of the digital world. But with sales and marketing automation, the impossible becomes the natural.

This is why marketing automation drives an average 14.5% increase in sales productivity. And the following easy-to-use automation tools are why figures like those could be at your fingertips, too.

CRM: Make Your Salespeople Unstoppable with Pipedrive

A good CRM system should not only make sales management a simple affair, but it should also make best practices automatic. Oh, and it should also be easy to use, so your team actually uses it.

With over 50,000 customers in 140+ countries, Pipedrive has proven that it checks all three boxes. Pipedrive can also automate just about anything – here are some of the top examples:

• Automate background research by using Pipedrive’s AI to collect info about your leads
• Automate customer relationship tracking by syncing phone calls, emails and online activity with Pipedrive so that it feeds into one single timeline
• Automate project management by having sales trigger instructions on the next steps for your service delivery team
• Connect pretty much anything to Pipedrive and set up long sequences of events by using Zapier (learn more about Pipedrive Automations and Zapier here).

You should also check out how you can (almost) entirely automate your online sales prospecting and sales process with the Triggerbee and Pipedrive integration.

List building: Use LiveChat to Build your Email List Fast

There are about a million ways to build a list of email contacts, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to getting your potential customer to fill out a form that says “Ok, here’s my email.”

That form is called an opt-in form, and getting your customer to complete it is the holy grail of list building. Form doesn’t look good? Customer will get suspicious. If the form offers more info about dog shampoo when your customer was just reading about skydiving? Not a chance. Forms aren’t working and you don’t know why? Good luck building your list.

LiveChat lets you create opt-in forms that pop up automatically in your live chat box, connecting to popular platforms like MailChimp. This is an excellent option because it allows you to organically build your list while providing better, more responsive customer service to your customers.

As a bonus, with the Triggerbee and LiveChat integration, you’ll get the full transcript between the chatter and the chattee in your visitor list.

Email: Automate Your Email Marketing with MailChimp

Studies show that for optimum sales efficiency, you should be emailing your list of prospects somewhere between three and six times per month. That might sound like a lot – and it is – but the data has proven that regular emails deliver sales and improve customer retention across all industries.

Here to help you manage that workload are email automation tools like MailChimp. Known best for providing an easy way to organize, schedule and automate email campaigns, MailChimp also goes above and beyond that offering.

Set up a series of emails to initiate when a new customer opts in, and you can and schedule an entire customer relationship. Set triggers to remind paying customers that you’re still there after a period of inactivity. Embed slick visuals into your emails, integrate with Shopify and other e-commerce programs, gather and analyze data about your customers, calculate ROI, and more. If you’re looking at email automation, MailChimp is a safe bet.

Demos: Sidestep Scheduling, Logistics & Communication Breakdown with Zoom

Zoom is a video-based conference call tool that is taking the business world by storm. Why? Because it’s free, easy, and flexible. Why else? Because communication and the logistics surrounding it have always been one of the most expensive parts of doing business.

Aside from being free and eliminating the need for all kinds of travel by essentially putting everyone in the same digital room, Zoom can automate stuff, too.

Schedule calls ahead of time by linking a Zoom call to calendar systems like Google Calendar and many others. Automate logistics and confusion by eliminating them: Your clients don’t have to have Zoom or download anything to use it. You can generate a simple link with Zoom, and all your client has to do is click it. If they have a computer or mobile phone with a camera, they can do a Zoom video or audio conference with you.

Website Tracking: Turn Website Visitors into Customers with Triggerbee

In the age of digital marketing, your website is basically your storefront. And if you’re not tracking what customers do on your site, you’re leaving them alone in the waiting room. They can ring the service bell, ready to make a purchase, but you won’t answer unless you can hear it.

Website tracking tool Triggerbee is that service bell. Actually, it’s more like a really good salesperson. Watching customers, learning about them, helping them get more information about what they want, following up, and offering all of your services in a proactive but friendly way. This is what Triggerbee lets you do for your web visitors.

Automatically sift through the window shoppers and identify real customers. Track the ones that got away and retarget them with the offers they’re ready to buy. And integrate literally all of the automation tools we just covered to help you bridge the final gap from web visit to purchase. Learn more about Triggerbee’s available integrations here.

Sales Analytics: Turn Data into Smarter Sales with Salesforce

What sort of customers give you the highest return? Which existing customers are worth the time spent on follow up? What kind of people should you be reaching out to? And, based on all your sales and customer history, what smart decisions should you be making?

These are the questions salespeople and data technicians spend untold hours trying to answer. Automate all that head-scratching by importing your data into Salesforce and letting Einstein Analytics do it for you.

A new product from popular CRM Salesforce, Einstein Analytics essentially does two things: it automates data entry, and it uses AI to answer all those burning sales questions. This product is deeply intelligent. It collects and collates data on every single customer interaction. It uses info about the customers to identify what’s working and why. And it uses THAT data to predict sales opportunities that you haven’t thought of yet. Think of it as a really good weatherman for what your sales team should do.

If you’re curious to learn more, check out the product features page for Einstein Analytics.

When was the last time that you bought a product right after laying eyes on it, without conducting any further research? That would be a very rare thing for most people. The only products that we buy in that way are products from companies that we know and trust or have been anticipating.

Most customers go through a process when making a new purchase — particularly in B2B where buying teams of 5 or more people are the average.

First, their awareness of the product is built. They discover it and begin to learn more about the product and how it applies to their situation.

Then, they begin to research the product, industry, and competition while they evaluate what might be the best fit for their company.

They evaluate and get a better understanding of the options that are available to them. Then, the decision-making process begins in earnest as they narrow down their list of options.

This is what is known as the buyer’s journey, as they work their way down your B2B marketing funnel. The leads that enter your funnel begin at the beginning in the awareness building stage, and must be nurtured throughout the process. It’s your marketing team’s job to facilitate that process and help the buyer learn about your product and how it connects directly to their needs.

Throughout the buyer’s journey, B2B marketing teams should be delivering content that facilitates the lead going farther down the funnel. Today 88% of B2B marketers are producing custom content for their leads, but only 42% of B2B marketers consider themselves effective at content marketing. But knowing what content to present when can be tricky. You want your content to perfectly align with their needs.

Let’s examine the different types of content that you should be delivering throughout the funnel.

Top of the Funnel Content: Build Awareness

The first stage of the B2B marketing funnel is all about building awareness. In this stage, the buyer is aware of a problem that they have and are looking for a solution to that problem. They may not even be aware that they need to invest in something in order to solve the problem. Different buyer’s come into the top of the funnel with a different understanding and different levels of awareness.

The content that you deliver in this stage should be top-level educational content. Your goal is to direct them toward the solution and better understand how their issue can be solved. At this stage, they don’t have a lot of value as a lead. They are still in the process of determining whether or not they need a solution. It’s your job to help them realize that they do and position your product (subtly) as the solution that they need.

The types of content that you should be delivering during the top of the funnel awareness stage include:

• Blog posts
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Infographics
• Social Media Updates
• eBooks
• Podcasts
• Video

The range of acceptable content types in this stage is really less important than the information that you are delivering. Content in the awareness stage should be educational in nature. Help them understand your product. Help them understand the problem that they are having. Inform them about your industry and important things they need to know before investing in a solution. Answer their questions. Avoid hard sells in the awareness stage because your prospects are not yet ready to buy.

Middle of the Funnel Content: Facilitate Evaluation

When a lead enters the middle of your B2B marketing funnel, it’s time to start helping them to evaluate your solution and compare it to the competition. While many companies avoid mentioning the competition at all in their marketing materials, they miss out on a key opportunity to contrast their product to the competition’s and position themselves as the better fit with leads.

In this stage, the prospect knows that they have a problem and knows that they will have to invest in a solution in order to solve it. Your job is to facilitate (positive) evaluation of your product and help them to see your product as a solution to the issue that they have encountered.

Keep in mind that your content in the middle of the funnel should also work to remove prospects from your list as well. Maybe they aren’t a good fit for your product. You want to help them to realize that so that you can avoid wasting resources on a lead that is never going to convert.

The types of content that you should deliver during the evaluation stage of the B2B marketing funnel include:

• Product Comparisons
• eBooks
• Webinars
• Case studies
• Product & Spec sheets
• Videos
• Email nurturing
• Sales-focused blog content

Again, the type of content that you deliver is less important than how well it aligns with the prospect’s goals based on where they are in the funnel.  In this stage, follow-ups are key. In this stage, email marketing is incredibly important for nurturing leads, which can help to take someone from prospect to customer. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Help them to evaluate your solution and compare it to other solutions that are in the market. Content in this stage should become increasingly sales-focused, but not present them with an outright hard sell.

Bottom of the Funnel Content: Close the Sale

At the bottom of the funnel, it’s time for the prospect to make a purchasing decision. They are ready to buy, but that doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy your product. If you’ve done a good job throughout the middle of the funnel, they should have an understanding of what their issue is and exactly how your product will help them to solve it.

In most cases, leads that reach the bottom of the funnel will have you on their final list of solutions. It may come down to your product and one or two others. They just need a final push and a persuasive call to action to get them to bite. It’s during this stage that you can offer discounts or deals that can push them over the edge. The right offer and content at this stage will put your sales reps in a position to close the deal.

A River of Value & Education

A successful B2B marketing funnel will walk your prospects through every stage of the buyer’s journey, educating them along the way. The more value that you can deliver throughout your engagement with a prospect, the better your chances of converting the sale become. Ensuring that you align your content delivery with their placement in your B2B marketing funnel is critical for success and presents your sales teams with a reliable stream of well-nurtured hot leads.