数据仓库
Economic value added
Economic value added (EVA) is a measure that reveals the financial performance of a business based on its residual income. It aims to define the value a company generates with the help of the invested funds and improve the generated returns for shareholders.
Why is economic value added important?
Entrepreneurs looking for a measure to figure out the performance of their business often consider their economic value added which is rapidly becoming a preferred indicator. Small and big companies use it to evaluate their actual financial performance.
With EVA, you can get to know where your company directs the invested funds of shareholders and find out whether a certain business can create shareholder wealth. It implies that a company should always make everything possible to enlarge shareholder’s value and be in demand. Simply put, EVA reflects the actual performance of a firm.
Besides depicting businesses’financial performance, the measure encourages companies’ management toevaluate their assets and expenses during the decision-making process. However, the calculations of this indicator can be time-consuming.
EVA can be measured only for a particular timeframe, and it can’t determine the future performance of a particular company. Moreover, if a firm is in the middle of reorganization or considers making big investments of capital, it’s also challenging to obtain this measure.
Apart from reflecting on the performance of a company, EVA can help you find out even more essential facts about your business. In the next part, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of this calculation.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Economic Value Added
The value is common among entrepreneurs who need to see how their business performs with the invested capital and discover some related facts. This measure:
serves as one of the methods to obtain financial data that aims at evaluating your business;
shows how funds are managed;
helps to reveal the working capital availability after the recoupment of its actual opportunity cost;
is used by management to be aware of the company’s situation and check whether their firm performs successfully;
indicates a connection between the use of capital and operating margin;
helps see the opportunities your business has and make improvements to achieve them.
Economic value added is widely used by businesses as an evaluation tool. Nevertheless, you should also be aware of its disadvantages:
it can’t help you define how effectively capital holders use retained profits through project management;
it doesn’t consider the size of your business;
it might overstress the need for businesses to generate results immediately;
it can’t estimate the return on expenses.
This calculation is an essential step for any business. If you’ve decided to estimate EVA for your company, you will need to use a specific formula.
How to Calculate Economic Value Added
EVA is based on residual wealth. It can be estimated by deducting your company’s cost of capital from its profit. The formula was created to calculate the actualeconomic profit of a specific business.
Below you can see the formula with the help of which you can calculate your economic value added.
Where:
NOPAT = Net Operating Profits After Tax.WACC = Weighted Average Cost of Capital.Invested capital = Equity + Long-Term Debt at the Start of the Period.
Economic value added is based on the idea that a business brings profit when it creates additional wealth for the shareholders and leads to higher returns than the cost of capital.
Now that you know how to calculate this essential measure, it’s time to review several ways of increasing EVA for your brand.
How to Increase Economic Value Added
You can improve your EVA by increasing revenues or reducing capital expenses.
Increase profit
To increase revenue, you can consider well-known methods of raising the prices of your products or increasing the number of goods sold to your target audience.
If you decide to charge consumers more for your products, the profit margin will increase. Yet you can’t rule out the possibility that some of your clients will refuse to pay more for a product if you have not enhanced its quality, features, and benefits. In this case, there is a high probability of a decrease in demand and, as a result, a decrease in revenue. That’s why it’s advisable not to increase prices drastically.
It’s a known fact that you can also increase your revenues by selling more goods and services. To meet the demand, you need to produce a considerable number of products. Ensure that the manufacturing cost doesn’t exceed the revenue you can receive.
Simply put, if you want to improve your EVA by increasing the company’s profits, make sure that the marginal revenue is bigger than the marginal costs associated with the production. For example, there is no point in spending $200,000 on productionto earn $150,000.
Reduce capital expenses
Operating expenses and marginal productivity influence your net capital costs. As an entrepreneur, you can decrease operating expenses by asking your creditor to revise the terms of the contract and the interest rate. Try to make the interest rate lower so that you can pay less money. Besides, negotiate a lower cost for the space you rent for your business purposes.
Reaching economies of scale empowers your company to improve marginal productivity. It will enable you to find ways to produce the same quantity of goods at a lower cost. For this purpose, consider creating a better production plan or using new technology.
EVA is a crucial measure that can show you the value your business generates. This, in turn, allows you to improve the generated profit by reducing capital expenses or increasing your revenue.
Email address harvesting
Email address harvesting — is the process of collecting email addresses from different sources for sending illegal bulk email campaigns.
Where do spammers collect email addresses?
random sites and pages
paper and web forms
bought mailing lists
forums
white pages
Spammers use lots of methods to get bulk email addresses. They depend on their skills and method complexity.
Commonly Used Harvesting Methods
Mailing list purchase
Website hacking
Usage of special software or bots
Dictionary attack
Tempting with a freebie
Mailing list purchase. This is the easiest way to get the addresses. One spammer buys an entire list from the other spammer. Remember that once your email falls into the hands of spammers, your email address will travel from list to list.
Website hacking. This method implies hacking the database of a website that is likely to have lots of email addresses, for example, eCommerce. An online store is a good targetbecausehackers may also look for credit card numbers.
Usage of special software or bots. These bots are called harvesters. They scrape the website code to find hidden email addresses.
Dictionary attack. This is an odd but effective harvesting method. Spammers try different addresses before the @ until they match any valid email address at the domain.
Tempting with a freebie. To get any freebie like an e-book, a user should enter an email address, but it doesn't mean a user wants to receive emails from this website. Spammers use these email addresses, as they prove to be valid.
According to the CAN-SPAM Act signed in 2003, email senders are to meet specific requirements. Otherwise, their actions will result in a penalty. Discover the main requirements in this article.
How does LIKE.TG suppress sending spam?
Before sending an email campaign withLIKE.TG, you are to activate your mailing list. Provide us with a detailed description of its source. After analyzing the proofs, we'll notify you whether your description is satisfactory. If not, we'll ask the owners of your email addresses to confirm their desire to receive emails from you.
LIKE.TG also provides an email verification tool. Use it to check if your mailing list contains invalid email addresses. With this tool, you'll stay out of the spam folder.
We strictly support Privacy Policy and Anti-Spam Policy.
eLearning
eLearning is the delivery of educational materials, online courses, training, and lessons through laptops, smartphones, and tablets. It allows students to receive the necessary information anytime from any part of the world.
In this video, a LIKE.TG marketer explains how to start your career in digital education.
In this article, we’ll unveil the benefits and types of eLearning and review the 5 best platforms.
Why is eLearning important?
eLearning empowers students and teachers worldwide to learn and teach remotely. This cost-effective learning approach enables online learners to obtain the necessary skills and knowledge in any university and field they wish, and lets educators monetize their knowledge. People can master new profitable professions through online courses, training, and special programs. Teachers can share their expertise with a wide audience interactively and engagingly. Multimedia lessons encourage sensory engagement and attention to detail.
Online learning meets the needs of a wide audience. Students can access the lessons at any time and from anywhere in the world. They can stop the pre-recorded lesson and resume it. If students prepare for the tests or exams, they can access the course to review it. As a result, knowledge retention increases. If the course is real-time, students can communicate with each other and have open discussions. It leads to improved teamwork and critical thinking.
Now that you know the importance, it’s time to reveal even more advantages of eLearning.
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Benefits of eLearning
You can reap numerous benefits after implementing eLearning. The main of them include:
cost-effectiveness;
sensory engagement;
higher knowledge retention;
the opportunity to combine studies and work;
the possibility to study from any corner of the world;
more insight for educators into students’ response to materials;
teamwork;
better productivity;
customization to students’ needs;
mobile-first design;
flexibility;
less cognitive overload;
increased engagement.
Now that you know the pros, let’s proceed to the next section to explore different types of eLearning content. After reviewing this information, you’ll be able to decide which type meets your main purpose.
Types of eLearning Content
To provide students with the right content, you need to consider several factors, such as learning goals and results, needs, and instructional design. Once you find them, you can identify the most appropriate content formats.
Videos. Video content is always engaging, eye-catching, and interactive. Videos can establish a sensory connection with students and remember materials visually. They are usually shorter than text materials, and people can stay focused on learning. You can connect with your students in real-time or provide them with pre-recorded videos. These videos allow users to review the materials and memorize them better. As a result — better knowledge retention.
eBooks. If you want to provide your learners with manuals, checklists, and step-by-step instructions, you better create eBooks. They are easy to make and will contain all the necessary materials in one place. Learners can store them on their digital devices and access them whenever they wish. eBooks will become sources of information when your students prepare for tests, assessments, quizzes, and exams. They are always on hand.
PowerPoint presentations. A slide presentation is perfect for engagingly presenting the information. Presentations can combine videos, audio, text, and infographics in one slide. This way, you don’t overwhelm students with information and don’t lose their attention. If you succeed in developing an eye-catching and exciting presentation, learners will memorize the most important points in no time. Slides are a great fit for self-paced learning and teacher narration. However, when creating a presentation, include as less text as possible and add visuals.
Podcasts. It’s a new yet effective way of learning. People search for podcasts on specific topics over the internet and study by themselves. Podcasts consist of episodes released on specific dates. Students can find an appropriate podcast and listen to it online. These lessons don’t have a visual element, but learners still perceive information well. This content type best suits topics like communication, body language, the science of happiness, leadership, etc.
Quizzes. This content format motivates students to perform better. You can start your online course or training with a pre-test to evaluate students’ knowledge and skills in a chosen field. The main aim of this test is to show learners what they already know and what they need to study. An effective pre-test should include the main points of your online course. Consider implementing tests once people enroll in your course. You can add them after lessons to review what users learned during this time. Students can memorize the answers. The results are equally important for your team. This way, you can assess students’ progress and figure out what needs your close attention.
eLearning games. Gamification improves the eLearning process and reduces cognitive overload. Games in online learning have become increasingly popular because they are both enjoyable and effective. Gamification is a mix of game mechanics and traditional eLearning activities. Teachers use leaderboards, points, and levels to add incentives so that students actively participate in the process. eLearning games will help you increase engagement and content recall, especially if you teach children. They will be excited to win and automatically will perform the necessary actions.
Now that you know what types to choose for your online course, school, or training, it’s time to unveil the platforms. In the next section, we’ll review the 5 best eLearning platforms in terms of price and functionality. They will speed up the process of online course development.
5 Best eLearning Platforms
You have a wide choice of services. However, before selecting a specific service, you should identify your needs. It’ll help you avoid overpaying for features you won’t use. We’ve listed the 5 best solutions in terms of price, usability, and user experience for you to consider.
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is an all-in-one platform that will help you create your course, promote it through multiple channels, and establish communication with students. The service’s course builder allows you to design appealing online courses, marketing schools, employee training, and customer onboarding. The platform is a great fit for marketing agencies, influencers, HR managers, and experts who want to teach and share their expertise with a wide audience.
LIKE.TG’s course creator empowers you to organize all your useful materials into a single course that will bring new knowledge and professions to students. You can design lessons, sections, tests, quizzes, assessments, and issue certificates of completion. If you can’t manage your online course on your own, you can invite users to become instructors. They will develop tests, check students' grades, and monitor their overall performance. After completing the course, you’ll be able to provide graduates with certificates. LIKE.TG enables you to design them based on your liking. You can promote your online courses via email campaigns, push notifications, SMS, landing pages, chatbots, and live chat on your website created with LIKE.TG.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in LIKE.TG.
Free plan: 3 courses, 200 students, 1 instructor, and 1 GB of file storage space.Paid plan: From $42 for unlimited courses, 1,000 students, 10 instructors, 15 GB of file storage space, personalized course link, and no LIKE.TG branding.
Pathwright
Pathwright is a platform with the necessary tools to design, teach, and learn. It’s a great fit for educators in small to medium-sized businesses who want to find an effective approach to teaching.
With the service, you can organize documents, videos, project instructions, Zoom, and other content into a Path. Add interactive content Blocks to keep every student engaged. The platform enables you to diversify your lessons to your liking and add various types of media, including text, meetings, videos, and quizzes. The final design will look great on desktop and mobile devices.
Pathwright allows you to add moderators to help you with your online course. They can also participate in the lesson development and create tests, quizzes, assessments, and certificates.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in Pathwright.
Free plan: 30-day free trial.Paid plan: From $99 per month for 1,000 students, unlimited paths, 1 cohort, and 1 mentor group.
Teachable
Teachable is a great fit for owners of online businesses. With the platform, you can create a course and instantly sell it within one place. The service offers a built-in sales page creator. It will help you build, grow, and manage an engaging course and coaching business. Marketing agencies, online schools, influencers, teachers, and HR managers use Teachable to create and promote their courses and manage communication with students. As a result, you’ll be able to share your expertise with learners and monetize your knowledge.
The platform’s intuitive builder enables you to create various types of online courses: self-paced courses, cohort-based courses, and live coaching. You don’t have to manage your course on your own. Teachable allows you to add instructors to create lessons, develop quizzes, and issue certificates of completion. Besides, your team can use comments to drive students’ engagement and satisfaction.
If you need some more marketing tools for your online course, you can integrate several useful platforms. The list of integrations includes MailChimp, Zapier, ConvertKit, Google Analytics, and Segment.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in Teachable.
Free plan: Unlimited students, 1 course, 1 admin user, unlimited coaching services.Paid plan: From $39 per month for unlimited students and courses, 2 admin users, and a custom domain.
Podia
Podia is a multifunctional platform that empowers you to design courses, create websites, and build communities. The service helps you handle every step of your online course: the design of your online courses, sales process, and payments.
The platform enables you to develop a bundle of courses, pre-launch courses, cohort-based courses, pre-sell courses, standalone courses, and drip courses. You can add multiple media formats to your online course in Podia’s course builder: videos, text, audio, links, downloadable files, and PDFs. Various content formats enable you to design an interactive and engaging course. After each section or lesson, consider adding multiple choice quizzes.
Podia allows you to build your course from scratch in no minutes without the knowledge of code. A flexible layout will help you provide students will a media-rich course.
You can receive payments from students’ credit cards through PayPal and Stripe. The service will store information about your students for further transactions.
Below you can see how to design a lesson in Podia.
Free plan: 1 coaching product, draft courses, community, 1 download, full website, email marketing, and live chat.Paid plan: From $39 per month for unlimited courses, coaching, downloads, community, full website, email marketing, and live chat.
Kajabi
Kajabi is an all-in-one marketing solution that allows you to develop courses, podcasts, coaching programs, and communities. With the platform, you can design, market, and sell your courses, onboarding programs, and employee training from one dashboard.
Customizable templates and intuitive design tools will help you quickly develop a short course or an extended program from scratch. Kajabi’s course creator enables you to design lessons and add quizzes to each of them to check students’ knowledge. Consider inviting other specialists to help you with the course. They will reduce the workload by creating tests and certificates and monitoring learners’ progress.
Kajabi empowers you to accept payments from students securely and without any fees. The platform connects with Stripe and PayPal to provide smooth selling of your online course.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in Kajabi.
Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan: From $149 per month for 1,000 active members, 10,000 contacts, 1 admin user, and 3 products.
Congrats, now you know what eLearning is and why it’s essential. Use one of the recommended platforms to increase efficiency and manage time properly when building an online course, school, customer onboarding, or employee training.
Email analytics
Email analytics is a method of tracking the way subscribers interact with your email campaigns. You can gather and analyze data for each email campaign with the help of bulk email providers and Google Analytics.
Watch this video and find out how to analyze emails in LIKE.TG.
Why should you analyze your email campaigns?
Without analyzing emails, you can’t total up your email marketing efforts, having a blur and inaccurate image of how well things work for you.
Email analytics provides a vast amount of data as a basis for improvements: the level of user engagement and loyalty, common behavior patterns, strong and weak points of your content. With that knowledge at hand, you can utilize sophisticated behavioral segmentation and provide your subscribers with a more personalized experience.
As a result, email analytics will help your business prosper because users will be more engaged with your brand, thus more likely to purchase your products or services.
Email Analytics Metrics
Email deliverability
Open rate
Click-through rate
Bounce rate
Unsubscribe rate
Conversion rate
Let’s review all the parameters that you need to analyze for your email marketing: email deliverability, open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversion rate.
Email deliverability. It is the number of emails delivered to the recipients’ inboxes from the total number of messages sent. This data depends on the authority of your email service domain and your sender reputation.
Open rate. It demonstrates the number of opened emails from the number of delivered. Сreate intriguing subject lines relevant to the content of the email to encourage more opens.
Click-through rate. It indicates how many people clicked links in your email. Come up with content relevant to your subscribers’ interests. Combine educational and promotional materials to encourage visiting your website.
Bounce rate. This metric indicates the number of emails that weren’t delivered. There are two types of bounce: hard and soft. A hard bounce means that the recipient’s email address or domain name is invalid. Use double opt-in and remove invalid addresses to deal only with valid ones on your mailing list. A soft bounce means temporary issues like the full inbox or maintenance of the recipient’s server.
Unsubscribe rate. It shows how many users clicked the unsubscribe link to opt-out of your email campaigns. An average unsubscribe rate is around 0,05%, so when it rises above that level, check your email sending frequency, quality of content, or get your emails more personalized.
Conversion rate.This means the number of subscribers that converted into customers. Though, any action may count as a conversion, for instance, a registration after clicking the partner’s link in your email newsletter.
You can analyze all of these metrics when sending email campaigns in LIKE.TG, except for the conversion rate, which you have to calculate manually.
Let’s move on to the statistics LIKE.TG provides.
How to Analyze Emails with LIKE.TG
When you create and send campaigns with LIKE.TG, you get a report full of useful data — opens, clicks on the link, the clicks map, and opens by the device.
In the screenshot below, you can see the percentage of opened and clicked emails along with the number of unsubscribes and emails marked as spam.
Another crucial aspect you should analyze is errors. Check the reasons why email servers bounced your email. If the recipients’ servers identify your emails as spam, you may lack authentication parameters — DKIM and SPF records. You can improve your sender reputation based on these errors.
The screenshot below shows the error statistics, including a full inbox and invalid email addresses.
Besides, you can analyze how particular users interact with your campaign. Filter out the list of recipients using different conditions: by status and by domains. On the screenshot below, users who opened and clicked the links are filtered out.
It will show the most engaged users, so you may praise their participation with special offers and build loyal relationships.
How to set up Google Analytics for email tracking
You can integrate Google Analytics with LIKE.TG to analyze your email marketing even deeper.
Use Google Analytics when you publish a new article and share it via a few media, say, email, and Facebook. UTM tags in the URL will help you find out how much traffic goes from each channel, hence, which one is more convenient for communication. Depending on these insights, create segments and promote your products and services via channels where people are most likely to engage with your content.
Learn more about the benefits of Google Analytics for email here.
Economic profit
Economic profit is the difference between the revenue obtained from the sales of products or services and costs spent to produce them, including opportunity costs (benefits a company loses because of not choosing a different alternative) and explicit costs (expenses on lease payments, inventory, raw materials, and utilities).
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of economic profit, figure out the difference between economic and accounting profit, and get to know how to calculate the measure.
Why is economic profit important?
Economic profit is crucial because it helps assess a company’s profitability and financial performance. It shows whether a particular business can cover its expenses and bring revenue to stakeholders. According to this measure, brands are successful only when they bring wealth to the parties involved. By estimating the measure, entrepreneurs determine their primary sources of big financial profits and the costs incurred by their company.
Although the process is considered time-consuming, it helps estimate a possible profit a certain brand can obtain. It’s done by reviewing any alternative options that stakeholders decided not to undertake for some reason. When companies want to compare the revenues they could obtain from different options, they use economic profit.
Now that you know why economic profit is essential, let’s make the difference between economic and accounting profit clear.
Economic Profit vs. Accounting Profit
Both economic and accounting profits are estimated by subtracting the expenditures on raw materials, wages, inventory, utilities, marketing, and transportation from the revenue a company manages to receive. However, to estimate economic profit, a manager also needs to know the opportunity costs to subtract them from the revenue as well. Businesses also use the measure to decide whether to enter, stay, or leave the market.
At the same time, to estimate accounting profit, a business owner has to be aware of the money a company manages to earn and also its explicit costs. The main difference between these two measures is that the first includes explicit and opportunity costs, whereas accounting profit includes only explicit costs.
The difference is clear, so it’s time to proceed to calculations.
How to Calculate Economic Profit
Generally speaking, economic profit can be estimated by deducting opportunity and explicit costs from a certain company’s revenue. You can see a formula and costs you need to know to do all estimations below.
The results you receive can be positive, negative, and zero. Positive points out that a business managed to cover its expenses and earn some additional capital. Negative shows that a company didn’t cope with the task, couldn’t cover the costs, and a business owner suffered losses. Zero profit is considered normal if a company has been in the market for a long time. It can happen due to the emergence of new companies.
To understand everything more clearly, we need to see an example. Say, there’s a consumer goods company called WWW. Let’s review the costs and revenue associated with this business. It took the owner $120,000 to start the company. After a year of producing and selling products, WWW succeeded in earning $165,000. In case this person hadn’t decided to open a business, they would have obtained $38,000 (opportunity costs) on their previous job. Hence, the economic profit will be:
$165,000 - $120,000 - $38,000 = $7,000.
You can see that the profit is positive. It means that a company managed to cover the expenses and gain some profit.
Simply put, the measure presents one of the indicators entrepreneurs use to determine the profitability of their business, evaluate its general performance, and analyze the profitability of other alternatives they decided not to choose.
Email advertising
Email advertising is a type of marketingperformed via email whereby the recipient has consented to receive promotional messages from a brand. In this form of advertising, marketers seek to gain permission from their prospective customers by giving them an option to opt-inbefore sending emails.
Email advertising is effective only if the recipients expect to hear from you. Achieve this by using opt-in or permission-based marketing. To be ahead of the game, marketers prefer double opt-in, which makes them sure that email campaigns are “welcomed” and “anticipated” by their subscribers. Unsolicited email marketing is alreadya thing of thepast because it hurts the sender’s reputation. It is no wonder — recipients may not be open to receiving promotional emails they haven’t subscribed to.
An example of permission email advertising is an email newsletter sent to customers of a particular brand. Newsletters usually inform subscribers about new products, upcoming events, or promotions. Marketers tell prospects what they will receive after leaving their email address in a subscription form. This way, the leads are aware of what they subscribe to.Today, many online marketers use services such as LIKE.TG Email to manage their opt-in contact information and send out advertising messages automatically using automation tools. Furthermore, they allow marketers to segment their advertising activities according to specific personal data.
Why is email advertising essential?
It is cost-effective and fast
It allows to reach targeted audiences through segmentation
It is permission-based
It shows higher ROI
It is easy to measure and compare
It is instant and shareable
Even with the tremendous growth of SEO, social media, and mobile marketing, email advertising remains one of the most profitable marketing strategies. According to Statista, 3.7 billion global email users sent and received 269 billion emails every day in 2017. The figure is expected to grow to 4.3 billion by 2022, which means that about half of the world's population will be using email by then. Therefore, advertising through email will present better business opportunities, as email use continues to increase. However, the decision to invest advertising dollars in this type of marketing should take into account the benefits that the business stands to gain.
So, what advantages can a brand enjoy when using email advertising?
It is cost-effective and fast
The cost of using email as a channel to advertise goods and services is quite lower than most of the other forms of marketing. The business does not incur printing costs as it would with posters or brochures. Also, there are no advertising or mediahosting fees for sending advertising messages to the target audience. Moreover, through bulk email sending and automation, marketers can save time on theiradvertising efforts. With LIKE.TG, you can send up to 15,000 advertising emails for freeevery month.
Reach targeted audiences through segmentation
Email advertising solves the numerous shortcomings of non-targeted marketing, such as television ads and billboards. With email, the marketer has more control over who sees their messagesbyusingsegmentation.You can group customers based on location, demographics, stage in the sales funnel, etc. and send emails targeting their specific needs.
It is permission-based
The best thing about email advertising is that the recipients who receive the marketing messages are people who are genuinely interested in the goods or services that your business offers. Since you send emails to contacts who have given their explicit permission, your mailing list will consistonly of prospects who are likely to convert.
Higher ROI
According to the Data Marketing Association, every $1 spent on email advertising is expected to return $32 in revenue. Therefore, email marketing is worth the investment as it brings increased sales and conversions. It is an effective strategy at every phase of the buying process. Moreover, less effort is required in this type of marketing as there are email services, like LIKE.TG, available to assist marketers in performing email advertising tasks.
Let's advertise via email!
Bring in new customers with branded subscription forms and craft a perfect sales strategy with 15,000 free emails each month.
Register and send advertising emails!
Easy to measure and compare
With email advertising, marketers can quickly assess the success of their ad campaigns.You can follow up on the performance of different emails and use the feedback to improve future campaigns. Moreover,you can compare your campaign results against email advertising benchmark reports in your specific industry. Benchmarking data can be found online. It helps marketers identify problems and make improvements.
It is instant and shareable
An email is delivered immediately, so marketers can see the impact in minutes after sending the campaign. Therefore, email advertising is ideal for persuading leads to take immediate action. For this reason, email remains the primary driver for customer acquisition for 81% of small and medium scale businesses. It is also easy for people to share advertising content with friends and familywith email, hence, creating increased brand awareness.Businesses can increase sales with email advertising with LIKE.TG using these steps:
Sign up to create an account
Create a campaign by choosing an email template, adding a subject line and text
Review the email and send
Track statistics and improve
Email Advertising Examples
Here are some excellent email advertising examples from different brands:
Chain Reaction Cycles offer free tires with selected wheelsets. Besides, they add clients’ reviews to make gain subscribers' trust.
Art.com offers 30% off Canvas art pieces and appeal to subscribers’ preferences. A discount is a great chance to sell overstocked goods.
Kate Spade uses email advertising to tell their clients about their new arrivals.
Email Advertising Best Practices
Make the subscription process easy
Use double opt-in
Avoid spamming
Schedule advertising emails
Perform split-testing
Below are some email advertising best practices every marketer should implement:
Make the subscription process easy
Marketers should make the sign-up process straightforward and enticing so that people subscribe easily. Ask only for the information you can use for better performance. For example, you can craft more personalized campaigns having the following data: name, age, gender, occupation, place of residence, etc.
Use double opt-in
We recommend using a double opt-in process because it ensures customers provide their unwavering consent to receive marketing emails from a particular brand. The double opt-in email should be short, sweet, and focused on the confirmation button.
Avoid spamming
Marketers should be careful when collecting email subscribers and engaging with them. Signing people up without their approval or buying email lists is a no-no. While writing messages, it is essential to provide relevant content, avoid uppercase subject lines, and so forth. Marketers ought to ensure that their emails have an unsubscribe option and physical address, as well.It's also a good idea to use a custom email domain as it enhances your professional image and brand identity, making your communication more credible and memorable.
Schedule advertising emails
Email advertising is most effective when you send emails to customers at the appropriate time. Thus, it is crucial to segment mailing lists based on time or time zones when catering to an international market.
Perform split-testing
With split-testing, marketers determine the content, subject lines, CTAs, send time, etc. that are right for their market segment. It is essential to split-test new things to ensure that your email advertising is successful.
eCommerce marketing automation
eCommerce marketing automation is using special software and tools to set activities related to online business promotion on autopilot. It helps companies communicate personalized and relevant messages to prospects and customers at any stage of their buyer journey, improving customer experience and boosting sales and overall marketing performance.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance and benefits of using automation for eCommerce marketing. We’ll also discover 13 excellent eCommerce marketing automation strategies and examples.
Why should you use automation for eCommerce marketing?
Automation allows eCommerce businesses to reap numerous benefits, including more sales, optimized marketing activities, and enhanced customer experience. Here are more reasons to incorporate automation into your marketing strategy.
Improved customer engagement. With automation, business owners can ensure constant contact with prospects and customers across multiple channels like email, messengers, and social media. Companies sending promotional, follow-up messages, or abandoned cart emails keep subscribers engaged and remind them about businesses' products and services. By sending scheduled emails, business owners stay on top of subscribers’ minds, remind them of events, and improve conversions.
Data-driven insights. Since all automation tools provide their users with analytics, business owners can receive valuable information related to customer interactions, behavior, and the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. After analyzing available data from automation tools, you can make well-informed decisions, improve strategies, and take the necessary marketing activities to boost sales.
Automating repetitive tasks. By incorporating automation, companies succeed in streamlining marketing operations. Brands manage to reduce the workload on their marketing teams by using automation for FAQs, reservations, onboarding, etc. With its help, businesses reduce errors and improve overall performance and efficiency. It results in faster execution, better workflows, and more organized marketing activities.
Consistency across multiple marketing channels. With marketing automation, companies ensure consistency across multiple channels they use for communication with customers. Automation used for social media, email marketing, or advertising allows you to provide a seamless customer experience and establish brand recognition. Automation 360 from LIKE.TG empowers you to maintain communication with clients by sending personalized messages across seven channels, including email, SMS, web push, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp on autopilot. With the platform, you can combine several marketing channels to build a flow that encourages more sales.
Cost efficiency. The tool is cost-efficient, especially in the long run when a business grows and scales. Entrepreneurs need to buy a subscription to enjoy the benefits of satisfied customers, constant interaction and engagement, and higher sales. When a company evolves, the owners can save costs by avoiding hiring additional team members to handle repetitive tasks.
Saving time on marketing campaign execution. When using marketing automation for eCommerce business, marketers don't need much time to launch marketing campaigns since they do it on autopilot. They should find the perfect solution, set up all the details, and send automated messages through various channels.
Benefits of Automation for eCommerce Marketing
Business owners searching for company growth and seamless marketing performance often utilize automation to set up processes related to marketing and sales. They do it because of the advantages marketing automation provides. Here are the main pros.
Cart abandonment recovery. Automation helps companies send automated messages reminding customers about items in their carts and uncompleted purchases. With special tools and software, you’ll be able to return some of the potentially lost clients and boost conversion rates.
Segmentation and targeting. With segmentation, you can divide your audience into groups based on various criteria like demographics, purchase history, or engagement. Using this approach, you personalize your communication with customers, send relevant messages, and meet clients’ needs. As a result, potential customers are more likely to convert.
Multi-channel integration. Since eCommerce companies usually use several marketing channels to execute their marketing campaigns, supporting customers across these channels is essential. With automation, you’ll be able to integrate all the platforms you need and ensure seamless, constant communication. As a result, your marketing strategy will be optimized and synchronized across email, social media, messengers, websites, and other channels.
Consistent execution. By incorporating automation, your company ensures that marketing tasks are performed consistently with no space for human error. Consistency is a crucial factor in building a positive brand image and recognition.
Behavioral trigger campaigns. Marketing automation platforms allow you to launch campaigns as soon as customers perform specific actions. The system will send automated messages that welcome new subscribers, encourage prospects to check out items in their shopping carts, and customers to repeat purchases based on user behavior.
More effective email campaigns. You can benefit from automation by sending emails based on the purpose. For instance, you can set up the sending of lead nurturing, customer retaining, and re-engaging emails. This reminds customers of your brand and makes them consider exploring your products or services.
Now that you know the pros, let’s proceed to the next section to explore eCommerce marketing automation strategies you can apply to your business.
13 eCommerce Marketing Automation Strategies
By incorporating automation, you can significantly improve your company's performance. However, you should know how to do it right to achieve your primary business objectives. In this section, we’ll uncover some of the most effective eCommerce marketing automation strategies for you to consider.
Welcome series automation. Consider using automated messages to welcome new subscribers after they sign up for your email newsletter. This series of automated emails usually includes a welcome message, the most essential information about your company, and an exclusive discount or offer for new subscribers to encourage purchases.
Onboarding. First and foremost, think of automating your customer onboarding to ensure seamless user experience and customer satisfaction. Use automation to create onboarding sequences for new clients, especially when you sell software. Get ready with valuable information, product guides, and exclusive offers to improve experience with your brand and ensure clients understand how to use your product.
Shopping cart abandonment recovery. Since many potential customers abandon their carts, it’s essential to follow up with them after they do it. For this purpose, consider sending automated emails reminding prospects about the items in their shopping carts. It will remind them of your brand and encourage them to complete the purchase. Personalized messages will help you encourage subscribers to open your emails and reduce cart abandonment rates.
Upselling and cross-selling. Consider using eCommerce marketing automation to sell additional products related to your client’s primary purchases. Automation will help you provide customers with product recommendations based on their actions, preferences, and purchase history.
Customer segmentation. It enables you to divide customers into segments based on specific criteria like demographics, purchase history, or behavior and craft personalized messages matching each group. Perform such actions to provide your subscribers with relevant and engaging content, encouraging them to read your messages and perform desired actions. LIKE.TG’s bulk email service enables you to segment and personalize your email campaigns, making it more likely for subscribers to open your emails.
Post-purchase follow-ups. If you want to get repeat customers, follow up with your clients after they make purchases. Consider sending them email campaigns asking for testimonials, reviews, and feedback. Show them that you appreciate their valuable input.
Password reset. Incorporating password reset automation is a crucial feature contributing to user experience improvement and security on an eCommerce platform. This way, you won't need human interaction to send email verifications, identify confirmations, and generate new passwords.
Price drop and inventory notifications. Consider sending your customers notifications related to the products they explored. Price drops on the items they like will entice customers to open your site and explore the offers, resulting in conversions. Inventory notifications also encourage prospects to consider a new purchase if the price is affordable. Price drop and inventory notifications will help you establish a sense of urgency, encourage engagement, and boost sales.
Re-engagement. By developing personalized campaigns and providing relevant offers, you can reconnect with customers who remain inactive for a long time. Consider using segmentation, behavioral triggers, and reactivation offers to help you re-engage customers without manual effort.
Loyalty program updates. Incorporate automated loyalty programs that will reward customers for repeating their purchases with your brand. Consider setting up an automation flow for sending email campaigns with personalized offers and exclusive discounts. It will help you boost loyalty and retention.
Customer feedback surveys. To collect post-purchase customer reviews, consider setting up surveys. After customers complete purchases, you can choose the day and time for the automated email sending. This information will help address urgent issues, boost customer satisfaction, and improve user experience.
Event promotion. To promote your event, consider creating automation and informing potential participants about the main topic, date, and venue. Develop a series of follow-up emails updating subscribers about the event details, speakers, and discounts and add call-to-action buttons for registration to each of them.
Exclusive offers during the holiday season. With automation, you can schedule limited-time offers that establish urgency and fear of missing out. Consider adding countdowns to entice subscribers to check out their favorite items faster.
Now that you know the strategies, it’s time to discover some compelling examples of using automation in eCommerce to grab inspiration.
Examples of Using Automation in eCommerce
You can find numerous examples of eCommerce companies successfully integrating automation into their marketing strategies. In this section, we’ve compiled some examples of automation at different stages of the customer journey so let’s explore them now.
Compass: Welcome Message
Compass uses automation to welcome new subscribers to its services. The email contains all the necessary information for users to start using this platform, uncovering how to search for homes and apartments for sale and rent. This welcome message includes two call-to-action buttons inviting new users to get started right away by simply clicking “Search Listings.” or “View Neighbourhood Guides.” Subscribers can find a link in the email footer to ask for help.
NYX Professional Makeup: Holiday Discounts
The cosmetics brand NYX sends automated email campaigns about special discounts before Christmas and New Year. The email has all the needed elements like phrases establishing FOMO, graphics, CTAs, and links to social networks. Scheduled campaigns before the holiday season allow the brand to encourage repeat purchases and boost sales.
Paperstime: Re-engagement
Paperstime strives to re-engage inactive subscribers by sending personalized email campaigns. This email contains an enticing promo code providing an 11% discount. Potential customers can instantly use the code by clicking the call to action button “Use Your 11% Off.”
Salesforce: Event Promotion
Salesforces uses email automation to increase the visibility of its events and encourage more registrations. The email has all the necessary elements, enticing subscribers to participate. It covers the main topic, key speakers, date and time of the event, and visible call-to-action buttons leading to registration for the event. The email is an automated reminder of the event, preventing subscribers from missing it.
MAC Cosmetics: Loyalty Program
MAC Cosmetics sends scheduled emails to subscribers, informing them about its loyalty reward program. It reveals the benefits of joining the program, exclusive offers, and points on purchases that bring discounts of up to 15% and free shipping.
Congrats, now you know what eCommerce marketing automation is and why it’s crucial. Hope that our examples and strategies gave you a hint on how to successfully implement marketing automation into your company strategy and achieve your primary business goals. Sign up for LIKE.TG now and enjoy the benefits of automated personalized email campaigns, pop-ups, chatbots for WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger, and live chat triggered by user behavior on your site.
eCommerce chatbot
An eCommerce chatbot is a chatbot created to ensure an excellent online shopping experience within an eCommerce platform. Businesses use artificial intelligence to provide human-like answers to customers’ questions, 24/7 support, personalized recommendations, and all the necessary information. LIKE.TG empowers you with all the necessary tools to build eCommerce chatbots for Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
In this article, we’ll explain why you should create chatbots for eCommerce and how to achieve success with them. We’ll also unveil where you can effectively use chatbots and provide some excellent examples.
Why should you create chatbots for eCommerce?
According to statistics, businesses using chatbots for communication with customers have an open rate of 85% and a click-through rate of 40%. You and your clients reap the benefits by building a chatbot and incorporating it into your eCommerce company. With its help, you can improve customer retention, provide personalized recommendations, come up with instant answers, and increase customer satisfaction.
Chatbots bring many advantages to eCommerce companies. Let’s discover the most important of them:
24/7 support;
higher customer engagement;
personalized recommendations;
instant answers;
cost-effectiveness;
integration with the most popular messengers and social media.
Now that you know the pros of having a chatbot for your eCommerce business, it’s time to find out how to power your success with chatbots.
How to power your success with chatbots?
Chatbots can become a powerful additional tool to your marketing strategy. With their help, you can manage several aspects of your business on autopilot, improving customer support and satisfaction. Let’s uncover several ways to power your success with chatbots.
Appointment scheduling. Using chatbots for appointment scheduling is a practical way of reducing your managers' workload. You can set up your chatbot and launch the booking process. Chatbots will automatically send messages and help your customers make reservations for your services. Chatbot enables you to use a conversational flow to guide clients and integrate with your calendar system.
Answering FAQs. With chatbots, you can provide instant answers to customers’ common questions. By assigning this task to your chatbot, you prevent your customer support agents from answering repetitive questions and let them focus on more urgent issues. The answers are quick, accurate, concise, and consistent. If you implement Natural Language Processing, your chatbot will be able to use natural language to respond. After training, your bot will understand variations of the same query.
Post-sale support. After a purchase, the chatbot provides essential support by swiftly resolving post-sale concerns. Businesses enable customers to conveniently track their orders by entering order numbers or relevant details. The chatbot delivers instant updates on order status, allowing clients to stay informed about shipping and delivery details. Moreover, it assists in managing returns, refunds, product support, and troubleshooting.
Automating sales. You can use chatbots to sell your products or services on autopilot. After training your bot to sell goods, you can integrate payment systems and add payment buttons to your chatbot flow. No sales manager involvement is required because customers can place orders by themselves.
Offering personalized recommendations. By utilizing chatbots, you can provide your prospects with personalized offers. Chatbot can collect user preferences and behavior data to ensure a personalized experience for customers. After gathering information about each customer and lead, the bot can send offers and products clients are interested in. This way, the possibility of customers making a purchase is increasing.
Feedback collection. The bot can become a perfect tool for collecting information about customer experience, products, and customer service. It’s your way of gaining insights into the performance of your business, customer support team, and product quality.
Lead generation. Chatbot is a great solution for lead generation. You can add a bot to your website, interact with potential clients, and collect their contact data. This will help you save time and focus on tasks that require human intervention. Besides, a chatbot will help you qualify leads based on your criteria before delivering them to your sales reps. It will result in more quality prospects.
24/7 support. Since chatbots can function on their own, it means that no human help is needed. With artificial intelligence, you can provide 24/7 support. Prospects can ask questions at any time and receive instant responses. It will make customers happy with your brand.
Marketing and promotions. Chatbots are your perfect promoters. After incorporating these tools, you’ll be able to send interactive marketing campaigns, quizzes, and surveys to customers. You can set up your chatbot to deliver promotional messages and discounts on a specific day and time.
eCommerce assistance. Chatbots can help your clients with product selection. They can serve as virtual assistants that provide your customers with the products they are looking for. Consumers can set their criteria and receive all your brand's items for the requirements provided.
Now that you know how to power your success with chatbots, it’s time to find out where exactly you can use chatbots and benefit from them.
Where can you use chatbots?
Chatbots can be used across multiple social media channels and messengers. In this section, we’ll unveil all the channels and their usefulness for your business.
Facebook Messenger. Since Facebook has 3.03 billion monthly active users, there’s a point in adding a chatbot for your business. It allows you to reach a large audience with many potential customers. All people who see your brand on Facebook and wonder about the pricing, features, and product catalog will be able to instantly receive all the information. By using a Facebook Messenger chatbot, you ensure constant availability to answer inquiries, regardless of the time. This guarantees seamless interactions with prospects and customers, enhancing their overall experience and improving your customer support.
Instagram. Since Instagram DM is a well-known communication channel, it’s essential to take care of it. Many online stores sell online, and it would be more convenient for them to integrate a chatbot. When customers text in DM, the chatbot can answer all the common questions. Customer support agents won’t need to answer the same questions all the time, and customers won’t need to wait for hours to get a response. Instagram chatbot is especially useful for eCommerce companies. It can serve as a channel for product discovery and new releases. Instagram chatbot is also good for frequently asked questions, order updates, basic troubleshooting, appointment scheduling, etc.
Live chat. A live chat carries several benefits, including better customer experience, conversion rates, and higher customer satisfaction. However, these aren’t the only reasons. With a live chat, customers get instant and real-time customer support. They can receive both automated messages and help from customer support agents. Clients can reach out to an agent whenever they need. Live chat has a proactive engagement feature. It means that your chatbot can start engaging with users based on their behavior. You can use live chat for lead generation. By interacting with prospects, the chatbot can sort them out and identify qualified leads. The bot helps you receive contact data of your potential customers and use it for further interactions.
WhatsApp. WhatsApp chatbot is a multipurpose solution suitable for appointment scheduling. It’s always convenient for customers to open WhatsApp and book a spot for a specific service. Businesses in healthcare, beauty, and services can benefit from utilizing chatbots. Users need to open the messenger and choose the appropriate service, date, and time. The bot will reserve spots for users on autopilot. Telegram. Telegram chatbot brings the same benefits as WhatsApp chatbot. It helps with appointment booking, 24/7 customer support, media sharing, etc. The chatbot enables you to automate routine tasks, like collecting user preferences, sending updates, and working with simple queries.
Now that you know where to use a chatbot, it’s time to proceed to the next section. We’ll explain how to set up an eCommerce chatbot with LIKE.TG.
How to create an eCommerce chatbot with LIKE.TG?
This section delves into the comprehensive process of creating an eCommerce chatbot using LIKE.TG. Below, discover a step-by-step guide specifically tailored for setting up booking appointments via Facebook Messenger.
Step 1. Connect your Facebook Messenger to the bot
Log in to your LIKE.TG account or register. Then, go to the “Chatbots” tab and click “Manage bots.” After, select a channel you want to connect your bot to. Log in to your Facebook account and follow the instructions provided.
If you want to add a chatbot to other messengers, social media, or websites, choose the required channel on the “Manage bots” page.
Step 2. Create a trigger
After integrating your bot with Facebook Messenger, you should select the bot on the left panel. Click the “Create a new trigger” button. Add all the possible words that might trigger this chatbot flow.
Step 3. Develop the flow
Add all the necessary messages and buttons to create a perfect flow. You can set the time when the messages will appear and add links with pricing, available services, website, etc.
Now that you know how to set up a chatbot for Facebook Messenger in LIKE.TG, let’s explore the 10 tips for effective eCommerce chatbots.
10 Tips for Effective eCommerce Chatbots
If you want to successfully incorporate a chatbot into your business, you need to consider several steps. We’ll cover the most important ones to ensure the effectiveness of your bot.
Utilize personalization. With chatbots, you can incorporate personalization and provide customers with relevant interactions. The bot can gather and analyze customer data to send special offers, discounts, and items based on clients’ interests. Consider using names to address customers, past purchase history to recommend products, and pay attention to customer needs and preferences to ensure a seamless shopping experience.
Provide shopping assistance. Make your chatbot a shopping assistant. You should train your chatbot to answer questions about products, sizes, colors, and other details related to your products. Consider creating sizing guides and product specifications within your bot.
Pay attention to customer feedback. After customers make purchases, you need to continue interacting with them. Consider sending surveys asking about their satisfaction with your chatbot. Their feedback will help you identify the gaps and eliminate them. You’ll also need to add more functions to your chatbot to assist your buyers more.
Ensure secure transactions. Since chatbots can serve as places for customers to checkout, you need to ensure secure transactions. Provide the security of transactions by using encryption and secure payment gateways. This way, you’ll be sure that your client’s data is protected.
Integrate the chatbot with your CRM. Integrating your bot with the CRM allows you to add prospects' contact data into the system automatically. It’s convenient and secure. Your team won’t need to transfer all the information manually. Customer names, email addresses, and other details are securely stored within the CRM. LIKE.TG empowers you to set up chatbots for various messengers and connect them to its CRM, ensuring the seamless transfer of customer data.
Add clear CTAs. Incorporate distinct CTAs to seamlessly direct users within your chatbot, leading them to essential information. Ensure your call-to-action buttons are clear and intuitive, enabling customers to easily access the product catalog, pricing details, make purchases, inquire about order status, or connect with your customer support agent.
Enable human handover feature. When chatbots don’t cover customers' queries, they need customer support agents. For such a scenario, add a button that allows clients to connect with a human agent. Ensure the button is visible so clients can instantly find it and contact your agent.
Set up a chatbot for multiple channels. Customers can use various channels to connect with your company. That’s why you need to develop chatbots for several communication channels. Consider conducting a short research to identify the most used channels by your audience. Choose several channels and set up a chatbot for them so that customers can instantly reach you.
Incorporate the chatbot for post-purchase engagement. Communication with customers continues after the purchase. If you want to have returning customers, you need to ensure post-purchase support. Chatbot can help you with this task. With its help, clients can solve problems with products quickly and increase satisfaction with your brand. You can also use this chatbot to ask for feedback and comments regarding the quality of your bot.
Enable cart management. Allow clients to manage their carts through the chatbot. You should ensure that buyers can add, remove, or modify products in their shopping carts within the chatbot.
Now that you know the best practices, it’s time to grab some inspiration from the examples below.
Top eCommerce Chatbots
Businesses widely use chatbots for multiple channels nowadays. Many famous brands demonstrate excellent customer support after implementing these tools. We’ll review three successful chatbots that work. So let’s dive in.
AsosHelper Bot
Asos, the famous online fashion retailer, has a huge number of customers not only in Britain but all around the world. Chatbots support their customer service. One of them is available on Telegram. Since the number of customers is instantly rising, it becomes impossible for agents to answer all common questions on pricing, product catalog, and other details. That’s why the well-known brand has bots to do it. AsosHelper Bot is designed to help customers make faster and data-driven purchasing decisions. The bot allows clients to compare product prices on Asos’ sites and choose the lowest price.
Wingstop
Wingstop is a fast food restaurant that uses a chatbot on Facebook Messenger to accept orders. After creating a new order or re-ordering the same items, customers can set up the delivery. Besides, clients can find the nearest restaurant and connect with the agent through the chatbot.
Turkish Airlines
One of the most trusted mainline carriers, Turkish Airlines, uses live chat to manage various customer queries and support clients worldwide. The chatbot serves as a source of answers to FAQs. Customers can find information about baggage allowance, lost baggage handling, miles and miles, and more.
Congrats, now you know what an eCommerce chatbot is and why it’s crucial for businesses. Hope that our tips and examples will be useful once you decide to set up the bot for your company.
eCcommerce marketing
eCommerce marketing is a method of promoting a business that sells its products or services through the Internet. The goals of eCommerce marketing are driving traffic to the online store, converting visitors to paying customers, and retaining them after a purchase.
As a complex tool, eCommerce marketing implies a lot of strategies for leveraging these purposes. Read on to learn which types of eCommerce marketing are worth using and how to incorporate them into your overall marketing strategy.
Types of eCommerce Marketing
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Web push marketing
Social media marketing (SMM)
Chatbot marketing
Influencer marketing
Affiliate marketing
Email marketing
eCommerce marketing comprises various actions aimed at increasing profits and ROI while reducing investments in brand promotion. Some of them work better for attracting new customers, others for retaining existing ones, or provoking a purchase. That is the main reason every business needs to try different types of marketing. We’ve picked the eight most appealing and effective of them for you to try.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This type of marketing implies optimizing your website for further promotion in search engine rating. SEO is applicable for any kind of business represented on the Internet that owns a website.
Companies use SEO to increase their website traffic, but it has other advantages, including an increase in clicks and sales. 70% of marketers consider it to be more effective than PPC ads.
Many believe that SEO comes down to incorporating some “magical” phrases in the text on the website. Meanwhile, in 2020, effective search engine optimization includes plenty of other things, such as relevant content creation and promotion, content updates, link building, adding mentions and reviews, HTML-code improvement, and more.
HM is an example of great work with search engine optimization. The brand is the first result for the search results for the query “women clothes online”. According to Ahrefs, the website has an excellent domain rating – 87, an enormous amount of backlinks, and amazing site speed for both desktop and mobile versions.
Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC)
PPC, or pay-per-click advertising is a type of digital marketing where a business pays a fee to an ad network each time someone clicks on their promoted link. This method allows companies to get new visits on their website.
Some doubt that PPC is still useful today when everyone uses ad-blocking applications. However, 75% of people said that paid ads helped them find what they needed, and 26% clicked on the ad because they were familiar with the brand. That makes PPC advertisements effective in interaction with interested and loyal customers. Apart from that, search ads can increase brand awareness by 80%.
PPC advertising positively affects businesses with high customer lifetime value (healthcare, education, cable internet providers), high margins (lawsuits, repair jobs, cars), retailers, and producers of unique products. Moreover, each small business benefits from the pay-per-click model — it allows companies to work on tight budgets.
In the example below, you can see the text advertisement for a “running shoes” Google search. Google shows this promoted content first and marks it with an “Ad” label, so users can distinguish paid search results from organic ones.
Web Push Marketing
Web push marketing is an advertising strategy that implies sending short notifications to the target audiencein a browser or mobile app. As you can send both promotional and transactional messages via this channel, goals can include advertising your goods, notifying your clients about their order status, communicating your updates, and more.
The average reaction rate to web push notifications is 7.8%. Readers respond most frequently to notifications from businesses in travel, finance, and online stores. Web push notifications can be helpful for those who promote their businesses through content marketing — notify customers about new articles or videos and increase your website traffic.
Applying this type of marketing to your strategy allows you to do better outreach, get higher engagement, and collect useful statistics regarding your open rate and CTR to improve your strategies. Another advantage of this communication channel is its low price. For instance, with LIKE.TG, you can send push notifications for free as long as you have less than 10,000 subscribers.
Start your web push marketing with LIKE.TG — register and create appealing personalized notifications. Segment recipients by location or other details and send them messages automatically.
Here is a notification created with LIKE.TG for boosting sales of an old clothing collection. To make it appealing and clickable, we added images and a CTA button. In the notification editor, you can not only create web push notifications but also preview them in different browsers straight away.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing means using social platforms as channels for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales. The SMM audience is enormous — 3.8 billion people. In 2019, 43% of internet users browsed h social media when researching products before making a purchase.
Social media marketing is suitable for every business, including B2B. This type of eCommerce aims to increase brand awareness, boost website traffic, improve content distribution, interact with a target audience regularly, and more. 73% of marketers believe that SMM is effective or very effective for leveraging these goals.
To nail SMM, create different strategies and content for each social media platform you use for your brand promotion. Vary the frequency of posting, themes, post formats, and so on to get the most from every social network.
Let’s learn some tricks from GoPro. The brand hasmillions of followers and posts different content on several social media platforms. For instance, GoPro goes for user-generated pictures and videos showing the quality of their cameras on Instagram.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, the brand pays more attention to promotional messages, special occasions, and challenges.
Chatbot Marketing
Chatbot marketing involves using a special computer application — a chatbot — for marketing purposes, such as supporting customers, handling orders, sharing company news, and promoting special offers. Chatbots communicate with customers based on predetermined scenarios or with the help of AI.
The biggest beneficiaries of chatbot marketing are businesses with large customer support services —bots can decrease customer support costs by 30%. Apart from that, chatbots provide round-the-clock interaction with clients, increase engagement, help with lead nurturing, and speed up the payment process.
Chatbots are helpful in eCommerce, healthcare, telecommunication, banking, food, and retail. Customers use bots to solve problems, make reservations, pay bills, buy various items, or get ideas for purchases. In the example below, a simple chatbot created with LIKE.TG helps clients subscribe to email campaigns and get consultations.
Start your chatbot marketing with LIKE.TG — create a chatbot for Facebook or Telegram, set up auto-replies, launch promo campaigns, and automate your business processes. Send up to 10,000 messages a month to an unlimited number of subscribers for free.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is brand promotion through publications made by bloggers or opinion leaders. It is a great way to attract new customers — people are more inclined to trust brands if they’ve seen their favorite blogger promoting it.
68% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is effective or very effective. Done correctly, this type of eCommerce marketing can increase your brand awareness, reach your target audience, help drive quicker customer acquisition, and boost sales. It is useful for every business but shows the best results for the fashion, cosmetics, travel, and holiday industries.
To benefit from influencer marketing, choose influencers correctly. Pay attention to their audience — it may be not very large but devoted, which increases your chances to make the most of the collaboration. Another key to success is to make sure your partner’s audience coincides with your target audience.
Here’s an example of collaboration between the pet supplies brand “I and love and you” and famous Instagram pups. The company chose the influencer perfectly — most of the subscribers are pet owners interested in providing a top-quality life for their dogs.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing implies promoting your brand through affiliated resources while paying a commission to them for every new customer. At first sight, it may seem similar to influencer marketing, but the mechanism is different. While in influencer marketing, you pay for the ad itself, in an affiliate model, you pay a fee after a sale occurs.
This type of marketing increases brand awareness, improves SEO, boosts sales, and gives you more R
OI. Well crafted programs can increase revenues by 30%.
Affiliate marketing is suitable for businesses that strictly control their product and purchasing, for instance, in direct selling. It helps lower reputational and financial risks from such kind of promotion.
This type of eCommerce marketing works well for most niches, from online education to retail. Here is an example of affiliate marketing on a financial expert website. As you can see, the resource promotes household appliances from Dyson and offers its readers a promo code.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is pivotal for lead nurturing, sales, and improving your customer experience. This communication channel works for B2B and B2C, international corporations, local businesses, and more.
To nail email marketing, include different types of emails in your strategy. Marketing emails will help you build relationships with customers and encourage them to make a purchase. Meanwhile, transactional emails will improve your clients' experience by informing them about changes made to their account, the status of a purchase, shipping updates, and so on.
Match your campaigns with customers’ interests, create engaging and good-looking emails, and always apply personalization. Otherwise, instead of boosting sales, you’ll create irritated clients. Don’t forget about automation — welcome, abandoned cart, birthday, and other emails sent automatically require minimal effort but enlarge your revenue greatly. We’ve created an appealing email with LIKE.TG. It provides unique offers and contains elements of personalization — receiver’s name and company’s address.
To create beautiful personalized email campaigns and send them automatically, register with LIKE.TG. We offer a convenient drag and drop email editor, our Automation 360 tool for sending trigger and other types of automated emails, and services for adding personalization and segmenting subscribers.
eCommerce Marketing Strategies and Tips
Upsell and cross-sell your products
Reward your loyal customers
Speed up your website
Optimize your website for mobile
Add personalization
Optimize for voice search
Add social proof
eCommerce is a promising market — by 2022, sales are projected to increase to $5.8 trillion. However, it’s a tough business — you have to compete with several million other companies, including giants such as Amazon.com. We’ve picked marketing strategies and tips to help you succeed in the eCommerce realm.
Upsell and cross-sell your products
Let’s start by differentiating one from another: cross-selling is offering additional products or services, for instance, a T-shirt in combination with jeans or speaking clubs in addition to Spanish lessons. Meanwhile, upselling allows a customer to get a better or larger product — meal or a laptop component — for an extra payment.
To nail upselling, stick to some rules. Offering additional value, think about the problems that users may face with the product and ways to solve them. Compare cheaper and more expensive versions to emphasize the advantages of the latter. And finally, be wise about the price and don’t ask too much—customers will rarely pay more than an additional 25% of the original price.
If you go for cross-selling, remember that your additional offer should fit well with customer’s needs and interests. Asos does it perfectly, letting customers shop the whole look — chances are a buyer would like to get everything.
Reward your loyal customers
Did you know that retaining your current customers is five times cheaper than attracting new ones? Loyal customers spend 67% more in months 31-36 of their shopping relationships with the brand than in the first half of the year. So, the key to higher revenue is to retain your customers — try to reward them for staying with you. Organize a customer loyalty program and offer bonus points, which can be exchanged for discounts, gifts, or free shipping.
For instance, Sephora launched a club for loyal customers. The brand divides members of the club into several groups according to how much they’ve spent shopping at Sephora. Each group earns a different amount of points and spends them on cosmetics or make-up lessons. Also, members get other perks, including birthday gifts, exclusive events, early access to new products, and more features shown below.
Speed up your website
There are few things more annoying than a website that loads for ages. The acceptable time of download is five seconds or fewer. Each extra second leads to a 7% drop in conversions and affects your website’s search results ranking.
Skyscanner demonstrates great website speed results in the Pingdom Tools service. The picture below shows that it takes a bit more than three seconds to load the main page, which is an excellent result.
We have a precise guide on speeding up websites on the LIKE.TG Blog. Here are the main hacks from it:
reduce the amount of hypertext used;
transfer protocol requests;
optimize and compress your files;
reduce the number of redirects on your page;
utilize browser caching;
choose a reliable web host;
use a content delivery network.
Remember that your website will probably slow down with time, so monitor it and make adjustments regularly.
Optimize your website for mobile
In the last quarter of 2019, mobile devices accounted for over 52% of internet traffic worldwide. People not only browse through the Internet for fun, but use it for work, study, and to make purchases. 69% of smartphone users said they would rather buy from companies with informative and convenient mobile websites. Don’t miss this audience — optimize your site for mobile.
Start with improving your website speed — it is crucial for mobile users to access content in seconds. Evaluate your speed with Google’s Test My Site feature. However, don’t fall into the trap of deleting your product images and videos — customers still need them to decide about the purchase.
Create a mobile version of your website instead. You’ll have to make some tweaks with mobile users in mind. Think about their needs, whether they are using a bigger “Add to cart” button or optimized content. Look at the mobile version of cosmetics brand Lush website — the page loads in seconds, contains all the features available for the web version, and provides easy access to buttons, including “Add to basket”.
Add personalization
80% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that provide personalized experiences. You can add personalization to most communication channels, including email and messenger campaigns, web push notifications, and your website.
To nail personalization, get to know your customers’ gender, location, favorite products, and other demographic information. You can segment them with a subscription form on your website or track the items they viewed. Here is an example from Net-a-Porter, that shows items similar to those the customer has browsed before. In the picture below the website recommended summer shoes according to the user's previous views.
Optimize for voice search
Voice search shopping is predicted to be a $40 billion market by 2022. To stay ahead of the curve, think about optimizing your website for voice search right now. It may encourage you to re-approach your SEO in general.
Bear in mind that voice search is not the same as type search — queries are longer and more conversational. Don’t be afraid of applying a conversational style to your blog or website — create articles and other types of content to answer popular questions.
In the example below, the travel agency, Kayak, uses this strategy. As a result, their website appears in the first line of search results with several queries, such as “Book a flight to Alaska”, “What is the cheapest flight to Alaska”, and “How long is the flight to Alaska.”
Add social proof
Social proof can do miracles for sales and ROI. 93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. There are a lot of ways you can add this tool to your marketing strategy.
Add reviews to product pages on your website. Ask an expert to test and recommend your products or services on their resources. Publish showcases in your blog. Share awards you have won or milestones, such as 50,000 subscribers to your YouTube channel. Mention your customer base size or their names in your bio, as OptinMonster did on their main page. The company shows its clients' logos, names the number of websites using their service, and the number of visitor sessions optimized monthly.
Combining sales tricks and technical methods, you can take your eCommerce marketing to the next level and skyrocket your ROI. The main secret is to use different types of eCommerce marketing and find those that best fit your business. For better performance, make use of an eCommerce platform. To apply email marketing, chatbots, web push notifications, and more to your strategy, register with LIKE.TG.
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Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a business model that lets brands sell products without stocking inventory. Usually, dropshipping suppliers are responsible for delivering goods so that retailers can focus on other management aspects.
In the article, we describe the advantages and disadvantages of this business model and explain how it works and how to start your dropshipping business. We also provide useful tips on improving the performance of such companies.
Dropshipping Advantages and Disadvantages
According to Grand View Research, the dropshipping market is expected to grow more than 3.5 times from 2020 to 2025. These inspiring statistics highlight the perceptiveness of this business model. Discover more about its pros and cons below.
Let’s start with dropshipping advantages.
It is easy to start. It doesn’t require much time and effort to launch your company. You don’t need to ship orders, track inventory and manage returns and exchanges. Find suppliers you will work with, register an account on social media or the marketplace and start selling.
It is scalable. Dropshippers don’t need to develop new products for months if they want to increase the sales volumes. They can find a few new suppliers and offer a wider variety of goods for a larger target audience. Also, dropshippers may spend more money on marketing and raise the number of sales without worrying about product availability.
It requires a little start-up capital. You do not need to purchase inventory and store it at home or rent a warehouse. The only spending you will have while starting a business are ecommerce platform fees and marketing costs. You may also need a domain if you would like to create a brand’s website, but it isn’t necessary as you can sell through social media.
You can fulfill orders from various locations. Dropshipping is an online business that lets you communicate with suppliers and clients from anywhere. It leads to high mobility and allows you to combine running the company with other aspects of your life.
It is a flexible and low-risk model. Dropshipping lets you react to the changes in your audience’s needs and preferences and offer only relevant products without having them in stock. You can adjust your online store assortment anytime it’s needed. Also, such a business model allows you to sell goods from multiple platforms, such as marketplaces, social media, or your website. In such a way, you can diversify risks and be agile.
Now let’s turn to the disadvantages of such enterprise management.
The dropshipping market is rather competitive and often has low margins. People can launch their businesses fast and without huge spending leading to enormous competition in the sphere. Most business owners try to attract buyers by setting low prices, which hurts potential profits. Dumping is widespread, so you will need to sell many products to earn enough money.
It may be difficult to track what products are out of stock. Inventory management isn’t dropshippers’ responsibility, which can lead to problems with fulfillment orders. If a client buys something in your store and you find out that there are no such goods at your suppliers’ warehouse, it will dissatisfy a customer and create a poor experience. If such situations happen regularly, it will influence your brand’s reputation negatively.
You don’t have control over the product quality and the supply chain. The reason is the same: you can’t pack and ship orders on your own. If a customer purchases a few products available from separate suppliers, it will be difficult for you to fulfill such an order and not overpay for the delivery. Moreover, sometimes your buyers may receive goods of bad quality, which will harm your reputation.
There are limited opportunities for customization. Branding is vital, as it helps raise your consumers’ awareness. Dropshippers can’t always control the product and package design making the goods they sell less distinguishable. Also, they are limited in providing discounts and special offers and have to discuss them with the supplier.
Keep in mind all these benefits and drawbacks while starting your dropshipping company. Continue reading to study how this business model works.
How does dropshipping work?
Shift Shop states that dropshipping is a business model of approximately 33% of online stores. It lets retailers sell goods and fulfill orders without having products in stock. The process goes like this.
Dropshipper finds a supplier on a database or special application, signs an agreement and discusses all the peculiarities.
Dropshipper creates a website or social media page, promotes the products, and attracts clients.
Consumers order goods from a dropshipper.
The brand’s owner forwards these orders to the supplier who packs and ships them.
Clients receive products and pay money to the dropshipper.
Such a model is beneficial for both supplier and retailer. The first one can collaborate with multiple stores and reduce marketing efforts, while the second one buys goods at a wholesale price and sells at a retail one. Usually, contractors share the areas of responsibility: the dropshipper deals with the promotion and the supplier works with product development and order fulfillment.
This business model can be extremely effective if you prepare carefully and do everything correctly. We provide a step-by-step guide to launching your dropshipping company in the next section.
How to start your dropshipping business?
Launching a company may seem complicated and terrifying, but it isn’t so. Here we will prove that establishing a dropshipping business isn’t difficult and give some tips to start it successfully.
Choose your niche and analyze the competition. We recommend you focus on one sphere, such as clothing, cosmetics, technology, or household appliances, and offer the product assortment connected with it. Pay special attention to this step. Although the dropshipping market is highly competitive, some industries are easier to work with. Evaluate companies that have already been on the market and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Study your buyer personas. Once you find the niche, describe your ideal clients. You should study their demographics, pains, needs, and behavioral patterns. Segment the target audience according to their preferences and consider how you will interact with each group.
Find suppliers and test their products. You can search for wholesale businesses on your own or register on an ecommerce platform. Be attentive to the people you are going to work with: they should be reliable and trustworthy. Then evaluate the products they offer. You can order a few goods from every supplier to study their quality, shipping time, packaging, etc. Note that wholesale prices should be at least 30% lower than average retail ones so that you’ll be competitive and make profits.
Register your brand’s name and fulfill other legal obligations. Once you find suppliers to work with, getting permission to trade from official structures is vital. The legislative nuances vary from country to country, so we suggest you consulting with a lawyer to ensure you do everything correctly.
Сhoose platforms to work with. You can sell products through ecommerce marketplaces, such as Amazon, but the competition there is rather high. Also, you can start working from a social media account. Many dropshippers do so, but such a model requires continuous qualitative content marketing. We recommend create a handy landing page with LIKE.TG drag-and-drop builder. Having your website can help you stand out from competitors and attract more clients by using SEO.
Create a brand platform. Describe the distinctive features of your company to gain a strong competitive advantage. Highlight your brand’s values and purpose, and identify visual language and tone of voice. Remember that all these elements should resonate with the buyer personas’ preferences and the lifestyle they aspire to. Show people how your products can make their lives better.
Launch your company and promote it actively. It is critical to develop a strong marketing strategy to start sales immediately. Reach the target audience through the channels they use the most often. Combine different approaches to advertising, as it takes 5-7 interactions to remember the company. Use email, SMS, and web push campaigns from LIKE.TG to catch up with consumers on several platforms.
Now you are almost ready to launch your dropshipping company. Empower existing strategy with the insights we provide in the next section.
5 Dropshipping Tips
Dropshipping is a scalable business model that can help you earn much money. However, to reach such results, you should work hard and develop your company constantly. Below we provide some tips on improving your business and making it more profitable.
Develop accurate workflows. Good organization is a key to qualitative service. Build your business processes in a way you’ll be able to manage them easily. It will allow you to serve customers better and provide positive experiences. It will lead to word-of-mouth marketing, as 58% of consumers share positive impressions with friends and family. Try our free LIKE.TG CRM to organize workflows and streamline sales.
Pay attention to your content marketing. It is especially important if you run your business on social media. According to HubSpot, 90% of marketers with a content plan will continue their strategy. Remember that all photos, videos, and posts you produce should align with your brand platform and be engaging.
Automate routine processes. Dropshipping may seem easier than a regular retail business, but there are still plenty of things you should care about. Use automation platforms and tools to reduce the number of repetitive tasks and focus on your company’s development. There are more than 300,000 chatbots on Facebook, and this number is growing. LIKE.TG offers an easy-to-use chatbot builder for you to automate answering FAQs and create sales funnels that don’t need the human element.
Monitor the trends in your sphere. One of the main dropshipping advantages is high flexibility. When you discover a new trend, you can get in touch with a supplier and start selling such goods very quickly. To promote only actual products, check Google trends and other similar platforms regularly. They will let you find out the things people are interested in now and study the ones that are only gaining popularity.
Provide high-quality service and be ready to own supplier’s mistakes. In the competitive dropshipping market, it is critical to deliver only positive experiences to consumers. It will help you reduce brand switching and turn new buyers into regular ones. Remember that even the best suppliers can sometimes make mistakes, so you should be able to solve these problems. It is better to consider how you can fix various issues in advance.
Congrats, now you know what dropshipping is and how it works, understand its advantages and disadvantages, and the ways to improve your performance. Start your business and empower it with LIKE.TG products to skyrocket your company on the market.
Dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing is a pricing strategy that uses flexible prices instead of fixed ones. Prices vary based on changes in the market, such as competitor pricing, demand, supply, time, and customers’ behavior.
In this article, we willtalk about the importance of dynamic pricing, its advantages and disadvantages, and the types of dynamic pricing. We will give you a step-by-step guide on how to implement a dynamic pricing strategy and take a look at some examples.
Why is dynamic pricing important?
Many business owners prefer flexible pricesfor their companies— let’s talk about why dynamicpricing models work so well.
First, there is a great chance to increase sales with dynamic pricing. You can adjust to the ever-changing market and react toemerging market demands more promptly. For example, there might betimes when lower prices can trigger sales and generate more profit. At the same time, raising prices, catching sales opportunities, and maximizing profits is a better strategy when customer demand is at its peak.
Second, it ischallenging to setspecific prices based on dynamic parameters. The market abounds withcomplex products, so such situations do not come as a surprise.Companies use dynamic pricing strategies to manage a range of pricing alternatives and adjust the prices according to the relative market value.
Now you know thekey reasons why many brands prefer dynamic pricing over fixed pricing. In the next section, we will describe the pros and cons of this pricing strategy.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Dynamic Pricing
Theprimary idea of dynamic pricing is to make businesses more flexible andraise the margin by reacting to customers’ demands. However, as with every strategy, it hasupsides and drawbacks.
Advantages of Dynamic Pricing
Prices can reflect demand. Certain products are in highdemand during specific periods and in low demand during others. Dynamic pricing is a way to reflect the changes and increase profitsby keeping tabs onthe number of people interested in certain products.
For example, Christmas decorations are in high demand in December, so it is a great time to increase their pricesand earn more. At the same time, no one needs them in summer, so you can decrease the prices to boost sales. This strategy can also be used in grocery shops, before events, etc.
Price changes can trigger sales and increase profits. You can use dynamic pricing to boost either profits or sales, as lower prices can trigger people to buy more and increase demand. Monitor and analyze your customers’behavior and adjustyour prices accordingly to earn more.
Brands can get more insights into customers’ behavior. You can calculate the demand curve for your clients and discover the minimum and maximum price they are ready to pay for a particular product. Keep track of customers’ behavior, think about the necessary changes, andoutrankyour competitors by providing a better customer experience at a lower price with dynamic pricing.
Your business can become more flexible. Using the dynamic pricing strategy can help you not to concentrate on keeping your prices stable, as you can change them anytime. Focus on other aspects of your business and look for new sources of revenue instead of worrying about prices.
You can manage your product line better. Sell the overstock with a discount andraise the prices for productsin high demand. You can control all the changes and maintaina steady flowof yourdynamic pricing strategy.
Disadvantages of Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing is not in favoramong all consumers.Not every company implements dynamic pricing — clients who donotdo enough research to find out about your reduced priceswill inevitably pay more, which will make them feel bad. While suchconsumerscan become hostile to your company because of this, the ones who purchased from you and saved moneywill come back to you again and again.
Clients can beat the system. Many peoplehave figured out how to useany dynamic pricing strategy to their maximum benefit.Consumers know that if the demand for a certain product rises,its pricewillbe increased. So, customers started using private browser sessions to limit theamount of information companies collect and prevent them from believing that a certain product has become more popular.
There aretools that help people compare prices on the same productson different websites, allowing them tobuy the cheapest ones without caring about a specific brand.This defeatsany dynamic pricingstrategy and decreases customer loyalty many brands struggle to achieve.
There is always the risk of dumping prices and price fluctuation. If you lower the price using a dynamic pricing strategy, your competitors may make their prices even lower. It will cause dumping, which is harmful to all business owners.
Using dynamic pricing also can cause pricing fluctuation in the industry. If you increase prices and your competitors lower them simultaneously, it won’t attract customers to your business, leading tolost sales.
Dynamic pricing is not a solution for everyone.Although dynamic pricing usuallyworks well for businessesinthe retail, air transportation, and hospitalityindustry, it is definitely not a one-fits-all strategy.Businesses that prioritize customer satisfaction and brand imageoverprofits will not find dynamic pricing beneficial.
Now you know all the pros and cons of this strategy— continue reading to discover the mostpopulartypes of dynamic pricing.
Types of Dynamic Pricing
To effectively use a dynamic pricing strategy, you need to know how to change yourprices based on different metrics. Let’sgo over the most popular dynamic pricing types, their peculiarities, and the spheres of usage.
Segment-based pricing
With this pricing strategytype, companies can use algorithms or machine learning to set up prices for different segmentsof customers. Prices vary based on location, demographics, social status, and other information aboutclients foundusing open resources. This is the mostdubious type of dynamic pricing, as it makes higher-paying customer segments feel disadvantaged and harmsbrand loyalty and image.
Time-based pricing
This type of dynamic pricing is often used in online retail, utility pricing, and electricity pricing. It means that prices can change depending on the time of the day or the dayof the month. For example, online shops may set higher prices for their products from 9 am to 5 pm, which is a high-demand period.
There is also critical peak pricing. It requires business owners to settheir priceson a time-of-use basis except for the critical days whenprices rise to reflect some other expenses.
Cost-plus pricing
The cost-plus techniqueis one of the mostpopular types of dynamic pricing. The price formula is the average fixed cost plus a certain amount of profit. However, this strategy does not reflect many factors, such as consumer value, competitors’ prices, changes in the market, etc.
Competition-basedpricing
If you want to succeed in the competitive environment, keeping track of your competitors’ prices is vital. This strategy is often used in online retail. For example, Amazon is one of the leaders in theindustry and changes its prices regularly, encouraging its competitors to adjust.
Companies tend to cooperate when it comes tohigh competition in the market. Setting up similar prices helps avoid dumping and increases profits for all businesses.
Value-basedpricing
In the ideal scenario, the pricing of certain products should be equal to their value for customers. However, it is almost impossible, as the value can differ from customer to customer. Moreover, it depends on the time and retailer. Use value analysis as a guideline in your dynamic pricing strategy.
There is also a subtype of this pricingstrategy called conversion rate pricing— itrelies on the percentage of website visitors who turn into buyers. When the conversion rate increases, the prices on a website increase, too. This strategy is used among online shops, and its peculiarity is that customers can influence the products’ prices.
Bundle pricing
According to this dynamic pricing strategy, the price of a product depends on whether it is bundled with other products. The prices for bundled products are lower than the prices of the same products sold separately. Subscription-based platforms, printed media, and online courses often use this dynamic pricing type.
Now you know the most popular types of dynamic pricing strategies. Read the next section to discover how toimplement them for your company.
How do you implement a dynamic pricing strategy?
Countlessbusiness owners want to change their pricing strategy and implement dynamic pricing into their policies. Below, we provide a step-by-step guide on how to do it successfully.
Define your commercial goal. Decide on your priorities besides making a profit. This goal will lead you and navigate you in the right direction during your business development, especiallywhen it comes to pricing and marketing.
Discover more about your target audience. Who do you sell your products to? Quantify the approximate number of clients and find their everyday needs and pain points. Afterward, segment your audienceto offer services, packaging, and pricing based on every group’s specific preferences.
Identifyother metricsthat influence the price. If you want toleverage a cost-plus dynamic pricing strategy, ensure that yousingle out proper metrics. While setting up your prices, add a fixed percentage on top of your unit cost.
Build a pricing strategy.Choose from the dynamic pricing strategies provided in this article or develop a complex one. Then turn it into a plan for your team to follow.Focus on your commercial goal and think about the ways to reach it.
Choose your pricing methods and rules. Methods and rules are the next steps to developing your dynamic pricing strategy, so think about how you will set up the price for every product.Come up witha system of discounts and consider high-low pricing.
Test your strategy and make changes if necessary. Launch your product and follow a dynamic pricing strategy. Test different priceoptions and monitor the changes in demand and income.
Let’s talk about industries wheredynamic pricingfits the most and discuss the peculiarities that influence the implementation of this strategy.
Dynamic Pricing Examples
Dynamic pricing is often used in many industries, such as air transportation, rideshare services, hospitality, and retail. Read more about them in this section.
Air transportation
All travelers know that prices onplane tickets to the same destination changedepending on the departure time, season, holidays in the area, and many more. Most airlines use a time-based dynamic pricing strategy— they developed expensive programsthat change prices automaticallybased on specific metrics.
Rideshare services
Many taxi and rideshare services, like Uber, use dynamic pricing systems.Fares always rise when it is rainy or snowy outside and during rush hours, meaning thatservices use dynamic pricing based on time and value. Moreover, food delivery services often use the same strategy in their work.
Hospitality
Just like airline companies, hotels set up their pricesdepending on the time and season. During the peak season, prices are much higher, and businesses earn most of their income. During therest of the year, the prices are usually much lower.Hotels also use demand and value tocalculate the highestamount of money customers are ready to pay. When the demand increases, business owners raise their prices, too.
Retail
Online retailers often use demand-based dynamic pricing and even develop special software to track how many people are interested in certain products. The higher the demand, the higher the prices.
Congrats, now you knoweverything there is to dynamic pricing. Think about how to use it for your product line and increase your profits.
Dynamic email content
Dynamic email content is any personalized part of a mass message that changes based on user behavior or data you have about your subscribers. To create personalized emails, marketers add variables to the mailing list, and group people based on specific common characteristics like location, gender, age, etc. Dynamic email content may also be referred to as AMP emails.
When companies use dynamic email content, they provide subscribers with a more personalized experience. Today, many users are ready to share personal data with brands in exchange for a highly personalized shopping experience and product recommendations. Using this approachmay help your business win the competition for the inbox, build long-lasting relationships with youraudience, save time, and increase revenue.
How Dynamic Email Content Works
Based on variables. A variable represents dynamic parts of content depending on the information you know about the recipient. Let’s see how to add a variable in two simple steps with LIKE.TG, using location information as an example here.
Step 1: Add a variable
Go to your mailing list, click on “Add variable,” insert its name, “location” in this case, andselect a variable type.
Step 2: Gather user data that applies to this variable
Upload data from an Excel doc, type it manually, or use a subscription form.
Create a subscription form and add a “Location” field. This way, your mailing list will be filled with location data from new users when they subscribe. However, don’t ask for toomuch information in addition to email address and name. Otherwise, users will be more likely to churn. The screenshot below is a subscription formthat collects users’ email addresses alongside with their location and gender.
Now that you are acquainted with the concept of variables let’s see how you can use them in your email marketing strategy.
How to add dynamic content to emails
Dynamic Email Subject Lines
Dynamic Email Body
Dynamic Email Footer
The usage of variables differs from service to service, so let’s focus on how to use them with LIKE.TG. You can make any part of an email content dynamic: text sections, images, calls-to-action, or subject lines.
There are three types of variables that you can use:
Subscriber data variables. By default, these variables include email address, name, and a subscriber ID. Add other variables like birth date, gender, location, order date, etc. to your mailing list using subscription forms or surveys.
Technical data variables. There are two technical variables: a web-version and an unsubscribe link variable. The first one adds a web version of the emailthat ishelpful when an email is not displayed correctly, or the recipient’s email service provider doesn’t display images. The second adds an unsubscribe link to the footer.
Sender data variables. These variables include company name, company address, company phone number, and sender email address. These variables are placed in the footer of each email sent with LIKE.TG by default.
When adding a variable to make content dynamic, think of users who haven’t shared their information: they will see an empty field instead of the material. To avoid that, set up criteria that will automatically substitute an empty field with a general piece of text. When a part of textlike “Paris” or “London” from a location variable is absent, use general text instead, for instance, “your city,” or othervariations according to the context.
Let’s move on and see how you can personalize different parts of the email.
Dynamic Email Subject Lines
According to MarketingDive, a personalized subject line gives a 50% higher open rate. To personalize it, create an email campaign, select the mailing list, sender email address, and type in the sender name. Write a subject line and add a variable according to your idea.
Write the text for users who haven’t shared their data to keep your content looking natural. For this, set a condition according to which general text should appear, like in the example below.
Dynamic Email Body
You can make different elements dynamic while editing your email template. For this, insert a variable where you want a dynamic text to be displayed, and add the necessary criteria like in the example below.
Dynamic Email Footer
LIKE.TG automatically adds a footer to every email template to help your company comply with the CAN-SPAM Act — a law against spam emails. Here’s how it looks in a LIKE.TG email template.
Dynamic Email Content Examples
No doubt, dynamic email content may affect your email marketing results, level of user engagement, and sales, so we’ve gathered some inspiring examples of big companies using variables for personalization.
Netflix. This streaming service encourages users to watch more series by sending them a personalized email based on user's preferences. The dynamic content, in this case, is the image from the series and its name.
Strava. This fitness tracking company sends personalized emails based on user activity during the last month. It helps keep subscribers motivated and inspired. In this example, dynamic content is represented by personal achievements.
Mitsubishi. Here is an example of straightforward dynamic content in the subject line, based on a variable {{name}}.
Read our blog article to get more insights into dynamic email content alongside with fresh ideas for your inspiration!
Duopoly
A duopoly is a market situation that entails two competing companies that share the market. In this market, two brands can collude to set prices or quantities and make customers pay more money.
As with any market structure, a duopoly has a significant impact on how companies interact with each other. Since there are only two players within the market, the actions of one will affect the other’s response and activity. They also influence the way a company operates and how it produces and promotes its products.
In this article, we’ll uncover the features of a duopoly and its advantages and disadvantages and make the difference between a duopoly and an oligopoly clear. Then, we’ll review the types and examples of a duopoly.
Features of Duopolies
Duopoly is a market structure similar to oligopoly. However, it still has some distinctive features. The first thing that distinguishes this market structure is that there are only two companies that share the market. Secondly, both businesses that exist within a duopoly are interdependent. To win the attention of customers, companies often take strategic actions, such as price reductions. If one company makes its product cheaper, the other will follow. This is necessary to attract consumers and encourage them to purchase.
It’s worth mentioning that players can collude to determine a price or output or maintain a competitive environment for significant profits. Since companies in a duopoly take different measures to developbrand loyaltyand implement low-pricing strategies, it’s hard for new firms to enter. As a result, sales volume and revenues are good enough because there is only one competitor and the barriers to entry are high.
Knowing the features of this market situation allows you to proceed to the next section, where we’ll discuss the pros and cons of a duopoly.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Duopolies
A duopoly is a market situation that influences businesses and consumers both positively and negatively.
Its advantages include the absence of other competitors. It gives all the opportunities for two companies to collaborate to receive the highest profits. Simply put, this market situation makes collusive cooperation possible.
Firms in a duopoly don’t strive to bring new products or services to the market. They rather concentrate on bringing innovation to their existing products and services. Considering that the market is divided only between two businesses, it’s worth pointing out that they are the ones to control prices and prevent other companies from entering the market.
The main disadvantage of a duopoly is that it creates limits for free trade. The existence of only two companies within the market significantly limits the choice of products for customers. It’s difficult for new firms to join the market and obtain some market share because of the barriers that existing companies create. One more drawback of a duopoly is that it involves price fixing and collusion. As a result, consumers have only a few alternatives and still have to pay a high price.
Duopoly vs. Oligopoly
Both duopolies and oligopolies create high barriers to entry, making it impossible for new companies to enter. They are also similar in terms of authority and power their players have since the competition is low. Moreover, businesses within these market structures choose cooperation rather than competition to maximize their profits. After all, the number of companies is limited, so customers have only a few alternatives.
However, a duopoly and an oligopoly differ in the number of companies their markets have. In an oligopoly, we can see a small number of companies (two and more), while in a duopoly, the number of players is always limited to two, and the market is divided in half. In a duopoly, firms have monopoly power and are interdependent in their strategies. The decision of one business will definitely influence the other company.
Now it’s time to move to the types of a duopoly.
Types of Duopolies
Duopolies can be divided into two main groups:
Cournot duopoly. According to this duopoly, the output of produced goods and services shapes the competition between players. Businesses in this market system manufacture a certain amount of products to maximize their profits. Besides, firms have to negotiate to divide the market. In the long run, companies establish stable prices and output. This type also excludes the presence of collusion.
Bertrand duopoly. In this market situation, prices shape the nature of competition between companies. Customers opting for the firms with the lowest price can cause price war and high competition between players. Consequently, brands implement low-pricing strategies and lose profit while consumers enjoy purchasing products or services for incredibly low prices.
Long story short, the two types differ in triggers that cause competition between players within the market situation. Let’s proceed to the examples of duopolies to see how that works in real life.
Examples of Duopolies
Sometimes it’s really helpful to review several examples to fully understand some marketing definitions. That’s why now we’ll discuss six large companies — prime examples of duopolies.
Mastercard and Visa
The two famous payment solution companies are a great example of a duopoly. Together, they own approximately 80% of all European Union card transactions. It’s no secret that both corporations have strong pricing power and prove resilient against payments newcomers.
Pepsi and Coca-Cola
The two companies that are famous for their carbonated drinks are the embodiment of a duopoly. According to Statista, the market share of Coca-Cola company was 43.7% in 2019. At the same time, the market share of Pepsi amounted to 24.1%.
Airbus and Boeing
The market share of airplane manufacturing is concentrated between Airbus and Boeing. The competition between the most prominent manufacturers of airplanes in the world is fierce.
To conclude, companies in a duopoly are either competitors or partners in collusion. Everything depends on the situation. The market structure entails fixed pricing, price wars, and a few alternatives for customers.
eCommerce email marketing
Ecommerce email marketing is an effective marketing strategy that uses email to promote products of an online store to existing or potential customers.
In the video below, Anya shares 3 powerful benefits of using email marketing for eCommerce. Check it out!
Emails are one of the most popular means of digital communication, and that’s the main reason why using them for marketing activities can be extremely effective. They help blow up user engagement, build customer loyalty, share useful information, announce the hottest deals, and boost sales.
The Importance of Email Marketing for eCommerce
Email marketing is crucial for achieving business success. The benefits of implementing effective email strategies are immense. Email marketing allows developing brand awareness, building credibility, and establishing trustworthy relationships with the customer. Also, it is a perfect way to generate leads, drive more sales, and boost website traffic.
The latest email marketing statistics
Here are the most recent statistics to prove that email marketing can take your eCommerce to the next level.
99% of consumers check their email inboxes every day;
The end expects 5.6 billion active email accounts in 2019;
59% of consumers indicate that marketing emails have the power to influence their purchase decision;
Email Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales
User onboarding
Lead nurturing
Mailing list segmentation
Re-engaging passive users
Cross-selling
Upselling
Let’s take a look at the most effective email marketing strategies that can help you boost sales, attract customers, and re-engage passive clients.
User onboarding
Awelcome email is a perfect wayto show new customers your attitude towards them. You have only one chance to create a positive first impression. Therefore, you need to think about how to grab readers’ attention. It’s worth mentioning that 33% of clients get more engaged with a brand if they receive a welcome email from the company. Also, you can encourage customers to purchase with a unique first-time-visitor discount provided in the email.
Onboarding emails often come in a series of 2-3 messages to provide the newcomers with a smooth start. Marketers share educational content to nurture leads. It may be a welcome video from the CEO of the brand, a how-to guide, or a short checklist.
Seehow ShortStack greets new subscribers. They explain how the service can help users and provide a short how-to guide to get started.
Lead nurturing
It is vital to make efforts to retain the generated leads and nurture them into loyal clients. One of the greatest ways to do it is to provide them with the necessary educational content during the entire lifecycle. Find out the reasons why leads drop off and support them right when they need that.
Below is an example of a lead nurturing email. Eventbrite offers an event venue checklist to increase subscriber engagement.
Mailing list segmentation
User segmentation is an essential strategy to provide your clients and leads with a more personalized approach. All users are different and have different interests. You need to know your clients and segment them according to their needs and preferences. Then, you can come up with emails that will be more appropriate for each group of clients.
Collect the data via a subscription form, preference management center, and based on user behavior on your website. Armed with this info, create highly personalized emails that will strike.
Take a look at the abandoned cart email below. That is one of the ways to segment your mailing list and increase sales.
Re-engaging passive users
You can opt for this email marketing strategy if your clients start losing interest in your services or products. By sending this kind of email, you will be able to draw your customers’ attention and invite them to your website to check out the latest discounts or seasonal offers. As this example shows, you can ask inactive users if they are still interested in receiving emails. Make sure that users can unsubscribe anytime.
Cross-selling
To make your visitors buy more, you can offer them products that complement their orders. Offer items thatare a perfect match for the selected products. Look how iHerb cross-sells to their customers.
Upselling
Upselling emails work perfectly for eCommerce businesses. After clients make an order or purchase, offer some new, pricier options or different models with advanced features. If you highlight the value the customers will get after purchasing more expensive products, they will go for these products.
To motivate users to buy a more expensive product, Clinique offers free shipping and a treat at checkout.
eCommerce Email Marketing Best Practices
Create eye-catching designs and use responsive email templates
Run A/B testing to know your customers better
Send extra discount emails to your loyal customers
Always notify your consumers about forthcoming sales
Send behavioral emails
Implement a referral program
Below, you can find some hints on practical email marketing approaches for an eCommerce business.
Create eye-catching designs and use responsive email templates. Make your emails convenient to read on any device and include a visible link to follow.
Run A/B testing to know your customers better. It will help you discover your clients’ needsand make your email campaigns more effective and sales-driven.
Send extra discount emails to your loyal customers. It’s one of the most working email marketing strategies for eCommerce business for nurturing loyal customers and building your brand image.
Always notify your consumers about forthcoming sales season, holiday-themed deals, and hot discount offers to entice them to visit your website and make a purchase.
Send behavioral emails. These messages are highly personalized and relevant to each client. They're sent in response to the user's actions. These emails include an abandoned shopping cart email, order confirmation emails, shipment status email, feedback request email, etc.
Implement a referral program. It’s a highly important step that will attract new leads and nurture loyal relationships. People tend to trust the recommendations of their peers, so it’s a great chance to promote your brand and attract new customers.
How to take your eCommerce marketing to the next level
Many email marketing tools can facilitate the process of email sending and allow achieving the best possible results. With LIKE.TG email service, you can create well-designed emails with a simple drag-and-drop editor. You don’t need any technical skills to do it. There are plenty of pre-designed templates to choose from, so you can opt for the one that suits your purpose.
Moreover, you will be able to analyze the effectiveness of email campaigns, monitor subscribers’ activities, and behavior. Track the results, run A/B tests, and send triggered emails to automate everyday challenges.
To improve your performance, use an eCommerce platform. It will help you build your site and manage the work of your store. Integrating it with LIKE.TG, you can exchange email addresses between services. This enables you to create an advanced email marketing strategy.
Final words
Email marketing has enormous potential for eCommerce businesses. You can use these best practices to attract new customers, retain existing clients, and drive more sales. There are plenty of email marketing services that can make this process easier, and LIKE.TG is one of the options available on the market. Give it a try and see the tangible results in almost no time. Start eCommerce email marketing with LIKE.TG!
Durable goods
Durable goods are consumer goods that have a long lifespan and don’t wear out quickly. Customers don’t purchase them often since they are considered expensive, and people can use them for at least three years.
In this article, we’ll review the characteristics of durable goods and their types, make the difference between durable and nondurable goods clear, and see various examples.
Characteristics of Durable Goods
Durable goods (also called durables) can be used for a long time, and customers don’t have to purchase them often. In general, if employed correctly for either individual or business purposes, they can serve their owner for years. This type of goods includes cars, appliances, office furniture, garden equipment, electronics, motorcycles, jewelry, and more. It’s essential to know how exactly durables differ from other goods, so let’s review their characteristics:
such goods have a long life cycle (more than three years);
they don’t wear out or break down quickly, so people don’t have to purchase them frequently;
they can be used many times;
these goods can be expensive, and that’s why many people rent them instead of purchasing them;
an increase in orders of durables signifies that the economy is getting better (i.e., consumers purchase durables when they know that the economy is improving);
customers sometimes rely on bank loans to buy these items because of their high price;
the process of purchasing these products usually requires careful planning.
Now that you know their features, it’s time to proceed to the types.
Types of Durable Goods
Durables can be divided into two groups that include consumer durable goods and business durable goods.
Consumer durable goods. This group refers to goods bought by individuals or households with the hope that these products will serve them for years so that they don’t need to buy them again soon. Examples include cars, furniture, electronics, books, tables, chairs, etc.
Business durable goods. These are the goods that entrepreneurs need for the proper and successful functioning of their firms. Machinery and equipment are necessary to start specific types of businesses. Engines, metalworking machinery, and electrical transmission apparatus belong to industrial equipment that enables certain types of companies to operate. Commonly, firms need buses, cars, and trucks to transport goods necessary for production or to deliver products to their customers. Besides, business owners often need computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets to control their business and track its success.
Now when you know the types, let’s make the difference between durable and nondurable goods clear.
Durable Goods vs. Nondurable Goods
Nondurable goodsare goods that have a short lifespan and are usually consumed in one use. After a short period of time, these goods must be bought again in successive purchases. Customers buy nondurable goods regularly. They are cheap, and people can pay for them with cash to obtain the benefits as soon as possible. Examples include perishables (meat and fish, fruits and vegetables, dairy and bakery products) and other products like cosmetics, soft drinks, dish soap, laundry detergent, etc.
In contrast to nondurables, owners of durable products can obtain their benefits not only once but during a certain period. Eventually, their advantages might reduce, but people canstilluse them until these durables break down. Let’s take automobiles, for example. People use them for years, although their speed and convenience might decrease over time.
Now that the difference between these types of goods is clear, we can move on to the examples.
Examples of Durable Goods
Durables are not presented only in specific industries, but you can find them everywhere, starting with electronics and finishing with factory production machines and equipment. That’s why it’s essential to mention that there are different categories of durables that you might need in your everyday life and business practices.
Let’s begin with the first category — home furniture and equipment. For sure, items like air conditioners, tables, chairs, microwaves, plant pots, beds, shelves, or blankets belong to this group of goods. We can also proceed to consumer electronics and products like tablets, laptops, earbuds, or smartphones. Long story short, you can find durable goods everywhere around you.
Now you know the characteristics of durable goods and the difference between durable and nondurable goods. The examples above show that it’s essential to differentiate these products since you use them differently in your daily routine.
Drip marketing
Drip marketing is a strategy that encompasses a company sending a series of pre-written emails to its prospects and customers to make them take the desired action. Drip campaigns can be sent based on subscribers’ actions or scheduled on specific dates. Drip marketing helps increase brand engagement and loyalty, promote relevant content, interact with customers, and capture abandoned carts.
In this video, Alex explains how to create killer drip campaigns.
In this article, we’ll explain why use drip marketing and its benefits. We’ll also uncover how to set up a drip campaign and provide you with some amazing examples.
Why use drip marketing?
Some brands send drip campaigns to interact with their target audience and boost conversions, others strive to increase customer loyalty. However, all of them use the same technique. Drip marketing is an essential strategy for lead nurturing since it allows companies to communicate the benefits of their businesses to potential clients who aren’t ready to purchase yet. With drip campaigns, they can educate leads about their products so that people consider their brands once they are ready to buy.
Marketers deliver the right content at the right time to provide subscribers with solutions they need at a specific moment. Since emails are sent in response to subscribers’ actions and people expect them, marketers receive great open rates and higher click-through rates.
A series of pre-written emails sent in response to specific visitors’ actions make users think of your brand and remember it. Once they need what you offer, they will recall you and purchase your product. You’ll build better relationships with customers and show them that you are a company they can trust and rely on. As a result, brand awareness will increase.
Now that you know why to use drip marketing, let’s discuss the advantages.
Benefits of Drip Marketing
Business owners can reap many benefits of this marketing strategy. If implemented right, it can bring the following pros to entrepreneurs:
higher brand engagement;
increased customer loyalty;
promotion of important offers, discounts, and releases;
higher sales volume;
effective lead nurturing;
brand awareness;
re-engaging passive subscribers;
higher customer satisfaction;
upselling and cross-selling;
customer retention.
Now that you know the pros, it’s time to find out how to set up a drip campaign.
How to set up a drip campaign?
Setting up the sending of automated series of emails is easy when using a specialized platform. With LIKE.TG, you’ll be able to schedule drip campaigns for different marketing scenarios: abandoned carts, re-engagement, purchases, etc.
1. Register with LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is an all-in-one marketing platform that enables you to create various drip campaigns to meet your main business goals. With Automation 360, you’ll send relevant emails at the right moment to subscribers on your list. Fill in the registration form with your contact information to start using our service and reap its benefits.
2. Create an Event
Once you finish your registration and log in to your account, proceed to creating an event. When your prospect performs a specific action, the event will be triggered. In this case, an event is a condition that will cause the sending of emails, SMS, push notifications, etc.
Go to “Automations” and click the “Events Manager” button.
Click “Add new event” and select one of four default events or create your own to reach your business objectives.
After clicking “Add” and creating the necessary event, our service will generate a unique URL. Ask your developers to send data to that URL.
3. Build an Email Workflow
Return to the “Automations” tab and choose “Create new automation.” Fill in the form with the information necessary to send your new drip campaign.
Once you click “Apply,” select the most appropriate trigger to send your emails. For example, brands send a series of emails when their customers abandon their carts because of their effectiveness. To create a series, follow the steps.
Use email, push, SMS, filter, condition, action, and goal elements to build your flow. You just need to drag and drop those necessary for your workflow. Add relevant content to attract subscribers once they receive your emails. Set conditions for the system to identify when the emails should be sent.
Below you can see a great example of how to do it.
4. Evaluate the Performance of your Drip Campaign
The last step is tracking and assessing the performance of your campaign. This is the perfect moment to find out whether your tactics work and bring great results: sales, conversions, customer loyalty, engagement, or brand awareness. LIKE.TG provides you with statistics: deliveries, opens, and clicks for each part of the flow in real-time.
Here you can see the numbers LIKE.TG users receive on their campaigns.
Now that you know how to build a drip campaign with LIKE.TG, it’s time to jump into some examples.
Examples of Drip Campaigns
The task of drip campaigns is to speed up the passage of the lead down the sales funnel with minimal discomfort by offering tutorials, guides, instructions, discounts, etc. Amazing drip campaigns can delight customers, make them engage with your brand again and buy your product. Let’s now explore some outstanding examples that hook the audience and entice them to engage.
Duolingo
Duolingo’s drip campaign mission is to win users back and make them more active. The company sends a series of emails to its subscribers once they show up in the app.
The first email welcomes you back and informs you that Duolingo is happy to see you again practicing and doing lessons. The team encourages to perform streaks to develop learning habits and attain goals.
The next email reminds you to take a lesson to practice language and improve your knowledge and skills. This way, this language learning company keeps in touch with inactive subscribers.
Leesa
Leesa, famous for its mattresses, uses drip campaigns to encourage potential customers to buy with a discount. The offer is very attractive and entices customers to shop immediately. There is a powerful trigger that informs about the upcoming Black Friday in July.
The first email in a sequence urges customers to hurry up to enjoy the benefits of the sale. It says that the discounts will end soon, so people who haven’t managed to grab the deal can do it now.
The second email is another way for a brand to increase conversions. People can still purchase mattresses at attractive prices since the sale was extended. If subscribers have a fear of missing out, they can hurry up to shop the mattresses.
Congrats, now you know the importance of drip marketing. Hope that our examples will serve you as a hint once you are ready to create email campaigns for different business events.
Double opt-in
Double opt-in is an email subscription method. It means that users are added to your mailing list only after they confirm the subscription two times. With this method, you’ll get high-quality leads and better email deliverability.
Building a mailing list using a subscription form can seem like a tedious process, but it is a must for your email marketing strategy. When choosing a list building technique, you should decide which email subscription method to use — single opt-in or double opt-in. Each of them has its own peculiarities as well as advantages and disadvantages. Read on to discover the difference between single opt-in and double opt-in.
Single Opt-in vs Double Opt-in
The difference between these two methods lies in the number of steps users must take to subscribe. Hence, the choice will influence the quality of your mailing list, email deliverability, and number of conversions.
Single opt-in means that a user joins your list right after they provide their email address and click “Subscribe.” So, this is a one-step process that doesn’t require users to go to the inbox to confirm their subscription.
Look below to see how the single opt-in subscription process looks. Users enter their email address.
Then, they submit the address and immediately join the mailing list.
A double opt-in method implies a two-step subscription process. After users leave their email address in a form, they receive an email with a confirmation link. If they follow it, they join a company’s mailing list.
Look at the example of the double opt-in form below. After users leave their email address, they’re asked to verify it.
Immediately, they receive a confirmation email. The brand asks them to follow the link if they want to subscribe or delete the email if it was received by mistake.
Advantages and disadvantages of double opt-in
Double opt-in subscription forms have several significant advantages over single opt-in forms. Check them out below.
Advantages
Quality leads. If users went through two-step verification, you can be sure they’re aware of what they’re doing and are really interested in your brand.
High email deliverability. The double opt-in method helps marketers eliminate spam traps, emails with typos, and their competitors’ attacks aimed at harming the sender’s reputation. With this method, you’ll collect a high-quality mailing list and send campaigns to engaged subscribers that will result in high email deliverability, open rates, and overall email performance.
Compliance with GDPR regulations. Despite the fact that double opt-in is not required by the GDPR regulations, it won’t be superfluous. Use it as extra proof that you send legal campaigns.
Still, the double opt-in method has some minor disadvantages. Before creating a subscription form, you should be aware of them.
Disadvantages
Slow mailing list growth. Since the subscription process takes two steps, users need more time to join your list. Besides, some of them can forget to check their inbox. As a result, it takes much longer to collect a list.
Lower conversions. Some users interested in your blog or products may not have time to check the inbox or simply give up halfway because of this two-step process. So, you should realize that you’ll get lower conversions.
Now, that you know the peculiarities of each method, it’s time to choose one and start collecting leads. No matter which method you like, LIKE.TG allows marketers to create both forms without any technical skill for free. Follow the instructions below.
How to Create a Double Opt-in Subscription Form
Register with LIKE.TG
Choose a subscription form type
Design your subscription form
Select the necessary subscription method
Creating a subscription form won’t take you more than 30 minutes with the LIKE.TG Subscription Form Builder. You only need to drag and drop the necessary elements to your form, and design them to your liking.
Step 1: Register with LIKE.TG
If you don’t have an account yet, create it. You can sign up with Google or Facebook.
Step 2: Choose a subscription form type
In your account, navigate to “Subscription forms,” click “Create a new form.” Then, choose the form you like and select a mailing list where all the addresses will be added.
Step 3: Design your subscription form
Drag the necessary elements from the left to your form, and edit them in the right panel. You can add as many fields as you need, use checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down menus, etc. Change style, colors, font, images, background color, etc.
Step 4: Select the necessary subscription method
In the upper right corner, click “Form Options” and go to “Opt-In Settings.” Here you should enable the corresponding setting by turning the toggle switch to the ON position. So, after subscribing, users will receive a confirmation email.
After that, you can edit the text of your confirmation email below.
If you decided to use a single opt-in method, you don’t need to change the settings since it is configured by default.
In our knowledge base, you’ll find a step-by-step guide to creating a subscription form.
Direct sales
Direct sales – a type of sales that implies direct contact between a seller and a consumer without involving any third parties. Direct sales occur in a non-retail environment – at home, cafe, online, office, etc.
Commonly, people associate direct sales with MLM-companies, such as Avon or Amway. However, many other businesses use this model. For instance, direct selling is popular in the B2B sector, where sellers communicate with their clientele personally.
In 2019, direct sales alone enriched the world economy with over $193 billion in total sales. The direct sales industry includes over 118.4 million representatives worldwide. 59% of them are located in Asia, 26% in North and South America, and 12% in Europe.
Advantages of Direct Sales
Maybe you are wondering why direct selling is so popular in different parts of the world? This business model has certain advantages. Most prominent of them are:
Promising business model. According to the World Direct Sales Association, direct selling has been experiencing sustainable growth during the last couple of years. Between 2015 and 2018, direct sales generated a compound annual growth rate of 1.7%.
Opportunity to adjust a product to customers’ needs. Direct selling companies control the whole cycle, from manufacturing to a final sale, in-house. With this approach, a brand swiftly receives feedback from customers and can tailor its products or services to meet clients’ needs and market demand on the whole.
Better personalization. By interacting with customers directly, sellers know their buyer persona better and can provide their customers with highly relevant and personalized offers. Consumers are more likely to shop with brands that make relevant offers and recommendations.
Better control at every stage of customer interaction. By not having middlemen, a company has full control over its product's price and can adjust it to customers’ needs. Companies can strictly regulate customer experience during the purchasing process and have lower reputational risks.
Strong customer relationships. The foundation of direct sales is personal contact with customers. It allows representatives to use an individual approach to every client and build long-lasting relationships with them. It has a major impact on business – a 5% increase in customer retention enlarges profits by over 25%.
Higher margins. Another benefit of having no intermediaries is that all revenue goes back to the company. There is no need to divide it between the business and third-party vendors.
What is the difference between direct sales and indirect sales?
In a direct sales model, a brand interacts with customers immediately. An example of a direct seller is Boeing. The company offers its products directly to potential customers – airlines.
Indirect sale, on the contrary, include various intermediaries – distribution centers, wholesalers, regional representatives, and so on. For instance, Coca-Cola uses this model. That means that a customer can buy a Coke from a third-party vendor, but not from the company’s website.
Top Direct Sales Companies
When it comes to the biggest direct sales companies, network marketing giants top the list. Below are the global top-five direct sales companies, by revenue.
Amway. An American company that sells health, beauty, and home care products.
Herbalife Nutrition. A global MLM-corporation that develops and sells dietary supplements.
Avon Products, Inc. A multi-level marketing company headquartered in the U.K. specializing in beauty, household, and personal care products.
Vorwerk. A brand from Germany that sells appliances, clothing and accessories, cosmetics, home decor, kitchenware, and personal care products.
Natura. A global company from Brazil with 6,400 regular employees and 1.7 million salespeople. This brand sells cosmetics and personal care products.
Types of Direct Sales
Information about the types of direct sales is inconsistent – people often confuse them with methods various companies use. Generally, the classification includes two categories:
Single-level sales. In single-level sales, a salesperson earns a commission for trading products. For instance, an advertising agency’s employee gets a certain commission from the sum of services they sold.
Multi-level sales. A representative not only sells products but also recruits new salespeople. They get remuneration both for their own sales and for sales made by people they have recruited. This approach is popular among MLM-companies.
Methods of Direct Sales
Salespeople use different communication approaches with their prospects. Let’s shed light on some of them.
One-on-one sales. This method implies in-person communication between a seller and a customer. It occurs when a salesperson goes to an individual business meeting with a client or wanders from door to door to present their products to prospects.
Online sales. Single-level and multi-level sales companies both love this method. Huge international MLM-companies, as well as small businesses and local representatives, sell products and services through their own websites or social media accounts.
Host or party-plan sales. Here, a seller gathers a group of customers and presents a product to them. Such meetings often resemble parties – participants enjoy a laid-back atmosphere of celebration and become more and more inclined to purchase something. However, the presentation can also take place in an office environment.
How to Do Direct Sales
Direct selling has its peculiarities. For instance, it should emphasize sales techniques and invest more in improving the team’s sales skills. We’ve picked five tips on how to manage a business in direct sales from the very beginning.
Set your goals. It’s impossible to do business without clearly defined goals. They are both motivators and the basis of success. For successful work, your goals should be specific and measurable, like “increase revenue by 15% in the third quarter.”
Determine your target audience. Often businesses have a vague understanding of their audience. Meanwhile, knowing your prospects is the key to better sales and ROI. Start by identifying your buyers’ personas – notice and include their occupations, lifestyles, habits, interests, and pain points.
Create a sales strategy and KPIs. To eliminate chaos, build a sales strategy. It will enable you to address the needs of your customers, increase ROI, and shorten your sales cycle. Include key performance indicators to make sure your business implements the strategy correctly and achieves its goals. Always keep track of KPIs – it will help you evaluate your strategy, spot the flaws in it, and find effective techniques.
Align sales and marketing. Marketing and lead generation are pivotal for any business, so develop a detailed plan on how to target potential customers. For achieving better results, join your sales and promotional efforts. Sales benefit from marketing by obtaining warm leads, and marketing improves their results by getting information about the customers from salespeople.
Learn and implement sales activities. Be aware of how to interact with your audience during each stage of the sales funnel. This includes being able to qualify a prospect as a potential buyer, present to them your product, work with their objections, close deals, and keep in touch with clients to turn them into returning customers.
How to Promote Your Direct Sales Business Online
Start a blog
Use lead magnets
Go social
Benefit from email marketing
Promote your brand with influencers
Think about messenger marketing
4.57 billion people worldwide are active internet users, and they are ready to interact with brands online. Boost your direct sales by applying these digital marketing tools to your strategy.
Start a blog
No matter what industry you are in, blogging is an effective way to promote your business. That is the reason 55% of marketers make blog content creation their top priority. Blogging helps attract people, build strong, trustworthy relationships with them, and eventually turn them into your customers. To achieve it, make your blog informative and helpful for your target audience. Post not your company’s news, but useful articles, like the social media posting service Amplifr does.
Use lead magnets
Once you have a blog or a website, make use of a lead magnet – a special offer for your audience in exchange for their email addresses. The lead magnet can be anything you’re ready to suggest to potential customers like a: discount, gift with a purchase, e-book, check-list, additional service, and more. After a person fills in the form with a magnet, they can proceed down the sales funnel with an email or messenger campaign.
Create subscription forms for your lead magnets easily with LIKE.TG. Our drag-and-drop editor, simple but powerful, enables you to build free customized multichannel forms in minutes to sign up customers for your email campaigns, messengers, and chatbots.
Go social
Social networks are a wonderful channel for communication with your audience. Almost half of the global population spends around 2.5 hours on social media daily. Using social media, companies generate leads and increase their brand awareness. In 2019, 43% of internet users browsed social media when researching products before making a purchase.
Another reason for going social is building a strong community around your brand. Look, how one of the top direct selling brands, Avon, maintains its Instagram profile. To reinforce its relationships with clients, the brand offers them free online consultations, reposts their publications, and encourages them to share their thoughts about everything that matters. You can adopt these techniques for your social media marketing strategy or check out our article about social media marketing for more inspiration.
Benefit from email marketing
Email campaigns are one of the most powerful tools to boost your sales – in 2019, for every $1 invested in email marketing brands received $42 back. With this channel, you can both engage your customers and send them special offers. They will love it – 60% of people prefer to receive promotional messages via email.
To increase your sales with email campaigns, you can send collections of your best products, like Stitcher does in the email below, as well as seasonal offers, birthday or trigger emails, and more. To create beautiful and personalized automated email campaigns easily and send them right in time to each customer, register with LIKE.TG.
Promote your brand with influencers
Collaborations with bloggers and influencers is a promising promotional channel. 89% of marketers claim that ROI from influencer marketing is better or much better than other marketing channels, and 41% say it’s comparable to other ways of promotion.
This practice is applicable in most industries, not only in cosmetics or wellness companies like Oriflame in the example below. Even if you do direct sales in B2B, there are likely some influences your audience appreciates. For instance, if you offer software for recruitment and HR, find an influential and respectable professional in this field on Facebook and get in touch with them.
Think about messenger marketing
Over 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger monthly. And you can benefit from it by starting messenger marketing with chatbots. They allow a brand to interact with customers round the clock, provide clients with feedback in seconds, and support personal contact with a client.
Launching a messenger chatbot has never been as easy and cheap as right now. Start by creating your Facebook Messenger or Telegram chatbot with LIKE.TG and make the most of this marketing channel.
Five Direct Sales Techniques
With immediate contact between a salesperson and a customer, direct selling requires certain tricks. True virtuosos in this field can convince a client they’re making the best decision by buying your product. To achieve this result, salespeople can use the techniques below.
FAB (features – advantages – benefits). The majority of scripts, landing pages, and promotional materials use this scheme. It implies consistently telling customers about the key features of a company or product, its main advantages, and positive effects on a prospect. This technique makes an offer crystal-clear for a consumer and boosts their interest.
BYAF (but you are free). Persistence is crucial for closing deals, but salespeople run the risk of going too far with it. As a result, customers often turn away from an overly-pushy brand representative after one purchase. To mitigate the pressure during negotiations, let your customer know they’re free in their decisions. It’s a popular technique for selling info-products and services.
The foot-in-the-door technique. The core of this technique, perfect for upselling, is to make small initial requests followed by bigger ones. Another option is to offer a low price at first, and then charge an extra sum for more profound services. For instance, if you’re selling online English lessons for international students, you may offer them a cheaper level check at first, and then start negotiations about buying the whole expensive course.
SPIN selling. The most interesting subject for every person is themselves, not your product. Benefit from this tendency by using the SPIN technique. During negotiations, allow a customer to talk more than you do and ask them questions about their situation (S), problem (P), impact (I, or implication) of the issue on them, and the need for a solution (N, or need-payoff). Once moving through all these stages, you can introduce your product as the key to solving the prospect’s issues.
The favor upfront technique. As social beings, humans tend to give something in return for the favors they receive. This trait lies at the core of the widely used reciprocity principle. To leverage reciprocity, give something in advance – a free trial period, discount, or additional service. This goodwill gesture will persuade the customer to accept your offer.
You can apply these tricks not only for in-person communications with a client but in your digital marketing as well. Reinforce your direct selling business with amazing email campaigns, chatbots, SMS, and push notifications. Register with LIKE.TG to create them with a few clicks.
Display advertising
Display advertising isthe process of promoting a product using an online paid adplaced on relevant social media accounts and third-party platforms. These ads include text, images, or videos and encourage site visitors togo to a landing page and takea certain desired action or buy a product.
In this article, we’ll explainhow display ads work, cover their advantages and disadvantages,discuss their types, and provide some examples.
How does display advertising work?
Display advertising is a great marketingtechnique since it benefits both website owners and advertisers. Host websites can monetize their traffic by selling some spaceusing Google AdSense while advertisers buy it with Google Ads.
Ads are served by the Google Display Network. It allows advertisers to find the right target audience and show their promotions in the right place at the right time. With this network, you can find new prospectsbased on similar audiences and reveal the most promising audiences to blow up your conversions with automated targeting. It works based on a landing page and your existing audiences. Alternatively, you can start with remarketing. Tracking users’cookieswhen they leave items in their shopping cart without buying enables marketers to sell more.
Google uses two pricing models: CPC(cost per click) and CPM(cost per thousand views). It means that every time a user clicks through your ad, you’re charged a specific amount of money based on your bidding strategy.
Advertisers monitor cookies and collect data from several external websites to keep track of users’ activities. This data aggregation enables them to do behavioral targeting. Google also makes it possible to create contextually targeted and geographical ads. Contextual ads are only placed on sites relevant to your commercial message. For example, if you sell sports shoes, your ads can be promoted on sports store sites and sport-themed blogs. Demographic and geographical targeting allows you to reach specific audience segments that might be interested in your products, and that is an excellent choice if you provide seasonal offers.
Now that you know more about the display advertising algorithm, it’s time toreview its advantages and disadvantages for your business.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Display Advertising
Before creating your first display ad campaign, you should be aware of its pros and cons. Besides, you will need to figure out if this type of ad is the best choice to reach your marketing goal, so let’s uncover the opportunities it provides.
The biggestperk of display advertising is its wide outreach that allows businesses to find prospects worldwide. Take a closer look at other benefits of this type of ad.
Helps build brand awareness. Unlike search advertising, display ads don’t reach audiences with purchase intent. However, they allow businesses to make people remember their brands even if these users have never needed their products before. This way, they manage to evoke initial interest and let people recall it once they have a need for it. As a result, this particular brand is associated with a certain product they promote using display advertising.
Provides targeting opportunities. With display ads, you can narrow down your audience to the most high-performing prospects. This is possible due to various targeting opportunities available. You can reach people based ontheir demographics, geographical position, language, general interests, behavior, and previous interactions. The last one means you can win back leadswho liked your products and added them to their carts but didn’t make purchases eventually.
Enables to track results. After launching your display ad campaign, you can monitoryour number of clicks,determine when a prospect converted into a client,identifyon which platform conversion took place, and reveal the most effective advertisements. This is a great chance to improve your future campaigns and invest in more successful strategies.
Now that youare more interested in creating your first display ad, you should also be aware of its shortcomings.
Low conversion rates. Compared to search advertising, display ads show lower conversion rates. Thisshould not come as a surprise — search ads are designed for leads with purchase intent, while display ads allow businesses to create more interest in a product. So, if you aim at increasing your sales, display ads maynot be the best choice.
Lack of reputation management. Since youdon’t have that much influence on the choice of platforms for your ads, they can sometimes beunrelated to your business, which also means you’ll be charged either way. Besides, such irrelevant ads may irritate site visitors. If your brand is famous and authoritative, displaying ads onimmaterial sites may damage your reputation.
Banner blindness. It has become a common phenomenon for many internet users in the last few years.Banner blindness helps us deal with information overload and ad fatigue. Peoplesubconsciously ignore advertisements, especially when they are designed as separate blocks that strike the eye. To make your display ads stand out, make use of rich media that attract users’ attention better.
Ad blockers. More and more people are using ad blocking technologies every daydue to ad fatigue. However, some brands try to cushion this negative impact by askingtheir site visitors to allow ads or buy subscriptions.
Now you can weigh all theperks anddrawbacks to decide which type of ad to choose. Since we’ve mentioned search advertising, let’s take a closer look at it in comparison with display advertising.
Display Advertising vs. Search Advertising
Search advertising and display advertisingare similar, yet they havetheir fair share of differences— the key one is user intent. Let’stalk about these two terms in more detail.
Search advertisingappears on the search engine results page (SERP) after a user types in a corresponding keyword. This ad reaches users with clear purchase intent since they look for the same product a brand advertises.
Display advertisinginvolves placing ads on sites relevant to your product and target audience. This kind of ad is based ona push approach, while search adsrevolve around apull approach. With search ads, only users looking for a particular product come acrossthesepromotions, while display ads are shown based on different targeting criteria.
When choosing the best ad to reach your goal, stay mindful ofyour need to increase brand awareness, search volume, budget, and business type. Firstly, you need to know ifyour audience is familiar with your brand and product. For this purpose, you can checkyour search volume for the necessary keyword with tools like Ahrefs. If the volume is low, you can choose display advertising, and if the audience is familiar with your brand, invest in search ads.
Secondly, decide whether you need to improve your brand awareness. If you’re an established brand and your outreach is wide, make use of search adsto sell to customers who already know you and your product.
Thirdly, think of your budget. Building brand awareness with the help of display advertising is an expensive and long-term strategy that will bring youfewer conversions than search ads can. If your business is on a tight budget,itmight be a better idea to invest in search ads because they will bring you more profit.
One more crucialfactor here is your type of business. Say, if you provide local products and services, choose search ads. If a person has an acute toothache, lost their apartment keys, or their pet got sick, they will look for immediate and specific solutions on Google and choose a company ranking high on SERP.
Now that you have a clear picture of the opportunities display advertising provides, let’s discover its typesso that youcan choose the one that fits your business.
Types of Display Advertising
There are different types, forms, and formats of display ads. To choose the most effective one for your business, check them out below.
Based on the type of targeting, there are the following kinds of display ads:
demographic (based on users’ general interests, marketers create personalized ads for specific websites);
geographic (based on users’ location);
contextual (based on a website’s theme, keywords, and ad topic)
retargeting (based on users’previous actions, for example, they viewed your product but didn’t buy).
Based on the ad format, there are the following types of display ads:
static (a traditional ad that includes text or images that don’t move);
animated (a GIF);
interactive (implies engaging a user to take action, for example, play a game);
floating (a kind of a pop ad that doesn’t disappear while scrolling);
expanding (an ad thatbecomes bigger in size after a user clicks on it);
video.
Now that you know the types of display ads, it’s time to see some examples to gain inspiration for your campaign.
Examples of Display Ads
Interactive and video display ads are becoming more and more popular since they help attract user attention and can be more engaging than traditional ads. Let’s check out several examples of display ads.
Tokionomo promotes its product on New York Times’ site using an interactive ad to draw users’ attention. The brand offers a shelf-advertising robot thatprovides businesses with a new type of brand communication.
Elle provides its ad space for Intertop. This is an example of contextual display ads since promoting shoes on a fashion blog seems relevant.
Below is an example of a retargetingad campaign on a beauty blog. Site visitors are shown the items they havepreviously looked through.
Congrats, now you know the pros and cons of display ads, their types, and the way they differ from search ads and have some examples at hand. So, choose the best type for your business, and increase your brand awareness and sales.
Drag-and-drop editor
The drag and drop editor is a powerfultool that allows you to easily create emails by adding particular blocks in a templateand changing the color, style, size, and location. You do not need specialized knowledge to work with the drag-and-drop editor. Every tool of the editor is arranged for editing your email template.
This video demonstrates how to create an email template with a drag and drop editor with LIKE.TG. It doesn't require any experience in HTML.
Elements of the Drag-and-Drop Editor
text
picture
button
separator
video
social media
checkout
Tips to Create a Template
Make sure the font is large enough to be read comfortably. Choose font size 12-14px with a line spacing of 1.5.
Set a background color that will contrast with your text font. Note that people with poor vision might read your email; that’s why the background color should be appropriately selected.
Use big headlines and other formatting to make the text easy for skimming.
When you add pictures to the drag and drop editor, their size will be 100%. Don’t forget to make it smaller if it is needed. It’s possible to change the format from 100% to 10%.
In the drag and drop editor, you will find all these settings for every block in your email template. For inspiration and better results, you can look through our template gallery.
Read our article on how to create your email template with LIKE.TG's drag-and-drop editor.
Discovery call
A discovery call is the first interaction with a prospect interested in a specific product or service. During a discovery call, sales representatives determine whether potential clients fit their ideal customer profile. It helps prevent salespeople from spending time, effort, and resources on unqualified leads.
In this article, we’ll unveil the purpose of a discovery call and how to run it. We’ll also review the 7 best sales discovery call questions.
What is the purpose of a discovery call?
After prospective customers show interest in a particular product or service, salespeople start interacting with them. The first-ever communication with a lead is a discovery call. This call is designed to identify whether a lead is a great fit for a brand and intends to purchase a specific product with a company. During this call, sales representatives can sort out prospects and only spend time with those willing to buy a product or service soon. As a result, a business prevents spending additional resources on potential clients who don’t fit the ideal customer profile of a brand.
Discovery calls help figure out the problems and desires of leads willing to purchase. The first interaction also enables you to establish good relationships and encourage trust. After listening to potential clients, your sales reps can receive valuable customer insights and outline their strategy to make a deal. Discovery calls allow your sales teams to frame a personalized approach to each customer by meeting their needs, requirements, and interests.
Now that you know the purpose of a discovery call, it’s time to uncover how to run it.
How to run a discovery call?
In this section, we’ll provide a short step-by-step guide showing you how to start your calls. Remember, before interacting with potential clients, you need to focus on research. We’ll dive into this essential step with details in the first step.
Research and prepare before the first interaction. Before any contact with a prospect, you need to conduct research. It will help you find more information about your client and make the right sales pitch. You should be as personalized as possible so that customers consider buying from you. The next step involves the preparation process. Get ready with your speech and rehearse it. This way, you’ll be able to avoid talking about unnecessary things.
Ask discovery questions. You need to ask the right questions to identify customers' pain points. Questions will help you qualify your prospects and figure out their problems and willingness to purchase. You should be friendly and sympathetic when uncovering the main purpose of your call and presenting your product. This is the time for you to identify future opportunities with these leads. Make sure to confirm your discovery call with a prospect. It will prevent you from being unanswered. During the call, ask questions that will help you qualify leads and receive answers to points you didn’t find when conducting research. The pace of your questions should be approximate to keep a natural conversation without any rush.
Outline your further steps. At the end of the discovery call, you need to prepare a proper solution for customers’ challenges and wants. The goal of the call is to evaluate the level of customers’ urgency to get a solution for their problems. Make sure to inform customers of the next step. You and your prospect should know what to expect from your further interaction.
Record your call to check for mistakes. To assess the quality and meaningfulness of your call, consider recording it. This way, you’ll be able to identify mistakes you need to avoid. Sometimes salespeople can talk too fast or too much. You'll find a golden middle for your sales pitch by evaluating your call. Listen to the recording to determine whether you communicated all the key points, which will help prospects understand your product and its usefulness. Evaluation of your calls will enable you to identify your mistakes and give some space for improvement. As a result, your next calls will be better, and communication with customers will be smoother.
Now that you know the steps, let’s proceed to the questions you need to ask your customers.
7 Best Sales Discovery Call Questions
By asking discovery questions, you can qualify all your prospects and list those who are a perfect fit for your product. In this section, we’ll unveil the best sales discovery call questions for you to consider.
Tell me about your business. This question implies asking prospects about their own companies. Although this question seems simple, you need to choose the right time. This way, you can receive a clear introduction to your leads. No need to rush because you need to make sure that your interlocutor is ready for the question. It helps prevent customers from forming negative opinions about you and your company. Good timing shows that you’ve done a good research before starting your first interactions with potential clients.
Tell me about your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities. At this stage, you should know more about the prospects themselves. Focus on identifying roles in their companies and daily tasks. Be friendly, empathetic, and understanding when listening to your leads’ responsibilities. This knowledge will help develop a clear strategy and a personalized approach.
Tell me about the metrics you take care of. If prospects need to mention the metrics they take care of, start this topic. During the conversation, use the word “metric” so that potential clients provide you with accurate answers. Your target here is to receive a quantifiable measure of the success of a company you’re trying to reach. Once you identify the metric, your team can evaluate how your product can improve it.
Tell me about your goals. Consider asking about prospective customers’ objectives for a month, quarter, or year. It’s necessary to find out during which time frame your product can help reach stated goals. Goals can be financial, customer-related, and operational.
What is your time target? The next step is asking customers about the time target. You need to determine when your prospects want to attain their goals. It can be a week, month, quarter, or year.
Tell me about your main problem. You should figure out the problem your lead wants to solve. Try to bring up the company's challenges to understand what solution your business can provide. Uncovering some pain points allows you to understand company problems at a more overarching level.
Provide me with a source of this problem. Besides identifying prospects' problems, you need to dig deeper and find out their sources. You need to know the source to understand the necessary solution clearly. Identifying the source is the key to creating an effective and personalized sales pitch.
Congrats, now you know what a discovery call is and why it’s crucial. Hope that our short guide and best sales discovery call questions will help you establish good relationships with your qualified prospects.
Drip email campaign
A drip email campaign is a sequence of emails sent during set periods to optimize an email marketing strategy and provide subscribers with more value automatically.
Watch this video to get inspired by the tips that will help you create effective drip campaigns for your business!
Trigger Email vs. Drip Email
Drip email campaigns are often confused with trigger emails because both can be sent as a response to the user’s action. The difference is that a drip email campaign always stands for a series of emails, while a trigger email consists of one email only.
If there are a couple or more emails sent to respond to a user’s action, consider them as a drip campaign. Each drip email campaign with LIKE.TG’s Automation 360 includes a trigger email as a start.
Whyare drip email campaigns important?
Increases revenue
Improves click-through rate
It helps with lead nurturing
Informs well
Saves time
Convenient to create
Increases revenue. Relevant drip email campaigns drive 18 times more revenue than mass emails.
Improves click-through rate. Drip email campaigns result in 119% higher CTR comparing with regular email marketing campaigns.
It helps with lead nurturing. High-quality content in the emails within a drip email campaign helps to build trusting relationships with the subscribers, warm up leads and gradually turn them into customers, loyal ones, ideally.
Informs well. Drip email campaigns are useful for giving people all the necessary information about a product or service, uncovering their properties, and igniting customers' curiosity step by step. For instance, the first email contains essential information, like product features, price, and its purpose, the second — a how-to-use video, and the third — customers’ testimonials.
Saves time. Developing a drip email campaign takes time, but after that, it works automatically without constant control. Drip email campaigns save time on various email marketing processes, like onboarding, promotions, invitations, etc., which run on their own.
Convenient to create. Email templatesfor a drip email campaign, whether created from scratch or pre-designed, can be built once and used multiple times. LIKE.TG’s feature for trigger emails “Automation 360” is also convenient for users, as it helps automate different processes of email marketing — welcome emails, birthday emails, promotions, etc.
How to Create a Drip Email Campaign
Create a mailing list
Build email templates for your drip email campaign
Set the start of the flow
Add emails to the flow
Launch your drip email campaign
Step 1: Create a mailing list
Registerwith LIKE.TG. Select the category “Email” and choose “Mailing lists.” Click on “New mailing lists.” Name your mailing list. Leave it empty until the launch of a drip email campaign. After the launch, you can add your existing subscribers to this mailing list, and they will all get this drip email campaign as well as new subscribersthat you can gather from subscription forms.
Step 2: Build email templates for your drip email campaign
Go to “Email templates.” Choose a template from the previously created ones or the library of pre-designed templates. If you want to create a new one, click on “Add a template.” Choose between “Layout template editor,” “HTML editor,” or “Template import.” If you choose the first option, select the style of your template: empty, basic, news, commerce, text.
Try out our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor. Drag elements from the left-hand side into the working field and set the elements to your liking on the right-hand side. Here’s how to create an email campaign.
Step 3: Set the start of the flow
Go to “Automations.” Click on “Automation360.” Name your drip email campaign. Select the sender and type in the sender’s name. Choose the preferable days and time for sending emails. Click “Apply” to continue.
Select the trigger action on the right-hand side. Choose the “Add subscriber” event to trigger the drip email campaign. Click on “Apply.”
Step 4: Add emails to the flow
Drag elements from the left-hand side and connect them with the flow start. On the right, choose the time for email sending, create a subject line, and select one of the templates you’ve designed for this drip email campaign. Click “Apply.” Repeat these actions to add as many emails as you need. Add filters, conditions, goals, and actions to increase the coverage and efficiency of your drip email campaigns.
Step 5: Launch your drip email campaign
If everything is up and running, click “Save and launch” at the right upper corner. On this page, you will be able to monitor the campaign’s progress in the automation flow, check detailed messages list, and examine statistics and conversions.
Drip Email Campaign Best Practices
Create a logical automation flow
Automate more processes
Personalize subject lines
Monitor your success
Create a logical automation flow. Develop a consistent sequence of emails for your drip email campaign. Leave time gaps long enough between emails so that the automation flow won’t be overwhelming for your subscribers. Provide customers with different benefits in each email, dropping to their inboxes.
Automate more processes. If you seek to optimize your email marketing strategy, start sending different drip email campaigns to various groups of people. With a drip email campaign, you will spend less time and effort creating separate campaigns.
Personalize subject lines. Send personalized emails, using datathat subscribers give you when opting in. A personalized subject line increases trust among your subscribers, so they are more likely to open an email of yours.
Monitor your success. Examine the data that you can observe after you started a drip email campaign. If some emails show lower open rates than you expected, try to change the subject line. If the CTR is low — change thecall-to-actions and work more on email content.
Drip Email Campaign Examples
Bear on my Ear. This drip email campaign is suitable for a popular music blog or review website. You can use a drip email campaign to send exciting articles about musicians, their bios, and the most popular album reviews.
Homeboy Travel Agency. A drip email campaign is terrific for keeping constant contact with your audience and inform them of the most interesting facts about the world’s most famous sights.
Booker T. With a drip email campaign, you can send promotions on the best selling literature for competitive prices once a month to bookshops and libraries representatives, stimulating them to order.
Send a drip email campaign
Distance learning
Distance learning is the process of teaching students online, which implies studying from home and receiving materials and lectures via the internet. It allows learners to take classes in colleges and universities, training, and online courses in any country. You can create an online course for free with LIKE.TG without any technical skills.
In this video, a LIKE.TG marketer, Anna, shares the perks of monetizing your digital education expertise and tips on switching to teaching.
In this article, we’ll uncover the pros and cons of distance learning, its types, and the 3 best platforms. We’ll also compare distance and online learning.
Why is distance learning important?
Due to COVID-19 outbreak, the process of learning has changed. Colleges, universities, and schools have switched to distance learning to ensure education for students. Distance learning is a perfect alternative to traditional education, where students and teachers should interact face to face. Educators can utilize technological innovation and inspire students to study hard to reach their goals.
Now people can find various courses, training, and master classes to obtain new knowledge and skills. They can master new professions remotely from any location. For example, influencers with millions of followers share their success stories and the power of Instagram. They teach how to write posts, pose for photos, and increase social media engagagement.
With distance learning, students can earn their degrees without any need to leave their homes and move to a new city. They can stay in their comfort zone and save money on paying for a room in a dormitory. Online classes allow students to stay flexible and combine work with their studies. Moreover, the price of online learning is lower than offline.
Now that you know the importance of distance learning, it’s time to uncover more reasons to consider making an online course for your business, school, college, etc.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Distance Learning
eLearning brings many benefits to students and teachers. We’ll review them all so that you can decide which type of learning you would like to implement.
The advantages for students include:
flexibility (can access the class anytime from anywhere);
lower price (distance learning is usually more affordable than offline);
technological innovation (teachers use all advantages of technology and the internet to provide the best knowledge);
saved time on getting to the classrooms of universities and colleges;
The advantages for educators include:
various formats of lessons;
flexibility (different schedules: asynchronous and synchronous learning);
saved time on traveling to class;
the opportunity to teach from anywhere in the world;
space for the application of theories;
time to answer students’ questions in private messages or group chat.
Each approach in education has both pros and cons. Since you need to be aware of both sides of this business, we’ll unveil the drawbacks.
During online classes, students can
get distracted by their devices;
lose their focus because of big amount of information;
have a lack of face-to-face interactions with teachers and students;
have a poor internet connection;
feel isolated;
have a laptop without necessary characteristics;
face technical problems.
During online classes, educators can’t
prevent cheating;
communicate with students in person and explain complex material;
focus on practice;
have full control of students who neglect assignments.
Now that you know the benefits you can reap after incorporating distance learning, let’s compare distance learning and online learning. People often suppose these concepts are the same, although they aren’t.
Distance Learning vs Online Learning
In this section, we’ll clarify the difference between distance and online learning, so you don’t misinterpret the terms. The concepts are different in terms of location, intention, and interaction. Let’s start with distance learning.
Distance learning is a learning process that involves an educator teaching and students studying remotely. Students visit online classes via the internet, and teachers check assignments online. The participants of the learning process can join the class from anywhere in the world. The process doesn’t include any in-person interaction.
Online learning is a learning process that implies students studying and communicating with a teacher in real time. A teacher has an eye on their progress. Students join lessons through Zoom, Google Meet, or Cisco Webex. Learners can communicate with teachers live, ask questions, and share opinions. Students can also request a teacher to explain some unclear points.
Simply put, distance learning is solely remote learning where students access real-time or recorded lessons, while online learning is real-time exclusively learning..
Now that the difference is clear, it’s time to proceed to the types. The next section will help you decide which distance learning format fits your main goal.
Types of Distance Learning
There are four main types of distance learning. Let’s review each of them to find out the details.
Synchronous distance learning. Educators deliver information to students in real-time using special video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex, and Skype or chatting online. Usually, participants connect with each other using video. Synchronous learning implies live communication online and it is less flexible than other forms of distance learning. The platforms help students and teachers communicate and see each other in real time.
Asynchronous distance learning. Teachers provide students with materials and deadlines to complete the tasks. Students work on their assignments on their own in their free time but they still have the opportunity to contact their instructors. Once they complete the tasks, they submit them through universities’ sites. Students only get access to a new module after completing the previous one.
Hybrid distance learning. It’s an integration of synchronous and asynchronous distance learning. Hybrid distance learning is the most popular form of distance learning that implies students accessing the course at a designated time and pre-recorded lessons. Instructors provide learners with pre-scheduled classroom activities they should complete to proceed to the next section. Students might be given tests, quizzes, surveys, and other forms of assignments after completing a lesson or section. These courses encourage interaction between students and communication with experts. Students can ask questions and share their opinions. These courses have little space for independent work.
Now that you know the types and can decide which one you prefer, it’s time to explore the platforms. One of these services will come in handy when you are ready to create an online course.
3 Best Distance Learning Platforms
The choice of distance learning platforms is vast. Your main task is to select the one that suits you in terms of short-term and long-term goals, usability, price, number of students, and courses. We’ll now review the 3 top services for you to consider. They are affordable, easy to use, and have an intuitive interface.
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is an all-in-one marketing solution that will help you create online courses, promote them, and manage communication with students. The platform offers you to send email campaigns, web push, SMS, and set up chatbots. For an affordable price, you’ll be able to create online courses for different purposes: online schools, employee training, customer onboarding, etc.
You can share your expertise in an interactive way by using LIKE.TG’s drag and drop editor to add multimedia. The service allows you to apply plenty of content formats like videos, audio, text, PDFs, downloadable items, infographics, and other images. This way, your course will look more attractive and exciting to students.
If you have no intention to develop the course by yourself and you have a team of professionals, you can add instructors. They will manage different tasks, including program development, creating lessons, designing tests, monitoring students’ progress, and issue certificates of completion. With the help of the platform and your team, you’ll be able to create a course from scratch and provide an exceptional experience to students.
Once you build a course, think about the channels you prefer to use for promotion. Use LIKE.TG to send email campaigns informing your subscribers about your upcoming course, set up chatbots to share the details about the start, and deliver SMS to remind them about the event. Since you don’t need to change the platform to perform different tasks, you can save your time on adding information.
With LIKE.TG, you don’t need to think about how to accept payment from students. The service has integrations with famous payment systems like PayPal, Stripe, and Liqpay.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in the service.
Free plan: 3 courses, 200 students, 1 instructor, and 1 GB of file storage space.Paid plan: From $42 for unlimited courses, 1,000 students, 10 instructors, 15 GB of file storage space, personalized course link, and no LIKE.TG branding.
Ruzuku
Ruzuku is a platform that focuses entirely on creating, selling, and teaching online courses. The service provides training to its users, so you will figure everything out very fast and be ready to build courses. The interface is user-friendly, so you’ll create and launch eLearning in no time.
With Ruzuku, you’ll be able to design a visual course and encourage students to remember the essential information. If you have your materials ready, you can add them to the course so that it looks more interactive. You can diversify text with videos, audio, and PDFs in minutes. The platform provides students with space for their opinion. The service allows users to leave comments and share ideas under the course’s images. This way, you can make sure that students are involved in your learning process. Ruzuku helps build both classes and communities for like-minded people.
The service has integrations with universally accepted payment solutions. You can accept payments from students through Stripe and PayPal or add another payment method.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in Ruzuku.
Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan: From $99 per month for unlimited courses, students, and 1 instructor.
Systeme.io
Systeme.io is a multifunctional platform that enables you to send email campaigns, create websites, run evergreen webinars, and build online courses. The service is simple in use and doesn’t require any technical skills. The platform’s team worked at your convenience and took care of your product promotion. Once you build your course, you can create a website, integrate course access and payments, and sell it to students.
The solution is fully integrated. It means that you can use all features without any need to input information several times and save your time and effort.
With Systeme.io, you can grant access to a course for students on a specific date. The platform allows you to register students for your courses by giving them full access or drip content. Full access implies having instant access to all lectures, while drip content implies accessing classes in progression. With drip content, students have to complete the lesson to proceed to the next one.
Drag and drop the elements you want to add to your course. You can use videos, podcasts, text, and images to draw attention and increase memorability.
To receive payments from students, consider using Paypal and Stripe integrations. They will guarantee your money is safe.
Below you can see how to build an online course in Systeme.io.
Free plan: 1 course, unlimited students, unlimited storage space, and assistant accounts.Paid plan: From $27 per month for 5 courses, unlimited students, storage space, and assistant accounts.
Congrats, now you know what distance learning is and why it’s essential. Hope that the list of recommended services will be useful when you decide to develop your course!
DKIM
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the technology that helps to reduce spamand phishing. It allows companies to vouch for their email messages. Technically, it can be done with the help of a cryptographic signature linked to a domain name instead of the traditional IP address.
Follow this video guide to create SPF and DKIM records with LIKE.TG.
For example, if you deal with banking and you sent mailings from the address [email protected], to prevent your subscribersfrom spamming and phishing, you should prove that domain, "vipbank.com," belongs to you. If you don’t set DKIM, there is evidence that email services like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail deliver your mailings to the spam folder. It happens because there are a lot of attempts to steal users’ passwords or financial details from email messages. Phishers often send emails on behalf of large companies and ask users to "verify their account" or "confirm their billing information," and then use the subscribers’ accounts for fraudulent purposes.
DKIM technology determines who the sender of an email is. That means that the email you send will not be regarded as an email from phishers, and so email services will deliver it to the "inbox." The sender authentication with DKIM is implemented by a digital (cryptographic) signature – a hidden code that is added to the email. The signature confirms that the email was sent from an email address in the particular domain.
Direct response advertising
Direct response advertising is a short-term strategy that entices leadsto take immediate action. Its main goal is to convert a lead into a client, and hence, drive sales.
Direct response advertising is a concept that is opposite to branding. While both approaches are aimed at promoting a brand, there is a key difference between them. Branding is a long-term strategy that implies investing money into several techniques to establish brand awareness. Direct response advertising is a short-term strategy that enables marketers to drive as many conversions as possible with the help of a single marketing campaign.
Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of a direct response ad.
Benefits of Direct Response Advertising
This marketing strategy allows companies to reap several benefits.
Powerful lead generation. Brands that strive to bring in a lot of new leads as soon as possible opt for direct response ads. They create high-converting landing pages, enticing lead magnets, and targeted ads on social media.
Quick revenue growth. Quick decision-making means moving leads down the sales funnel faster. You should ensure that your users are qualified enough to make a purchase to enjoy this benefit. The more they know about your products, the more chances you have to close a deal. Thus, this strategy is especially popular among marketers who drive clients back to their abandoned shopping carts, offer customers to buy their favorite items at a reduced price, and inform them about the products that are back in stock. Email marketing is an excellent choice in this situation.
Segmentation opportunities. You can target your direct response ads to specific market segments for better performance. This way, you can communicate your offer to the warm leads who are likely to buy from you. LIKE.TG allows you to segmentyour subscribers based on their gender, location, age, occupation, and activities.
Easily traceable results. It’s easy to measure the conversions of each advertising campaign. You can monitor the number of users who filled out yoursubscription form, followed a link from an email campaign or web push notification, and clicked on your banner. This will help you identify the most profitable advertising mediafor your business.
Direct response advertising has a lot of advantages that can help you bring high revenue. Send promotionalemail campaigns with LIKE.TG for free. Segment your mailing listand track results immediately with the help of reports. You don’t need any special skills or HTML knowledge.
Now that you know the benefits you can reap with direct response advertising, let’s have a look at some examples.
Examples of Direct Response Advertising
In this section, we’ll share several examples of direct response ads that make users take action. Check them out to see what benefits they can bring.
Below is a behavioral email triggered by an abandoned shopping cart. Patagonia’s team reminds their client about an item left in the cart, states its price right in the email, informs about two-day free shipping, provides an option to contact their support team, and offers to complete the order right away.
TopShop’s team uses Instagram Stories in their marketing strategy. They share news about new arrivals in Stories and enable their customers to check them by including a swipe-up link to their site.
Below is an example of display ads. The festival is promoted in a California-based newspaper and targeted at Californians.
Now you have some examples of effective direct response advertising at hand and know about its benefits. Choose the best media for your business or create a killer promotion mix for better performance. With LIKE.TG tools, you can communicate your message to the target audience for free,so start right now.