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9 Tips For Keeping Your Emails Out Of The Spam Folder

Posted on by Jessica Lunk

Congratulations, email marketer! You’re a spam artist.

You may not see yourself that way, and you may not want to brand yourself as such, but the truth is that every email we send, every drip campaign we painstakingly organize, every A/B test we fire off—they’re all getting lumped together with Viagra ads and Nigerian-prince scams.

Each email client operates differently, but the fact is that Gmail can tell when you’re sending a massive swath of emails out to thousands of people, and that’s an inherently suspicious action. Even when you have double-opt-in consent to email the person, they may never see your email.

It’s our job, as intelligent people, to elevate our work above the blah. We should hold ourselves to greater standards and ensure our work floats above the sea of meaningless gibberish to which most email clients seem to think we belong.

But, of course, there’s good news: we can achieve this dream. There are ways to keep your emails out of spam folders across the web. Here are nine of them.

Ask to Be Added to Address Book

The first email from your drip campaign should probably include some whitelisting language. Whitelisting, essentially, is the act of labeling an email address as “safe,” to ensure it goes straight to your inbox and avoids the spam folder. Different email clients have different ways of achieving this, but offering some kind of instructional advice is a good start.

We recommend using comfortable, normal language: “Because you took the time to sign up for my emails, I’d love to make sure you read them, so you never miss any deals or offers. Here’s how you can do it.”

Even if only a few people actually comply, that’s a few more who wouldn’t have otherwise, and you’ll see better engagement and open rates as a result.

Use a Real “From” Address

One of our top email tips—one that we still see disappointingly few people realizing—is to change your “from” address to a real name. Instead of using a generic email (e.g. noreply@benchmarkone.com), try using your real name—“Jess from BenchmarkONE”—to create a sense of personality and trust. After all, you’re asking for trust from them by using their email address, so it’s fair to give some back.

Be Consistent With Your Schedule

Sending emails whenever it’s convenient? Good luck with that. Email marketing is far more effective when you stick to a schedule—if you’re dishing out a weekly newsletter, people will look forward to receiving it on regular days. This also helps foster loyalty and brand recognition. If you’re managing a drip campaign, think about how much time people will want to spend between emails—fire them off too quickly, and people will get annoyed; fire them off too slowly, and they’ll forget the first one.

Distinguish Your Content From Spam

One of the ways spam filters determine which emails to tuck away is by analyzing the content of the email itself. You should avoid huge file sizes, attachments, spammy backlinks, and misleading phishing phrases entirely. The less your emails resemble actual spam, the better your odds are at avoiding the spam box.

While there’s no be-all-and-end-all list of which words trigger the filter, certain risky terms, like “free,” “buy,” “prize,” or “bonus” can be enough to send your beautifully developed and well-intended message in the wrong direction.

Be Compliant and Ask Permission

You never know who’s reading your emails—so make sure you comply with all major email requirements. CAN-SPAM has been the main protector against spam in the United States since 2003, but other countries have taken things a step further. Canada’s CASL law requires express consent, usually in the form of a double opt-in agreement, in order to email people. Europe and Australia have similar laws. Even if you don’t think you’ll be penalized for breaking Canadian law, they’re good laws that lookout for the safety and comfort of end-users—and that’s who you should be caring about, too.

Balance Your Text-to-Image Ration

Image-only emails are generally considered a marketing faux pas. There are a few reasons why. From a design standpoint, text written into images doesn’t appear as legibly on all devices as actual text; from a marketing standpoint, email clients can’t identify what’s in images, so are more likely to mark them as spam; from a UX standpoint, users who can’t view images in their inbox can’t see your message at all. Using alt text is a good start, but balancing words and pictures is even better.

Use a Good Email Service Provider

A quality ESP will have your back—they can help ensure you’re compliant, make designing emails easy with drag-and-drop tools, allow for simple split testing and let you keep in touch with your fans automatically with drip emails and segmented lists.

Be Relevant

A generic or uninspiring message can cause recipients to send you right to the spam folder. Marketing automation can help you send emails that hit home with your audience and make them want to take action. With marketing automation, you’re constantly gathering information about what your audience is interested in, making it super simple to segment your list and trigger relevant emails when they hit a specific goal – like checking out a product or service on your website or filling out a form.

Test and Tweak Regularly

There’s really no magic formula for getting more of your emails into your recipients’ inboxes. This is why A/B testing is so important. Don’t be afraid to play around with different subject lines, email lengths, and image-to-text ratios, measuring results to see what works and what doesn’t. This will help you to determine what types of messages get the kind of results you’re after so you can optimize future campaigns for better performance.

Email marketing can provide an ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. But those results are only possible if your messages are successfully getting through. Our comprehensive email marketing tool, along with the tips listed above, can help you manage, execute and optimize your campaigns like a boss, improving the chances of turning those email recipients into loyal, paying customers.

The Top 5 PPC Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Posted on by Jeanna Barrett

Let me guess what one of your biggest goals is this year for your business: get more customers and make more money. I’m guessing this because, well, money makes your business go round! And it keeps you from being one of the 50 percent of businesses that will start and fail this year. If this is in fact your business goal, then one of the best ways to achieve this goal is to invest in marketing. Specifically, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

If you’re not familiar, PPC is the tactic of using search engine advertising or social advertising to display ads in front of people based on keywords and targeting. You ‘pay per click’ or ‘pay per impression’ for these ads, and essentially drive brand awareness and traffic to your website. Some of the top platforms for PPC advertising are Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Because of the depth of knowledge associated with all of these different platforms, PPC advertising can be complicated and leaves a lot of room for error. With error comes a waste of budget without getting customers, which is counterintuitive to the goal of getting more customers and making more money. So, it’s important to understand these PPC mistakes and how to avoid them.

PPC Mistake #1: Failing to Use a Landing Page

PPC traffic will send a ton of new visitors to your website and brand. And, if you do your targeting right you’ll know exactly what they’re looking for. So, don’t make the mistake of sending them to your home page, which is likely a generic place that explains your brand. Instead, set up specific landing pages for each target segment and product, so you can give your new visitors the exact information they’re looking for. This will also help you test landing page optimization such as copy, images and your call to action button.

If your site is built on WordPress, you can easily create landing pages using the popular (and easy) content management platform. You can also use one of the top landing page building tools, if your marketing automation software doesn’t include a landing page tool. Just be sure you don’t make one of the common landing page mistakes when building pages for your PPC campaigns.

PPC Mistake #2: Not Testing

Don’t make the mistake of writing one version of copy and running your PPC campaign without testing. Chances are your first attempt won’t be the best, so write multiple versions of ads for every campaign you’re running, and test all of these ad versions. If you’re conducting PPC on Facebook’s Ad Platform, then be sure you’re also testing images and not just copy. To write multiple versions of your PPC ads for testing, try this exercise from Google AdWords copy expert Amy Middleton Hebdon:

  1. Write an ad version that answers, “what’s in it for me” and discusses the value of your business and what customers will get from purchasing from you.
  2. The second ad version will focus on the pain point you’re solving and the services you provide.
  3. Finally, your third copy version is a wild card — get creative, write creative copy and headlines and something completely different from the first two ads.

PPC Mistake #3: Failing to Track the Right Metrics

If you’re not careful, you can spend a ton of money on PPC campaigns and not understand what ads are working to drive new business to your brand. In general, here are five key metrics you should be tracking:

PPC Mistake #4: Targeting Broad Keywords

The beauty of PPC advertising platforms is the ability to hyper-target your potential customer audience. The best performing ads get really specific in targeting to find the exact customer that is more likely to convert when they click through to your landing page. Be sure you’re not using broad keywords when setting up your campaigns. For example, instead of “cheap flights” you might use “cheap flights from San Francisco to New Orleans” or instead of “marketing agency” you might use “Austin Texas marketing agency.” The beauty of getting more targeted with your campaigns is that highly-targeted keyword sets are cheaper cost-per-click than broad terms that a ton of brands will be bidding for. So, if it’s cheaper to bid on targeted keyword sets and they also convert better, you might wonder why a business would ever make this mistake. Us too.

PPC Mistake #5: Jumping in Without Understanding PPC Advertising

PPC advertising can be really complicated and particular to understand. There’s a reason why it’s some people’s full-time job (and a high-paying one, at that!) Before you jump into all of the different PPC platforms, make sure you do your due diligence to read up on all the different platforms, best practices, tips and mistakes to avoid. Spending some initial time training yourself will help you save tons of money in the end. If you find it overwhelming or too time-consuming to teach yourself, consider hiring a PPC firm to help you out.

4 Tips for Avoiding Burnout in the Workplace

Posted on by Allie Wolff

Running your own business—free of the hassles of working in corporate America —is supposed to be exciting and energizing. So why do you feel so worn out?

Your exhaustion may have more to do with the nature of work in the 21st century than being an entrepreneur.

And you’re not alone in feeling that way. Nearly half of U.S. adults surveyed said they are often or always exhausted because of work—a 32% increase from 10 years ago, according to an analysis of General Social Survey of 2016 published in Harvard Business Review. Their emotional exhaustion often leads to feelings of loneliness, noted co-authors Emma Seppala, Ph.D., the science director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, and Marissa King, Ph.D., professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management.  The results were “pervasive across professions, and up and down corporate hierarchies,” they wrote.

Fortunately, it’s possible to reverse burnout and prevent it from creeping back in the future. Here are some strategies that will help you get your mojo back at work.

Connect.

Seppala and King recommend building a workplace culture that encourages community and places value on “warm, friendly, and understanding relationships between people.” One way to do this is by finding creative ways to celebrate collective successes, they say. Keep your eye out for achievements to celebrate—whether it is attracting a new account or winning an industry award—and look for inexpensive ways to recognize your team for contributing, whether that is by having an ice cream tasting party or ending work early one afternoon to watch a comedy movie and eat popcorn.

Connecting with friends and family outside of work is important too. Instead of jumping on social media when you get home from work—a superficial type of contact that can contribute to feelings of isolation–make plans to see a friend in person or do something fun with family.

Work smarter, not harder.

Long hours at work can contribute to burnout—and many of us are putting in more time at the office. The average American work week was 44 hours, according to Gallup research last summer, and the average amount of time spent checking in with work via electronic devices was 6.3 hours per week.

Fortunately, there’s something you can do about it, as a company owner. Look at your schedule from a 20,000-foot perspective to see if there are ways to cut down on the hours you spend working. Are you attending meetings with prospects that aren’t leading anywhere, because no one qualified the prospects? Are you “putting out fires” because poorly trained employees keep making mistakes you have to fix? Are you spending time on rote tasks like scheduling appointments that could be done using an automated system like ScheduleOnce?

Even a short-term policy like setting summer Fridays can help you get some R&R and refresh your perspective. In a survey by Gartner, 42% of more than 200 employers were offering Fridays off this summer. Not only will a policy like this help you avoid burnout but it will give your employees time to recharge, too—raising the overall mood in the office.

Ditch “energy vampires.”

We all encounter situations and people that drain us, instead of energizing us. If you find you’re not spending time on activities that fill you with energy and excitement, it’s time to make some room in your life for them.

Take stock of the situations at work that cause you the most anxiety and stress and look for ways to prevent or eliminate them. Are you lying awake at night worrying about managing a high-maintenance client? Are you stressed out from dealing with a vendor who keeps failing to deliver? Are you constantly listening to complaints from your team about an employee who keeps causing drama and strife?

Learning new techniques for managing the situations you can’t change–perhaps by working with a business coach or taking a leadership course—and ending relationships that are no longer productive can give you a new lease on life.

Schedule time for relaxation.

We all know that activities like exercise and meditation are good for us, but closing the knowing doing gap can be hard. It’s easy to cancel a morning yoga class when a report is due to a client or to skip a meditation session if a child gets sick and you’re scrambling to find childcare or work from home.

By putting your wellness activities into your calendar a week or ideally a month ahead of time, you’ll increase the likelihood you will stick with them. Even if you have to go to a plan B, like doing your high-intensity workout at home with the help of a video at 9 pm instead of at your usual gym, you’ll be more likely to get it done if you’ve already set an intention to fit it into your day.

Remember, scheduling time to take care of yourself can go a long way toward arriving at work full of energy and enthusiasm. And it’ll make it a lot easier to avoid burnout.

5 Ways You Need to Market Differently to B2B Customers

Posted on by Jessica Lunk

People are people, no matter where they are or where they work—this is true. And while you might think this means a B2C approach will appeal to anyone with a pair of eyeballs and common sense, in fact, B2B decisions are often made in an entirely different way.

Business decisions are usually handled by multiple people after multiple consultations. Frankly speaking, it’s not really a human decision—at least not always. (It depends on the company.) It’s more of a spreadsheet-consulting decision.

So you’ll need to target your marketing differently to capture each audience. Here are some ways to market differently to B2B customers, instead of relying on B2C logic.

Create a B2B user persona

Step one is to know who you’re talking to. B2C marketing tends to be more breezy and emotional, appealing to people’s wants and needs instead of their common sense. (There’s a reason last-minute purchases are called “impulse buys.”)

That’s not the case in B2B.

 

Since B2B decisions are made by committees and consultants, or at the very least multiple heads making financially-minded decisions, you’ll want to do some market research into the kind of people making these decisions before pitching them. If you’re pitching small business CEOs in Chicago specifically, you can drill down into average ages, salaries, company sizes and city demographics to get a sense of who they are and how they make decisions. Just like with B2C marketing, you need to know your customer.

Choose your social platforms wisely—and then measure their success

When we’re talking about social media, it’s important to keep metrics in mind. In this area, particularly, some marketers argue that people are people regardless of whether they’re customers or business owners, and the social platform should reflect that.

A great example of this was written up by TrackMaven. While LinkedIn is the B2B social network of choice, TrackMaven found that those brands saw far less engagement on LinkedIn than they did on Instagram or Facebook—according to the study, B2B brands have 36 times more followers on LinkedIn, but 20 times as much engagement on Instagram.

 

It’s true for Hatchbuck: We have more followers on LinkedIn, but way more fun (and engagement) on Instagram.

 

In other words, the B2B-style approach of pure follower numbers doesn’t translate into anything meaningful. Engagement, clicks and shares are what you want on social—so it’s important to keep an eye on how successful your social presence is, not just whether it fits the stereotype of what B2B marketing should look like.

Offer more information than you think is necessary

Glossy branding sells to customers, but info and stats sell to businesses. Overwhelming your business customer can be okay—it shows you’re prepared, thorough and reliable. Because so much of B2B marketing relies on trusting work relationships, you’ll want to start off committed and helpful.

 

IBM’s landing page for Watson offers everything you could want, including sample code and starter kits.

 

This isn’t to say the design or style has to suffer, just that you should alter your marketing content and customer goals to answer all the questions and objections your business customer might have.

With so much B2B competition out there, decision makers can look for any excuse to easily reject an option—you shouldn’t give them one. You don’t want to appear aloof or vague; save that for piquing customers’ interests.

In short: less isn’t more. In B2B, more is more.

Be prepared for a negotiation

Customers don’t negotiate with you—they either buy your product or they don’t. They’ll shop around and find the best price; if they want a cheaper version, they’ll buy that. If they want a higher-end product, they’ll find it. You set your rates and target a demographic that fits.

In B2B, that isn’t always the case. Your prices aren’t necessarily set—you’ll sometimes have to negotiate.

Because agencies and small businesses typically rely on human relationships, establishing and maintaining those relationships matters more than anything else. Because of that, even though it can sound a bit counterintuitive, you’ll want to spend more time and energy detailing your product’s benefits to a B2B lead than a B2C one.

You’ll have to try harder to win over customers and work hard to keep them. Negotiating is a key part of that. But when you give a little, you can establish a better relationship to benefit your company down the road, or maintain your relationship with the person even after they leave that position to move to a different company.

Create a B2B editorial calendar

For inbound marketers, B2C calendars revolve around holidays, news stories and promotional offers.

B2B marketing follows a similar theme, but is based on a whole other calendar: think business events, conferences, product launches and partnership news. Just as important, but also totally different.

You can stay on top of most major industry events with attentive planning and research. Find out who the major players will be at each conference or moment, then target them specifically when marketing. Enmesh those relationships into your blog and social strategy, and you’ll see results.

6 Reasons You Need to Make SEO a Priority in Your Editorial Calendar

Posted on by Jeanna Barrett

SEO and content marketing go together like milk and cookies — you can’t (or shouldn’t) have one without the other. There are a variety of benefits from SEO. It demands fresh, new content and keywords to ensure your website can rank better. SEO also requires backlinks to your website. And, really great content naturally builds backlinks (for free!) as other brands and individuals link to your blog post.

An excellent way to organize your content and help turn strategy into action is through an editorial calendar. This content management tool enables you to plan your content ahead of time for events such as industry conferences and seasonal themes. It also helps you maximize every piece of content you’re producing. Your marketing team can see the path ahead of them and stay on track with deliverables and deadlines because you can publish and share the calendar.

When you’re investing time and resources into content creation, you want to maximize your ROI. This may seem obvious, but if your audience can’t find your content, it won’t produce results. A search engine’s number one priority is serving up results that provide exactly what their users are looking for. With the massive amounts of content on the internet, this is not an easy task. SEO such as keywords, title tags and meta descriptions will make your content favorable for certain search results. So, why should you prioritize SEO? Here are six reasons why I believe SEO is a crucial part of your editorial calendar.

Reason 1: SEO Drives Content Strategy

An example of how SEO should drive your content strategy is the length of your content. The average length of a piece of content that ranks on the first page of Google is 2,000 words. So, why would you spend your time creating an editorial calendar with 30 short posts? Instead, you should create an editorial calendar with 10 really great, high-quality posts that are lengthy and in-depth. Even though you’re posting less, you’re likely posting close to the same amount of new content and keywords to your site. An example of a website that does really great in-depth articles and has an industry best blog is CoSchedule.

Reason 2: SEO Builds Organic Results on the First Page of Google

SEO drives organic traffic to your website and in turn drives up the revenue for your business when those hoards of new visitors convert. According to Smart Insights, the third organic position of Google will drive 12 percent of clicks to a non-branded search result. So, hypothetically if you were able to rank in the third position for a keyword that had 6,600 searches a month, you would receive approximately 1,980 clicks from these monthly searches, which is 23,760 (FREE!) visits to your website a year for one blog post (see graphic below). This is much better than paying for search engine ads to drive 23,760 visits to your website!

Reason 3: SEO Saves Money

Let’s take the above hypothetical example and include a price with it. Let’s imagine a keyword that gets 6,600 searches a month and the cost-per-click (CPC) is $3.20. Now, if you drive 1,980 organic clicks a month to your website for that keyword term, that is a cost saving of $6,336 a month and $76,032 a year. (Wowza!) And this is for one blog post that you will likely spend no more than $200 for a freelancer to write, plus the time and energy of an internal employee who edited and posted it. Imagine if you ranked for 100s or 1000s of keywords that drove this type of cost-saving traffic to your website and didn’t have to spend on search engine marketing anymore. This type of savings model from organic traffic is essentially why brands partake in content marketing!

Reason 4: Content Ranks Better and Performs Better if it has SEO in Mind

For example, what if you wrote a piece of content titled, “How to Do SEO Keyword Research” and the term “SEO keyword research” has a volume of 400 searches a month with a keyword difficulty of 73. But, with a little bit of keyword research using a tool such as AHREFs, you can discover that a keyword opportunity exists with the keyword phrase “Google search tools,” which has a monthly search volume of 2,600 and a keyword difficulty of only 26. Instead of writing “How to Do SEO Keyword Research” you might instead write “Guide to Using Google Search Tools for Content & SEO,” which could be easier to rank and drive more traffic if so.

Reason 5: SEO Can Increase Your Site Usability

SEO simultaneously helps to make your website more navigable not only for search engines but also for users. SEO should include paying particular attention to a site’s architecture and links to make pages within the website easier to find and navigate. This focus on navigation and links also makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and find pages, and makes it easier for users to get the information they are looking for from your website.

Reason 6: SEO Generates Brand Awareness

Since top position rankings on Google result in significant impressions from people searching for those terms every month, your brand and website are both naturally exposed to more awareness by holding one of these top search positions. If 60,000 people a month search for a key term that serves your business up as a top result, then the majority of 60,000 people will see your business and website every month! That’s huge exposure. Plus, appearing on the first page of Google for your main target keywords not only helps users associate your brand with those search keywords, but it also helps instill trust with your potential customers since companies on the first page of Google are perceived to be more trustworthy.

A good content marketer likely has a different skill set than an SEO professional does, but it doesn’t mean the two areas should work separately. At all. Maximize your content potential and increase your search traffic at a faster pace by combining your content marketing and SEO efforts.

 If you’re a content marketer that doesn’t have access to an SEO professional, then read up on  SEO tactics so that you’re maximizing SEO efforts in your content marketing calendar each month.

What Type of Digital Marketing Ads Are Best For Your Small Business?

Posted on by Allie Wolff

With digital marketing, the possibilities feel endless. It’s significantly cheaper than traditional marketing such as billboards, flyers and print ads,  and a lot of it can be done in-house if you’re willing to invest the time.

There are also a lot of mediums to choose from.

This is digital marketing’s blessing and curse. Small business owners can use display ads, YouTube, Instagram, and more to promote their products on a budget. But as we’ve discussed several times on our blog, spreading yourself thin can lead to an unfocused, inconsistent digital marketing strategy. If your marketing team is made up of one team member – you – the smart approach is to assess the pros and cons of different methods and pick one that works for your business. Here are a few digital marketing options that may fit into your small business budget.

Display Ads

Display network ads show up on websites that have Google AdSense enabled. Let’s suppose you’re on a blog called Marketing St. Louis, reading an article about the best ad agencies in the St. Louis area. Across the top of the article or along the side, you’ll likely see advertisements from St. Louis marketing, advertising and content agencies.

In essence, display ads are paid ads that are spread across the web and placed where they are most relevant.

The benefit of display ads is that they’re great for building brand awareness. If there’s a popular pet blog in your city that pet owners adore, you certainly want your company’s name to be seen by this audience if you’re a pet supply store.

The downside of display ads is that they aren’t effective converters. Consumers have developed ad blindness or banner blindness. We’re so adept at identifying something as an ad just by its appearance and positioning that we can read an entire article without even absorbing the images or copy.

Small business owners have a limited marketing budget, which means conversions are important and ultimately many can’t justify the investment in paid ads. This doesn’t mean you should rule out display ads entirely. Rather, choose search network ads over display network ads until you have a decent understanding of the metrics involved in gauging a campaign’s effectiveness.

Video Ads

Small business owners tend to shy away from video ads because of the effort involved in producing them. Between writing, producing, shooting, and editing, it’s can be a pricey endeavor. But it might be worth the investment.

We now absorb a significant amount of our content online. In 2019, it’s projected that 80 percent of online content will be video content. As a result, producing ads that can be integrated into viewing experiences will be essential.

If you think video marketing is a realm reserved for the top dogs, you’d be mistaken. Companies like YouTube are interested in tapping into the small business market by making it as simple as possible for owners to create high-quality videos. Business owners can download the free YouTube Director for Business app that provides the guidance needed to produce great video ads.

Once you’ve created your video, YouTube offers the same tools that allow you to target paid ads based on demographics. All small business owners should consider producing at least one good video advertisement.

Radio Advertising

TV may have killed the radio star, but it certainly didn’t kill radio ads. In fact, radio ads have maintained their relevance despite a changing technology landscape. Instead of making radio obsolete, the internet has enhanced it.

Today’s two most popular options for radio advertising are Pandora and Spotify. They offer a significant improvement to traditional radio advertising. When you pay for an ad to run on your local radio station, the ad is broadcast to all of its listeners. Advertising through sites like Pandora and Spotify allows you to segment your ads so they are presented to specific listeners.

Much like display ads, ads on these streaming services are better suited for brand awareness. Companies can certainly drive customers to their business with radio ads, but it will cost them, so if your budget requires immediate results, radio advertising may not be your best bet.

What Are The Best Digital Ads for a Small Business Budget?

Small businesses who have limited resources and need to see immediate results should stick to:

  • Search Network Ads: These ads appear before people who are actively looking for something. If you choose your keywords right, your ad for accounting services will appear in the search engine results for someone who is looking for an accountant. An ad in the Display Network would appear before someone who is researching their finances and may someday need an accountant – which isn’t helpful for you right now.
  •  Video Ads: These are visually stimulating and tell a story. Not only are they effective when used as paid ads on other videos, but they can also be useful for your social media channels.

Digital marketing is an expansive world with lots of cool bells and whistles, but don’t let your imagination run further than your budget. With limited resources, your focus should be on conversions and optimizing each ad and channel to be as effective as possible.

Do Competitions Really Fuel Company Culture?

Posted on by Jonathan Herrick

Many of us love contests—and they can be a highly effective way to motivate employees in businesses of all sizes. That’s why so many companies offer vacations as incentives to their sales teams. And with trends like gamification being used to put a new spin on workplace contests, workplace competitions are increasingly popular and creative.

That said, contests can also backfire. If you put everyone’s score in a contest on a leaderboard, for instance, the people who have racked up the fewest points may feel isolated or even worse humiliated. That can lead them to become disengaged at work—leading to lower productivity. Research by Globoforce, a provider of social recognition solutions, found that while 86% of employees said a recognition program would motivate them, 79% said they would not work harder if the recognition were displayed on some type of leaderboard.

As a result, if you are planning a contest, you need to consider the decision carefully. Here are some questions to ask yourself.

How competitive is your team?

Some people thrive on friendly rivalry and love going head-to-head with their opponents. Others are more collaborative and find that contests that pit them against the co-workers in adjoining cubicles can be stressful and erode the supportive relationships they’ve built with colleagues.

Knowing how your team feels can be helpful before you embark on a contest. Do an informal, one-on-one poll of individual team members to see what they think of the idea. Even if they are not excited about a contest that pits employees against each other to hit sales and performance benchmarks, they may welcome a competition to meet other types of goals.

When the company Nextjump wanted to inspire more of its employees to work out and stay healthy—a concern among many companies that want to keep health care costs in check—it created the Fitness Challenge. The company was divided into five teams, with peer-nominated captains. Every week, the teams competed to inspire the greatest number of members to work out. The winning team won WOWPoints, a virtual currency that could be redeemed for purchases at an online retail mall or transferred to a health savings account. Nextjump, which has an onsite gym, found that the program increased gym attendance to 80%.

Is the prize right?

When planning a contest, also ask your team what type of prizes would be most motivating. Even though you might think a monetary bonus will always be welcome, it could be that if you’ve been putting in long hours, your team would prefer another type of prize, like getting an extra day off so they can take a four-day weekend.

Bear in mind that some employees may not want to win a cash prize because they will have to pay income taxes on it. But there are other reasons they may not want to win cash, as well. Some value opportunities for personal and career development more. Research by the Incentive Research Foundation in 2016 found that 65% of employees would rather receive an experiential award they like, such as travel, than cash, if the experiential reward includes elements such as unique opportunities to network.

What do you want to reinforce?

Contests can be great for inspiring a team to meet an easily measurable goal—like hitting a revenue benchmark or signing up a certain number of new customers—because you’re keeping score. If you’re trying to reinforce the firm’s cultural values, which can be harder to quantify, make sure it’s possible to tailor a contest to that goal. For instance, if your firm prizes outstanding customer service, and you want to set up a contest where different business units compete against each other to wow your clientele, you will need to set up an objective system to measure their performance, such as customer satisfaction surveys. Achievement of more intangible goals might be harder to track and measure in a contest, in which case you’ll need to consider other types of incentives to motivate your team.

How much time will it take you to run the contest?

Some contests can be time-consuming to manage, so it’s important to consider whether your business will have a high return on investment when it comes to improving your culture. Even if you don’t manage the contest personally, one of your employees will have to promote the contest, keep track of results, share them and administer rewards on paid company time. Making sure that you can devote the proper resources to the contest ahead of time can go a long way to make sure it’s a hit that truly fuels your culture.    

9 E-commerce Email Promotions To Boost Sales This Month

Posted on by Jeanna Barrett

The importance of email marketing cannot be understated when it comes to your business success. A solid email promotion strategy will work to both generate leads and boost sales. And, while email marketing isn’t a new trend, it remains one of the best ways to communicate and engage your customers. Email marketing is one of the highest ROI-generating channels you can leverage, so don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking email is an old tactic that doesn’t work anymore or that “email marketing is dead.”

In the world of e-commerce, email promotions and discounts are a must when looking to boost sales quickly. But they’re a bit trickier and require you to walk a fine line. You don’t come across as too spammy or shake the brand loyalty of your current customers. Enforce a strategy by ensuring you are appropriately segmenting your customers and choosing the audience that fits the email messaging and offer. Do this by taking a look at how you initially acquired a customer or lead you’re communicating with through email. This information could help you nurture those contacts better.

Offering promotions, sales and discounts that expire by the end of the month will generate a sense of urgency and influence recipients to purchase sooner. So what types of email promotions can you implement to boost your sales this month? Check out a few options I’ve gathered below.

1. Win-Back:

Develop a particular offer email for any one of your customers who haven’t purchased from your company in the last six months. Use messaging such as, “Come back, we miss you!” or “Exciting things are happening!” Mention recent events, or new features and advancements with your product or service. Include a coupon to spend within a week— coupons are a great way to attract customers who have been thinking about purchasing, but haven’t yet purchased from your business.

2. Birthday:

Generate a special birthday offer for clients. If you request it from your clients, birth dates should be stored in your customer relationship management (CRM) system and is a just one of the benefits of using a CRM to manage your customer’s information. Here’s a tip (that may seem obvious), but don’t forget to include the word “birthday” in the subject line. It’s also a great idea to include a coupon or promotion in this email as a “birthday gift.”  

3. Summer/Holiday:

Develop a special offer for summer only or an upcoming holiday like Labor Day. Don’t be afraid to get cheeky with it — if your brand voice allows — play off the summertime weather or your favorite summertime activity.

4. Special Offer:

Be sure to make the offer clear, short and sweet. This is another opportunity to segment your list to avoid sending this special offer to someone who paid full price yesterday. Also, be aware that these types of emails are the type Google likes to flag and push into the “Promotional” tab in Gmail.

5. Sale:

Consider a one-day or weekend-only deal. For example, “Take advantage of 40 percent off this weekend only.” Be sure to include a clear CTA.

6. Shopping Cart Abandonment:

If your products and/or services can be purchased on your eCommerce website, you’ve most likely experienced a loss of sales through shopping cart abandonment. More than 67 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes the sale. This could potentially be a huge portion of your sales. Let’s get those abandoned shoppers back!

Send an email to that customer with a special offer to purchase one, or all, of those items that they left in their cart. For example, “You left this item in your cart. Take 15 percent off your item if you purchase within the next 24 hours.” Or consider retargeting advertising to these customers on other platforms such as Facebook.

7. Upgrade:

Offer an upgrade of your product or service at a discounted price. If your product or service doesn’t have an upgrade, this type of message could be adjusted to pitch complementary products or valuable content.

8. Top Customers:

Reward your top customers with a special offer. According to RewardStream, “81 percent of online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of a targeted email.” You could present a tiered offer based on the customer’s sales volume or order frequency. Offers could include discounts, store credit or a free gift with purchase.

9. Invite:

Consider inviting your customers to your brick and mortar location, with messaging such as, “Stop in our store before the end of the month and receive a 10 percent discount on purchases $50 or more.” If you don’t have a physical location, you could invite them to be a part of an exclusive email group, such as a beta group, pre-sale, etc. and offer them a discount once they join that email list.

To maximize your ROI, try testing multiple versions of these emails, or testing a few different formats to see what type of email resonates with your audiences. Promotions and discounts are necessary tools for a marketer’s email strategy, but as stated above, it’s important to use them wisely. You don’t want to damage your brand or hurt your bottom line.

 You also don’t want people to unsubscribe or hit the spam button! So, ensure your email communications are targeted and useful for all of your customers and prospects.

5 Tips for More Productive Workplace Discussions

Posted on by Jonathan Herrick

We’ve all been part of discussions at work that didn’t go the way we planned. Maybe we reacted emotionally when someone gave us feedback, spoke in anger instead of waiting until we cooled off or offended someone unintentionally.

Although most of us tend to wing it when it comes to workplace discussions, putting in some forethought can go a long way, given the mix of personalities involved in every business. So how do you ensure you have more positive and productive discussions with your colleagues and customers? Here are some strategies to put to work for you.

Remember you’re a public figure.

When you own a business, no matter how small, you’re the public face of the company. What you say has disproportionate weight with employees, contractors and customers. Before you communicate with team members or external stakeholders—whether in person, by email or on video, remind yourself that they are paying close attention to what you do and say in public.

Think about what you say to these key stakeholders and how you say things. If you would feel uncomfortable if your conversations were recorded and shared with people in your community or the public at large, then it’s time to consider “editing” what you say in the future. It’s possible to remain genuine and honest with the people in your orbit without letting it all hang out—and every leader needs to find a way to strike the right balance.

Listen first, speak later.

Smart leaders listen more than they talk. That’s true whether it is under positive circumstances—such as when an employee wants to share an idea for a new product—or negative ones, such as fielding a call from an angry customer.

Challenge yourself to listen as attentively as you can in every conversation at work, instead of immediately leaping in with a comment or solution, and ask questions, so you have a full understanding of what someone is trying to say. Take notes if it will help you remember the details of the discussion later. If you’re listening to something you’d rather not hear, ask yourself how you could learn from it. By making sure those around you feel “heard,” you’ll set a productive tone—and act as a positive role model for how others in your organization can converse with each other.

Watch out for the third rail of office discussions.

In a political environment like the one we have today, many of us find it hard to avoid talking about the headlines at work—despite the classic advice to steer clear of political discussions. Unfortunately, the political conversations many people are having in the office are causing problems. A Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association this past spring found that 26% of U.S. workers said they felt tense or stressed out because of political discussions at work, up from 17% in September 2016. And for 40% of American workers, discussions of politics led to at least one negative outcome, such as increased workplace hostility.

If you do opt to discuss politics at work and the discussion starts to get heated, make sure to keep your tone professional. At the Emily Post Institute, etiquette expert Anna Post advises saying, “Well, we obviously don’t agree on this one and we may not change each other’s minds. Let’s move on to something else.” Then she suggests changing the subject.

Coach, don’t criticize.

In the book Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, authors Doug Stone and Sheila Heen encourage readers who are being evaluated at work to listen closely for valuable advice that is part of the feedback, instead of viewing the evaluation as an attack.

If, as a business owner, you want your team members to see your feedback this way, then make it a point to offer any advice you deliver with the mindset of a coach, not a critic. Assume the best—that they truly want to reach their potential at work—and offer concrete suggestions on how they can develop their skills and talents, rather than focusing on what they’re doing wrong. Also, ask them where they need help, so you can mentor them, and give them time to ask you questions.

Sharpen your negotiating skills.

To run a successful company, it’s important to know how to build consensus and bring people with different points of view to an agreement. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources to help you get better at it. Many business schools offer executive education classes on negotiation and there are a number of well-regarded books on the subject, among them Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson and Joseph Grenny, Influence by Robert Cialdini and Getting to Yes by Robert Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton.

Negotiation is a skill that takes time to develop, so if you’re out of your depth on negotiating a contract or other sensitive document, there’s no harm in turning to an attorney or another expert for advice. What you learn from a pro will often pay for itself many times over.