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Common costs
Сommon, or indirect, costs are costs that can’t be attributed to a product or process. These expenditures relate to a group of individual costs.
In this post, we’ll figure out what common costs are, how they correlate with other types of expenses, and how you can calculate them. Let’s start by answering how you can avoid these costs.
Are Common Costs Avoidable?
On average, a business has both avoidable and unavoidable costs. Avoidable costs are all the expenses you can eliminate. For instance, if you stop manufacturing one of your products, you will get rid of expenses on raw materials, labor, and so on.
However, even if you wipe out specific product lines, you’ll have to pay for rent, electricity, and water. These expenses are common costs. You bear them no matter what, which makes this type of spendings unavoidable.
One more point to consider is the difference between joint and common costs. Read on to learn how they correlate to one another.
Common Costs vs. Joint Costs
Though the terms “joint costs” and “common costs” are often used interchangeably, they have different meanings. Joint costs occur when one process or element results in outputting several goods. For instance, you can derive kerosene, fuel oil, gasolene from crude oil.
Common costs arise when a firm outputs several products. However, these expenses can’t be attributed to any of these products directly. For example, a manager's salary is a common cost. You can distribute it between several manufacturing processes, but it's not related to any of them.
The nature of common cost makes counting them difficult. To help you get your head around it, we’ve prepared three cost allocation formulas.
Common Cost Formula
Counting the sum of all of your common costs is not rocket science – just sum up expense items. Things get trickier when you find out how to cut these costs as you'll need to distribute them.
There are three ways to allocate common costs: stand-alone, incremental, and the Shapley value method. Let’s discover the formulas for them and crunch some numbers.
Stand-alone method
In this case, you distribute costs according to the percentage each department would have paid separately. Imagine that department A pays $900 for rent and a department B pays $1,500. The total sum for the departments is $2,400.
Then the company got a discount from a property owner and now pays only pays $2,000. To allocate this sum between two departments, count the percent each of them paid initially.
A stand-alone amount for the department A is $900/$2,400*100 = 37.5%.
A stand-alone amount for the department B is $1,500/$2,400*100 = 62.5%.
To count the sum after allocation, multiply the percentage of the new sum.
Department A’s payment after reallocation is 37.5%*$2,000 = $750.
Department A’s payment after reallocation is 62.5%*$2,000 = $1,250.
Incremental method
You can use this method if one of the costs is inevitable and the other is additional. For instance, the company's goal was to renta workspace for department B. The adjoining room was vacant, and the firm decided to rent it and place department A there. In this case, you need to subtract the additional cost from the total amount:
$2,000 – $1,500 = $500.
So, now department B pays $1,500 and department A – $500.
If theworkspace for a department A was the initial goal, the table turns:
$2,000 – $900 = $1,100.
In this situation, department A pays $900 and department B – $1,100.
Shapley value cost allocation Method
According to this method, you need to count two or more costs and calculate the average.
The payment for a department A would be ($500+$900)/2 = $700.
The department B would pay ($1,500+$1,100)/2 = $1,300.
Now you know how to calculate and allocate common costs. Let’s move on to practice and find out what kinds of costs you may encounter.
Common Costs in Business
The problem with creating a list of common costs is that they differ for various businesses. However, you can consider the following expenditures to be the common costs in most cases:
rent;
phone and utilities;
licenses and tax deposits;
professional services;
insurance;
travel expenses;
office and other administrative supplies;
marketing budgets.
Marketing budgets are unavoidable costs. Still, you can cut these expenses by applying marketing automation services. Sign up with LIKE.TG to automate your email, web push, SMS, and chatbot marketing.
Commercialization
Commercialization is the process of introducing a new product to the market. It includes stages such as production, distribution, marketing, sales, and customer support.
In this video, you’ll find out how companies commercialize their products.
In this article, we’ll review the importance of commercialization and its advantages, compare product commercialization and product launch, explore several steps to commercialize your new product, and see examples.
Why is commercialization important?
Commercialization is the process that allows businesses to raise and solve problems of new products and bring them to the market. It helps companies decide when to launch a certain product by reviewing various factors influencing or delaying a launch. There might be multiple factors affecting a product, like unfavorable market conditions or inquiries requiring some changes.
Firms make some critical choices and strategic decisions. One of the essential parts of the process is deciding where to launch. Companies choose whether to bring their product to a local, national, or international market. They also take into account the resources available,such as operational capacities and capital. Business leaders also conduct marketing research to define their primary consumer group.
The importance of commercialization is evident now, so it’s time to review the advantages it has.
Advantages of Commercialization
Companies create new products and services to meet unanswered customer demands. They make products that can solve many consumers’ problems and decide on their feasibility, costs, and ways to roll out commercialization strategy. Commercialization enables business owners to develop products with great benefits that people will admire. Let’s get to know some more advantages of commercialization. They are as follows:
better choices of products and services that customers can obtain;
increasedROI;
efficient production process;
thought-out decisions;
reduced public expenses.
Now that you know the pros, let’s proceed to the next section, where we’ll make the difference between product commercialization and product launch clear.
Product Commercialization vs. Product Launch
People often use words like “commercialization” and “product launch” to define the same thing. However, these two concepts represent different processes. The two main factors that make these terms different are timing and goals.
Product launch is the process that occurs when a product is created and is ready for release. Businesses implement promotional strategies and use diverse channels to reach maximum exposure. When a company launches a product, it has already gone through the idea conceptualization stage.
At this stage, companies are ready to bring their product to the audience, and they usually need a marketing partner to present it. The main aim here is to boost interest in your product and increase customer awareness.
Product commercialization is the process that starts before the product is ready. It involves turning certain ideas and concepts into products that will be accepted by the audience and ultimately bring high profitability. The process involves production, distribution, marketing, and sales.
Commercialization enables customers to obtain a wider choice of products and allows companies to generate more revenue, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. It’s a critical process since it entails making strategic and tactical decisions. They affect the success of a product and a company in general. To succeed, business leaders create a commercialization plan.
Let’s look at the six main steps required to commercialize the new product of your company.
6Steps to Commercialize Your New Product
Define your offer
Align the product with your businesscore
Identify your target audience
Promote your product
Use a sales plan
Forecast the results your productcommercializationcan bring
The commercialization process can be boiled down to six steps. They allow companies to determine production volumes and methods, choose distribution channels, and implement specific marketing techniques. Let’s discuss each of the steps in detail.
Define your offer. Create an overview statement that contains clear and detailed information about your product, describe the benefits customers can obtain after buying it, and mention the problems it can solve. Remember to determine your pricing strategy and decide on the price of your product for customers and other stores or companies.
Align the product with your business core.You should understand how close your new product is to the business core (strength and competencies) to define several strategic directions necessary for your commercialization plan. If your product is similar to those your company has produced before, it means that you won’t need new strategies for product promotion. However, if the product is more diverse than your core, then you’ll have to do more work to set up the new infrastructure.
Identify your target audience. Start with your current customers, and find out whether your new product will satisfy their needs. If you want to define your new audience, you can create a buyer persona to make everything clearer. Remember to include the initial customer profile in your strategic plan.
Promote your product.You should be active with your social media and email marketingto reach more customers. LIKE.TG enables your company to send personalized emails that will reach your target audience. With our drag and drop editor, you can easily create professional email templatesthat encourage people to purchase your new products. Define social media platforms your customers prefer the most. Consider using Instagram Stories, paid ads, power of opinion leaders, pay-per-clickson Facebook, pre-roll ads on YouTube, and many others.
Use a sales plan.You should tailor a sales plan for your new product. It helps choose strategies that will enable you to reach your ideal buyer. The plan covers the aspects of business growth: target audience, revenue goals, strategies and tactics, metrics, business goals, market conditions, team capabilities, and resources.
Forecast the results your product commercializationcan bring. One of the critical parts of commercialization is predicting the sales volume your company will reach in the nearest three years. The forecast includes your gross margin, sales quantities, operating income, capital expenditure, and return on net assets.
Now that you know the six steps to commercialize your product, let’s jump into some examples.
Examples of Product Commercialization
Many companies launch a lot of various products but only commercialize a few of them. This is because the process includes strategic and tactical decisions that take time and influence market success. Let’s walk you through the examples so that you can grab some inspiration.
Let’s imagine that there’s a cinnamon rolls company, for example. It has grown from a small startup and demonstrates promising results. The company decides to commercialize its cinnamon rolls by selling them as packaged products to local grocery stores. As a result, consumers can buy their products in more locations and drastically increase this company’s profits.
The same applies to the apparel industry. A store that sells clothes and accessories and has many regular customers can also try to reach more clients online. The store can partner with online retail services. It can become popular in different cities and deliver its goods to more people.
Hence, product commercialization entails production, distribution, marketing, sales, and other functions necessary to achieve success. It occurs when a small company has grown and is ready to reach new levels and a larger audience.
Competitive advantage
Competitive advantage is a brand’s ability to provide customers with products or services that are better in quality or cheaper than competitors’ alternatives and can outperform them. It helps companies generate more sales and earn higher profit margins.
In this article, we’ll cover the importance, types, and examples of competitive advantage and also review the best ways to gain it.
Why is competitive advantage important?
Competitive advantage is essential because it makes a product or service look more attractive to consumers. To gain customers’ attention and make people choose their products or services, brands create unique and high-quality products, set lower prices, provide excellent customer service, unusual features, or flexible return and exchange terms. Doing this helps companies get high sales volume, profit margins, and a high level of customer loyalty.
A business with a superior offer is in great demand among buyers. It generates more sales and brings good revenue to its owner. To stand out among competitors and surpass them in some areas, different companies leverage advanced technology, hire a team of professionals, ensure excellent customer support, or create a fantastic service. These steps help them increase market share and get a bigger ROI. Entrepreneurs also aim to improve their productivity and efficiency, trying to build successful brands.
Since a lasting competitive advantage brings a lot of benefits to businesses, companies’ owners try to attain it in several ways. They implement something competitors don’t have, launch new innovative products others can’t duplicate, implement innovation, and more. Having a clear competitive advantage provides a company with certainty and enables the right allocation of resources.
Now that you know why competitive advantage is essential, let’s unveil its two main types.
Types of Competitive Advantage
Companies with a competitive advantage have a unique position that brings benefits to their stakeholders. There are two main types of competitive advantage you can use to make your business grow: comparative and differential.
Comparative advantage refers to the ability of a certain business to manufacture products more efficiently than its rivals. Simply put, it occurs when a company can produce products that are similar to its competitors’ alternatives but sell them at a lower price. The strategy helps bring in more customers and increase revenues. Let’s imagine that two companies offer perfect substitutes,but one of them sells the same product for a lower price. For sure, a customer will choose a cheaper one, especially if there’s no visible difference between the two.
For example, a person wants to buy sneakers of a certain brand in a retail store. This customer can choose between two open stores. One store sells these running shoes for $50, and the other one sets the price of $45. The client will buy from the second brand to save money.
Differential advantage refers to the situation in which a company creates products or services with superior quality, additional functions, benefits, or an interesting appearance. Brands often use new technology, a strong brand identity, and their best personnel to manufacture high-quality products. These crucial factors support a company’s increase in market share and ROI.
Apple is the best example of a brand with a differential advantage. The company manufactures innovative products like iPhones, MacBooks, AirPods, etc. The brand has a high level of customer satisfaction with product quality and appearance so that clients are even ready to pay a much higher price for its smartphone or laptop.
Let’s take a look at some strategies to obtain a competitive advantage.
4Ways to Gain Competitive Advantage
If you want to develop a competitive advantage, it’s worth thinking about a suitable strategy to reach this goal.
Consider cost leadership.Companiesoften implement cost leadership strategies to take positions of industry leaders. You can use the approach if your company can provide consumers with product qualitysimilar to your rivals’ alternatives but for a lower price. To apply the strategy, you should find how to manufacture the same goods at a lower cost or use your resources more efficiently. Remember that there shouldn’t be any additional costs since you still need to obtain a good profit margin. Pay attention to the factors that influence your efficiency, such as technology, equipment, personnel, etc.
Implement differentiation. This strategy focuses on making a company different from others. Your brand shouldn’t necessarily stand out and be memorable only because of low-price products. There might be other attributes that encourage people to buy from you: unforgettable experiences, innovations, a wide variety of products, etc. Think about it to make your brand look more attractive. Once you have something that distinguishes your company from other businesses, search for a specificaudience segmentfor which this attribute matters and communicate your message through the most suitable channels.
Utilize focus strategy. To stay ahead and outperform your competitors, you should always maintain a competitive advantage. If you want to leverage the strategy, you should choose a market segment and focus on it. Do everything possible to develop a product or service that cansatisfy your customers, solve their problems, and obtain great results. As an option, you can become a manufacturer of products with the lowest cost in this narrow segment or provide customers with unique products.
Seek strategic alliances. This strategy is closely connected with business partnerships. If you want to gain a competitive advantage, consider teaming up with other companies in the same or related industry. Strategic alliances are similar to joint ventures and are used to pool resources and gain profit at the expense of other businesses.
Now that you are acquainted with four main strategies to gain a competitive advantage for your company, it’s time to walk you through some real-life examples.
Examples of Competitive Advantage
Both big corporations and startupscan have a competitive advantage. Your company should provide customers with something essential or necessary for them: enjoyable experience, innovation, variety, or low price. We’llreview how established brands do it to help you get inspired.
Zara
Zara’s main competitive advantage is an efficient and organized supply chain and logistics. The clothing company controls all manufacturing processes and meets customer demand very fast. The brand’s team manages all the processes professionally and prevents possible problems. Zara produces and delivers clothes worldwide within a couple of weeks.
McDonald’s
The main advantage of this famous fast-food company with a rich history is its products at affordable prices. You can conclude that the brand implements a cost leadership strategy. This indicates that McDonald’s can leverage economies of scale, produce fast food, and spendless money at the same time. This allows the brand to sell its products at a lower price than its main competitors.
Starbucks
One of the most important things each brand should bring is a positive experience–it should be unforgettable, exciting, and unique. This chain of coffeehouses has been doing it for years. Starbucks developed this almost legendary idea to put their customers’ names on coffee cups. Now no one can pass by this coffee house without stopping for a cup of hot cappuccino or iced caffelatte.
Now you know that competitive advantage helps attract more customers, establish brand loyalty, and make you differ from your competitors. Companies do a lot to gain it and utilize different methods to stand out among rivals because they know that it’s worth it in the long run.
Cold lead
A cold lead is a type of marketing lead that expresses no interest in a brand or service. These leads might have never heard of a company. Sales representatives usually reach them via cold emails or cold calling.
In this article, you'll get to know the difference between cold, warm, and hot leads. You'll also learn how to generate and convert them in warm leads. So, stay tuned!
The Difference Between Cold, Warm, and Hot Leads
Although cold leads demonstrate the lowest engagement level, they are as important for companies as warm and hot leads, because they provide new opportunities. Let's make the difference between these types of leads clear.
Cold leads might have never heard about your brand. They don't know that you provide a specific solution to their problem. Alternatively, they might have subscribed to your email newsletter to get a checklist and never interacted with your emails then. Or, your sales representatives cold them some time ago but they expressed no interest in your brand. So, their email address or phone number exists in your database. These leads are at the top of their buyer journey. They are valuable for your business since they have the features of your ideal customer. With a thought-out lead nurturing strategy, you can convert them into customers.
A warm lead is in the middle of your sales funnel. This type of lead have expresses their interest in your product. They might have subscribed to your email newsletter, followed you on social media, visited your website, or left their contact information. Warm leads are aware of your solution but they're not ready to purchase yet. These leads also require some nurturing efforts from your side but they're much easier to convert into clients.
Hot leads are the most promising prospects. They are at the bottom of your sales funnel. These leads need a final push to buy from you. They are aware of your solution and even know your competitive advantages. Hot leads are highly qualified and don't require any nurturing activities to become customers.
Now that you know the peculiarities of each type of lead, we'll consider the ways to generate cold leads.
3 Ways of Generating Cold Leads
There are three ways how your sales reps can generate cold leads. The choice depends on the specifics of your product, your budget, and your level of intrusiveness. Let's consider each one.
Cold calling. Sales reps contact people they have never interacted with before. This is a great way to tell about the benefits of your products and consider their competitive advantages. Sales reps should be ready with an effective sales pitch. What's more important, they need to be interested in the needs and desires of leads to provide the best solution. A good sales rep should be able to face objections. To make this strategy work, do some research before calling, develop a script, and identify the best timing. You need to know your prospect well to provide value.
Cold emailing. It's an old but gold way of generating leads and increasing brand recognition. Companies send email campaigns to people they have never interacted with before. The most important thing here is that you should not buy email lists. This is SPAM. Leads should share their email address with you. To succeed in cold emailing, choose a reliable email service. LIKE.TG is one of those platforms. You can send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers each month for free. Warm up your IP address, verify your emails, create an informative subject line and design a nice email to make this strategy work.
Social media. Whether you work with B2B or B2C clients, they all spend time on social media. You can't underestimate the power of this channel. Find out the platforms preferred by your target audience and generate leads there. It can be LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. These platforms provide lots of chances to generate leads. You can share the testimonials of your existing clients to let your leads look through them before making a choice. You can also create a chatbot with LIKE.TG for free to communicate with your potential clients 24/7 without the need to hire a new employee. A chatbot can provide information about your product, assist while making a choice, provide help, answer FAQs, handle orders, etc. Finally, social media is a great place to build your brand community.
Now that you know how to connect with your potential clients, we'll share some tips on how to convert them into warm leads.
How to warm up cold leads?
There are lots of marketing strategies that will help you convert a lead into a customer. You should invest time and money into producing high-quality personalized content. Let’s take a closer look.
Provide personalized communication. People appreciate brands that care about their needs, wants, and desires. In a highly competitive market, it’s not the price that makes people choose a brand but the service. Spend some time on research and collecting data about your prospects to provide them with personalized offers in the future. You can do that via email campaigns based on personalization and segmentation.
Develop targeted content. Leads at different sales funnel stages are interested in different content formats based on their engagement level and knowledge of your product. Create checklists, step-by-step guides, podcasts, webinars, and cases to attract potential clients, demonstrate the benefits of your product, show how things work, and share reviews of your satisfied customers. All these content types will help you achieve specific goals.
Create a lead nurturing strategy. With its help, you can move leads down the sales funnel. It helps educate them, provide help and the necessary information right when they need it. A well-thought nurturing strategy implies sharing valuable content, sending emails, and regular follow-ups based on users’ actions. For example, if they added an item to the shopping cart without purchasing, you can once set an automated email sending. This email will remind them of the product in a cart and provide a discount to buy right now. This email can be sent to all subscribers with items in their shopping cart. LIKE.TG provides Automation 360 that helps automate communication with clients and increase conversions.
Run webinars. A webinar is an online event that helps companies bring in new leads, and increase engagement, brand recognition, and website traffic. During a webinar, you can demonstrate the benefits of your product, show how it works, and share some lifehacks. To get the email addresses of the attendees, you can either let them access it with their address or promise to share the recording in exchange for an email. So, this is a win-win for both parties.
Offer a free plan or trial. For SaaS companies, it may be difficult to generate new leads since they are not ready to invest immediately. Users need much time to research, ask for recommendations, and compare different services before purchasing. So, help them to make this decision with a free trial or plan. They will help them evaluate the benefits of your company and understand what they’re paying for. If they like your product, they will buy a subscription to continue using it. Do your best to help your new lead realize the power of your product.
Congrats, now you know how to approach cold leads to convert them into paying customers. Register with LIKE.TG and make use of email service, SMS, web push notifications, landing page builder, CRM, and chatbots to build long-lasting relationships with your clients!
Cold email
A cold email is an email sent to a recipient that a company hasn't interacted with before. It helps build long-lasting relationships with clients and partners, especially in B2B.
In this article, you'll get to know the benefits of cold emails, how they differ from warm emails and SPAM, and learn how to write and send them for free. Stay tuned!
Why send cold emails?
Cold emails are great for starting partnerships and scaling a business. With a thought-out strategy and personalized approach, you'll reap the following benefits.
Networking opportunities. Cold emailing is a powerful tool for establishing partnerships after events, conferences, summits, etc. You can collect email addresses of companies in cooperation with which you're interested and contact them immediately after the event.
Lead generation. Email marketing is one of the most popular and effective ways to generate new leads. Prospects can leave their emails while visiting your online or offline store, or you can collect the addresses of interested users during your event. Since people leave their contacts, they're potentially interested in buying from you, so don't miss this chance to acquire new leads.
Recruiting opportunities. While looking through profiles on LinkedIn or communicating with specialists during the events, you may find potential candidates that will perfectly suit your company. Cold emailing allows you to headhunt to find top talents.
Brand recognition. Cold emails help brands establish recognition without much effort. After users share their email address with your company, they are not likely to remember it and recognize its logo while scrolling the feed. So, you can send them targeted and personalized email campaigns. Sometime later, they will associate a specific problem with your brand as a potential solution, which will be to your advantage when they have to choose a product or service.
Boosting traffic. If you launch an event, webinar, or workshop, sending an email to users who have shared their addresses previously is a great idea. You'll increase the number of attendees, which you can later convert into clients.
Increasing sales. Emailing is a proven way to increase sales. You can inform your subscribers about updates, product launches, and hot deals via an email campaign. This way, you'll increase engagement and multiply conversions.
Sometimes, marketers hesitate to send cold emails, confusing them with SPAM. Although, a thought-out cold email strategy has nothing to do with SPAM. So, let's make the difference clear.
Cold Email vs SPAM
Cold email is contacting a user with whom you haven't interacted before. They might have left their email address while visiting your store, or you might have received them during a conference. So, while sending a cold email, you state where you've got their email address and communicate the goal of a potential partnership with your company.
SPAM is an unsolicited email. It means a user hasn't shared their email address with a company. It might have parsed a list of email addresses on the internet. More importantly, a SPAM email's goal is to trick something from a recipient. So, the sender's name is usually fake, and the email is not sent from a business email address as it should be. In addition, such an email provides no opt-out button.
So, you see that the goal of a SPAM email is to deceive a receiver with fake information. In contrast, a cold email aims to establish business partnerships.
To create a winning cold email, check out the next section.
How to write an effective cold email?
Having users' email addresses is not enough to start cold emailing. Follow these three steps to prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder and harming your sender's reputation.
Step 1. Warm up your IP address
If you have a new IP address from which you haven't sent emails before, you need to do a warm-up. Otherwise, your campaigns will land in the spam folder, hurting your sender's reputation. IP warm-up is a chance to tell email service providers that you're not a spammer. A warm-up implies gradually increasing the email-sending volume, which usually takes 4-12 weeks. Firstly send emails to your engaged subscribers who are most likely to interact with the email. Then, increase the number of emails sent day after day. This way, you'll build a good sender reputation.
Read this article to learn how to do IP warming correctly, and check out five valuable tips.
Step 2. Check your mailing list
A high-quality mailing list is the basis of effective cold emailing. Use LIKE.TG Email Verifier to ensure wise investments and keep your mailing list clean. With this tool, you can verify email addresses on your list to find invalid ones, preventing you from sending them to non-existent addresses. As a result, you'll have a high sender reputation and a list of valid email addresses.
Watch the short video below to verify your email list for free.
You can collect users' email addresses by creating a smart widget using our templates or find leads on social media. Check out LinkedIn and Facebook to find users who have interacted with your company. They might have commented, sent you a message, or asked questions. Request their email address for further communication. Using such tools as Snov.io, you can get an entire lead profile having their email address. This will help you send highly targeted and personalized emails.
Step 3. Stick to the correct cold email structure
Follow the tips below for your email to look professional and build trust among its recipients. Each email element should be thought out.
Send from a business email address. This step is vital as it increases the loyalty and deliverability of your campaign. Business email address includes your domain name, so recipients can easily recognize you. For example, "[email protected]" or "[email protected]." For more details, follow our guide on how to set up a business email address.
Write an informative subject line. Your subject line, along with your sender name, is the first thing a recipient sees in their inbox. It makes them decide whether to open your email. So, take it seriously. First, make it short and sweet. Mind that users' smartphones can cut off subject lines. Make sure to make it as informative as possible. It should be relevant to your email body and reflect the central message of your email. Avoid writing clickbait subjects since they tend to deceive subscribers. You risk harming your sender's reputation. Keep away from using excessive capitalization and spammy language. This will lead your email to the spam folder. If you have a subscriber's name or any other personal information, use it to personalize your subject line. This will blow open email open rates. Follow the tips to create a subject line that converts.
Make use of an email preheader. You can see it after the subject line. Very often, email senders underestimate the power of an email preheader. Use it to your advantage. Keep it short, include emojis, and encourage subscribers to open an email. Make sure your preheader supports the email subject line idea and continues it. Here you can also incorporate personalization for better performance. Read this article to create an effective preheader.
Craft a nice email body. It is the central part of your cold email. To create an effective email, you should know your subscribers. Research a bit to find out who you're going to talk to. Learn their demographics to speak their language. Avoid gendered language, familiarity, and exclamations. Personalize your greeting to set a friendly tone of communication. Get straight to the point, and don't beat around the bush. Communicate why you are writing and explain where you got subscribers' email addresses. Thus, you will immediately answer the questions that the recipient may have. Avoid using slang, colloquial language, and professional terms not to scare off a potential client. Personalize your email body as well if you have some subscriber data. Include a clear call to action. It should tell the recipient what they should do next. Make sure it's short, visible, and easy to click or tap. The CTA button should be only one. Create a neat design. It should be consistent with the design of your brand. This will help you increase brand recognition.
Create a professional email signature. It provides subscribers with information about the email sender. Include your name and company name, email address, position held, business phone number, company logo, link to your website, and social media icons with links to your company's profiles.
Provide an unsubscribe button. This is a must. Otherwise, your email will land in the spam folder. Let users unsubscribe in one click. Make this option visible and easy to click and tap.
Now that you know how to design a perfect cold email, learn how to send it for free with LIKE.TG without having to code.
How to send a cold email for free?
LIKE.TG provides a bulk email service. You can send up to 15,000 emails each month for free to 500 subscribers. Design a professional email template with an intuitive drag-and-drop email editor. You don't need code knowledge or any technical skills. Personalize your subject line and email body for a higher email open rate.
You can also collect site visitors' email addresses with our subscription forms. Create a form using a pre-designed template.
To create a cold email with LIKE.TG, follow the three steps below.
Step 1. Register with LIKE.TG
If you don't have a LIKE.TG account, register.
Step 2. Upload your mailing list
You can upload an existing email list or import it from other services. Upload a file or copy and paste the necessary addresses.
Create variables for subscribers' data. It can include any information. Below is a mailing list created in LIKE.TG.
You can enable email verification while uploading the addresses to ensure a high-quality mailing list.
Step 3. Create an email campaign
With the LIKE.TG convenient email editor, it won't take you more than an hour to create a professional email campaign. You can use a pre-designed template or design a unique email.
Check out a webinar invitation email below to see how things work with LIKE.TG.Drag the text, picture, and button blocks from the left to your email body, and design them on the right.
You can preview your email before sending and track the email open and click-through rates after sending.
Congrats, now you know the advantages of cold emails and how to create a powerful campaign. So, register with LIKE.TG and get started!
Clicks
With LIKE.TG, you can track the number of unique clicks when your subscribers:
open your email;
click on separate links;
click on the image of your email campaign;
view attachments.
Marketers track the number of clicks in every email because it is an opportunity to analyze results and improve the email marketingstrategy. To see the statistics, click the "My campaigns" tab, choose a campaign, and go to "Campaign statistics." Here you can find the information about how many people opened your email. In "Campaign statistics," you will also see the "Click map" tab where you have an opportunity to take a look at which links work best in the email. You can see what this looks like in the example below. The unique clicksof each link are located in small green blocks.
By analyzing how many people click on particular links, you can find out:
which calls-to-actionare more productive;
which images your subscribers prefer;
what to use best: pictures, videos, or GIFs; and
if it is a good idea to attach files to your emails, and so on.
Cold calling
Cold calling is a sales technique that implies communication with a prospective customer who had no interaction with a brand before. This person doesn’t know about the product, its benefits, and its features and shows no interest in it. This sales approach is usually based on phone calls or telemarketing.
In this article, we’ll unveil how cold calling works and share five tips and techniques. We’ll also show you how to create a cold-calling script.
Does cold calling work?
Cold calling is an old but gold marketing approach that implies contacting people who have yet to show interest in a specific product or service. Sales representatives from different companies often call prospects or use telemarketing to reach them. Sales teams present the product and tell how people can benefit from it. Salespeople can also apply other popular channels to contact consumers. They use email campaigns and door-to-door visits.
To win customers during cold calling, sales reps should possess specific traits of character. They need to be persistent, sympathetic, friendly, and ready to face objections. Before communicating with consumers, sales representatives conduct short research on their customers’ demographics and
explore the market. It helps them find the right words during phone, in-person, or messages.
When sales reps call potential customers, they can receive numerous responses. Salespeople must instantly react to these responses to continue communication and convert a person into a client. Many consumers hang up the phone or terminate calls because they are unwilling to engage in cold calling. However, some consumers still become interested in a product offered and show interest in meet-ups.
Nowadays, many new methods like email, text, and social media are considered more effective, so cold marketing has become less popular. However, if the technique is perfect for your business, then go ahead and implement it with your sales team.
Now that you know how cold calling works, it’s time to explore tips and techniques if you feel like incorporating cold calling into your company.
5 Cold Calling Tips and Techniques
If you need cold calling for the success of your business, you probably need some effective techniques. We’ve listed tips and techniques below so that you can successfully implement this sales strategy in your company.
Do research before calling. Calling without research isn’t an option if you want to close deals. To attract customers’ attention, you need to come up with a worthy offer. That’s why conducting research and knowing your prospects is necessary. You’ll be able to address their needs and solve problems. This way, you have a higher chance of being heard. By exploring leads’ data, your sales reps can avoid getting into undesirable scenarios, objections, disputes, frustrations, and phone terminations. Moreover, a clear understanding of your prospective consumers allows you to personalize offers based on their needs and save time.
Create a script. To successfully implement cold calling, you need to have a clear script. You should write it and cover the following aspects: a step-by-step plan of action, answers to FAQs, and approaches to objections. However, your sales team shouldn’t get your script by heart. Consumers won’t appreciate listening to a generic message. The communication shouldn’t be robotic because prospects can hang up the phone. Your salespeople should use this information to their advantage without making interaction the same for everyone. Make sure that they find a personalized approach to every lead.
Identify the best timing. The day and time you decide to contact your potential customer also matter. There are busy days and hours when people simply don’t have time to communicate with sales reps. You need to look at your call records to identify the best hours to call. This way, you’ll be able to figure out when prospects answer the phone most often. It indicates that they are willing to communicate at this time.
Make sure you are ready to find arguments. As a sales rep, you can’t give up on a customer after the first objection. This role requires your sales team to deal with objections professionally and always find arguments for customers. You’ll be able to prove that your product is worthy and make leads change their mind. Consider developing a guideline for newcomers to sales. However, if your sales representatives encounter rejections, your sales team should be ready to accept “no” and proceed to the next prospect. It prevents your company from spending time, resources, and efforts on potential customers with no interest.
Avoid starting a conversation by presenting your product. The most common mistake salespeople make during cold calling is beginning their talk with a sales pitch. You should first question customers’ opinions about the product, their needs, challenges, etc. After you figure out that it meets customers' requirements, craft the offer based on their needs, and start your personalized sales pitch. It will enable you to achieve the best sales results.
Now that you know the techniques, it’s time to proceed to the process of cold-calling script creation.
How to create a cold-calling script?
Cold calling can be ineffective if your script isn’t detailed and thoughtful enough. In this section, we’ll uncover how to write a cold-calling script that helps convert prospects into customers.
Find your verticals. Rather than spending time on people who aren't into your product, you better focus on those willing to buy and value your product or service. In cold calling, picking up the right potential customers is crucial since it can be time-consuming to work with objections and hang-ups. Moreover, if consumers demonstrate a negative history of communication with your sales reps, it’s better to avoid contacting them again. Focus your efforts on people who can become interested in your product. Analyze the list of your leads who successfully converted into consumers. Try to find a consistent pattern. Choose a couple of verticals. After a short analysis of your customers, you can find out that consumers from retail and banking prefer to purchase your product or service.
Find 20 suitable leads. Once you are done with verticals, continue looking for a perfect fit. Consider using all your outlets and tools to identify your prospective customers for cold calling. You can get the best results by searching on LinkedIn. The platform is perfect for finding potential clients. Use the service’s filters to narrow your search and find the right people. Say you are looking for educational platforms that might need your online course builder. Type “General manager” and use the necessary filters. In this case, you might need filters like “People,” “Country,” and “Education.”
Conduct research. In cold calling, there’s no need to rush. The more you explore your prospect, the higher the possibility of winning consumers. Use LinkedIn at its most: explore the company’s main tasks, the prospect’s responsibilities and duties, your experience with similar businesses, and a “fun fact.” Besides, make sure to spell the potential client’s name right. You can check the name pronunciation on LinkedIn or use PronounceNames.
Congrats, now you know what cold calling is and how it works. Hope that our short step-by-step guide brought you closer to understanding this technique. If this method doesn’t suit your main business purpose, consider using LIKE.TG’s bulk email service, chatbot creator, SMS, and web push notifications.
Clienteling
Clienteling is a technique that allows companies to build long-term and trustful relationships with customers focusing on increasing their satisfaction. They implement an individual approach that helps create relevant offers based on clients' preferences, purchase history, behavior, and other data. With a CRM system, you can collect, store, and use customer data to your advantage. LIKE.TG provides a built-inCRM that lets marketers keep all information about clients and launch campaigns on a single platform.
In this article, you'll learn the benefits of clienteling, how it works, and how to implement this technique in your business.
Why is clienteling important?
Clienteling is all about personalizing the interaction with a customer at each buyer journey stage. According to McKinsey, this tool helps reduce acquisition costs by up to 50%. Instapage states that 77% of customers are ready to pay more and recommend a product if a brand provides a personalized experience. SmarterHQ states that 90% of users prefer sharing their behavioral data with companies if it saves money or improves customer experience. According to Grenis Media research, 40.5% of online users would like to see ads targeted to their preferences. Statistics prove that 56% of online customers will likely return to a brand recommending products based on their previous interactions.
Personalization is a powerful tool that helps brands reap numerous benefits.
Benefits of clienteling
The statistics mentioned above let us list several advantages of this sales technique.
Clienteling helps reduce customer acquisition costs. Brands often concentrate their strategies on working with existing customers rather than acquiring new ones since it's much cheaper to keep your clients engaged than to invest in reaching new audiences. Your satisfied customer will likely return to your brand after having a positive experience. So, it's a surefire way of increasing sales and reducing costs.
Clienteling allows you to increase sales. Customers appreciate brands that take care of their needs and want to provide the best experience. Creating personalized offers, assisting at each stage, and providing an excellent after-sales service encourage clients to pay more and recommend a brand to their friends.
Clienteling enhances building an advanced customer base. Since online shoppers are happy to share their behavioral data with companies to get a better experience, it's a great chance to collect valuable insights about your audience. The more data you have, the more personalized and targeted offers you can provide.
Clienteling enables companies to create highly effective targeted ads. Consumers make their customer profiles expecting to receive personal discounts and hot offers and be in the know of the latest releases and new collections. They would like to see ads based on their preferences, interests, and previous interactions since it saves them time searching for the necessary product and shows that the brand cares.
Clienteling boosts the number of loyal clients. Loyal customers help brands grow. They bring them more money, show what can be improved, and promote the company organically. Every satisfied client can become your potential customer. So approaching each consumer individually will make them return to your brand and become its ambassador.
Now that you know the benefits of clienteling, discover how it works in the next section.
How does clienteling work?
To realize the power of clienteling, let's have an example.
Say you're visiting a pet store you've already bought from before. You enter the store and walk down the shelves until the assistant offers their help. They ask you what kind of pet you have, its breed, and age, and identify if he has any health issues. Then, they need to determine which food your pet prefers and how you care for him. After the discussion, they can make their suggestions. You make the final decision, purchase, and leave the store.
It seems like a pleasant experience, right?
Now let's model a situation where the store uses clienteling.
An assistant recognizes you when you enter the store and asks how your pet is doing. He opens your profile and gets all the necessary information about your pet. Then the assistant might be interested if your pet loved the food or accessories you've bought before. You share your impressions and tell what you need. Analyzing your pet's profile, the assistant quickly finds the best-fitting product. He can also recommend new products or toys for your pet. You buy several items and get a bonus card. An assistant can also ask about your pet's birthday and include this data in the profile for you to have a discount on this special day. As a result, you've spent less time finding the necessary items, got some bonuses, and were offered to get even more on your pet's birthday.
The second situation seems much more attractive, and you may want to return to this store again because it provides a highly personal approach.
This is how clienteling work. You need to collect data about your consumer, their history of interactions with your company, preferences, and interests. Then, leverage this data in your strategy to build long-lasting relationships.
Collecting this data manually will take much time and effort, so you can use a CRM system. It will store information about your clients and record all the deals, and you can access customers' profiles anytime and make informed decisions.
LIKE.TG CRM allows you to manage all your sales processes, launch campaigns, store customer data, and connect with them from a single platform. You can invite your team members and share access for better performance.
Below you can see the board with all the deals created categorized based on their status.
Opening a deal card, you can see the information about the deal and the lead, the history of interactions, comments, and the sales rep responsible for it. You can add fields and comments, contact a customer right from the card via email or chatbot, or close the deal.
LIKE.TG allows you to establish long-lasting relationships with your customers, generate more sales, and automate business processes with the help of email, SMS, web push campaigns, landing pages, chatbots for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even sell your online courses. It is a multifunctional marketing platform for small businesses and established brands.
Now we'll share four recommendations that will help you master clienteling.
4 Clienteling Tips
To create an effective strategy, you should consider several important aspects, including your customer care team. Take a look below.
Implement an omnichannel approach. Customer experience is the top priority in omnichannel marketing. Consumers have touchpoints with brands on websites, social media, promotional emails, web push campaigns, etc. Implement an omnichannel approach to provide a consistent and smooth buyer experience across all the channels. You can acquire leads through your website, nurture and qualify them via a chatbot or live chat, and convert them via emails. Unlike multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing focuses on delivering a positive experience rather than communicating the message through all possible channels.
Ensure the cooperation of your sales and customer care teams. For your sales reps to provide users with targeted offers, they should know their pain points and issues preventing them from buying from you. Since a customer care team deals with consumers more than other departments, they can provide the necessary answers. Ask them to record FAQs and the most popular issues to analyze this data and improve your sales strategy.
Choose a reliable CRM. Since this tool is fundamental for a winning clienteling strategy, it should satisfy your needs. Look for an intuitive CRM to help beginners get started without hassle. Make sure it provides communication tools to work on a single platform. To evaluate the benefits of a CRM, choose a service with a free plan or a free trial. This way, you'll know what you are paying for before investing. You can use LIKE.TG CRM for free for 5 users in your account.
Segment your customer base. Segmentation is one of the primary personalization tools, and it allows you to divide your list based on common characteristics such as age, gender, occupation, income, country, etc. With a segmented list, you can create personalized campaigns and send them to different groups in one click. LIKE.TG offers both ready-to-use segments and advanced options for better results.
Congrats, now you know the benefits of clienteling and how it works, so get inspired by the tips and register with LIKE.TG to boost sales and establish long-lasting relationships with your customers!
Cohort analysis
A cohort analysis is a technique that implies dividing customers into groups (called cohorts) based on their behavior or actions they perform within a certain timeframe. It is aimed at obtaining insights into customer retention and churn.
In this article, we’ll review the importance and types of cohort analysis and make the difference between cohorts and segments clear. We’ll also uncover how to do cohort analysis and use it to increase customer retention.
Why is cohort analysis important?
Customer behavior and actions are the most valuable source of information when it comes to evaluating a company's product or overall experience interacting with a brand. By analyzing the behavior and actions of their users, business owners obtain valuable information and use it to identify the problems within the company, improve onboarding process and acquisition strategies, develop techniques to meet consumers’ needs, and come up with innovative ideas for product development.
After cohort analysis, marketers can increase a company's performance, analyze and improve user experience, test their hypothesis about the influence of a certain customer action on specific areas of a company, improve conversion funnel and customer retention. Results help understand several crucial points about a business. They allow companies to:
see customers’ actions and find out how their behavior influences product development and marketing strategies;
unveil customer churn and determine the causes of its increase;
estimate customer lifetime value to find out whether a certain customer is worth the company’s efforts and time;
improve customer engagement.
Now that you know why cohort analysis is important, it’s time to proceed to its types.
Types of Cohort Analysis
There are three main types of cohort analysis. They differ in the way cohorts are grouped. Let’s review all of them to see the difference.
Segment-based cohorts. The group involves consumers who bought a certain type of product or service in the past. With this type of cohort analysis, companies divide customers into segments based on the product or service they paid for. Clients can have different needs and brands should be aware of them. This information enables companies to develop services and products that satisfy the needs of certain audience segments.
Time-based cohorts. These are clients who started using a product or service during a specific time. This information allows businesses to trace customers’ behavior based on the time they used the product for the first time. Time-based cohorts help brands find out what they did right and wrong during product promotion. For example, 60% of people who signed up with a brand in September still stayed with a company in March while only 10% of those who signed up in December stayed with a brand until May. This result shows that the business wasn’t able to keep the promises given in promotional campaigns in December and meet the expectations of their clients. The company needs some changes in its advertising campaigns.
Size-based cohorts. This type is used for B2B. Startups, small firms, well-established companies, and huge enterprises, all can become clients. By grouping customers according to their size, companies can identify consumers who bring the biggest profit. The information about customers who bring the least income is equally important since it helps a business find out the problems with a product that might bother these clients. A brand can eliminate the possible issues and increase sales volume.
When you know the types, it’s crucial to figure out the main distinctive features of cohorts and segments.
Cohorts vs Segments
Although cohort and segment might define similar things, they are different and are used in different situations. Let’s discuss the meaning of each term in more detail.
A cohort is a group of clients a company chooses for analysis. To be more clear, it’s a group of customers who share common characteristics within a certain timeframe. In business, consumers are divided into cohorts based on the actions they perform at a specified time. For example, people who purchased a premium plan in January. These groupings are created to answer the main questions, identify the problems and eliminate them, and make some improvements that influence customer retention.
A segment is a group of customers who share common behavior, actions, interests, gender, locations, etc. When marketers divide the audience into segments, they don’t take into consideration a time parameter.
Simply put, when companies group users into cohorts they do it based on the timeframe and similar behavior while segmentation is about dividing customers into groups only based on common interests, behavior, gender, location, etc.
To better understand how the analysis works, let’s walk you through the main steps of this process.
How to do a cohort analysis?
The technique enables businesses to identify factors that influence customer actions. These factors include ad content, campaigns, channels, new product lines, sales, etc. So, if you are interested in improving your company, let’s start.
Write down the targeted questions. Since the main goal of the analysis is to obtain insights into your product, service, or user experience, you need to ask the right questions. If you strive to receive useful and accurate information after conducting the analysis, think over every question to the smallest detail. Collaborate with the experts that specialize in this field to create good clear questions for customers.
Decide on the metrics that will help you obtain information. It’s advisable to find out the subscription start, cancel dates, and the value every client brings you each month. This way, you’ll be able to find out the drawbacks of specific campaigns or some problems with a certain version of your product and remove them.
Identify the relevant cohorts. Divide clients into cohorts based on the distinctive traits they share. Often, customers are divided into groups according to the date they started using the product or service for the first time. The selection process doesn’t end at the date. Later, customers who started using the product at the same time can be divided based on the subscription plan they use or some other characteristics.
Do the analysis. You can choose from different techniques and services to do cohort analysis for your company. Consider using Excel for this purpose. With its help, you can assess churn rate, monthly revenue, and customer lifetime value by visualizing data and applying pivot tables.
When you are aware of the necessary steps, it’s time to figure out how to use this knowledge to improve customer retention and reduce churn rate.
How to use a cohort analysis to increase retention and reduce churn?
Meet customer expectations
Revise your customer onboarding process
Improve your customer acquisition
There are many different scenarios in which you can use the results of cohort analysis. It’s necessary to review them to see how to use the technique.
Meet customer expectations
Sometimes, businesses can’t meet customers’ actual expectations. This causes frustration and confusion. The reasons might include targeting the wrong audience or exaggerating the benefits of a product during promotion. If customers sign up for a product or service and it doesn’t meet their needs, they are more likely to churn.
The best way to figure out whether your product makes customers happy is to do cohort analysis. First, you need to identify users who left. Secondly, find out the reasons. It will help you unveil the main problems with a product that bother users. Thirdly, create a cohort of people who decided to stop using the product because of their unmet expectations. You also need to see the date when they joined your company to identify what and when went wrong. Do your best to remove the problem and avoid additional churn.
Revise your customer onboarding process
People can give up on using a product or service because they don’t know how to make the most out of it. Since poor onboarding results in 23% churn, it’s essential to provide customers with a flawless experience.
To prevent users from leaving, you need to develop step-by-step guides and other informative educational content that will help them explore your product, provide best practices, design product tours, and send all the necessary materials. However, if you want to check whether you have some issues when you welcome customers onboard, you can perform the same sequence of actions as in the previous step.
You should look through the list of users who canceled the subscription. Ask them questions to figure out the actual reason for their cancellation. If the number of these people is big, you need to consider reviewing your customer onboarding.
Improve your customer acquisition
Today, companies can choose from a wide variety of channels and marketing techniques to acquire new customers. Sales, discounts, and special offers are old and proven ways of winning new customers. However, customers who come during sales can leave quickly. It can result in customer churn. That’s why before running any sale, make sure that it will bring benefits for your brand.
If you aren’t sure that your acquisition model fits your business, do an analysis. Change your model and compare the results of the first and second models. The experiment will help you find out the ways that bring more quality leads.
Simply put, cohort analysis is one of the effective ways to analyze different areas of your business, identify problems, and eliminate them. It helps improve retention and prevent further churn.
Closed-loop marketing
Closed-loop marketing is a strategy that implies gathering and analyzing information about customers and distributing it to sales and marketing teams. It’s used to create targeted content for different audience segments, develop quality marketing campaigns, and reach better ROI.
The development of online companies forces marketers to search for new methods and approaches to make these businesses thrive and prosper. The marketing strategy we are going to discuss is about making your company profit more. With a well-prepared plan, you can obtain quality leadsandincrease conversionrates and profit margins.
In the video below, you’ll get a clear explanation of this marketing strategy from Sprocket Talk.
In this article, we’ll discuss the perks of closed-loop marketing and review several steps to implement it.
Benefits of Closed-Loop Marketing
Nowadays, when consumers can choose among a vast number of companies with great offers, all businesses around the world prefer to leverage inbound marketing. The process involves sales and marketing teams working together to collect information about their leads. They establish the primary sources of their prospectsand channel all their efforts in the right direction to increase the number of customers.
Then, marketers use gathered data and insights to develop campaigns relevant to these users. Thus, companies can analyze customer behaviors and reach out to their target audiences. With this strategy, firms take into account consumer needs and preferences to improve customer experience.
The cooperation between marketing and sales teams allows brands to resonate with their customers’ wants and address them. As a result, a brand can easily close a deal. Companies that use this strategy witness a significant increase in conversion rates, profit margins, and qualified leads. Having all this information enables entrepreneurs to find the most effective platforms for communication with their potential clients.
The advantages are clear now, so let’s walk you through the key steps to implement this strategy.
4Closed-Loop MarketingSteps
Identify your site users
Explore your visitors’interests
Create your customer database
Manage relationships with your customers
The strategy can be boiled down to four steps. Now it’s time to review each step in detail.
Identify your site users. Today, it’s difficult to imagine a company without a website. It’s necessary to convey an important message and bring value there. The purpose of any good site’s content is not only to sell but also to provide helpful information. If you don’t have a website yet, you can create one with LIKE.TG. Moreover, you can create a professionallanding pageor an online store in just 15 minutes. Remember that high-quality sites with blog posts, articles, and educational videos drive more traffic. To understand leads that come from different sources, companies often apply tools like Google Analytics, Moz Keyword Explorer, Bitly, and more. They provide website owners with various insights about their visitors’ location, sources, visited pages, time spent on each page, etc. As a result, you’ll know yourkey sources of traffic, the most visited pages, and content visitors don’t need.
Explore your visitors’interests. Once you create a list of visitors, divide them into groups based on their interests. Some of them will remain just visitors, and others can become your potential clients. Most of the time, they get to know about your business from blogs, pre-roll ads, social media channels, pay-per-clickads, and other marketing tools. If there are people interested in your company, they will let you know. People who want to continue exploring your business will subscribe to youremail newsletter.
Create your customer database. Now when you have a list of potential clients, it’s worth mentioning that you need a database. The best option is to use a CRMsystem. It will help you collect all the necessary information about your customers. As a result, you’ll be able to make quality marketing campaigns, build trust and brand loyalty, and ultimately generate more sales. Consider using LIKE.TG to create a professional CRM database. Our service is ready to help you store the information about your customers and ensure effective communication with your clients.
Manage relationships with your customers. The final step is to build strong relationships with clients and ensure collaboration between the most critical teams: the marketing, sales, and customer support departments. There are plenty of marketing tools you can use to build good customer relationships, such as email newsletters, rewards for loyalty, posts on social media, giveaways, etc.
To leverage this strategy effectively, you need to provide smooth communication between your sales and marketing teams. Today, when you can encounter dozens of software solutions, connecting your team members is no problem. For your convenience, consider using CRM, email, social media, and other marketing channels. LIKE.TG offers you a great chance to ensure communication with your clients and automate sales processes with our built-in CRM.
CMS
Content Management System (CMS) is software that is used to add articles, photos, and videos to your website and manage this content.
Advantages of Using CMS for Site Management
Easy to use
User access levels
Easy and quick site maintenance
SEO
Customizable website design
Easy to use
You don't need to have advanced skills to add content with CMS. The interface is easy, and it doesn't take too much time on training.
Modern CMS makes website creation and management simple and straightforward to the point where anyone who wants to start a blogthat is great in terms of UX, design, and overall performance can do so in a matter of hours without having to dive deep into web programming and other related technical stuff.
User access levels
To prevent information leaks, you can limit access to different sections of the site when employees are managing the content. Some of them (sales managers) can have access only to add product pages. Others, such as marketers or copywriters, can have access to edit and produce blog posts.
Easy and quick site maintenance
If you need to make changes to any section of your site with CMS, it easily searches the particular page among hundreds of other pages. With CMS, you can make changes, update the CMS software, and add functionality without breaking the site.
A good CMS has the function to make your content grow invisibility in organic search engine results.
Customizable website design
CMS makes it easy to change the design because content and design are in separate sections. A leading marketplace for creating assets Envato has recently launched a collection of themes for the HubSpot CMS Hub to help you build a data-driven digital experience that your customers will love.
Cloud marketing
Cloud marketing isthe process ofusing digital platforms to provide customers with personalized experiences. The approach involves reaching customers online through social media, email campaigns, and websites andpromotingcertain products or services. Brands can improve buyer experience, increase visibility, and drive sales bytailoring their content to each customer'sneeds.
In this article, we'll unveil the advantages of cloud marketing and review the best cloud marketing platforms.
Advantages of Cloud Marketing
Cloud marketing is the number one way to effectively approach customers and make them engage. Customized content is customer-oriented, which means that targeted ads, personalized emails, and relevant campaigns are more likely to hookyour audience and win its attention. These marketing tools help customers find solutions to their problems. Moreover, cloud marketing is beneficial for companies, as business owners can:
instantly connect with theirtarget audience;
establish strong relationships with customers;
get to know their consumers;
personalizetheiremails, ads, and campaigns;
send only relevant content;
win customers' attention;
save costs on implementing traditional advertising methods;
quickly updatetheirclients on upcoming releases, campaigns, and promotions.
Now that we have reviewed all the key cloud marketingbenefits,we also need to talk about how to find atool that fits your primary purpose. Let's review a few cloud marketing platformsso that you can choose the bestone for your business.
Top 5 Cloud Marketing Platforms
In this section, we've gathered the most powerful services that can help your business sell online effectively. Let's begin with LIKE.TG, a multifunctional platform.
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is an all-in-one marketing automation solutionthat will come in handy for big and small businesses. Its well-developed products like bulk email service, chatbot builder, CRM, landing page builder, and web push service will help reach your customers in no time and promote your product.
LIKE.TG's chatbot builderis a perfect choice if you need to provide yourclients with excellent customer support, onboard them quickly, and accept payments. Our service empowers you to set up Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram chatbots. The most outstanding chatbot feature you can deploy is its ability to receive payments. This means that you can accept payments from customers via your bot. You'll only need a couple of minutes tocreate your own chatbot, add a paymentbutton, and integrate the necessary payment system.
LIKE.TG's email service will empower you to tailor email templates to your liking with its drag-and-drop editor, customize your emails based on subscribers' preferences, and send campaigns at the right time. You can also make use of the most crucial platform features: personalization, segmentation, A/B testing, Automation 360, and email scheduling.
Below you can see one of the featured templates you can use to design your email campaign and customize it for your subscribers.
Free plan: Available forever.Paid plan:Startingfrom $8 per month.
Cision
Cision is a cloud-basedpublic relationsservice provider thathelps businesses establish a positive image in the market and among consumers. The platform keeps you updated on your mentions, news, products, and competitors. With Cision, you can identifyopinion leadersin your niche. You can pick the most suitable digital media platforms toshare your content, win your target audience's attention, and create and send personalized pitches and campaigns. Monitor your performance statistics and make changesto your campaigns to establish strong relationships with customers.
Below you can seea dashboard where you can monitor your mentions, customer sentiment, and top publishers.
Free plan: —Paid plan:Starting from $600 per month.
Salesforce
Salesforce provides you with all the necessary marketing tools for sales and relationship management. Startupsand large enterprises can benefit from the service'scustomizableCRMsystemwith built-in AI. The platform's Customer 360 feature captures data from all available sources that include emails, support channels, and calendars. You can always have access to your list of leadsand their data. Salesforce is flexible, meaning that you can run your campaigns on multiple channels towin your customers' attention. Moreover, you'll be able to keep an eye on your sales funnelusing the sales forecasting feature.
With Salesforce, you can create a personalizedcustomer journey and ensure a seamless buyer experience. Salesforce helps manage campaigns successfully and improve their performance, send relevant newslettersto subscribers, generate leads and qualify them, assess mobile messaging, and analyze the results.
The dashboard below demonstratesa lead card where you can qualify your prospect.
Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan:Startingfrom $25 per month for each user.
Marketo
Marketo is a perfect solution for B2Bsales. So, if you need to sell your product directly to customers, you should consider another platform. However, if you are interested in B2B sales, you can take advantage of Marketo's marketing automation, lead management, email marketing, and revenue attribution features. The platform allows its users to segment customers, personalize content, engage with audiences through different marketing channels, and nurture customers at every stage of their buyer journeys.
Below you can see Marketo's dashboard and list of customers sorted based on the profitability they bring.
Source: Adobe Experience League
Free plan: —Paid plan: Starting from $895 per month.
Oracle
Oracle is a multifunctional marketing solution that helps collect data on one platform, engage with customers, and communicate relevant messages to the right people. The service is a perfect fit for both B2B and B2C. This platform enables you to launch cross-channel marketing campaigns.
The platform covers email marketing, targeting, segmentation, A/B testing, and optimization. With its help, you can also launchweb push, email, SMS, and social mediacampaigns. It also helpsenhance your campaigns'performance and gain a high return on investment— Oracle's CRM is a leading product with ROI management tools. With its help, you can nurture leads and track your campaigns'performance.
Below you can seeOracle's homepage with pipeline analysis charts, appointments, contacts, opportunities, tasks, etc.
Free plan: 30-day free trial.Paid plan: Starting from $75 per month.
In a nutshell, cloud marketing is a must for every business that wants to effectively reach its customers. As more and more people go online and usedigitalplatforms, you should be ready to provide personalized emails and offers, targeted ads, and relevant campaigns.Cloud marketing platformscan help you improve the quality of your communication with customers.
Click map
A click map is a part of the statistics report that displays your email with the number of clicks on each link of the sent email.
You can get this report in LIKE.TG with just a few clicks. Follow the steps in the article "Statistics" to see the click map of every email campaign. These small green blocks show you the number of unique clicksin your email.
A click map is a powerful tool for analyzing the results of your email campaign. By knowing which your subscribers open links, you can create efficient and productive email campaigns.
With this feature, you will have the opportunity to create a series of emails. For example, if a subscriber read an email and clicked the link with a particularoffer, then you can send a follow-up email with another offer.
How does it work? Well, you send an email to your subscribers and then get the results on the click map. If the subscriber clicks on your offer, you can send them another offer. If the second email was clicked too, it means the subscriber showed significant interest, and you can make another offer. If the click map shows that subscribers don’t click the link at all, then you can add them to the list of the re-engagement email campaign. The example below shows how you can arrange a drip-email campaign based on the click map where you can see if the subscribers click on your offer.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a conversational AI platform that uses human language and technology to understand clients’ questions and respond accurately. It helps you provide instant, accurate, and human answers to customers’ questions, ensure product recommendations based on clients’ needs and update on relevant discounts and promotions.
In this video, you’ll learn how to use ChatGPT to profit your business. You’ll also uncover the advantages of ChatGPT, how to connect chatbots to this new technology, and AI models.
In this article, we’ll unveil the cost of chatGPT, how it works and where you can use it. We’ll also review the benefits, limitations, and use cases of chatGPT and walk you through four AI models. Finally, we’ll provide you with a step-by-step guide connecting GPT-3 to your LIKE.TG chatbot.
Is chatGPT free?
Since ChatGPT is in the ‘research preview’ stage, people can use it for free to see the positive impact on their businesses. Users can test the chatbot and share their experience with developers. Moreover, creators promote reporting issues through the user interface. The winner will receive a prize of $500 in ChatGPT credits.
Now that you know that ChatGPT is temporarily free, consider using it for your business. We’ll proceed to the next section to explore what chatGPT-3 is.
ChatGPT-3
ChatGPT-3 is a machine-learning model designed to create various types of text. With the model, users can input a short text and get large volumes of machine-generated relevant text instead. ChatGPT-3 needs the internet to operate. It’s the fastest way to produce content without human help. With the model, you can receive answers to questions available on the internet, create long texts, solve language tasks, perform translation, write summaries, create poetry, and write code. The results of your work will look very similar to human language.
Later we’ll tell you how to leverage this model with LIKE.TG’s help, but we need to unveil how ChatGPT works first.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is a perfect tool for taking care of conversational tasks. Unlike other services, this AI-powered chatbot doesn’t require human supervision. The platform figures out which answers to send without any need to teach it how and what to respond.
A multi-layer transformer network which is the base of ChatGPT, analyzes the input sentence and applies internal knowledge to provide relevant answers. Customers receive accurate responses and don’t need to communicate with customer support or the sales team for further details. The main advantage of ChatGPT over other chatbots is the ability to create contextual conversation. The flow looks natural and resonates with the sentences or phrases written or said before.
Now that you know how the model works, it’s time to find out where you can apply this technology.
Where can you use ChatGPT?
This multitasking tool can be used in different areas and for various tasks. With ChatGPT’s help, you can translate texts from multiple languages, summarize huge amounts of information, and perform sentiment analysis. ChatGPT writes code, short stories, and songs. You can use chatGPT to write emails, create business and blog ideas, develop blog post outlines, etc.
ChatGPT is an excellent solution for customer service and sales departments. The platform enables your business to provide customers and prospects with relevant answers without distracting team members from important matters. The language and messages look natural. ChatGPT provides answers based on messages’ history.
Your sales team benefits from the model. The conversational AI platform can inform clients about upcoming deals and discounts based on their shopping history. Messages are based on customers’ preferences therefore, they are personalized. ChatGPT empowers you to increase customer satisfaction since consumers get the products they wish to purchase.
Now that you know the areas of your business where you can successfully apply ChatGPT, let’s figure out the benefits companies can reap from this new type of chatbot.
How can online businesses benefit from chatGPT?
There are many areas in which ChatGPT can help brands. First, it’s a huge supporting system for your existing customer service chatbot. Its training database enables you to respond automatically, even to unpredictable consumers’ inquiries. At the same time, the answers are natural and human-like.
ChatGPT allows you to reply to FAQs and educate customers on how to use your product or service. You can connect your knowledge base or a website to make it a source of information for your chatbot. When clients ask questions from the knowledge base, they get accurate and relevant responses. This way, you can teach users how to make specific steps with your product and help solve problems. You can be sure that your consumers receive all company-specific information when needed.
ChatGPT can serve as a translator. Companies that sell their product in several countries can use the model to provide quality responses in multiple languages. It can also help with different tasks related to translation. ChatGPT specializes in text rewriting.
The technology provides personalized interactions. ChatGPT uses the previous history of communication with a specific customer to ensure accurate responses and relevant recommendations. It can send consumers personalized offers, promos, and discounts that might interest them. As a result, user experience with a brand improves.
With ChatGPT, prospects and customers get instant answers to their questions 24/7. Since clients don’t need to wait for customer support reps, they can quickly solve their problems and find solutions.
Now that you know the advantages, it’s time to discover the limitations. You need to know these points to meet your key business goals.
The Limitations of Chat-GPT
Although ChatGPT has many benefits, it also carries disadvantages for its users. In this section, we’ll uncover the limitations you can face when applying the model to your business.
Since ChatGPT is programmed to avoid harmful responses, it can’t answer such questions. If customers or prospects ask toxic questions, the system will avoid responding to them. Secondly, the quality and accuracy of questions influence the quality of answers. The model works better when it receives prompt direct questions or accurate directions.
Thirdly, Chat-GPT’s answers aren’t always correct. Many users have noticed that sometimes the model provides incorrect responses and have reported the issue to developers. The point is that the platform was programmed to give answers that humans consider as correct.
Now that you know the drawbacks, let’s proceed to four AI models.
AI Models
There are four main types of Al models. We’ll review each of them in detail so that you can choose the most appropriate one for your business.
Davinci. The model analyzes complex intent, cause-and-effect problems, summarization, explanation, and code generation. Davinci is a complicated and slow model that requires big expenses from its users. Since the model works with large amounts of data, it’s considered slow compared to the three other models. To work with the same tasks as Curie, Babbage, and Ada, this Al model needs fewer prompts. We recommend you use Davinci to deeply analyze the context and generate more complex text or code. With this ChatGPT model, you can solve logic problems.
Curie. The model is a perfect solution when you work with translation, complex classification, text sentiment analysis, and summarization tasks. It enables you to respond to direct input, analyze text, and provide key points. Consider using Curie for QA in your chatbots. The model allows you to insert questions and sources of information for a chatbot to find answers for consumers.
Babbage. It will help you with moderate and semantic search classification. Babbage identifies obvious text patterns and uses them to generate new text. The model understands text structures to create simple plots and titles.
Ada. This model specializes in parsing text, simple classification, address correction, and keywords. Ada is considered the fastest and cheapest model of all.
Now that you know the models, let’s jump into the integration of GPT-3 to your LIKE.TG chatbot.
How to Connect GPT-3 to Your LIKE.TG Chatbot?
In this section, we’ll show you how to connect GPT-3 to your LIKE.TG chatbot and provide more accurate and relevant responses. It will help your prospects and clients accomplish multiple tasks.
First, create an account with OpenAI. Click “Sign Up” to kickstart the registration process.
Once you finish registration, go to your account, click your avatar in the right-upper corner, and choose “Manage account.”
Afterward, proceed to “API Keys” and click “Create new secret Key.” Copy the key and save it on your device.
Log in to your LIKE.TG account to set up the integration. Select the bot you want to connect and proceed to “Bot settings” > “Integrations.” Click “Enable” near OpenAI (GPT-3).
Enter the key generated with OpenAI.
Select the most suitable AI model to provide bot replies based on the use case. Four models are available: Davinci, Curie, Babbage, and Ada.
Next, add a prompt to the bot. Provide your free-form prompts in the “Bot instructions” field.
Insert the number of tokens in the “Maximum number of tokens in response” field.
After clicking “Save,” test your chatbot. You can find a complete step-by-step guide on connecting GPT-3 to your LIKE.TG chatbot in our knowledge base.
Now that you know how to integrate the LIKE.TG chatbot with GPT-3, it’s time to discuss where you can apply these skills and knowledge.
ChatGPT Use Cases
We’ll review various scenarios where you can apply ChatGPT. Let’s see each of them individually to find out how to leverage various models for your business.
Text Optimization
ChatGPT serves as a text optimization tool. If you need to identify keywords, proofread your text, or optimize it to comply with SEO principles, consider using this model.
After you add prompts to the Ada model, the bot enables you to receive SEO-optimized texts and provides you with relevant keywords. So you can easily improve your content to meet SEO requirements.
Below you can see an example of the Ada model with 1024 tokens.
Business QA
Companies that need a FAQ database can use Chat GPT to create it. Business owners can teach the bot to respond to clients inquiries that arise when using the product or service.
You can connect the technology to the existing source of information, for example, your knowledge base. It will serve as a list of answers for ChatGPT. Once your bot receives users’ inputs, it searches the knowledge base and provides customers with fast and accurate responses.
Below you can see an example of the Davinci model. After you add the necessary information to the system, the bot establishes and develops a dialog with your customer or prospect based on the available information. The bot will find the answers about your company and product and ensure natural responses.
Code Decryption
If you have a programming academy, your students can use the bot to decrypt the necessary code. They can obtain answers to their questions about the code or generate it by using natural language. Consider using the Davinci model with 700 tokens to work with code decryption. This model can explain code and its parts. Besides, you can modify the bot's tone to receive answers in simple language.
Encyclopedia QA
The bot can provide users with facts that can be found on the internet fast. So, you can create a bot that will serve people as an encyclopedia where they can input the desired sentence to find out about history, famous individuals, mathematical formulas, etc. The Davinci model will enable you to design encyclopedia QA for your users. Below you can see what such a bot looks like.
Congrats, now you know many facts about the newly developed technology. With LIKE.TG, you can reap various benefits GPT-3 can bring to your brand.
Chatbot builder
A chatbot builder is a tool for creating chatbots. Its main benefit is that it allows you to create chatbots without coding, thus makes it available to everyone. With a simple LIKE.TG chatbot builder, you can create chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram.
In this video, Alex explains how to nurture leads, engage your audience and promote your products with chatbots.
A chatbot builder is a platform that helps businesses to automate communication processes according to pre-determined scenarios. It allows you to send news, updates, and reminders; processing orders; providing immediate customer support.
Why are chatbot builders important?
Ready-made solutions
Self-service chatbot builders
Chatbots from scratch
Let’s say you own a bakery, and you sell your products in socials. You notice that your customers frequently ask questions like “how to make an order?” “is there any vegan food to buy?”, etc. Well, why not create a chatbot to get that covered?
A chatbot automatically guides your audience towards a purchase, while the person responsible for customer support deals with more critical issues. Today, technologies give three ways to create a chatbot:
Ready-made solutions. These are pre-designed chatbots able to cope with specific business needs, like shop messages, dropshipping assistance, educational bot, etc. Botlist and Kik Bot are among ready-made solutions.
Self-service chatbot builders. These are chatbot building platformsthat allow you to develop a chatbot specifically for your business, with the help of an intuitive interface and instructions like in LIKE.TG.
Chatbots from scratch. In this case, you need to hire a team of professional developers who will bring your chatbot idea to live.
These three approaches have their pros and cons. However, chatbot builders are a balanced option since they allow having full control over the process. Chatbot builders fit any business from a small family company to a vast enterprise. They are also cheaper comparedto chatbots created by developers from scratch.
Chatbot Builder Cost
LIKE.TG
FlowXO
Botsify
Chatfuel
13chats
The cost depends on your goals and the complexity of your idea — the process you need to automate. Let’s do a little research and check some of the most popular chatbot builders comparing their pricing plans and functionality.
LIKE.TG. This multichannel marketing platform allows you to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and Telegram. Send up to 10,000 messages to unlimited subscribers for free.To remove the branding logo from all widgets and create more than three chatbots, you have to pay $9.85 per month.
FlowXO. It allows you to start for free but limits functionality. Upgrading to a standard plan costs $19 per month. A standard plan opens access to all features except the unlimited number of interactions and bots you can create. You can utilize add-ons to raise that number when 5,000 interactions and 15 bots are not enough.
Botsify. This chatbot builder provides with a free trial. You can upgrade your account to a self-service $50 monthly plan with 10,000 interactions or fully managed plan for $300 a month with unlimited communication. Both plans enable you to create up to 10 chatbots.
Chatfuel. You can use this chatbot builder for free with an up to 1000 subscribers limit and Chatfuel’s branding logo. The Pro plan costs $15 a month, while Premium costs $300 a month.
13chats is a convenient online service for marketers and support teams that allows you to increase sales with online chats, smart widgets, and chatbots. You can use a large free plan for 5 operators with full access to all of the service features. The standard plan for 13 operators costs $13/month, the Pro plan is $33/month, and the Premium plan is $93/month. Limits can be increased upon request.
How to Build a Chatbot
LIKE.TG allows you to create chatbots to support your audience ina pre-determined scenario. This chatbot builder can make use of different elements — message, flow, action, and pause — to customize and blend.
Follow this step-by-step guide to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and connect it to your page.
Create and connect a Telegram chatbot with these instructions.
Chatbot Building Best Practices
Use chatbots yourself
Introduce your chatbot
Set expectations
Guide customers
Predict possible mistakes
Be straightforward with chatbot limitations
Make chatbot speak your language
Allow unsubscribing
Use chatbots yourself. To understand chatbot usability, you should be an active chatbot user. This knowledge will show you the weak points that chatbots have and avoid those mistakes when building yours.
Introduce your chatbot. Let your chatbot introduce itself. It is also essential to mention it is not a real person, like this: “Hello, I’m AidBot, your virtual assistant in a Medical Clinic.”
Set expectations. Let users understand the purpose of the chatbot: “I’m here to help you choose the best gift for your kid!” or “I’m Captain Price, I aim to help you choose the right pricing plan.”
Guide customers. Actively use buttons to guide them and speed up communication. Mind that the choice between more than three buttons confuses the reader, and slows their way down the sales funnel.
Predict possible mistakes. When there’s no chance to use buttons because you need users to type in the name of their city, for example, expect misspellings. Think about the most popular mistakes and include them in the list of words that trigger a reply to avoid the conversation restart.
Be straightforward with chatbot limitations. If a user types in something that your chatbot wasn’t programmed to answer, make a reply as such: “Sorry, but I don’t understand.” And give a couple of buttons like “Go back” or “Main menu” as a response.
Make chatbot speak your language. Use emojis, images, and all available chatbot builder functionality to create conversations relevant to your brand communication style.
Allow unsubscribing. At the very start, let people understand how to leave the dialog if they wish to. Usually, users are unsubscribed automatically after they type in “stop.”
Implement chatbots into your marketing strategy alongside with emails, SMS, and web push in LIKE.TG!
Celebrity marketing
Celebrity marketing is a technique that implies hiring a famous person to endorse a brand’s product or service. It covers different types of promotion: an opinion leader using and recommending a specific product or an influencer in the image of the brand. A brand uses a celebrity’s reputation to establish trust, awareness, and recognition among this person’s following.
In this article, we’ll uncover why to attract celebrities for advertising and how to get celebrity endorsements. We’ll also review some great examples of successful celebrity marketing campaigns.
Why attract celebrities for advertising?
Brands often involve celebrities to showcase products and influencers to recommend them to draw attention immediately and establish brand awareness. Influencers and opinion leaders can generate buzz around a company, increase exposure, and attract more people.
Since celebrities have the power to influence customer decisions, companies use them to their advantage. According to statistics, 37% of consumers trust the recommendations of social media influencers and discover new products from their videos, photos, and stories. You can often see large brands with opinion leaders as brand advocates. They become salespeople, showcase products, and encourage customers to purchase. With influencers' help, companies reach new audiences and enhance credibility and visibility. Moreover, celebrity endorsements enable brands to stand out among competitors. If an opinion leader uses a specific brand and recommends it, people trust and buy its products.
Influencers can use different techniques to draw followers’ attention: create tutorials, guides on product usage, before and after stories, posts, etc. They call out to people through different marketing channels and help companies attain their conversions, sales, and revenue goals.
Now that you know why brands partner with opinion leaders, let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to encourage endorsements.
How to get celebrity endorsements?
Unlike endorsements in TV and print advertisements, modern celebrity marketing establishes a connection between an endorser and a customer. Brands are serious about choosing an influencer and don't rely solely on that person's fame. They look at a career, hobby, lifestyle, and other aspects. Customers should associate this opinion leader with themselves. So finding a great fit isn’t an easy task. In this section, we’ll show you how to do it.
Determine your budget. First, you should do is to decide how much money you are willing to spend. The budget depends on the celebrity you want to invite and the contract. You might consider famous personalities (models, actresses, influencers, entrepreneurs, etc) if you have a big brand. However, if you are starting a business, you can work with micro-influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Ensure you know your target audience. Before selecting a celebrity, analyze your target audience to learn their needs, hobbies, interests, and desires. Create a buyer persona to have a clear understanding of your ideal customer.
Find the right candidate. You can choose a basketball player, makeup artist, popular singer, or a famous actress for your promotion. However, remember about finding a celebrity related to your product and with a passion for promoting your product. Searching for the most popular celebrity isn’t always a good strategy. Find someone who fits perfectly with your brand's mission, values, and ideas. If the influencer shares your vision and ideas, they will sound more persuasive to customers.
Ask micro-influencers for help. If you are starting your brand, consider collaborating with influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers. It’s a cost-effective way to reach more people and gain exposure. They can be even more effective and dedicated to your product promotion than singers, models, and actors. Moreover, micro-influencers are more trustworthy and share information within their niche industry. For example, travel influencers post about hotels, tickets, special clothes, apps, etc.
Now that you know how to get endorsements, it’s time to explore some powerful celebrity marketing campaigns.
Examples of Celebrity Marketing Campaigns
Celebrity marketing is considered one of the most effective marketing strategies that help achieve key business goals. In this section, we’ll review some examples to see what influencers have brought to world-known brands.
Shaquille O’Neal Papa John’s
Perhaps every American knows Shaquille O’Neal as a sports analyst and one of the greatest basketball players. Yet it’s not the full list of his professions and achievements. In 2020, Shaquille O’Neal partnered with Papa John’s pizza chain. The collaboration aimed to create a specialty pizza – The Shaq-a-Roni pizza. The campaign brought stunning results to the brand. They managed to sell more than 3 million pizzas and collect 3 million dollars for charities. Shaquille O’Neal and Papa John’s raised this money in two months. After the campaign, the famous basketball player became a board member of the company.
Eva Longoria L’Oreal
American actress, producer, and director Eva Longoria endorsed L’Oreal, a French personal care company. The attractive actress with long beautiful hair was a perfect fit for the brand’s product. In 2020, the actress released a series of useful how-to YouTube videos with L’Oreal aimed at the brand’s product promotion.
Congrats, now you know what celebrity marketing is and why it’s essential. Hope that our successful examples will serve you as inspiration when you decide to develop your celebrity marketing campaign.
Chatbot
A chatbot is an application that can imitate a real conversation with a user in their natural language. Chatbots enable communication via text or audioon websites, messaging applications, mobile apps, or telephone. With the LIKE.TG chatbot builder, you can create a chatbot for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp without any coding skills for free.
In this video, Alex, a marketer at LIKE.TG, explains how to use chatbots to boost your social media.
Why are chatbots important for a business?
Let’s highlight some of the advantages that chatbots offer businesses going by findings in the State of Chatbots report of 2018.
Help companies to provide 24-hour service.64% of respondents to this survey reported that 24-hour service is one of the main advantages of using chatbots. With bots, businesses can ensure that they respond to customer queries regardless of the time, thus boosting customer experience — an essential factor for success in business.
Allows brands to reach out to more customers. Going by this report, 69% of users prefer bots over apps when interacting with businesses. It, therefore, makes economic sense to use this channel if a brand passes information regarding its products and services to a broader demographic.
Benefits of a Chatbot
Better customer engagement
Cost savings
Tracking gaining insights and consumer data
Successful lead generation, qualification, and nurturing
Easy operation in global markets
Below are more benefits of using chatbotsfor your business:
Better customer engagement. Chatbots shine at engaging both prospects and customers, leading to more sales. While a brand can go overboard with the traditional customer service by providing more information than is required, chatbots only give bits of data based on the input provided by users at each time. They do not end up annoying users with irrelevant information. Instead, they keep the customers engaged for longer by sharing the compelling content flowing.
Cost savings. Business owners have to pay their employees to manage a chatbot 24/7. These expenditures keep increasing as the business grows and can soon reach uneconomical levels. Chatbots are a one-off investment that assists firms by cutting down on staffing expenses. Brands can easily integrate customer support chatbots to cater to simple concerns of prospective customers and pass on the complex issues to customer service agents.
Tracking gaining insights and consumer data. Chatbots collect useful feedback from customers, and this information can go a long way to help brands improve their services. Moreover, this feedback can prompt brands to optimize their sites by making changes to low-converting pages.
Successful lead generation, qualification, and nurturing. Chatbots receive consumer information that enables them to send personalized messages to customers at various stages of the sales funnel. Bots can ask relevant questions, persuade the prospect, in turn, generate a leadfor a brand. Moreover, bots can help businesses to find out unqualified leads via key performance indicators (timeline, relevancy, resources, budget, etc.); thus, barring businesses from dealing with time-consuming leads.
Easy operation in global markets. Chatbots help enterprises offer excellent customer service in multiple languages all year round. In turn, brands can scale up their operations in new markets.
How does a chatbot work?
Chatbots work based either on artificial intelligence or rules. We'll consider rules-based chatbots because they don't require the knowledge of code or any technical skills. Non-tech-savvy marketers can select a platform providing chatbot functionality. Such a service lets create auto-replies and advanced scenarios based on triggers. Subscription to a chatbot, any keyword or message sent by a user can work as a trigger. For example, a user subscribes to your bot. You can create a welcome flow that will be sent to users automatically after subscription. Include quick replies with several options available, such as "About us", "Learn more about the product", and "Contact sales department." Then you can send different messages based on subscribers' replies. You can even assign tags to users to provide them with relevant offers later.
Consider as many potential triggersas possible that users are most likely to type in. If you sell products, they may include "price," "size," "exchange," "refund," etc. After you list these possible triggers, design auto-reply flows to provide leads with the necessary information. This way, your sales reps and support team will manage to deal with high-priority tasks and automate answering FAQs. Read on to learn how to create a chatbot with LIKE.TG for free.
Now that you know the benefits of chatbots, take a look at platforms providing chatbot functionality.
5 Best Chatbot Platforms
LIKE.TG
ManyChat
Tidio
Chatfuel
MobileMonkey
In this section, you'll get to know the important factors to consider when choosing a chatbot platform. We'll cover the features and pricing of the 5 best services. Stay tuned!
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is a unified marketing platform that helps small and medium businesses automate communication with clients through email campaigns, chatbots, web push notifications, and SMS. It provides a simple and functional chatbot builder that requires no coding to create a powerful chatbot.
LIKE.TG allows you to design a chatbot for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp. You can turn website visitors into chatbot subscribers with the help of multichannel subscription widgets. LIKE.TG chatbot builder functionality enables brands to reduce the workload of their customer support teams by setting up auto-replies to answer users' everyday questions. You can encourage chatbot users to answer several questions about their product preferences and provide them with personalized offers which will result in higher sales.
LIKE.TG chatbot builder features
using images, files, audio, video files, and emoji to create interactive conversations;
automated replies to users mentioning your brand in their Instagram Stories;
promoting your chatbot on Instagram Direct with the help of ads;
adding several live agents to Instagram chats;
accepting payments via Stripe, PayPal, Fondy, and LiqPay;
creating filters based on subscribers' personal information to send relevant messages and offers;
saving user information with the help of input for further customer segmentation;
detailed stats on interaction with a chatbot;
chatbot management on your smartphone.
It won’t take you more than an hour to create a chatbot flow with LIKE.TG. Check below a flow created for a bookshop with the LIKE.TG chatbot builder. Users can choose several scenarios and get help with making a perfect choice.
Follow the instructions to create a chatbot for your Facebook page.Find out how to create an Instagram chatbot.Learn how to create a WhatsApp chatbot.Discover how to connect a Telegram chatbot.
Pricing
LIKE.TG offers a free plan which allows you to create up to 3 bots, have up to 1,000 contacts, send up to 10,000 messages per month across all of your bots, and add up to 10 variables. With this plan, you can evaluate the benefits of the service.
If you want to create a WhatsApp chatbot, design unlimited bots and variables, accept payments, add tags and webhooks, upgrade to a paid plan which cost $9,60 per month for 1,000 subscribers.
ManyChat
ManyChat is a platform that allows users to supercharge their Facebook Messenger and Instagram marketing with chatbots. They help reach more leads, engage prospects, blow up sales, and automate conversations with customers without much sweat even if you’re not a tech-savvy marketer.
ManyChat allows its clients to provide their customers with instant support, improve lead generation, increase sales and qualify leads by automating conversations for Instagram Direct Messages and Facebook Messenger. Drag and drop functionality lets you design advanced flows without much stress. You can conduct contests, giveaways, and promotions to boost subscriber engagement with your brand. If needed, your team will be informed that customers want to have a live chat.
ManyChat features
audience segmentation;
customization of text, media, and destinations;
comments automation;
automated reacting to users mentioning your brand in their Stories;
a wide choice of conversation starters;
automatic capture of user information;
adding team members to live chats;
leading users to your Facebook Messenger chatbot with the help of a Messenger URL Growth Tool;
conversation analytics.
ManyChat offers a drag and drop conversation builder, so you need to add the necessary blocks to build a flow. Check out an example below. You can also learn detailed stats of each action and block to improve your chatbot on the go.
Pricing
ManyChat provides a free plan which allows you to create a chatbot for Instagram Direct Messenger and Facebook Messenger, automate conversations with up to 1,000 contacts, use basic Growth Tools, have 10 customer tags, and get email support.
Upgrade to a paid plan which costs $15 per month to engage unlimited subscribers, use unlimited Growth Tools, and build advanced campaigns using tags, custom fields, and segments.
Tidio
Tidio is a customer service tool that helps supercharge your conversations with clients via chatbots for Facebook Messenger and live chats. You can add a live chat to any website without having to code. Customize a live chat widget to fit your brand style. You can build a chatbot scenario with an intuitive drag and drop editor or use one of 20 chatbot templates.
Tidio lets its users communicate with leads and never lose a customer via any channel from one place. Increase sales by collecting customer personal data, advanced lead qualification, and recovering clients’ abandoned carts. Let your support team deal with more complex tasks and delegate part of their workload to chatbots. This way, you can automate answering repeated questions, segment users, and inform operators about certain customers’ actions to respond immediately. Drag and drop the necessary nodes (blocks) to build a chatbot flow that can consist of actions, triggers, and conditions.
Tidio chatbot builder features
35+ pre-designed chatbot templates;
segmenting customers based on their behavior;
adding text, galleries, user input, emoji, quick replies, buttons, email phone number validation;
customer data overview along with custom fields, tags, and segments;
basic analytics.
Although Tidio lacks some advanced features like a Facebook website widget, comments auto-reply, webhooks, and growth tools, this platform can be a perfect choice for beginners looking for a straightforward solution without wide functionality.
Below you can see an example of a lead generation bot created with Tidio. The interface is pretty simple, so it won’t take you much time to learn. This is the bot for users who engage with your website for the first time.
Pricing
Tidio provides a free plan which lets you have up to 100 unique visitors per month, unlimited chats, and add up to 3 agents.
To reach unlimited unique visitors, upgrade to a paid plan which costs $49 per month. It also allows you to build unlimited active chatbots, use ready-made chatbot templates, and access 24/5 live chat support.
Every new user gets a 7-day free trial of the paid plan to evaluate the premium features of the platform.
Chatfuel
Chatfuel is one of the leading chatbot platforms in the world used by Levi’s, Adidas, and Netflix. Users appreciate the service for its functional chatbot builder and clean interface that require no coding skills to build an advanced chatbot flow for your business. You can collect customer data, attract new clients, automate support, and boost sales via a website, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram chatbots.
Chatfuel allows you to attract new prospects in Facebook Messenger, cover their demands, answer FAQs, send auto-replies and promos, and segment customers. With this platform, it’s easy for users to make bookings in a few seconds, collect client feedback after the purchase, retain and bring customers back, and qualify leads saving each interaction in the built-in CRM system. You can easily capture leads’ information through direct messages and Instagram ads to nurture and segment them effectively.
Chatfuel features
intuitive drag and drop chatbot builder;
adding images, video, audio, attachments, emoji, gallery, quick replies, buttons, free text input;
creating custom fields and user segments;
pre-designed Instagram templates for different scenarios;
custom automated replies;
automation of all Instagram communication channels including stories, mentions, direct messages, post comments, ads;
lead management: segmenting, qualifying, exporting;
live chat
clear analytics.
Below you can see the process of creating a chatbot for a bookshop. You can add different blocks on the left panel and customize them by enriching them with media on the right. Test your chatbot before launching.
Pricing
Chatfuel offers a free plan which allows you to create a full-featured bot for 50 subscribers and have priority support for the first 30 days.
You can upgrade to a paid plan which costs $15 per month and lets you interact with 500 contacts.
MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is a chatbot marketing platform with enormous potential for your business growth. It enables marketers to automate outreach, convert inbound and outbound prospects into clients, and boost sales via social messaging channels. With its tools, you can find targeted prospects, qualify and convert leads, and close more sales. MobileMonkey’s technology OmniChat enables marketers to write automated chat conversations working across multiple apps.
MobileMonkey lets you either develop a bot using the framework or create a bot without a line of code with a visual builder. It won’t take you more than 15 minutes to create a bot scenario. Alternatively, you can use pre-made templates for different industries. You can optimize answering customers’ FAQs with automated sequences. A bot can effectively walk your user down the sales funnel and provide a positive user experience.
MobileMonkey features
pre-designed chatbot templates;
chat blaster which allows you to send a message to all your contacts or specific segments;
sending drip campaigns;
chat widgets;
Q/A triggers;
custom variables;
link to Messenger;
Facebook Comment Guards;
bot analytics;
bot cloning;
template sharing.
Below you can the process of creating a chatbot flow for a bookshop with MobileMonkey.
Pricing
MobileMonkey provides a free plan which allows you to send up to 1,000 messages every month to unlimited subscribers. You can create widgets, and add attributes and tags.
Upgrade to the Pro plan to send up to 2,000 messages per month. It will cost you $19.
Now you can choose the platform which fits best your business goals. Now, we'll walk you through creating a chatbot with LIKE.TG.
How to Create a Chatbot with LIKE.TG
How to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger?
How to create a chatbot for Telegram?
How to create a chatbot for Instagram?
How to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger, being the second most used messenger app in the world and the first in America, is the best place to set up a bot.Set up chatbot marketingwith LIKE.TGby following these steps:
Step 1: Create an accountwith LIKE.TG and go to the “Messengers” tab
If you are not already on LIKE.TG, sign up. If you are already logged in, click “Facebook chatbot” under products.Go to “Messengers” tab at the top of the page and click the "Connect channels" button.
Step 2:Sign in with Facebook and create a bot
Select group pages for which you want to create chatbots. Click "Enable" opposite a group to enable a chatbot.
Step 3: Send atest message
Subscribe to your chatbotand send yourself automated messages and campaigns to test them.
When a prospect subscribes through a widget, the chatbot automatically sends them the first message. Launch messenger marketing strategy with LIKE.TG and send Facebook campaign anywhere faster!
Connect your Facebook bot
How to create a chatbot for Telegram?
Creating a Telegram chatbot is as easy as pie with LIKE.TG. You don't need to code or have any technical background. You can create up to three bots each month and send up to 10,000 messages for free. Follow this step-by-step guide to get started.
Step 1. Create a bot with @BotFather
Sign in to your Telegram account, enter @BotFather in the search tab, choose the bot that has a blue checkmark beside it, and click "Start" to activate it.
Then, create a name and username for your bot
Step 2. Connect your bot to LIKE.TG
Copy your token value and add it to your LIKE.TG account.
After you are redirected to the Telegram app, click "Start" and you will be subscribed to your bot. Look for more precise instructions in this guide.
Connect your Telegram bot
How to create a chatbot for Instagram?
If you still don't have an account, register with LIKE.TG. Follow _ below.
Step 1. Connect a chatbot
Navigate to the "Chatbots" tab and click the "Connect" button.
Step 2. Connect your Instagram account
To connect a bot to Instagram, you need to have a Facebook page and an Instagram business account. Follow the instructions on the screenshot to connect your account to a Facebook business page.
Step 3. Select the necessary Instagram business account
Choose the account for which you want to create a bot. Then select the company's Facebook page.
Step 4. Add the bot owner
Make your personal Instagram account the bot owner. Log in and scan the QR code.
Step 5. Enter the code and send the message
If everything is set correctly, you'll receive a welcome flow.
Check out this guide on our Knowledge Base for more detailed instructions.
Connect your Instagram bot
Chatbot Examples
Below is a Hello Fresh chatbot.
Here is how the Score uses a chatbot to provide fans with updates regarding their favorite teams.
Eddy Travels bot allows users to find the necessary flight. Check out below.
Finally, HipMunk’s Facebook chatbot helps travelers book flights and hotels quickly.
Chatbot Best Practices
Give the chatbot a personality
Give users reading time between messages
Know when to use buttons or quick replies
Use tactful quick replies to say no
Give the user a way to re-engage with the bot at the end of the conversations
Here are the best practices for building, testing, and using a chatbot:
Give the chatbot a personality. How people perceive the bot will affect how they converse with it. Simple things like giving it a face and a name can go a long way to enhance the user experience.
Give users reading time between messages. No wait times or short wait times make it frustrating forusers to keep up with the conversation. So, set wait times depending on the length of the message and increase the wait times a bit more with each additional message.
Know when to use buttons or quick replies. Quick replies are written as the user responds to facilitate the conversation flow and usually disappears after use. Buttons, on the other hand, are written when the chatbot is talking and is used to navigate. They do not go away after use.
Use tactful quick replies to say no. Have polite negative quick responses that people can use without feeling bad about it.
Give the user a way to re-engage with the bot at the end of the conversations. Craft a response that allows the users to re-engage the bot later.
Create chatbot
Churn rate
The churn rate is expressed in terms of interest or money and refers to the clients who have left the company. Thus the fall of incomes is implied. Calculation of this indicator is essential for business as it allows us to detect losses in the competitiveness of the enterprise’s offer.
How to Calculate the Churn Rate
The process of churn rate calculation is relatively simple if the company has a clear definition of a lost client and accounting for this indicator. For example, if your churn rate is 5%, it means that every month your active client base is reduced by 5%. Your churn can be $ 2000: in that case, every month, you lose $ 2000 of income due to the cancellation of customers or their downgrade.
To discover your churn rate, divide the number of lost clients by the number of clients you had at the beginning of the month, for example, and multiply by 100%.
The more buyers you have today, the fewer of them will remain tomorrow with you, and it means that the cost of each new customer, like the difficulty of their search, is steadily growing. If you continue to lose your current users, finding others will be much more difficult.
Customer churn is an indicator of problems with the product itself, therefore it is very important to track churn rate and analyze it. You need to understand what exactly causes the churn customers and eliminate the discovered drawbacks of the product because only this will reduce the churn.
What are the reasons for churn rate
Low products' quality. People became your clients because they needed your product or they appreciated its high quality, but soon it might fall, and they are no longer satisfied, so you have lost them.
Bad service. Not only a product's quality is essential, but the service as well. Your customers might have waited for their order for two weeks, but you promised to deliver it in 5 days, or you sent damaged goods. All your mistakes may easily make your client leave you in search of better service.
Brand loyalty decreases. It happens that prospects find somewhere negative feedback about your company, and it prevents them from dealing with you. Besides, you might have made a mistake once, and it harmed if not even spoilt your reputation. Thus, people lose trust in your brand.
Appealing competitors' offers. Competitors always try to offer more appealing offers for lower prices, and it's quite okay as it makes you develop, improve your business. Mostly, people choose something cheaper, or they are merely interested in new and original products and services.
Personal reasons. Reasons like a change of interests, needs, preferences, income decrease.
How to reduce the churn rate
Of course, it is impossible to avoid churn, but you can reduce it. Churn rate means dissatisfaction with your business. Who knows the reasons better if not your clients? Ask them! You should establish and maintain relationships with them not only to get your regular revenue but to improve.
Ask your clients what they are not satisfied with, what can be improved, or what they expect from your service/products.
Create a questionnaire where you can ask, "What should we improve in our service to make it better?" Mention that you will surely take into account customers' pieces of advice.
Make it easy for subscribers to leave feedback about your work.
Don't forget to reward your loyal customers, offering them special discounts.
So, there are many chances to reduce the churn rate, but it takes much time and effort. Analyze your work, communicate with your clients, and take the necessary steps to improve!
Certification mark
A certification mark is alabel on a product that indicatesits compliance with the existing standards and regulations. It helps companies show consumers that their productsare high-quality,meetcertainrequirements, andhave the necessary documentation.
In this article, we’lltalk about whata certification mark is, clarify the difference between a certification mark and a trademark, and learn how to obtain this mark.
What does a certification mark indicate?
A certification mark indicates that your products and services have been thoroughly tested in terms of theirquality, safety, and durability. Certification organizations confirm thata product meets the existing standards and let companies use a specific type of certification mark for their goods. It shows that there is an agreement between a producer and national testing organizations. This agreement controls the safety and quality of products from different brands all over the world.
If a product or service has a certification mark, it meets the existing requirements of certification centers. If a government agency registers a certification mark, it approves the product’s quality. There are different types of marks. They can show the specific region an item comes from and how it was produced. For example, ifa product was created from recycled materials, you’ll see it on its certification mark.
There are no special rules forcertification marks. They don’t need to include some special kind of wording,but you can often encounter goods with the word “certified” on their packaging.
Now that you know why brands need certification marks, it’s time tofind out what the difference isbetween certification marks and trademarks— sometimes people use these terms interchangeably, though they denote different processes.
Certification Mark vs. Trademark
People confuse these two terms, so we’ll provide a detailed description of each. This way, you’ll be able to identify whethersomeone is talking about a certification mark or trademark.
A certification mark is alabel thatindicates that a product complies with the standards and requirements of certification organizations. Theyevaluatethe safety, quality, material, and other characteristics of goods and servicesand decide if they comply with a certain set of standards. A certification mark supports the agreement between producers of goods and testing organizationson a national level.
A trademark is a word, symbol, or phrase designed toindicate that a product or service was produced by a specific company. It prevents any infringements or negative influences onsuch companies’ reputations from other businesses.A registered word, symbol, or design associated with your products allows you toprotect your brandfrom being brought down by competitors’ dishonest acts.
In a nutshell, a certification mark indicates that an item is producedin compliance with generally accepted rules and standards, whereas a trademark helps itsproducer protect their ownership rights ontheir products and services.
The difference is clear now, so let’s proceed to the next section todiscover how toregister a certification mark.
Howdo you acquire a certification mark?
Althoughthe process of acquiring a certification marktakes some time and effort, itisworth it in the end, as your products’ quality, materials, and origin will be nationally recognized.
To get a certification mark, you need tohave the following documents:
alegal name and physical and email address;
alegal entity type;
citizenship (the US or a foreign country);
a detailed description of your certification mark;
an English translation (for those who have their documents in a foreign language);
the list of goods for which you want to get a certification mark;
a drawing of yourcertification mark;
a filing fee (chargedby a government agency) and a filing basis.
Once you have all the documents from the list above, you can apply to get a certification mark. To do it, use the Trademark Electronic Application System. You’llbe notifiedwhenyourcertification mark is ready.
To recap, certification marks differ based on the products you use them for butare similar in their purpose — protecting customers’ rights. They prove that certain products and services are safe and created according to generally accepted standards.
Click-through rate
A click-through rate (or CTR) is a metric that determines the number of clicks on email links from the number of delivered messages. For YouTube videos, it shows the percentage of clicks from the number of impressions (times when a video has been surfaced by YouTube algorithm.) In Google Ads, CTR is the number of clicks on the ads from the number of times they’ve been viewed.
In this video, the LIKE.TG marketer offers eight tips to improve email CTR.
Why is tracking a click-through rate important?
It’s a crucial digital marketing metric that helps companies monitor performance of their email marketing campaigns, YouTube videos, and PPC advertising. You can’t analyze how users engage with different types of content emotionally. However, people express their interest when they click through your content. This allows you to nurture them to the next lead funnel stage. Without tracking this metric, it will be completely unclear what impact your marketing campaigns make on your audience.
CTR indicates how effective your marketing approaches and methods are, as well as how accurate you target your audience. This metric also identifies whether you speak your clients’ language and whether you thought out your promotion campaign well. A click-through rate also allows you to compare your current campaigns with previous campaigns and realize if you move in the right direction. A low click-through rate is a wake-up call that tells you’ve made a mistake somewhere.
Let’s find out how to track this metric on different internet marketing channels.
How to Measure a Click-Through Rate
CTR formula for email campaigns
CTR formula for YouTube videos
CTR formula for PPC ads
CTR is calculated similarly for each channel where marketers use this KPI. Let’s see how to check your click-through rate on different platforms.
CTR formula for email campaigns
Here’s how to measure a click-through rate of your email campaign.
Email CTR = Number of clicks/Number of delivered emails x 100
A click-through rate, alongside the open rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, etc., are automatically tracked after sending your email campaigns with LIKE.TG. This detailed statistical report looks like an infographic, so it’s easy to analyze.
You can also go beyond email CTR with a click map. It allows you to track precisely the links users click in the email. Here’s how this feature looks.
CTR formula for YouTube videos
Here’s how to calculate the YouTube video click-through rate.
YouTube video CTR = Number of clicks on the ad/Number of impressions
You can analyze CTR, watch time, average view duration, and the number of unique users in the “Analytics” tab in your YouTube Studio. A report shows a 4.9% click-through rate for videos over the last 28 days.
CTR formula for PPC ads
You can analyze this and more metrics in Google AdSense — a platform for tracking your advertisements’ efficiency.
PPC ads CTR = Number of clicks on the ad/Number of impressions
Here’s the “Home” tab in AdSense, where you can analyze your estimated earnings, including earnings by country, and performance metrics, including the number of page views, clicks, and CTR.
What is the average click-through rate?
This metric drastically differs between channels, industries, and brands. Let’s get acquainted with this data across the three channels:
Average CTR in email marketing. According to HubSpot, the highest average CTR is from 8.5% to 9.3% in retail, health, and manufacturing industries. The lowest average is from 6.8% to 7.1% in real estate and financial fields.
Average CTR for YouTube videos. According to YouTube, half of all videos on the platform have CTR from 2% to 10%.
Average CTR in PPC ads. According to WordStream, the highest average CTR for display ads is 3.4% for online dating industries. The lowest CTR is 1.3% for industrial services and legal industries
Let’s now find out how to improve your CTR for each channel.
5 Best Practices to Improve Email CTR
Improve your open rate first
Format your emails correctly
Personalize your messages
Use a straightforward CTA
Run A/B testing
The key to success in email marketing is to build long-lasting relationships with your audience, share relevant content, and maintain your email list healthy. Let’s see five specific tips that are solely aimed at improving your click-through rate.
Improve your open rate first. The open rate shows how many people opened your message. If this metric is low, so will be your CTR. Create catchy and relevant subject lines, enrich them with preheader text, and clean your email list from inactive email addresses to improve your open rate.
Format your emails correctly. Make sure your email looks professional and has a responsive design, so that it displays well on all devices including smartphones. Users will be less likely to engage with wrongly formatted email, in fact, they may even unsubscribe or mark your email as spam.
Personalize your messages. Segment your audience into groups that have common interests. This will help you create relevant and personalized emails and come up with irresistible offers and discounts at the right time. With personalization, you can bring more value to your audience, increasing CTR.
Use a straightforward CTA. It’s best to use only one call to action to better focus subscriber attention. A good CTA should tell users what their next step is. If you promote language courses, your call to action should say “Learn more” or “Buy now” in case you’ve already described all the details in the email. If you send an abandoned cart email, it’s best if your CTA says “Proceed to checkout” or “Return to cart.”
Run A/B testing. This feature allows you to compare different variations of subject lines, CTAs, text, images to find out what works best. A/B testing is free for LIKE.TG users.
Let’s see how to get more clicks on your videos.
3 Best Practices to Improve CTR for YouTube Videos
Work on your title and thumbnail
Adjust your content for your target audience
Analyze your audience’s retention
Like in email marketing, the quality of your content is crucial for generating more clicks and views. Here’s what you should try to improve things.
Work on your title and thumbnail. If your video gets many impressions on YouTube while only a few people click to watch it, it means your title and thumbnail are not catchy, or the video itself doesn’t meet user expectations.
Adjust your content for your target audience. Define your target audience, what language they speak, as well as their needs and pain points. Stepping into your viewers’ shoes is a great way to create awesome content that users will likely engage with and click at.
Analyze your audience’s retention. Look for patterns in your audience retention graphs. This will help you understand why users close your video without watching to the end and what holds their attention. Use these insights to craft better content and increase your CTR.
6 Best Practices to Improve your PPC ads CTR
Use a countdown timer to create FOMO
Use ad extensions
Put the primary keyword in the ad’s URL
Use a straightforward CTA in your banner ads
Test different ad types
Use remarketing
Digital ads have the lowest CTR among other channels, but immerse global reach of these advertisements makes it worth a while. Let’s review six tips to improve it.
Use a countdown timer to create FOMO. It’s a good idea to add time-sensitivity to your ad. If you tailor your ads to the right audience, this technique will help you win more clicks.
Use ad extensions. These extensions allow you to upgrade your search ads on Google. Using them, you can enrich your ad snippet in SERP with specific location, contact, ordering, and app information. You can attract more users to your site by showing them specific details, for instance, product prices.
Put the primary keyword in the ad’s URL. Users who see your ad in Google SERP will notice that your company specializes in a certain field such as yoga classes. This will add more reasoning to click through your ad.
Use a straightforward CTA in your banner ads. Clarify what happens when the user clicks on the ad. People have a short attention span, so you need to catch their focus with a clear CTA right away. Any unclarity will reduce the number of clicks on your ads.
Test different ad types. Try different types of ads, including search, display, and location ads. You never know which types work better for your industry unless you try.
Use remarketing. This form of online advertisement allows you to show your ads to users who have previously interacted with your ad multiple times. Although some people find this irritating, it may help you drive more warm leads to your website.
Congratulations, you’ve learned what CTR is in digital marketing! We hope this guide will help you improve your CTR.
Chatbot platform
A chatbot platform is a service that allows marketers to create and maintain chatbots for various messengers, like Facebook Messenger and Telegram.
In this video, Anna shares some tips on how to use chatbots and make your conversions fly through the roof.
Chatbot marketing is gaining popularity among many businesses today. In 2020, there are 40 million businesses on Facebook Messenger with 300,000 active chatbots. Thanks to services like LIKE.TG, MobileMonkey, ManyСhat, and more, it has become nearly effortless to create a useful chatbot without any coding experience.
Chatbot platforms are convenient tools that help companies automate various touchpoint interactions with their audience, such as ticket booking, placing orders, sharing updates, news, etc.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of using a chatbot platform for your business.
Why are chatbot platforms important?
Provide universal tools for creating chatbots
Help identify the best messengers for your business
Simplify multichannel marketing
Help track your overall chatbot marketing efficiency
Here are four key reasons to include a chatbot platform in your overall digital marketing plan:
It provides universal tools for creating chatbots. An efficient chatbot platform offers a set of tools to build chatbots for different messengers — all in one place. This means that you won’t need to try different chatbot builders to create a chatbot for Facebook, Telegram, or WhatsApp. Besides, an all-in-one chatbot platform has one customer support team that can help you set up and run your chatbots on all the messengers you use.
It helps identify the best messengers for your business. Using a chatbot platform, you can test the efficiency of chatbots for various messengers, and determine which medium — e.g., Facebook, WhatsApp, or Telegram — is the most effective for your audience. After that, you can direct all of your efforts in one place, especially if your business is on a tight budget.
It simplifies multichannel marketing. A chatbot platform helps users implement a successful multichannel marketing strategy that saves time and money while improving their relationships with the audience. By actively using chatbots, you can collect new leads for your business. Besides, having one more marketing channel allows you to move your existing audience between channels, providing value, and a more personalized experience.
It helps track your overall chatbot marketing efficiency. You can easily track the efficiency of each chatbot you have with a wide range of statistics. The main stats for measuring chatbot’s effectiveness are the number of sent and opened messages and redirects to your website. Some services display these metrics using a click map.
Now, let’s pay attention to some factors to keep in mind when choosing a chatbot platform for your business.
How to Choose a Chatbot Platform
Multiple communication channels
Multi-language support
Automation
Personalization tools
UX
Free plan availability
It’s necessary to find a chatbot platform that fits your business needs. Your choice depends on your goals, the chatbot’s functionality, and pricing. Here’s a list of factors to consider when choosing a chatbot platform:
Multiple communication channels. It’s best if a chatbot platform enables you to create chatbots for various messengers and multiple social media pages. If it does, you can quickly increase your market share and overcome the competitors.
Multi-language support. It should enable you to create chatbots that can “speak” different languages. Ideally, it should automatically translate inquiries from one language to another so the support team can handle issues for users all around the globe.
Automation. A good chatbot is a multifunctional system, able to automate processes beyond auto-replies. It should answer FAQ, guide users towards making orders or booking seats for an event, redirect users to specific pages or a manager, etc.
Personalization tools. Marketers should take advantage of all the user data they collect to create a deeply personalized user experience with their chatbots. Highly personalized chatbots include users’ names in messages and create specific flows based on their unique position in the lead funnel.
UX. Creating chatbots should be intuitive and straightforward. Any company, be it a small family business or a large enterprise, should be able to design chatbots without coding skills.
Free plan availability. A free trial is necessary to get acquainted with a chatbot platform’s functionality. It’s best to create some test chatbots before upgrading to a paid plan.
For that reason, we’ve reviewed some chatbot platforms that offer a free plan. Before you decide which chatbot platform is worth your time and effort, let’s compare a few of them.
Best Chatbot Platforms for 2022
LIKE.TG
Chatfuel
MobileMonkey
All professional chatbot platforms have the following basic functionality: adding images, audio, video, text, files, and quick response buttons.
Let’s focus on the value these three platforms provide.
LIKE.TG
Functionality. LIKE.TG is an omnichannel marketing platform that allows you to combine channels like chatbots, email, SMS, web push notifications into an integrated digital marketing strategy. Its chatbot platform has a convenient and user-friendly chatbot builder to develop chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram. It allows you to gather leads for your chatbot using a subscription widget. The service provides tools to create sequential auto reply flows based on predefined and custom-made triggers.
LIKE.TG also allows you to send webhooks via chatbots, collect data based on user input, and assign variables and tags to particular contacts based on their activity. You can also send promotional and educational campaigns, updates, and notifications to chatbot subscribers.
Here’s an example of a chatbot flow created with LIKE.TG in under an hour. All messages of the flow are placed within one convenient interface so you can see the entire chatbot. This particular chatbot is designed to help users choose a new book by providing recommendations. A book shop can use a similar flow to increase sales and reduce the workload on their sales team.
Free plan. The service allows you to create up to three bots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram using up to 10 variables, and send up to 10,000 messages monthly to an unlimited number of bot subscribers.
Paid plan. This plan starts at $9.85/month and lets you send unlimited messages, provides unlimited bots, variables, and tags. Plans are based on your number of subscribers.
Chatfuel
Functionality. Chatfuel bots for Facebook Messenger, save user inputs, and export data to Google Sheets and Google Analytics. This chatbot platform allows you to use an A/B testing plugin and an RSS plugin to share content from RSS feeds via chatbots with ease.
Here’s a similar chatbot for a book shop. There is a welcome image on the left-hand side and blocks that you can connect with each other. On the right-hand side, you can customize these blocks and create the right sequence of messages, images, quick replies, etc. Although you cannot see the entire chatbot at once, you can test it as if you are on Facebook Messenger right in the chatbot builder.
Free plan. This chatbot platform provides basic bot-building features to design a simple chatbot and allows you to send campaigns to the first 1,000 active bot subscribers.
Paid plan. A Pro plan starts at $15/mo based on the number of users connected to a chatbot and allows you to use conversation handover, with the ability to delete inactive users. A Premium plan offers custom pricing, allows you to send cart reminders for Shopify, and provides an individual account manager assigned to you and bot-building help.
MobileMonkey
Functionality. The platform works for Facebook Messenger and website bots. It provides OmniChat technology that enables you to write chat content once and use it in every chat platform. The service allows you to segment your audience based on custom tags and provides useful integrations with Zapier.
MobileMonkey also offers a chatbot widget for lead generation, integrations with a landing page builder, custom attributes, and tags. Besides, you can use helpful tools for setting QA triggers, bot cloning, and template sharing. The content of a bot made with MobileMonkey can be organized into folders connected to your flows.
Here’s another replica of a book shop chatbot created with MobileMonkey. Similarly to Chatfuel, this chatbot platform allows you to structure your bot in separate folders and custom blocks.
Free plan. This chatbot platform limits you to 1,000 monthly messages to an unlimited number of subscribers and lets you create subscription widgets, attributes, and tags.
Paid plan. The Pro plan allows you to send up to 2,000 messages for $19/mo, the Pro Unicorn plan offers 6,500 messages for $49/mo, and the Team plan allows up to 5 users’ to collaborate and a 1-hour premium onboarding session for $299/mo. Paid plans allow you to use manager handover and provide detailed bot analytics.
This has been a small overview of chatbot platforms, you can view a more detailed comparison of 8 chatbot builders.
Congratulations, you’ve learned what a chatbot platform is. We hope you take advantage of LIKE.TG’s free plan and create your first chatbot today!
Try LIKE.TG's chatbot platform
Cause marketing
Cause marketing is an approach in which a profit and non-profit organization collaborate and create campaigns that help drive profits and bring social change. It carries corporate social responsibility and activist messages in its marketing campaigns. This strategy allows a company to improve its brand image, stand out among competitors, change people’s behavior, and establish strong connections with communities.
In this article, we’ll cover the importance, benefits, types, and examples of cause marketing. We’ll also figure out how to create an effective cause marketing strategy.
Why is cause marketing important?
More and more people are conscious of environmental and social problems. According to statistics, 87% of consumers have a better perception of a brand that cares and supports environmental and social initiatives. 88% say they will demonstrate more loyalty towards such a company. Cause marketing helps companies improve customer loyalty, retention, and draw attention to problems around us. It’s beneficial for the revenue of the company and society. This tactic encompasses collaboration between profit and non-profit organizations and campaigns aimed to contribute to charities and social communities.
Since social consciousness and the need for sustainability have become increasingly popular, brands should adapt. In today’s world, socially responsible companies are at the top of consumers’ lists. Cause marketing allows brands to make good profits and bring social change. The collaboration of profit and the non-profit company brings more awareness and consciousness.
There are many reasons to implement cause marketing, especially when you know its benefits. So let’s figure out what they are.
Benefits of Cause Marketing
Cause marketing is an excellent idea for nonprofit organizations whose budgets and resources are usually limited. It helps nonprofits gain brand awareness and draw attention to the problems they raise. Moreover, this approach brings benefits for the corporate partner as well. The pros are:
positive brand image;
social responsibility;
competitive advantage;
strong relationships with communities;
conscious employees;
an increase in sales volume;
customer loyalty and trust;
satisfied customers’ expectations.
Now that you know the advantages, it’s time to explore the types of cause marketing campaigns you can leverage for your business.
Types of Cause Marketing Campaigns
Companies implement various forms of cause marketing campaigns. It’s time to explore each of them to identify the one that suits you the best.
Point-of-sale. Once customers want to pay for products, a cashier encourages them to donate. Consumers can see different advertisements about donations at the register. If customers buy online, a company can invite them to donate during the checkout.
Buy one, give one. Customers purchasing products automatically donate money for environmental or social change. Many companies that plant a tree for every product a customer purchases. WeWOOD, Baron Fig, Wave Tribe are excellent examples of brands that strive to save forests in different parts of the world. TOMS is one of the brands that contributed to “buy one, give one” becoming popular. This for-profit company donated a free pair of shoes for every pair sold. Now the brand has slightly different tactics. Once you buy a pair of TOMS shoes, you’ll be provided with a cause to support.
Purchase triggered donation. After people buy products, they automatically donate to a certain cause. There are many issues people can support: poverty, inequality, human rights, water pollution, etc.
Digital program. This type includes using web services and social media platforms. With their help, companies can collect donations.
The types are clear, so let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to create an effective cause marketing strategy.
How to create an effective cause marketing strategy?
The effectiveness of your campaign depends on the way you create it. We’ll walk you through the steps to develop a perfect campaign that encourages people to be socially responsible.
Choose the cause. Once you decide to employ a cause marketing strategy, you need to decide about the issue to raise. When choosing one, consider your business. It’s always a good idea to select a cause related to what you do. For example, shoe companies can leverage the “one pair of shoes bought = one pair of shoes donated” approach. If the cause is closely connected to your company, your team will be more professional in developing a strategy.
Define your goals. Once you select the cause, it’s time to think of the goals. Figure out the things you want to achieve through this campaign. For example, plant 10,000 trees, donate $100,000 to animal shelters, attain 1000 new customers, or gain brand awareness. Spell out all your goals to analyze the results and see if you succeed in achieving them.
Select the perfect timing. You should use resources efficiently and select the best time for your event. Timing depends on numerous factors such as corporate schedules, days associated with your campaign, or a season. To have enough time for campaign development, avoid a busy season. Make sure to determine the right time for the launch and campaign’s length.
Involve customers. You need to encourage as many people as possible to participate. There are different ways you can do it, mainly with the help of social media. Promote your cause marketing campaign on your social media platforms to hook the audience and get them involved. As an option, consider creating a hashtag and placing it under related videos and photos. It will drive customers’ interest.
Leverage marketing channels. As we’ve already mentioned, one of the most effective ways to involve people is through marketing channels. You can leverage popular social platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well as inform customers about your campaign through emails and messengers. This way, you’ll reach more people and encourage them to support your initiative.
Implement a visible and clear CTA. Ensure to include a visible call-to-action in all your messages. Customers will support your campaign by making donations and sharing information with others.
Now that you have a clear picture of the process, let’s see some examples to get inspired.
Examples of Cause Marketing Campaigns
We can name dozens of brands that successfully implemented cause marketing campaigns and resonated with customers. We’ll now review the most outstanding ones so that you can grab some inspiration. Hope these examples will encourage you to create a unique campaign that drives change.
The Body Shop
The company is actively involved in environmental protection and was created on these principles. However, you can not only see “100% Vegan” on the product packaging and “Against animal testing” on its website. The Body Shop constantly creates campaigns that promote the protection of the environment and support social responsibility. Let’s review one of the latest ones called “Time To Care” in more detail.
The famous cosmetics company decided to show appreciation to healthcare workers for their dedicated work. With this initiative, the brand is expected to support people’s health and wellness. The company donated around 510,000 products to hospitals fighting the effects of Covid-19.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Since Monterey Bay Aquarium had to close its doors for customers, there were no sales. Aquarium had no income. Yet, animals still needed usual care from the staff. To solve the money problem, marketers decided to start a YouTube channel and post videos about aquatic life. This way, they succeeded in educating viewers about aquatic life and raising different animal issues.
This public aquarium also showed the "Act for the Ocean" campaign. It aimed at educating people about climate change, plastic pollution, protection of ecosystems, and making them more conscious.
Cause marketing is a good way to raise questions our world is facing. With its help, you can benefit by providing help to those who need it and establishing awareness.
Chatbot marketing
Chatbot marketing is a way to promote products and services using a chatbot — a computer application that carries conversations with users by a predetermined scenario or with the help of AI. Brands create this virtual assistant with achatbot builder, and connect it with messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, etc., or add it to their website. LIKE.TG provides a visual chatbot builderwhich allows you tocreate a chatbot for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram for free.
In this video, Alex shares tips on how to increase engagement on social media, promote products, and nurture leads with chatbots.
The first “chatterbot” named Eliza was developed in 1967 to demonstrate communication between humans and machines. Today, chatbots help companies achieve a high level of user engagement and solve users' problems, speaking with leads right in their private space. It promises the growth of profits but, at the same time, requires responsibility and respect.
Benefits of Chatbot Marketing
Saves time and money
Helps segment traffic
Provides a quick response
Speeds up the payment process
Fits any business
Boosts engagement
Gives data for analysis
Helps in lead nurturing
Let's discuss every aspect in detail.
Save time and money. A chatbot allows your business to serve more clients with fewer resources and efforts. Unlike human beings, the chatbot needs no salary and works 24/7, meaning that creating a chatbot is a one-time investment.
Help to segment traffic. Chatbots diversify your audience by leading the conversation in different directions. For example, a person showing interest in pricing is likely to be a warm lead, so the chatbot may suggest making an order right in the chat. In case people need more information, the chatbot should give all the necessary details about your product or service.
Provide a quick response. An instant reply enables users to solve their problems fast and results in a positive user experience for your clients. If performed correctly, the chatbot will improve your brand image and grow the feeling of trust associated with your company.
Speeds up the paying process. You can utilize a chatbot for completing orders without making users move to a website. Making orders and paying right inthe chat takes less time and effort from your customers to buy from you. For that, you need to connect PayPal or other money transfer services toyour chatbot. How beneficial for eCommerce stores!
Fits any business. You can design a chatbot to cover various processes, regardless of whether you own a small family business or a vast enterprise. It is a universal marketing channel, and LIKE.TG enables creating chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram.
Boosts engagement. The conversation is held in messaging apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc., with an enormous audience — around 5 billion users, according to MessengerPeople. This means that you will have a chance to communicate with a highly targeted audience on a globalscale.
Gives data for analysis. All data collected with the help of your chatbotgives you insights on your audience’s needs and preferences. With this data, you can adapt your chatbot marketing strategy as well as overall marketing to achieve better financial and communication results.
Help in lead nurturing. With chatbot marketing, you can smoothly and rapidly move prospects down the sales funnel. If you sell shoes, you can show different models, colors, characteristics — anything to warm leads and help them decide that your services worth their money.
What can a chatbot help you with?
Making orders
Customer support
Scheduling meetings
Tracking orders
Sharing news and updates
Now,that we know whychatbots are essential for marketing, let’s review some functions it can handle for your business.
Enabling making orders. If you run an eCommerce store, selling clothes, food, accessories, etc., a chatbot is a lifesaver since it allows taking orders directly in the chat. In case a user is yet not ready to make a purchase, a chatbot can at least tighten the search before the customer contacts a real person. For an organic food store, it would be helpful to find out which vegetables person needs — and only then address them to the sales rep.
Delivering customer support. A chatbot is a great assistant for answering FAQs. Besides, working 24/7, the chatbot helps solve the problem of different time zones. For a financial consultation agency, located in the US with the better part of its customer base in India, a chatbot would help to avoid hiring customer support on a double-shift basis.
Scheduling meetings. A chatbot may be extremely helpful for one-person brands in any industry — hair salons, fitness trainers, DJ services. You can connect it to Google Calendar, and your virtual assistant will take care of appointments while you give a haircut, move your body, or spin vinyl.
Tracking orders. “It said my package would come in three days, but I never received it!” — chatbots liberate you from that hassle that always appears with selling goods. A sophisticated chatbot allows tracking packages, while the simplerone can inform a person about the shipping and delivery automatically. Wouldn’t it be great to ask for a review a couple of weeks later and offer another product?
Sharing news and updates. When people start communication with your brand, you can suggest that you will be providing them with the latest news: new collections of clothes, fashion shows, etc. A chatbot can help you stay in touch with your audience, keeping people engaged.
Well, you can hire developers for creating a very expensive chatbot or try out a predesigned chatbot that solves a particular task or create one without a line of code in a chatbot builder. With LIKE.TG, you can create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and Telegram without any coding skills.
Check out some effective use cases: «Real Facebook Chatbot Use Cases to Inspire You».
In the next section, you'll get to know how to create a chatbot and connect it to your Facebook page. Stay tuned!
How to create a chatbot for free with LIKE.TG
Our chatbot builder doesn't require you to know code or have any technical skills. Creating a chatbot flow has never been easier. You can set up auto-replies for different channels to automate answering clients' FAQs, handle orders, introduce leads and customers to your service, receive payments, etc. Connecting a chatbot is the same process for all the channels, so let's take Facebook Messenger as an example.
Step 1. Connect your Facebook account
Register with LIKE.TG if you haven't got an account yet. Go to the "Chatbots" section and click "Connect" near the necessary channel.
Then, sign in with Facebook.
Step 2. Select the necessary page
This is the page you want to create a chatbot for.
Step 3. Grant permissions
Enable all the permissions to access subscribers' Facebook messages.
Step 4. Connect your chatbot
Click "Connect" near the necessary Facebook page.
To get more detailed instructions, follow this step-by-step guide in our Knowledge Base.
Find out how to connect an Instagram chatbot: «How to create an Instagram chatbot».
Find out how to connect a WhatsApp chatbot: «How to create a WhatsApp chatbot».
Find out how to create a Telegram chatbot: «How to create and connect a Telegram chatbot».
Let’s now find out how companies from various sectors utilize chatbot in their marketing strategies.
Chatbot Marketing Examples
Travel and hospitality. In this example, booking.com helps users find apartments based on keywords that stand for location.
Restaurants. A fast-food restaurant called Wingstop allows users to make orders without going to their website.
Travel.Below is Eddy Travels bot which allows users to find the necessary flight via Telegram app. Check out!
Retail. Louis Vuitton helps its users choose by dividing their products into different categories according to color and price range, gives the optionto contact a real person.
Chatbot Marketing Tips
Find out the FAQs of your business
Build specific conversation tunnels
Test your chatbots
Make your bot stand out
Ask permission for sharing news
Ask for data
Promote your chatbot
Continuereading to get more information on the subject.
Find out the FAQs for your business. To create a useful chatbot, examine which difficulties people usually have and what they don’t understand when using your product or service. You can analyze the data within any marketing platform you already use, by giving a small survey or getting feedback from your customer support team.
Build specific conversation tunnels. Your chatbot should be very specific when solving problems. Any step aside from a particular task will result in an unpleasant experience for users since chatbots are still limited in understanding what people want. Limit the choice of remarks for the user, create a conversation tunnel — one for each task like answering FAQs, confirming orders, or scheduling meetings. In case your chatbot doesn’t understand a query, let people know they can contact a human being anytime.
Test your chatbots. Try a chatbot yourself first, or show it to your friends and colleagues. After you launch a chatbot, analyze the way your audience interacts with a chatbot to get insights on how to improve it.
Make your bot stand out. Since a chatbot aims to simulate a real-person conversation, give it a name depending on your industry. If you teach coding, let it be Cody, or Moto — if you offer car rental services. Make sure the conversational style correlates with your overall brand image and your niche, i.e., a formal manner for finances, medical care, insurance, and a more informal style for other services.
Ask permission for sharing news. Once the user starts communication, you can send scheduled messages with updates and news. But don’t think it allows you to bombard users: they will immediately stop it without thinking twice. Ask for permission first and agree upon the frequency of messaging from your side. It’d better be not too often.
Ask for data. It’s okay to ask users to share some data like their name, age, location, etc. Your motivation is to provide a more personalized way of interaction in the future. Besides, ask your audience to leave their email addresses to continue communication on other platforms if chatting isn’t very convenient for them.
Promote your chatbot. Make sure people know about your chatbot.
To enrich your knowledge, follow chatbot best practicesto know how to create a chatbot that will give your audience positive user experience.
Create chatbot
C2B
Consumer-to-business is a business model that entails a customer making a product that a brand uses to get a competitive advantage. It includes consumer-generated blogs, websites, videos, and social media poststhat help a company accomplish specific tasks,enhance its business wellness, and reach its defined goals.
In this article, we’ll review the benefits and examples of the C2B model and compare the consumer-to-business and business-to-consumer models.
Benefits of the C2B Model
In the C2B model, everything revolves around two parties: a consumer and a business. In this scenario, a customer can have a product that might attract a company, for example, a blog, website, or account with a large following for which the consumer can create reviews, videos, or social media posts. This person can market a brand’s product for free or for a certain fee. A consumer can write a review or share acompany’s product witha large followingto get paid.
In their turn, companies need the C2B model because they can gain the following benefits:
customer loyalty;
brand awareness;
cheap advertising;
product developmentinsights;
better relationships with customers;
higher revenue;
trust and credibility.
Now that you know all theC2Bpros, let’s take a closer look at the C2B and B2C models to compare them.
C2B vs. B2C
Consumer-to-business and business-to-consumer are two different business models that can sometimes confuse readers. That’s why we’ll uncover their main features to make this difference clear.
C2B is a business model in which a consumer becomes a product or service provider for a certain company. This person often has acertain talent and tools that can help promote someone’s business. Companies pay this customer a certain amount of money for the services rendered. Such services include:
writing reviews for personal blogs or websites;
sharing posts on social media;
creating photos and videos.
Theprimary goal is to get closer to thebrand’s audience and effectively promote and sellits product.
Let’s take food brands, for example.A company canfinda food blogger and ask this person to promote the brand’s new seasoning in the blogger’s next video. If the influencer agrees, then the brand has to pay for the advertising. The company can provide the food blogger with free products or pay a certain fee.
B2C is a business model in which companies sell directly to consumers, which means there is no need for a mediator. Customers can visit a company’s website, choose a product, and have it delivered within days or weeks. The B2C model has lots of advantages, ascustomers from remote areas can buy products they need online at a lower cost.
For example,Amazon sells directly to customers via the internet. A customer selectsa sellerand delivery optionand receives their ordered product.
Now when the difference between these two terms is clear, let’s proceed to the next section to explore more examples of the customer-to-business model.
Examples of the C2B Model
There are many excellent examples of the C2B model. They include paid testimonials and reviews, data sharing, and referral programs. Since the freelance market is increasing rapidly, companies can make use of freelance experts. For instance, copywriters can create compelling copies and post them on their blogs, sites, and social media profiles for an arranged fee.
Brands in the photography industry need professional photographers to get some unusual, unique, and fascinating images. They include Shutterstock and Unsplash, companies that exist thanks to user-generated content. Freelance photographers help them thrive and boost their revenue.
Another great example is a customer who receives a free sample of a product in exchange for a post ontheir personal social media account, whichbrings benefits toboth parties. A customer gets a long-awaited product, and a brandgets a great review.
Congrats, you now know the basics of the C2B business model and have a clear picture of how it works. Hope this information helps you get answers to your questions.
Capital goods
Capital goods are tangible assets a company needs for manufacturing products that will later be sold to customers. They entail tools, buildings, equipment, or the machinery necessary to make final products.
Why are capital goods important?
It’s impossible to run a business without a building, equipment, tools, or machinery which aren’t at hand. These physical assets are the main factors of production that ensure the manufacturing process of finished goods.
In today’s economy, capital goods play an important role. Not only do they enable companies to manufacture goods but serve as a barrier for companies to start their production process. Sure, equipment and tools are quite expensive, but the process is impossible without them. That’s why some businesses might seek help from another company to supply products.
These goods are not necessarily presented in the form of machinery and equipment to manufacture products. Various devices from the electronics industry also belong to capital goods as well as the ones found in the service sector: coffee machines, fans, hair clippers, and many more.
Now that you know why such goods are essential for your business, it’s time to find out the main features of capital and consumer goods and the difference between them.
Capital Goods vs. Consumer Goods
Goods can be divided into two groups based on the way they are used. A capital good is used to manufacture final products, whereas a consumer good is a final good sold to customers and further used by them for their purposes.
The same product can be both capital and consumer based on how it’s used. Let’s take a peach, for example. A peach you buy at a supermarket to eat is a consumer good. However, it becomes a capital good when a company buys a peach to make fresh peach juice. As you can see, the main difference between them is the way of utilization.
Capital goods are usually used by companies that aim at manufacturing products and services. These are buildings, equipment, tools, and vehicles. They have no connection with financial capital that defines the funds invested in a company to bring benefit to its owner.
It’s worth noting that companies don’t sell capital goods, but they sell consumer goods. That’s why this type of goods can’t bring direct profit like consumer goods. Companies use loans, investments, or savings to obtain vehicles, buildings, machinery, and equipment for their business because their price can be too high.
Durable goods play a significant role in improving your company’s capacity to manufacture products. Simply put, they can help businesses produce products fast and in large quantities.
Consumer goods are final goods people buy for consumption and aren’t further used to produce other goods. You see such products in your everyday life: clothing, food, electronics, and more. There are three types of final goods:
durable (have a lifespan of 3+ years);
nondurable (have a lifespan of fewer than three years);
services (for example, haircuts).
From a marketing standpoint, these goods can also be divided into several groups: convenience goods (e.g., cheese), specialty goods (e.g., rings), shopping goods (e.g., furniture), and unsought goods (e.g., life insurance).
Now that you know the difference, it’s time to move to the types of capital goods.
Types of Capital Goods
When we discuss capital goods, we don’t necessarily mean fixed assets that include manufacturing equipment. All goods that help produce a product or service are capital goods. You can even find them in the service sector, for example, the equipment hairstylists use, paints for painters, or musical instruments for musicians.
Besides tangible assets, capital goods can also be in the form of intellectual property. Production processes often involve intellectual property and additional investments to manufacture products legally.
Examples of Capital Goods
Every company needs capital goods to manufacture products that are later sold to customers.You can notice a lot of examples of this in your everyday life, especially if you own a big or small business.
Let’s take the service sector, for example. Every hairdresser should have specific equipment and tools to serve clients. All-purpose shears, curling irons, razors, blow dryers are just several goods a salon has. When a client comes, a hairdresser should be ready to meet their wants with the help of proper equipment.
Let’s imagine that you are giving a thought to opening a dairy farm. To get milk, cheese, cream, and butter through milk processing, you need to buy specific equipment and tools. Milk tanks that keep dairy products fresh, cream separators that make low-fat milk and cream, and butter churns to produce butter is the equipment necessary for your farm.
To conclude, a business can’t exist without capital goods since they’re vital for the manufacturing process of final goods. Machinery, property, tools, equipment are all capital goods used in the manufacturing process of products or services.
