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

9 Powerful Growth Hacking Strategies for eCommerce Businesses

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 an increasingly digital and customer-centric world, your ability to collect and use customer data to shape and personalize customer interactions is becoming more important than ever.

Personalization, when done right, can deliver incredible value for both your business and your customers. 

In fact, over 74% of your customers expect a personalized online experience.

Yet, most businesses are still only scraping the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delivering these experiences. There are a lot of challenges standing in the way for smaller companies, and large companies are still trying to figure out how to do personalization effectively at scale. 

However, there are 3 main challenges that companies of all sizes will face at the beginning of their journey to better customer experiences: 

1. Data and technology

Challenge: Customer data is siloed and spread across multiple tools – giving you a fragmented view of your customer

Solution 1: Implement a customer data platform
Solution 2: Collect first-party data with a data activation platform.

According to a survey conducted by Evergage, 55% of marketers don’t feel they have enough customer data to implement effective personalization. 

This is easily solved. How? By collecting first-party data. 

First-party data is collected directly from your customers: 

  • Contact information
  • browsing behavior
  • website actions (clicks, downloads, purchases)
  • channel-specific engagement
  • purchase history
  • survey information
  • etc

The best part? You own it to 100% and can use it however you like (assuming you have properly collected marketing consent from each customer). 

When this data is combined it becomes a customer profile, which you can then use to deliver personalized, individual messages.

The only problem?

In most organizations, customer data is fragmented and spread out across different tools. 

Your CRM contains a whole bunch of contact information, your email marketing service contains data about your subscribers, and your analytics software stores anonymous browsing data.  

However, unless these tools are connected in a way that lets you use the data from all of these sources, it’s impossible for you to even separate a returning customer from a new visitor on your website.

This type of insight is fundamental to your personalization strategy.

Traditionally, companies have outsourced much of their data collection to an agency or IT-department. And as a result, that data is trapped and left unavailable to the team that needs it the most: the marketing team.

This data needs to be accessible to everyone who plays a part in building the personalization strategy. And as such, it’s important that you have the right technology in place. 

So start by finding software that collects first-party data, and creates customer profiles. 

This allows you to activate your data, meaning you can use it to target individual customers with offers on your website, or with ads. 

Data-activation software is installed on your website and collects both contact information and behavioral data about your customers and prospects. It then puts these two data sources together to create unique customer profiles containing interests, browsing behavior, and important milestones (eg. Downloaded Whitepaper or Added Product to Cart). 

With this data available, you can create personalized campaigns that are tailored to individuals with certain online behavior.

Data activation software can also help you break free from marketing to segments and lists, and instead start delivering personalized content and promotions to individual users. 

2. Balancing privacy and personalization

Challenge: Appearing trustworthy while at the same time personalizing the experience

Solution: Take a privacy-first mindset into your marketing strategy

The nature of data privacy has become a concern for both businesses and consumers. 

Companies that use frequent or advanced personalization methods are more likely to trigger privacy concerns among their customer base – it’s in these situations that proactive, and sometimes manual, privacy management plays an important part.

When building your personalization strategy, you should start by identifying situations where it feels appropriate to use personalization and think about the situational impact.

For example, a recommendation module showing “People who bought this also bought these” might not need an explanation about how the data was collected. However, greeting website visitors with their first name on your homepage can feel really creepy  – unless you explicitly state that the section or banner is specifically personalized for them.

You need to make it clear for your customers that you take data privacy seriously, and build trust by explaining how their data is used and processed.

3. Invisibility 

Challenge: Delivering personalized experiences without being too obvious and intrusive

Solution: Carefully select opportunities

To avoid creeping out your customers, you need to make sure that your personalization is more or less invisible and seamless across channels.

For example, having a homepage section only for returning visitors, showing any items they left in the shopping cart from a previous visit, adds value because you’re highlighting and “remembering” their previous actions for them.

Clothing giant Zalando is a more concrete example of a company who is using personalization effectively. When you log into their app, you can customize the items shown on the front page by selecting a number of influencers that wears the style of clothes you like. 

The more influencers you choose, the more your front page is filled with items you probably would buy. 

This approach is effective because you, their customer, have complete control. You can choose to unfollow anyone you have followed, and as a result removing your personalized feed.

Effective personalization is not intrusive or obvious, it’s “just there” when you need it.

Summary

The hardest part of personalization is often just getting started. In our experience, most companies already have more than enough data and people to get value from day 1 – even if the first step is something as small as not showing a newsletter popup to website visitors who are already in your email database. 

Start by determining which use cases to focus on and find a technology provider that can help you reach your initial goals quickly, and iterate on your personalization strategy as you become more advanced.

Personalization is the heartbeat of modern digital marketing. By having the right data at hand and the right technology in place to use the data you collect, the possibilities are endless.

But, don’t do everything at once or you’ll most likely become overwhelmed with all your options. 

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.

account-based marketing

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

buying team roles

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.

In order to automation cold email prospecting, there are a few tools that any company will need.

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.

 

If you’ve looked into tools that you can use to arm your sales teams for success, there is a good chance that you have heard about intent data. It’s a hot topic in data-driven marketing and for good reason — it’s an extremely powerful tool for both sales and marketing teams.

Put simply, intent data is data collected on a prospect’s content consumption and behavior that provides insight into their interests.

However, despite its recent popularity and usefulness in sales processes, intent data is only used by 25% of B2B companies today, although 35% of companies state that they are planning to begin using intent data within the next 12 months.

Even if you haven’t pursued capturing and using intent data, you are already collecting it. First-party intent data from your website is more commonly known as engagement data, and any business with a basic Google Analytics setup is already collecting it at its most basic level. Most of the time that data is anonymous, meaning you don’t have data about who the individual visitors are until they fill out a form and can only identify individual users by IP address.

However, that just scratches the tip of the iceberg for what is possible with intent data and how it can be integrated into your sales processes.

What Is Intent Data?

So, what is intent data? To accurately speak about how intent data can be used, we have to know what kind of intent data we are talking about and there are multiple classifications based on where the data came from and how it was collected.

Intent data is behavioral data that is collected about a single individual’s activities. Intent data includes information about topics and context to provide a clearer picture of what individual leads are interested in.

The different classifications for intent data are:

  • Anonymous 1st Party Intent Data. These are people who visit your website and are typically only identifiable by their IP address. That IP address is then mapped to a company name if possible. Companies may use other solutions to help turn anonymous intent data into known intent data.
  • Known 1st Party Intent Data. People that visit your website and are known by name. Maybe they filled out a form or provided their contact information in another way. Once they have provided their information, you can then track their actions on your website and map that information to their company.
  • Anonymous 3rd Party Intent Data. People that have visited another website that you do not own. There must be an indication that the data is relevant to your own products for it to be useful. Only contains IP information. Data typically acquired through direct partnerships or vendors.
  • Known 3rd Party Intent Data. People that have visited other websites and have also provided their information through a contact form. The website owner knows who they are, and you can acquire their data through a number of vendors.

At Triggerbee, our solution helps companies to collect and utilize their anonymous and known 1st party intent data from visitors to their own website. Our solution makes it easy to track the actions that your visitors take on your website.

How Can Sales Reps Use Intent Data?

Intent data is an excellent tool for aligning sales and marketing teams. With more information about your key accounts at their fingertips, your sales reps can more aptly speak to the needs and concerns of the hot leads that are already visiting your website. Marketers can connect intent data to the accounts that they are already building relationships with for improved personalization, and sales teams are able to integrate what they learn directly into the sales process.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how sales reps can integrate intent data into their sales processes to improve conversion rates and speed up sales cycles.

Map Discussions to a Customer’s Actions

Intent data tells you a lot about what a customer is thinking. The content that they engage with tells you a lot about what means the most to them and their company. It helps sales reps identify which product features will be the most important to cover, and which points the most important to drive home during the sales process. Salespeople can use the actions that a customer takes on your website to outline future discussions and follow-ups with prospects.

Deliver Personalized Content Based on Actions

Content personalization is becoming increasingly important during the sales process. Prospects want to know that you fully understand their business and concerns when buying into an expensive product and putting their reputation on the line. 79% of consumers say that they are only likely to engage with an offer that has been personalized to reflect previous interactions with the brand. Seeing the content that they engage with gives you the opportunity to custom tailor future content that you send. Intent data gives you an inside look into their biggest concerns. To not utilize that data would hamstring your sales reps.

Accurate Led Scoring Leads to Better Prioritization

Intent data is extremely useful in the lead scoring process. In fact, the most effective sales reps and marketers give a lot of credit to lead scoring. 68% of “highly effective” marketers pointed to lead scoring as their top revenue contributor in a 2013 study.

To accurately score leads, you have to have accurate information. Triggerbee’s intent data simply gives you more information to work with and increases the accuracy of your lead scoring. Then, your sales reps can better prioritize the leads that they interact with, focusing on the accounts that are most likely to convert. This ensures that your sales reps waste less time talking to prospects that ultimately don’t pan out and provide a better and faster experience to leads with high scores.

Engage New Leads Quickly and Effectively

Being quick to engage with prospects is absolutely critical to the sales process.  Research shows that 35%-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Intent data gives you that chance. Using intent data to identify new accounts and prospects that are actively searching for a solution like your product allows your sales reps to be quick to open a dialog with them before your competitors are able to do the same.

Further, you’ll have more information about what individual prospects are looking for based on the intent data that you have available on them. If you want your sales reps to be quick to reach out, intent data will not only help them to do so but will more them more effective while doing it.

New Data for Existing Accounts

Intent data isn’t just useful for engaging with new accounts, it’s also incredibly valuable for informing your interactions with current accounts as well. Keeping a close eye on what your prospects are engaging with throughout the sales process will help you to tailor conversations toward their biggest concerns and position your product as a true solution to their needs. Intent data allows you to flesh out existing accounts and provide the big picture to your sales reps.

Engage with Complete Buying Teams

In B2B sales, buying teams are huge. 61% of buying teams include five or more people. You need to make sure that you are able to speak to the concerns of each member of a buying team in order to close the deal. This often means competing viewpoints and conflicting opinions. Intent data allows you to see which pieces of content each individual stakeholder interacts with and use that data to inform your interactions with them as a group and ask individuals.

Intent Data is a Valuable Tool

Intent data is an extremely valuable tool for any sales team. The more insight that you can arm your reps with, the more effective they will be. All companies are already in a position to collect and utilize intent data on their websites, most simply don’t have the tools that would allow them to do so. Triggerbee makes it easy for companies to start collecting anonymous and known 1st party intent data and integrate that data into their sales and marketing processes.

If you’ve looked into tools that you can use to arm your sales teams for success, there is a good chance that you have heard about intent data. It’s been a hot topic in the digital marketing industry recently and for good reason — it’s an extremely powerful tool for both sales and marketing teams.

Automated sales — it’s the dream, right? Where all your sales processes are put on auto-pilot and you can put all of your focus on your product. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite possible — yet. No sales cycle can be completely automated, but a natural place for companies to start is in the automation of individual sales processes.

At Triggerbee, our system plays a key role in the sales automation operations of our customers. The data, customization options, and reliability of our system helps businesses automate key steps in their sales process and shrink the workloads of their sales reps.

Still, automating sales isn’t something that is going to happen overnight. It takes time to ensure that you have the right tools, processes, and strategies in place to make automation an effective alternative to more conventional by-hand strategies. But once you do have those in place, the sky’s the limit.

The Right Tools and Strategies

It can’t be understated how important having the right tools, processes, and strategies in place is when you begin your journey into sales automation. Without a clear idea of where you are heading, it’s too easy to get lost on the way. You need clear goals. What will you be automating? What tools will you be using to accomplish that automation? How will this change processes for your current sales team? These are important questions.

Start by determining which sales processes you would like to automate. Where do your sales reps take the most time? What types of automation would help you the most? Work closely with your sales reps to identify key processes that are both able to be handled by publicly available automation tools and can realistically be installed into your current sales processes.

Every company has different processes, and no one tool can completely automate everything that your sales teams do. Instead, focus on automating singular processes and combine those to work closer toward your larger automation goals.

Automated Prospecting and Lead Generation

One area where most companies would like to inject some automation into is in the prospecting and lead generation department. Sales reps and marketing teams spend a lot of time and energy on generating new leads and identifying targets. In fact, the average salesperson spends 15% of their time engaging with existing customers. Luckily, it also happens to be one of the sales processes that are ripe for automation.

There are many types of automation that you can use to improve the prospecting process. Companies like Close.io offer several features to improve automation including cold calling automation, SMS, emailing, and in-depth reporting to help you measure your effectiveness.

Here at Triggerbee, we make prospecting and lead generation automation simple. Every single day you have people that come to your website and leave, never to be heard from again. They might even be interested in your product but just don’t have the time to seek out a customer service rep and get their questions answered.

Triggerbee allows you setup custom automations based on “If this then that” logic, similar to segmentation options in popular email marketing software like MailChimp or Sendgrid.

Because Triggerbee is able to automatically identify company names of website visitors and then tracks their activity and engagement, you can create warm lead lists of prospects that have expressed interest in your product through their on-site actions. Our system tracks who visits your website, where they come from, and what they do when they are there.

You can then have these lists automatically delivered to your sales reps every one, seven, or fourteen days. This ensures that your sales reps have a constant supply of fresh leads that they can begin building relationships with.

In another example, Triggerbee will send a notification to a salesperson when the prospect visits the website following the delivery of a proposal. If the prospect is currently in Pipedrive (a CRM solution, which we’ll touch on in a second) Triggerbee can also add a note that shows what that prospect did during their visit to your website.

Intent Data and Lead Scoring

Intent data is data that indicates the level of interest from a particular prospect or account and is typically used in the lead scoring process. Internal intent data refers to data detailing the actions your customers take on your website.

By identifying parties that are further along in the buying cycle or more interested in your solution, your sales reps can close more deals quickly. 79% of all leads are never converted into sales, and intent data can help any company to hone in on interested parties and improve that number.  

In many companies lead scoring is done by hand. Sales reps (or marketers, before marketing the lead as sales qualified) have to analyze interactions that they have tracked and actions the lead has taken to gauge their interest. It’s often a very time-consuming process.

Luckily, Triggerbee tracks detailed intent data by analyzing the actions that your visitors take on your website, giving your team all of the information that they need to accurately score leads. If the visitor is identified, their email is synced into the system, which enables your sales reps to score the lead and stay in continuous contact with them through email as they traverse the buyer’s journey.

CRM Usage and Automation

A customer relationship management tool is a must-have solution for modern sales teams and one that plays a critical role in sales automation. CRM adoption increases sales by up to 29%. Today, the customer experience and a brand’s relationship with their customers is more important than ever before. In a recent survey by SalesForce, they found that 51% of sales leaders are placing their focus on improving customer retention through building deeper relationships.

To automate sales, you have to have a central location where you store information about your target accounts. Your automation tools then must interact with your CRM solution to add, edit, and update it with relevant data. Our favorite solution is Pipedrive, but there are many CRM software suites out there.

Triggerbee connects directly to your CRM solution and updates information based on the data that is collected when people visit your website. While we are expanding our CRM integrations, our integration with Pipedrive is currently the deepest. Our system will create new deals in Pipedrive when a website visitor performs a specific action.

One example might be when a website visitor downloads a resource or visits a specific page on your website (even when the visitor is still anonymous). If our system can identify the visitor from a previous interaction like a form submission, it will. Then, it will use that information to create the contact card in Pipedrive and keep your CRM up to date.

Automating Sales Relies on Data

Your ability to automate sales comes down to your ability to collect and use vital data. Automating sales requires that you have the right tools and strategies in place to make effective use of that data. Start by determining specific sales processes that you would like to automate and build from there. By taking specific tasks off of your rep’s plates (or simplifying them), you free up their time to focus on more important tasks. Sales automation won’t take care of the entire sales process for you, but it will put your sales reps in a position to close high-value deals more quickly.

Interested in seeing how Triggerbee can help you get started with sales automation? Start your free trial today!

Automated sales — it’s the dream, right? Where all your sales processes are put on auto-pilot and you can put all of your focus on your product. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite possible — yet. No sales cycle can be completely automated, but a natural place for companies to start is in the automation of individual sales processes.

In this article, you’ll read about 8 amazing examples of data-driven marketing from the real world. 

Data-driven marketing has been a top priority for over a decade. But with the rise of AI and machine learning, the possibilities for using data have expanded rapidly. Especially for consumer-facing brands.

Most brands have more data at their fingertips than ever before, and the ability to act on that data in real time is already a major competitive advantage.

Today 64% of marketing executives strongly agree that data-driven marketing is crucial to success in the modern global economy.

Data-driven strategies like personalization, progressive profiling, predictive targeting, and even gamification are critical for long-term profitable growth.

They help marketers optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and create content that resonates with the right audience at the right time.

It can be used to track and optimize your campaigns, evaluate the health of your brand overall, and inform new content and marketing collateral that connects with your audience.

What holds most companies back is not a lack of data, but a lack of clear, effective ways to use it. These data-driven marketing examples highlight how leading brands are closing that gap and how you can do the same.

Example 1: How KICKS Sells Makeup for Millions Using CRM and Behavioral Data

KICKS is a leading beauty chain in Scandinavia, selling makeup, fragrances, and skincare to haircare. They have a loyalty club (“KICKS Club”) where over 1.5 million active members are rewarded with bonuses and exclusive offers.

They use Triggerbee to drive signups to their loyalty program and collect first-party data about their audience which they can use in all of their marketing. Instead of sending out the same offer to every single customer, they use behavioral data collected from their website with customer data from their loyalty program (purchase history, average spend, membership level) to target specific segments with personalized offers and reminders. 

KICKS are not using unique coupon codes in their campaigns. If you are looking to use a similar tactic, consider generating unique coupon codes for an added layer of security and to stop coupon hacking.  

Being able to create a personalized shopping experience for their customers has been key to the success of their loyalty program. For example, they use customer data to hide membership signup campaigns from existing members and display bonus points reminders to members with unused points. 

Kicks-bonus-aktivering

The message in each campaign is targeted at different member levels, and the results are mind-blowing:

  • 4,8x higher CTR than average with the help of targeted Onsite campaigns
  • Increased the number of used bonus checks for members
  • Increased engagement among members
  • Over 1,000% growth in email subscribers

This is a huge win for a brand like KICKS, especially considering each member is worth a lot when they redeem their points. 

Example #2: GreenPal Uses Demographic Data in Campaign Planning

This example of data-driven marketing goes to show that not all data usage has to come from data collected internally. Let’s assume that you would like to upsell a new product to your most valuable customer segment. You’ll probably have some data for that segment that has been collected in-house, but there are always going to be a few missing details. You may not fully understand that segment’s spending habits or local weather patterns in their region.

This is exactly the type of problem that GreenPal, a lawn care services provider, ran into when marketing a new product to their customers. After running a successful AdWords campaign in the metro Nashville area, the company sought to optimize and improve their conversion rate by adding more contextual information.

Using publicly available data, they discovered that homeowners in East Nashville, which was a relatively new and upstart lower-middle class community, was more price-sensitive than other demographics in the area. They targeted zip codes for those neighborhoods and ran specific ads that touted them as the “cheapest lawn care solution in Nashville” and saw a more than 200% lift in click-through rate and a 30 percent lift in on-page conversion rates.

Greenpal's adwords account

There are some really excellent free sources of publicly available data online. Data.gov offers more than 300,000 government-provided datasets that could be useful in marketing campaigns. Similarly, the European Union publishes a lot of their available data as well. States, counties, and cities are also known to publisher data that may be more relevant to smaller marketing campaigns as it focuses on specific communities.

Example #3: DirecTV Partners With USPS to Target New Movers

Another great example of data-driven marketing comes from DirecTV. While looking for new ways to connect with consumers that were not signed up for a television plan, the company honed in on one specific market — people who had recently moved to a new location and therefore had not yet signed up for a television plan.

Statistics about new movers and cable TV habits

Source: Monetate

By striking a partnership with USPS, the company was able to directly target consumers that had recently filed for a change of address. Using that data, they sent advertisements that led consumers to a personalized homepage that spoke directly to the “mover” segment. Their campaigns were delivered through direct mail, PPC, and email.

This serves as an excellent example of using third-party data to run effective lead generation campaigns. There are no sources with higher quality data about recent movers than USPS, and gaining access to that data through a partnership gave DirecTV access to their most crucial customer segment. Can you think of any organizations that might collect important data on your most crucial customer segments?

Example #4: OKCupid Uses Dating Data to Create Intriguing Content

As one of the largest dating sites in the world, OKCupid has a wealth of demographic information from their users. They aren’t shy about it, either. The company regularly publishes insightful user data on their blog, attracting a lot of attention. The attraction to their data and relationship-related data isn’t just for their users either, the company has gained a lot of traction with non-users as well.

They provide a great example of using your internal data to create content that your target demographic will find interesting. In one recent post, they examined how using a flash when taking pictures seemed to make their users appear older, based on their internal data:

OkCupid

It’s easy to see why this kind of content wouldn’t just appeal to their own users, but to anyone that uses social media. Finding interesting opportunities to leverage your internal data to create content is a great example of thinking outside the box when it comes to data-driven marketing.

Example #5: GrubHub Correlates Food Data With Political Leanings

GrubHub is a food ordering app that collects a ton of data about what its users eat. The food delivery app follows in OKCupid’s footsteps by creating interesting content using its internal data. A big part of their revenue comes from partnerships that they have with a variety of publishers who use their data to create native advertising that feels natural.

In an effort to expand their partnerships with political publishers, GrubHub sought to learn what they could about how the food choices of their users correlated with their political leanings. As a result, they sent out a survey as part of a profiling campaign that asked their users what foods they would prefer and connected those users to congressional districts around the U.S.

Grubhub Quiz

As you can see above, their results were pretty interesting and potentially made it easier for the company to translate their data to secure new partnerships with political publishers. Done right, this is essentially a form of gamification marketing and it’s easy to see how this same technique could be applied to other industries, allowing them to expand their native advertising base and grow their revenue.

Example #6: Activia Uses Self Esteem Data to Fuel Campaigns

In February 2017, Activia, a probiotic yogurt company, launched their new “It Starts Inside” marketing campaign. The campaign was designed to spark conversations around helping women to reach their full potential, rising above detracting thoughts and self-esteem issues.

Activia starts inside

The campaign was based on a study with a partnered research firm, GlobalWebIndex. The study revealed that 80% of women in the US between the ages of 25 and 55 view themselves as their own worst critic. The marketing campaign featured interviews with women talking about their experiences with self-doubt.

The campaign was a huge success for the company, speaking to real problems that their customers faced every day. Appealing to customers’ emotions helped them to build empathy and shift the perception of their company among their target demographic. This campaign is proof that data-backed campaigns can have a substantial effect.

Example #7: Olay and #killerskin

Olay is one of the world’s biggest skincare brands, and for the 2019 Super Bowl they had decided to debut with a massive new campaign.

To maximize their chances of success, the team working on the new campaign looked at data from various sources to learn more about their audience’s interests outside of skincare. 

This is pretty unusual considering Olay is a skincare brand. It later turned out to be a pretty smart move. 

By looking at Google and Youtube data to see what their audience searched for and what videos they preferred to watch, the team found two areas of interest that stood out from the rest: 

  1. Horror movies
  2. Football

This led to Olay creating the #killerskin campaign, which became a massive success for the brand and generating tens of millions of views and a huge uptick in search interest.

 

Example #8: How Abreva reaches teenagers with celebrities and makeup

Abreva wanted to reach a younger audience with their cold-sore medication. Traditionally, Abreva advertises to audiences over 35-years and older through TV. Eventually they discovered that most people get their first cold-sore as teenagers – an insight that made them rethink their marketing strategy moving forward.

The marketing team at Abreva knew that teenagers watch less TV than the audience they’re used to advertise to. So, they decided to focus on YouTube. 

Knowing that cold-sores are an uncomfortable topic for teenagers, they knew they had to create videos that connected with their audience’s interests.

Abreva’s marketing team leveraged machine learning to identify and reach their target audiences. They then created 119 versions of one base ad, customizing the copy to match what a YouTube viewer was watching.

Teenagers watching celebrity gossip saw this ad:

Abreva celebrity gossip ad

And someone about to watch a makeup tutorial might instead have seen this:

Abreva makeup ad

But what about the results?

In the end, the campaign drove a 41% lift in overall ad recall and a 342% lift in search interest among its target audience across Google and YouTube. 

One could say Abreva hit a real home-run with their data-driven marketing strategy.

Summary: Data-Driven Marketing and Creativity

Data-driven marketing won’t change your business overnight on its own. It has to be used in conjunction with the right technology and powerful, creative campaigns that connect your data to real-world issues that connect with your audience. The data-driven marketing examples in this article might help to get the gears turning and give you some ideas for harnessing the data that you collect and using it to influence your next marketing campaign.