An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a comprehensive description of a business for which your product will become a perfect solution. It helps you identify the right clients, align your product with customers’ needs, and personalize your offer. In this article, we’ll discuss why you need an ideal customer profile and compare an ICP and a buyer persona. We’ll also unveil how to build this profile and use it in marketing. Why do you need an ideal customer profile? If your company focuses on sales, developing an ideal customer profile is crucial since it helps identify quality leads. This is the key reason to create a profile of an ideal customer that will be a great fit for your solution. Besides quality prospects, you can reap even more benefits. After creating an ideal customer profile, you can prevent your company from using extra resources and teams from spending their effort on unqualified leads. With the lead qualification, you can easily identify customers with a high willingness to purchase from you. You can start nurturing relationships with these prospects and turn them into long-term partnerships. Using your profile, historical sales data, and predictive learning, you can increase the speed of lead conversions. Improving the way you approach your customers enables you to encourage trust and build loyalty. If you succeed in developing a perfect ICP, you’ll be able to align your product with customers’ needs. You’ll provide personalized offers and content to your clients by ensuring collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Since your profile covers specific characteristics and patterns, consider using them to your advantage. Build a framework for outreach activities to reach your potential customers. Now that you know the reasons, it’s time to make the difference between an ideal customer profile and buyer persona clear. Ideal Customer Profile vs Buyer Persona Sometimes people use these two concepts interchangeably, yet they help attain different goals. Let’s uncover these two terms for you to consider. An ideal customer profile is a detailed description of a company for your solution. It enables you to choose the right businesses, adjust your marketing strategy, and provide personalized offers. If your company focuses on working with businesses rather than individuals, then you need to create an ICP to improve the work of your sales and marketing departments. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional reflection of your ideal customer that covers demographics, objectives, motivators, and problems. It helps your team map out the strategy and allocate resources and time. Buyer persona brings structure to your company and helps find and reach the right prospects. Now that you know the difference, it’s time to find out how to create an ICP. How to create an ideal customer profile? This section will uncover how to develop an ideal customer profile for your business. Let’s dive in. Consider applying templates. You can use the existing templates to speed up the process of creating an ICP. Find the right platforms to download and use the templates for free. This way, you’ll save time on building the profile from scratch. The only thing you’ll need to do is to fill in the blanks. Conduct short research on your future clients to insert the necessary data. Select the right software. Creating an accurate profile requires collecting all available information from your current customers. It will help you find a highly personalized approach to your prospects. Consider using your software to get data. If you use a CRM, look through customer profiles and deals to identify common patterns. If you don’t use a CRM, consider using the built-inCRM from LIKE.TG. With its help, you can store all your customer information, track all your deals within one platform, and automate your sales and communication with clients. After choosing a CRM, you also need a tool for conducting surveys. It will help you collect customer feedback about your product. You can use SurveyMonkey, GetFeedback, Zoho Survey, etc. Analyze demographics. The next step involves analyzing the external demographics of your potential clients. During this step, you should identify the market your product suits the best, the verticals your prospects operate in, annual revenue, the number of employees, and the location of these businesses. These points will help you get a better picture of your future customers. Gather feedback from your clients. Using the general information you have in your CRM isn’t enough to win deals. To establish connections with prospects, you need to research your current clients. For this purpose, you need to conduct surveys and communicate with consumers. You can do it in written or oral form with surveys or interviews. To speed up the process, consider using survey tools. They will enable you to design forms fast, send them to customers’ emails, and record their answers. Make sure to include questions about your product, things that make it stand out from the competition, and things that make it difficult to work with. Ask for comments and recommendations. With customer interviews, your company reps can talk with clients in real-time by phone or during a meeting. This way, you can directly see their reaction to your questions and read what they really like from their facial expressions. Focus on the problem. Think of the challenges your product can help solve. Identify the characteristics of businesses that need this product. Analyze your existing customers and their problems. Dive deeper into your clients’ behavior and discover how and why they use your product. Think of their pain points. Develop profiles. When developing ideal customer profiles, remember that you try to reach actual companies with their problems and needs. After finishing with the attributes for your ICPs, you need to focus on the individuals you want to reach to win the deal. Often, these are company representatives. To establish good communication and trust, you need to research companies’ decision-makers. Make sure you know their titles, age, income, reasons they need your product, role, and responsibilities. Track and evaluate. Once done with the profiles, you need to monitor your progress to identify successes and failures. It’s necessary to make improvements. Assessment is essential for obtaining new customers and taking your business to the next level. Now that you know how to build an ideal customer profile, let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to use it in marketing. How to use an ideal customer profile in marketing? Besides creating an ICP, you also need to know how to apply the knowledge provided. This section will help you find it out. Every company needs an ideal customer profile. It empowers sales and marketing teams to define their ideal customer and target the right people. Everything starts with the development of a profile and then moves to the process of reaching prospects. A well-defined ideal customer profile enables you to reach and sell to targeted accounts. With its help, your team can determine challenges, create personalized approaches, meet customers’ needs, and align your marketing efforts. An ICP will be helpful for future alterations to your product and strategy. Use it when choosing the best marketing channels, identifying how to start communication, and encouraging to purchase. Congrats, now you know what an ICP is and why it’s crucial. Use our guide to identify the right customers for your business.

Incentivized traffic is the traffic generated by users who receive different types of rewards such as cash, gift, discount, whitepaper, free eBook, or game tokens for visiting specific websites. It brings more visitors to websites and valuable customer data. In this article, we’ll unveil the benefits and types of incentivized traffic. Benefits of Incentivized Traffic Incentivized traffic is an easy way to boost the number of visitors to your website which results in more potential customers. The strategy aims at acquiring customers by providing them with different incentives. Your company can invite prospective customers to click a link to obtain a discount, whitepaper, upgraded product, eBook, or a gift. With incentivized traffic campaigns, you can focus on driving prospects’ interest, encouraging them to explore your content and product, and perform the desired action to get the reward. Besides increasing customer acquisition rate in a short time, incentivized traffic can bring you even more pros. With its help, you can boost customer reactions. Over time, the high number of downloads and customer acquisition rate will positively influence your ranking in search results. Consequently, more users will see your site. For instance, if your mobile app is increasingly popular on Google Play or App Store and the number of installs is high, over time it will be more visible for users. Companies will see positive changes from these campaigns in around three days. Now when the benefits are clear, let’s discover the types. Types of Incentives Companies can offer different incentives to increase customer acquisition and boost visits. There are many rewards they can use to encourage people to perform the desired action. Many websites apply content locking and ask users to answer several questions to access it. Gaming sites and apps implement offer walls. They reward gamers with game tokens for referring friends or sharing information about their accounts on social media. Besides, they generate traffic by giving cash, discounts, access to materials, gifts, etc. Incentives are extremely popular in mobile gaming since they help advance and inspire users to play the game more often. Companies can reward their users with exclusive bonuses. Angry Birds is a mobile game that demonstrates great results from its incentives for users. The company has daily bonuses for players. Its daily login streaks and bonuses for new levels encourage gamers to play and increase customer retention. The choice is yours. Choose the strategy that suits you the most to obtain leads. Hope the examples above will help you in deciding how to approach prospects in the best way.

Growth hacking is a field in marketing that uses cost-effective tactics to achieve rapid business growth. Growth hackers have to find cheap and creative solutions, run experiments, and measure results. In the video below, Growth Tribe defines growth hacking and explains how it differs from traditional marketing. This instructive guide will help you learn more about growth hacking. We’ll explore the benefits of this approach, learn how to set up growth hacking for your business, and unpack some tips and examples. What Is the Goal of Growth Hacking in Marketing? The concept of growth hacking appeared in the era of early startups. These businesses needed to enlarge their customer base, market share, and revenue as fast as possible. Meanwhile, startups had extremely low budgets, so they couldn’t afford traditional promotion and customer acquisition tactics. This situation has formed the primary goal of growth hacking in marketing – to acquire the maximum number of customers for minimal costs as quickly as possible. Following this objective, businesses devised specific growth hacking methods – we’ll explore them later in this article. Now it’s time to discover how exactly growth hacking tactics differ from ones that traditional marketing uses. Difference Between Growth Hacking and Marketing Growth hacking lives at the intersection of marketing, technology, and data science. Thus, it goes against traditional marketing in many ways. Let’s discover the main differences between these approaches. Goals. Traditional marketing focuses mostly on brand awareness and increasing sales. Growth marketing’s be-all and end-all is business growth in general, thus, this approach works with all stages of the sales funnel. Product. Marketing has everything to do with selling your finished product. Growth hacking goes further and helps companies improve the product in order to meet customer’s expectations. Expertise. Modern marketers must not only conduct marketing campaigns, but also measure their results on and offline. However, their expertise still lies mostly in the marketing field. Growth hacking requires the ability to automate everything, and knowledge of data analytics and programming. Growth hackers can measure the effect marketing has on business in general. Budgets. Growth hacking implies limited resources and tries to make the most of them by using offbeat tactics, mechanics, and channels. Traditional marketing often operates with bigger budgets and can afford paid promotional techniques – PPC, targeted ads, TV commercials, SMM, and so on. Focus on business growth, expertise in data analytics and programming, tight budgets, and management of all stages of the pipeline are core characteristics of growth hacking. Read on to learn how exactly this approach combines and employs all of it. How Growth Hacking Works To make business expansion soar without spending a fortune, growth hacking employs automation, data analytics, and creativity. Customer attraction at the top stages of a funnel requires growth hackers to use offbeat techniques. Thus, they constantly come up with novel ways to generate traffic. After devising a hypothesis, growth hackers start testing them – this is the only way to find out which tactics drive desirable results. Here is the moment when data analytics comes in handy. To achieve sustainable growth and improve outcomes for future campaigns, growth hackers need to figure out not only WHAT works well but also WHY it does. Thus, growth hackers use data to track customers along their journey down the pipeline and try to understand what causes the existing results and how they can improve conversions at each stage. They constantly explore the target audience's expectations and customer satisfaction and offer to change the product to improve results. Finally, when growth hackers learn what works best, they automate those processes. After this, they are ready to repeat the cycle with a new hypothesis. These loops of creating hypotheses, running experiments, collecting data, and automating processes are crucial in growth hacking. Let’s explore the details about the importance of this approach. Why is Growth Hacking Important? Growth hacking is vital for startups and other businesses on a tight budget. This concept allows brands to expand their audiences and boost revenue even though they can’t afford costly marketing tactics. Growth hackers constantly search for low-priced ways to promote a business and, thus, eliminate a lot of spending. Better yet, growth hacking has a positive effect on big corporations as well. Employing some basic growth hacking methods, brands can embrace new audiences, improve ROI, and increase customer loyalty. These are just a part of the benefits growth hacking brings about. Benefits of Growth Hacking There are a lot of ways growth hacking can affect a business, apart from its low cost and impressive results. Let’s get into detail and unpack the main benefits of this approach. Provable outcomes. Growth hacking is data-driven, so companies that use it, run experiments, and measure their performance. Thus, they have a full picture of the efficacy of each technique employed. Better yet, they have concrete measurements that allow them to judge and prove the results of strategies they use. Product improvement. Growth hackers constantly test different options and learn more about the audience – their demands, preferences, interests, and more. It leads to a deeper understanding of how to improve the product or service a company provides. Adjustable strategies. Modern marketing is kind of tricky – the strategies that worked well half a year ago may suddenly stop bringing desirable results. Growth hacking keeps an eye on performance and allows you to dump less effective methods to new ones. It also works the opposite way – you can scale the bulletproof tactics and apply them to other marketing channels. Growth hacking can change the game for your business; it works off the beaten track and lets you get incredible results by changing minor details and investing next to nothing in it. For instance, replacing a traditional lead magnet with free access to paid content can drive a 400% increase in opt-ins. Read on to discover more growth hacking strategies and techniques to adopt. Growth Hacking Strategies and Techniques Create a brand personality Collaborate to grow audiences Find new communication channels Employ interactive content Craft a free tool Thinking through ways to boost your company’s growth can get tough. To help you out with this task, we’ve picked five growth hacking tactics and strategies. Create a brand personality Facebook, Tesla, Uber – what factor unites these companies, apart from their rapid growth and market leadership? Well, there are well-known and beloved personalities behind them. That’s not a coincidence – the popularity of these startups’ founders has a dramatic effect on their expansion. People tend to trust, communicate, and engage with other people more than with faceless businesses. Use this human psychology trait to your advantage – create a strong personality behind your company. You can start with social networks – they are a great place to build your personal brand and communicate with potential clients. To inspire people, start a personal blog telling them about your launch. Collaborate to grow audiences Partnerships are a golden opportunity to double or triple your brand’s audience in the blink of an eye. Better yet, it requires next to nothing in investment, especially compared to traditional marketing. To benefit from this technique, choose the partner carefully. Opt for a complementary business – it ensures an influx of new audience members with the same interests as your brand. For instance, if you sell natural juice, you may collaborate with a protein bar manufacturer. Chances are your best customers are fitness enthusiasts. Before offering the partnership, get ready. Prepare ideas on how to blend your audiences organically. The options may be tagging each other on social media, launching live streams together, offering product bundles, and so on. Find new communication channels Highly competitive communication channels are demanding. To get to your audience there and win, you probably need a huge budget. If you launch a business in a busy industry with well-established leaders, the barriers may become too high. To break through to your potential customers, consider smaller social networks or resources. Choose the platforms, which your most promising prospects prefer. You may opt for TikTok if you work with a young audience, or go to The Dots if you target professionals from creative industries. Employ interactive content Growth hacking requires creating various types of content, from articles to videos to ads, and so on. In an ideal world, your audience would engage with every piece of your content. In reality, the users’ attention spans are limited. To grab their attention, use interactive elements. Interactive content can lower bounce rates, improve search engine results, boost engagement, etc. Besides,in most cases adding interactive elements costs brands next to nothing. The best part of this tactic is that elements don't have to be expensive or difficult to produce. You can use special tools to create surveys, quizzes, action buttons, or subscription forms. To create web forms for free, try the form builder from LIKE.TG. It lets you craft embedded, floating, fixed, and pop-up forms from scratch, or use templates. LIKE.TG forms are responsive and adjustable on the go. Craft a free tool Lead magnets are a proven technique to broaden the mouth of your lead funnel and collect more contacts. Their magic is based on the reciprocity principle – people are more likely to give something – their money, time, or data – if they got something in advance. By the way, using psychological traits is an extremely effective and free technique. Read our list of hacks to make the most of them. Returning to lead magnets, you should keep in mind that users are overwhelmed with free ebooks, checklists, and other pieces of content. So, you can take a step further and offer your audience a free tool. People will get used to it and appreciate it, so they become more prone to share their data with you and test your paid tools. On the basis of these tactics, you may invent your solutions to start growth hacking in your company. To facilitate your transition to the new framework, we’ve created a step-by-step guide. How to Start Growth Hacking Check your product-market fit Create a data lake Pick your North Star metric Improve your pirate metrics Build a backlog of ideas Switching to the new approach requires resources and an action plan. In this part of the article, we’ll offer you a five-step plan you can follow to engrain growth hacking into your company. 1. Check your product-market fit Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies market demand. Put simply, if your product-market fit is great, it means that your audience needs your product. Hence, you won’t face significant difficulties in selling it. To figure out whether you have a good product-market fit or not, you may employ various tactics. At first, consider creating a landing page and measuring the number of leads it brings. This will help you get an idea about the demand for your product. If you already have a customer base, you may lean on customer retention and satisfaction rates, as well as the number of brand advocates you have. Customer surveys and conversations may come in handy as well. Try Sean Ellis’ product-market fit survey. It will help you understand how many people will be disappointed with the disappearance of your product. Moreover, you’ll get a better understanding of your core benefits and the opportunities for improvement. 2. Create a data lake As growth hacking is a data-driven approach, you need to build your data lake – a vast array of raw data. In this step, your task is to collect as much data as you can without worrying about the purpose. Here is the main information you can look for: the source of a customer’s first visit to your website; the pages a customer looks through on your site; the source from where they’ve signed up for a trial; the interaction with features of your product; the customer lifetime value; the references each customer makes; the results of those references; the reasons for avoiding your product. Think through how you will collect this data, where and how you plan to store it, and what tools you will use to analyze the information. The easiest way is to use CRM software. Opt for analytical systems – they are made to manage data about your customers. To find the best option for you, follow our comprehensive guide on CRM systems. 3. Pick your North Star metric In recent years, Silicon Valley companies have come up with the concept of the North Star metric. This term stands for the single metric that a company uses as a focus for its growth. Each company chooses its own North Star metric according to its growth model and the value it provides to customers. For instance, Facebook aims at boosting the number of daily active users. For companies that work on a subscription model, the metric might be the number of premium subscribers, or customer lifetime value. To find your metric, think of what will help you achieve long-term growth. Thus, if you develop an eCommerce business, you can grow due to the number of purchases per month. This would be your North Star metric. 4. Improve your pirate metrics To successfully grow your North Star metric, you’ll need to keep an eye on pirate metrics as well. The pirate metrics, or AARRR, is a framework devised to help startups understand the customer journey and optimize a sales funnel. AARRR stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. Now let’s get into the details and find out how to work on every step: Acquisition. In this step, you should revise your customer acquisition channels. Find out the one that drives the most valuable traffic and the one that has the lowest cost. Try to improve your conversion rate on these channels – follow our comprehensive guide on conversion rate optimization. Activation. Ask yourself how good the user’s first experience with your product is and when a potential customer realizes the real value of your product. You can reinforce the activation with a polished value proposition – read our article to create and improve one. Retention. Try to understand how many of your customers you retain, and why others go. To improve this metric, employ some of the strategies we’ve listed in the article “Seven ways to keep your clients for life.” Referral. Think through the ways you can turn your customers into your brand advocates. Revenue. Mull over the question of how you can increase your revenue. The key indicators in the last steps are your Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. To work these metrics out and improve them, follow the tips from our article “5 KPIs to keep an eye on.” 5. Build a backlog of ideas With large data arrays and defined metrics, you can start thinking over ways to grow your business. The more ideas you have, the more regular experiments you can run. Consistency is the key to success with testing, so you should have a backlog of hypotheses and creative ideas. For effective work, your backlog should fit the following criteria: it has a place to create a list of ideas; it lets you add a description and hypothesis to each of those ideas; it allows you to prioritize ideas; it enables teamwork; it lets you save the results of your tests. Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that provide the opportunities listed above. You can opt for any tool from traditional Google Sheets and Trello, to specific software, such as Experiments by GrowthHackers. After finishing these five steps, you have everything to start running tests. Remember to track their results carefully and replenish your backlog of ideas according to the new data you get. You also need to automate processes that drive desirable outcomes. To perform all these tasks, you’ll need a wide set of tools. Growth Hacking Tools Working in a growth hacking framework requires a lot of tools to handle all the processes effectively. We’ve picked our favorites to help you set up integrations, collect data, run experiments, and automate processes. Zapier is a core service for each marketer and growth hacker. It allows you to connect over 2,000 online services and tools together to help users be more productive. Apart from that, the service lets you create automated workflows with a few clicks without coding or any technical skills. Colibri.io is a tool for internet monitoring. It helps you learn what people think about your brand or any chosen subject and allows you to approach these people. The service also helps you improve search engine results and your brand visibility on social media. Optimizely is an A/B-testing tool. You can run experiments and measure the effectiveness of new headlines, offers, or campaigns in general. LIKE.TG is a multi-channel marketing automation platform. The service lets you work with emails, SMS, push notifications, messengers, and chatbots. With LIKE.TG’s Automation 360 tool you can start automated message flows based on dates, events, and user’s actions. Among other useful features are message personalization, subscriber ratings, and advanced statistics. LIKE.TG provides an easy-to-use drag and drop landing page builder that allows you to create a landing page, online store, or link page for your social media bio without any coding skills and for free. You can also automate sales and communication with your customers with the help of our free CRM system. Sign up with LIKE.TG to automate your marketing, create subscription forms and chatbots, and send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers a month for free. These are only a couple of the tools you may need as a growth marketer. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to describe all the services in one article. However, we already have articles on the most popular tools: Landing page creators; CRM systems; Form builders; CMS software; Chatbot builders. You can save this guide to address the compilations listed above later. Now, let’s move on to the tips experienced growth hackers would give you. Growth Hacking Tips Ensure you can scale Leverage your strengths Book more time for tests Although growth hacking is a relatively new field of marketing, it has accumulated a lot of mistakes and ways to avoid them. Read on to learn more about them. Ensure you can scale Growing a company seems alluring – who doesn’t want to boost their revenue? However, before starting growth hacking, make sure that you really can scale your business. Will your infrastructure really fulfill the increased demand? Check up on the main points of your business and try to answer the following questions: Is your team ready to manage the increased number of leads and prospects? Can your infrastructure cope with bigger arrays of data? Will your current business model work effectively for an upscaled company? Can you cope with the increase in expenses? Evaluate your processes, team, resource, and even your psychological willingness to handle a large business. Startups too often cannot cope with rapid growth, and the outcomes can be disastrous. Leverage your strengths There are two approaches to improvement. The first one implies focusing on tackling weaknesses to get well-rounded expertise. The problem is it often leads to mediocre or average results at best. The second approach is to focus on using your strengths. For instance, to promote a new product, you may employ email marketing or influence marketing. Meanwhile, you don’t have the experience of working with digital influencers but have a huge mailing list full of loyal customers. Chances are good email campaigns will bring you more sales with low investment. Don’t be afraid to refuse marketing channels or strategies that don’t work for you and don’t drive amazing results. Remember that growth hacking is all about testing and finding ways to get better outcomes for lower efforts. Book more time for tests You can spend hours discussing the effectiveness of ideas and hypotheses. However, the results of these conversations are only speculative, and putting ideas into practice may lead to completely different outcomes. You should prefer testing hypotheses rather than talking about them. Keep your meetings short, make good choices, and implement them to get provable results. Be ready to refuse from poorly-performing practices or improve them on the go. Remember to book enough time for testing your hypotheses. Most of the strategies only bring reliable results after several weeks or months. Don’t rush to get rid of some practices after several days of testing. Even the most successful examples of growth hacking took time. Let’s examine effective techniques that transformed recent small companies into modern market leaders. Growth Hacking Examples Practice is the best teacher, that’s why you can’t learn without examples. We’ve picked three companies that came up with creative solutions to grow their businesses. All of them have a sustainable market share and customer base now. Dropbox The file-hosting service, Dropbox, shows a perfect example of rapid growth with little investment. The company didn’t use advertising or costly marketing techniques to acquire new customers. To win their audience, Dropbox created one of the most successful referral programs ever. As you can see in the picture below, the company offers its users over 500 MB of extra storage space in return for each friend invited to the service. Immediately, this move helped Dropbox achieve a 60% surge in users. Dollar Shave Club Dollar Shave Club did the impossible – the company won an oversaturated market, which has been dominated by another brand for decades. To do so, Dollar Shave Club spotted customers' pains and offered a solution – delivering razors and other personal grooming products by mail for only a dollar per month. This is the perfect example of a product-market fit. To deliver its message and benefits, Dollar Shave Club, invested in video marketing. The reasons for choosing this strategy are simple – this type of content gets 135% more reach on social media. The company crafted a video seasoned with a dose of humor, which went viral. It has got over 26 million views and triggered over 12,000 orders within a couple of days. Airbnb In the beginning, the little startup, Airbnb, had a strong competitor – Craigslist. To overpower their rival, Airbnb went cheeky – it encouraged the audience to cross-post Airbnb’s listings on Craigslist’s website with a backlink. The mechanic was super-easy, so hosts could publish their ads on two websites with a single click. As a result, they got more views and traffic, and so did Airbnb. However, simply pulling traffic from your competitor's website is not enough. Airbnb knew they needed a unique value proposition, so they offered one. The pictures for listings on rival websites were terrible – people couldn't see what they were paying for and refused to book anything. Airbnb owners rented a camera and made high-quality photos of as many apartments as they could. A month after the experiment’s start, revenue doubled. Since then, Airbnb offers professional photo services to hosts. Growth hacking is the perfect way to scale your business fast with minimal investment. To employ this framework, you need skills in data collection and analytics, programming, as well as a huge dose of creativity. Book time for brainstorming and creative thinking by using automation services for routine tasks. Sign up with LIKE.TG – we’ll help you set up automated email and messaging campaigns, web push notifications, and email flows.

Growth hacking is a field in marketing that uses cost-effective tactics to achieve rapid business growth. Growth hackers have to find cheap and creative solutions, run experiments, and measure results. In the video below, Growth Tribe defines growth hacking and explains how it differs from traditional marketing. This instructive guide will help you learn more about growth hacking. We’ll explore the benefits of this approach, learn how to set up growth hacking for your business, and unpack some tips and examples. What Is the Goal of Growth Hacking in Marketing? The concept of growth hacking appeared in the era of early startups. These businesses needed to enlarge their customer base, market share, and revenue as fast as possible. Meanwhile, startups had extremely low budgets, so they couldn’t afford traditional promotion and customer acquisition tactics. This situation has formed the primary goal of growth hacking in marketing – to acquire the maximum number of customers for minimal costs as quickly as possible. Following this objective, businesses devised specific growth hacking methods – we’ll explore them later in this article. Now it’s time to discover how exactly growth hacking tactics differ from ones that traditional marketing uses. Difference Between Growth Hacking and Marketing Growth hacking lives at the intersection of marketing, technology, and data science. Thus, it goes against traditional marketing in many ways. Let’s discover the main differences between these approaches. Goals. Traditional marketing focuses mostly on brand awareness and increasing sales. Growth marketing’s be-all and end-all is business growth in general, thus, this approach works with all stages of the sales funnel. Product. Marketing has everything to do with selling your finished product. Growth hacking goes further and helps companies improve the product in order to meet customer’s expectations. Expertise. Modern marketers must not only conduct marketing campaigns, but also measure their results on and offline. However, their expertise still lies mostly in the marketing field. Growth hacking requires the ability to automate everything, and knowledge of data analytics and programming. Growth hackers can measure the effect marketing has on business in general. Budgets. Growth hacking implies limited resources and tries to make the most of them by using offbeat tactics, mechanics, and channels. Traditional marketing often operates with bigger budgets and can afford paid promotional techniques – PPC, targeted ads, TV commercials, SMM, and so on. Focus on business growth, expertise in data analytics and programming, tight budgets, and management of all stages of the pipeline are core characteristics of growth hacking. Read on to learn how exactly this approach combines and employs all of it. How Growth Hacking Works To make business expansion soar without spending a fortune, growth hacking employs automation, data analytics, and creativity. Customer attraction at the top stages of a funnel requires growth hackers to use offbeat techniques. Thus, they constantly come up with novel ways to generate traffic. After devising a hypothesis, growth hackers start testing them – this is the only way to find out which tactics drive desirable results. Here is the moment when data analytics comes in handy. To achieve sustainable growth and improve outcomes for future campaigns, growth hackers need to figure out not only WHAT works well but also WHY it does. Thus, growth hackers use data to track customers along their journey down the pipeline and try to understand what causes the existing results and how they can improve conversions at each stage. They constantly explore the target audience's expectations and customer satisfaction and offer to change the product to improve results. Finally, when growth hackers learn what works best, they automate those processes. After this, they are ready to repeat the cycle with a new hypothesis. These loops of creating hypotheses, running experiments, collecting data, and automating processes are crucial in growth hacking. Let’s explore the details about the importance of this approach. Why is Growth Hacking Important? Growth hacking is vital for startups and other businesses on a tight budget. This concept allows brands to expand their audiences and boost revenue even though they can’t afford costly marketing tactics. Growth hackers constantly search for low-priced ways to promote a business and, thus, eliminate a lot of spending. Better yet, growth hacking has a positive effect on big corporations as well. Employing some basic growth hacking methods, brands can embrace new audiences, improve ROI, and increase customer loyalty. These are just a part of the benefits growth hacking brings about. Benefits of Growth Hacking There are a lot of ways growth hacking can affect a business, apart from its low cost and impressive results. Let’s get into detail and unpack the main benefits of this approach. Provable outcomes. Growth hacking is data-driven, so companies that use it, run experiments, and measure their performance. Thus, they have a full picture of the efficacy of each technique employed. Better yet, they have concrete measurements that allow them to judge and prove the results of strategies they use. Product improvement. Growth hackers constantly test different options and learn more about the audience – their demands, preferences, interests, and more. It leads to a deeper understanding of how to improve the product or service a company provides. Adjustable strategies. Modern marketing is kind of tricky – the strategies that worked well half a year ago may suddenly stop bringing desirable results. Growth hacking keeps an eye on performance and allows you to dump less effective methods to new ones. It also works the opposite way – you can scale the bulletproof tactics and apply them to other marketing channels. Growth hacking can change the game for your business; it works off the beaten track and lets you get incredible results by changing minor details and investing next to nothing in it. For instance, replacing a traditional lead magnet with free access to paid content can drive a 400% increase in opt-ins. Read on to discover more growth hacking strategies and techniques to adopt. Growth Hacking Strategies and Techniques Create a brand personality Collaborate to grow audiences Find new communication channels Employ interactive content Craft a free tool Thinking through ways to boost your company’s growth can get tough. To help you out with this task, we’ve picked five growth hacking tactics and strategies. Create a brand personality Facebook, Tesla, Uber – what factor unites these companies, apart from their rapid growth and market leadership? Well, there are well-known and beloved personalities behind them. That’s not a coincidence – the popularity of these startups’ founders has a dramatic effect on their expansion. People tend to trust, communicate, and engage with other people more than with faceless businesses. Use this human psychology trait to your advantage – create a strong personality behind your company. You can start with social networks – they are a great place to build your personal brand and communicate with potential clients. To inspire people, start a personal blog telling them about your launch. Collaborate to grow audiences Partnerships are a golden opportunity to double or triple your brand’s audience in the blink of an eye. Better yet, it requires next to nothing in investment, especially compared to traditional marketing. To benefit from this technique, choose the partner carefully. Opt for a complementary business – it ensures an influx of new audience members with the same interests as your brand. For instance, if you sell natural juice, you may collaborate with a protein bar manufacturer. Chances are your best customers are fitness enthusiasts. Before offering the partnership, get ready. Prepare ideas on how to blend your audiences organically. The options may be tagging each other on social media, launching live streams together, offering product bundles, and so on. Find new communication channels Highly competitive communication channels are demanding. To get to your audience there and win, you probably need a huge budget. If you launch a business in a busy industry with well-established leaders, the barriers may become too high. To break through to your potential customers, consider smaller social networks or resources. Choose the platforms, which your most promising prospects prefer. You may opt for TikTok if you work with a young audience, or go to The Dots if you target professionals from creative industries. Employ interactive content Growth hacking requires creating various types of content, from articles to videos to ads, and so on. In an ideal world, your audience would engage with every piece of your content. In reality, the users’ attention spans are limited. To grab their attention, use interactive elements. Interactive content can lower bounce rates, improve search engine results, boost engagement, etc. Besides,in most cases adding interactive elements costs brands next to nothing. The best part of this tactic is that elements don't have to be expensive or difficult to produce. You can use special tools to create surveys, quizzes, action buttons, or subscription forms. To create web forms for free, try the form builder from LIKE.TG. It lets you craft embedded, floating, fixed, and pop-up forms from scratch, or use templates. LIKE.TG forms are responsive and adjustable on the go. Craft a free tool Lead magnets are a proven technique to broaden the mouth of your lead funnel and collect more contacts. Their magic is based on the reciprocity principle – people are more likely to give something – their money, time, or data – if they got something in advance. By the way, using psychological traits is an extremely effective and free technique. Read our list of hacks to make the most of them. Returning to lead magnets, you should keep in mind that users are overwhelmed with free ebooks, checklists, and other pieces of content. So, you can take a step further and offer your audience a free tool. People will get used to it and appreciate it, so they become more prone to share their data with you and test your paid tools. On the basis of these tactics, you may invent your solutions to start growth hacking in your company. To facilitate your transition to the new framework, we’ve created a step-by-step guide. How to Start Growth Hacking Check your product-market fit Create a data lake Pick your North Star metric Improve your pirate metrics Build a backlog of ideas Switching to the new approach requires resources and an action plan. In this part of the article, we’ll offer you a five-step plan you can follow to engrain growth hacking into your company. 1. Check your product-market fit Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies market demand. Put simply, if your product-market fit is great, it means that your audience needs your product. Hence, you won’t face significant difficulties in selling it. To figure out whether you have a good product-market fit or not, you may employ various tactics. At first, consider creating a landing page and measuring the number of leads it brings. This will help you get an idea about the demand for your product. If you already have a customer base, you may lean on customer retention and satisfaction rates, as well as the number of brand advocates you have. Customer surveys and conversations may come in handy as well. Try Sean Ellis’ product-market fit survey. It will help you understand how many people will be disappointed with the disappearance of your product. Moreover, you’ll get a better understanding of your core benefits and the opportunities for improvement. 2. Create a data lake As growth hacking is a data-driven approach, you need to build your data lake – a vast array of raw data. In this step, your task is to collect as much data as you can without worrying about the purpose. Here is the main information you can look for: the source of a customer’s first visit to your website; the pages a customer looks through on your site; the source from where they’ve signed up for a trial; the interaction with features of your product; the customer lifetime value; the references each customer makes; the results of those references; the reasons for avoiding your product. Think through how you will collect this data, where and how you plan to store it, and what tools you will use to analyze the information. The easiest way is to use CRM software. Opt for analytical systems – they are made to manage data about your customers. To find the best option for you, follow our comprehensive guide on CRM systems. 3. Pick your North Star metric In recent years, Silicon Valley companies have come up with the concept of the North Star metric. This term stands for the single metric that a company uses as a focus for its growth. Each company chooses its own North Star metric according to its growth model and the value it provides to customers. For instance, Facebook aims at boosting the number of daily active users. For companies that work on a subscription model, the metric might be the number of premium subscribers, or customer lifetime value. To find your metric, think of what will help you achieve long-term growth. Thus, if you develop an eCommerce business, you can grow due to the number of purchases per month. This would be your North Star metric. 4. Improve your pirate metrics To successfully grow your North Star metric, you’ll need to keep an eye on pirate metrics as well. The pirate metrics, or AARRR, is a framework devised to help startups understand the customer journey and optimize a sales funnel. AARRR stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. Now let’s get into the details and find out how to work on every step: Acquisition. In this step, you should revise your customer acquisition channels. Find out the one that drives the most valuable traffic and the one that has the lowest cost. Try to improve your conversion rate on these channels – follow our comprehensive guide on conversion rate optimization. Activation. Ask yourself how good the user’s first experience with your product is and when a potential customer realizes the real value of your product. You can reinforce the activation with a polished value proposition – read our article to create and improve one. Retention. Try to understand how many of your customers you retain, and why others go. To improve this metric, employ some of the strategies we’ve listed in the article “Seven ways to keep your clients for life.” Referral. Think through the ways you can turn your customers into your brand advocates. Revenue. Mull over the question of how you can increase your revenue. The key indicators in the last steps are your Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. To work these metrics out and improve them, follow the tips from our article “5 KPIs to keep an eye on.” 5. Build a backlog of ideas With large data arrays and defined metrics, you can start thinking over ways to grow your business. The more ideas you have, the more regular experiments you can run. Consistency is the key to success with testing, so you should have a backlog of hypotheses and creative ideas. For effective work, your backlog should fit the following criteria: it has a place to create a list of ideas; it lets you add a description and hypothesis to each of those ideas; it allows you to prioritize ideas; it enables teamwork; it lets you save the results of your tests. Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that provide the opportunities listed above. You can opt for any tool from traditional Google Sheets and Trello, to specific software, such as Experiments by GrowthHackers. After finishing these five steps, you have everything to start running tests. Remember to track their results carefully and replenish your backlog of ideas according to the new data you get. You also need to automate processes that drive desirable outcomes. To perform all these tasks, you’ll need a wide set of tools. Growth Hacking Tools Working in a growth hacking framework requires a lot of tools to handle all the processes effectively. We’ve picked our favorites to help you set up integrations, collect data, run experiments, and automate processes. Zapier is a core service for each marketer and growth hacker. It allows you to connect over 2,000 online services and tools together to help users be more productive. Apart from that, the service lets you create automated workflows with a few clicks without coding or any technical skills. Colibri.io is a tool for internet monitoring. It helps you learn what people think about your brand or any chosen subject and allows you to approach these people. The service also helps you improve search engine results and your brand visibility on social media. Optimizely is an A/B-testing tool. You can run experiments and measure the effectiveness of new headlines, offers, or campaigns in general. LIKE.TG is a multi-channel marketing automation platform. The service lets you work with emails, SMS, push notifications, messengers, and chatbots. With LIKE.TG’s Automation 360 tool you can start automated message flows based on dates, events, and user’s actions. Among other useful features are message personalization, subscriber ratings, and advanced statistics. LIKE.TG provides an easy-to-use drag and drop landing page builder that allows you to create a landing page, online store, or link page for your social media bio without any coding skills and for free. You can also automate sales and communication with your customers with the help of our free CRM system. Sign up with LIKE.TG to automate your marketing, create subscription forms and chatbots, and send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers a month for free. These are only a couple of the tools you may need as a growth marketer. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to describe all the services in one article. However, we already have articles on the most popular tools: Landing page creators; CRM systems; Form builders; CMS software; Chatbot builders. You can save this guide to address the compilations listed above later. Now, let’s move on to the tips experienced growth hackers would give you. Growth Hacking Tips Ensure you can scale Leverage your strengths Book more time for tests Although growth hacking is a relatively new field of marketing, it has accumulated a lot of mistakes and ways to avoid them. Read on to learn more about them. Ensure you can scale Growing a company seems alluring – who doesn’t want to boost their revenue? However, before starting growth hacking, make sure that you really can scale your business. Will your infrastructure really fulfill the increased demand? Check up on the main points of your business and try to answer the following questions: Is your team ready to manage the increased number of leads and prospects? Can your infrastructure cope with bigger arrays of data? Will your current business model work effectively for an upscaled company? Can you cope with the increase in expenses? Evaluate your processes, team, resource, and even your psychological willingness to handle a large business. Startups too often cannot cope with rapid growth, and the outcomes can be disastrous. Leverage your strengths There are two approaches to improvement. The first one implies focusing on tackling weaknesses to get well-rounded expertise. The problem is it often leads to mediocre or average results at best. The second approach is to focus on using your strengths. For instance, to promote a new product, you may employ email marketing or influence marketing. Meanwhile, you don’t have the experience of working with digital influencers but have a huge mailing list full of loyal customers. Chances are good email campaigns will bring you more sales with low investment. Don’t be afraid to refuse marketing channels or strategies that don’t work for you and don’t drive amazing results. Remember that growth hacking is all about testing and finding ways to get better outcomes for lower efforts. Book more time for tests You can spend hours discussing the effectiveness of ideas and hypotheses. However, the results of these conversations are only speculative, and putting ideas into practice may lead to completely different outcomes. You should prefer testing hypotheses rather than talking about them. Keep your meetings short, make good choices, and implement them to get provable results. Be ready to refuse from poorly-performing practices or improve them on the go. Remember to book enough time for testing your hypotheses. Most of the strategies only bring reliable results after several weeks or months. Don’t rush to get rid of some practices after several days of testing. Even the most successful examples of growth hacking took time. Let’s examine effective techniques that transformed recent small companies into modern market leaders. Growth Hacking Examples Practice is the best teacher, that’s why you can’t learn without examples. We’ve picked three companies that came up with creative solutions to grow their businesses. All of them have a sustainable market share and customer base now. Dropbox The file-hosting service, Dropbox, shows a perfect example of rapid growth with little investment. The company didn’t use advertising or costly marketing techniques to acquire new customers. To win their audience, Dropbox created one of the most successful referral programs ever. As you can see in the picture below, the company offers its users over 500 MB of extra storage space in return for each friend invited to the service. Immediately, this move helped Dropbox achieve a 60% surge in users. Dollar Shave Club Dollar Shave Club did the impossible – the company won an oversaturated market, which has been dominated by another brand for decades. To do so, Dollar Shave Club spotted customers' pains and offered a solution – delivering razors and other personal grooming products by mail for only a dollar per month. This is the perfect example of a product-market fit. To deliver its message and benefits, Dollar Shave Club, invested in video marketing. The reasons for choosing this strategy are simple – this type of content gets 135% more reach on social media. The company crafted a video seasoned with a dose of humor, which went viral. It has got over 26 million views and triggered over 12,000 orders within a couple of days. Airbnb In the beginning, the little startup, Airbnb, had a strong competitor – Craigslist. To overpower their rival, Airbnb went cheeky – it encouraged the audience to cross-post Airbnb’s listings on Craigslist’s website with a backlink. The mechanic was super-easy, so hosts could publish their ads on two websites with a single click. As a result, they got more views and traffic, and so did Airbnb. However, simply pulling traffic from your competitor's website is not enough. Airbnb knew they needed a unique value proposition, so they offered one. The pictures for listings on rival websites were terrible – people couldn't see what they were paying for and refused to book anything. Airbnb owners rented a camera and made high-quality photos of as many apartments as they could. A month after the experiment’s start, revenue doubled. Since then, Airbnb offers professional photo services to hosts. Growth hacking is the perfect way to scale your business fast with minimal investment. To employ this framework, you need skills in data collection and analytics, programming, as well as a huge dose of creativity. Book time for brainstorming and creative thinking by using automation services for routine tasks. Sign up with LIKE.TG – we’ll help you set up automated email and messaging campaigns, web push notifications, and email flows.

A hot lead is a marketing lead interested in a brand's product. They realize the competitive advantages of your product, and have the budget and authority to make a purchase. These leads are at the bottom of your sales funnel. In this article, you'll learn the difference between cold, warm, and hot leads and how to convert hot leads. So, stay tuned! The Difference Between Cold, Warm, and Hot Leads These three types of leads represent the way a user comes through to become your customer. They have different intents and needs, so they require different approaches. Let's take a closer look at the features of each type of lead. Cold leads are at the top of your sales funnel. They may not know that your brand solves their problem, or they may not be interested in your products yet. Your sales representatives could collect their contacts via cold calling or cold emailing. You need to develop a step-by-step lead nurturing strategy to convert a cold lead into a customer. Warm leads are in the middle of your sales funnel. They are familiar with your brand. Warm leads could have subscribed to your email newsletter, followed you on Facebook or Instagram, or visited your website. They realize that your brand provides a possible solution to your problem but are not ready to buy yet. They may have doubts regarding the product or have no authority to make a buying decision. You need to implement a personalized approach to make them choose your company. Hot leads are your most valuable prospects because they are at the bottom of your sales funnel. These leads know much about your company and realize the benefits of your product. They're highly qualified leads. They have both desire and authority to buy, but they need a final push. Sales reps should act immediately not to lose such a deal. The more time you think about how to approach a hot lead, the faster it will turn cold. Now that you know how cold, warm, and hot leads differ, it's time to move on. We'll share some practical tips that will help you convert hot leads into customers. How to convert hot leads? Hot leads have a whooping conversion rate. In addition, you don't even need to nurture them. Your task is to remove the last obstacle which prevents them from becoming your client. So, we'll share our experience in converting hot leads into customers. Identify the sources of acquisition and engagement. This information is essential since it helps you determine your leads' needs. You'll get insights into their customer journey and discover their interests. You can get this information in your CRM or Google Analytics if you haven't nurtured the leads on your own. LIKE.TG provides a free CRM which adds leads automatically after they perform targeted actions on a landing page, chatbot, live chat on your website,email campaign, subscription form, or make a payment. So, once they click "Order," they will be added to your CRM. For more details, read this guide. You'll get to know which products they're interested in and which channels bring you more profits. Provide the necessary marketing support. Although hot leads know pretty much about your company, they may need the final push before making a purchase. Never treat your cold, warm, and hot leads with the same content and offers. Discover your leads' hesitations and obstacles to provide the necessary collateral when it comes to a purchase. You can share your most successful case studies and testimonials, offer a demo, or give a discount. Use personalization and segmentation. These tools reinforce your personalized approach to every lead. People appreciate brands caring about their individual needs and preferences, so don't miss a chance to become such a brand. With personalization, you can send the same email but include dynamic content, which varies depending on the data you have. Segmentation allows you to divide your leads into segments based on common characteristics and appeal to them with relevant offers. With LIKE.TG, you can send personalized and segmented emails for free. Offer a free trial. Although hot leads spend much time on research and realize the benefits of your SaaS product, it may be difficult for them to buy a plan in advance. Let them evaluate its features and competitive advantages with the help of a free trial. You can enable leads to use all the advanced features of your product during a week, and if they like it, they will buy. Ask your customer care agents to support leads this week to help make the most of your product. Use a CRM system. With a CRM, you can keep track of all your deals, monitor how they move from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel, and communicate with them in the most appropriate channel. LIKE.TG provides a free CRM that will help you effectively manage your sales process and communication channels in one place. You can collect and store customer data, launch marketing campaigns, add new deals, and connect with leads from a single platform. Allocate the deals among your sales reps and reward those who perform better. Congrats, now you know how hot leads differ from cold and warm prospects. Get inspired by our tips and register with LIKE.TG to bring communications with your customers to the next level!

Guest blogging is the process of writing articles for another company that aims at sharing expertise and popularizing a certain brand’s website. It helps content creators increase their traffic, attain new customers, improve domain authority, establishtheir position as industry leaders and experts, improve brand recognition, and maintain relationships with companies in the same industry. In this video, you’llget guest blogging tips, learn how to search for guest blogging sites, anddiscover how tofindkeywords for topics that have high traffic. In this article, we’ll unpack the reasons to leverage guest blogging, its benefits, and opportunities. Next, we’ll proceed to the stepsyou need to take to start guest blogging, find appropriate websites, and monetize your efforts. Why should youstart guest blogging? Writing evergreen articles or creating other forms of content that are relevant and fit for a partnering company is a challenging task. However, it offers several benefits for guest bloggers. By sharing their expertise, companies obtain high traffic, new leads and customers, domain authority, brand awareness, and good relationships with businesses within the market. Besides, it enables brands to obtain constant growth and win customer trust. Guest blogging is beneficial for both the author and the website hosting their content. Becoming a guest blogger improves a brand’s exposure to different target audiences and attracts people interested in a particular topic. Now that you have the reasons to hire professionals to create quality blog posts, let’s proceed to the next section to discuss the advantages of this effective technique. Benefits of Guest Blogging Creating original and quality content for companies in the same industry isn’t an easy task, but it’s worth the effort because of the various benefits it brings: high website traffic; wide reach; good relationships with influencers and well-established companies in the industry; extra social media shares; big social media following; established position of an industry leader and expert; additional backlinksto your website; high brand awareness; qualified leads; fast sales cycle; big sales volume; profound content marketing knowledge and new skills; different points of view and information for readers. The pros are clear now, so it’s time to review how bloggers can find an opportunity to write a guest post. Howto Find Guest Blogging Opportunities Use Google search Consider prolific guest bloggers Look through backlinks of your rival companies Become a part of relevant communities As a guest blogger, you will definitely look for opportunities to place your articles on relevant sites with high authority. When doing this, remember to review blogs that relate to your industry and have an audience that will be interested in your company. For example, if your brand sells and specializes in beauty products, it’s better to look for a website that contains information about cosmetics, skincare essentials, fragrances, etc. Use Google search The majority of blogs that need guest bloggers inform about this on their websites. You can easily find them by leveraging Google search operators. Say, your brand provides customers with marketing automation software solutions. To find a placeto post something related to your industry, you need to create a query in Google that contains your main keyword plus “submit guest post” (use quotation marks) to obtain all marketing automation websites open to guest posting. Your query should look like this: marketing automation platform + “submit guest post” Look, you instantly receive around 15,800 results for your query. The only thing you need to do now is to find the most relevant websites for your business. Consider prolific guest bloggers One more opportunity is to find some great authors in your industry who always come up with relevant and quality content. Look through their accounts on social media to see their articles and the companies they promote. These brands can be perfect for your articles as well. Find them on Google, and check out whether it’s possible to publish your guest post. Explore their guidelines. To search for an influential guest blogger, you should create the following query in Google: name + “guest post by” (use quotation marks) For example, let’s look for guest posts written by Kay Dexter, a marketing strategist. You can see the necessary query below: Kay Dexter + “guest post by” By writing this way, you’ll obtain the websites that contain Kay Dexter’s guest posts. Look through backlinks of your rival companies To get great websites for your guest posts, you can always leverage Ahrefs or SEMRush. Select your key competitors, and check their recent backlink profiles. If your competitors succeed in publishing their guest posts on some good websites, there’s a chance that they will publish your articles as well. For example, let’s check Runner’s World’s website and its backlinks in Ahrefs. Become a part of relevant communities Depending on the type of your business, you can join an appropriate community for new opportunities. For example, if you work in digital marketing, it’s worth creating a group on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Slack. This way, you can find websites that welcome articles from other companies. Besides joining such a community, you should also show your active participation in it. Now that you know where to find some opportunities for your guest blogging, follow our guide to start creating guest posts and publishing them on reliable and relevant websites. How to Start Guest Blogging Look for guest blogging opportunities Get to knowyour target websites’ content Explore the guest posts on these blogs Find out what types of authors these sitesneed Study their guidelines Pitch a great idea for your post, and write an article Create a guest bio Monitor and evaluate your post’s performance To kickstart your guest blogging, you should be aware of several steps. We’ll discuss them in more detail below. Look for guest blogging opportunities. As we’ve already mentioned in the previous section, when searching for some chances to guest post, pay attention to the websites that operate in your industry. The blogs you search for should be in the same niche, have an audience that will be interested in your company, and have a high level of engagement. Look for potential clients through Google search, prolific guest bloggers, social media, competitor backlinks, or communities of guest bloggers. MyBlogGuest is one of the examples of such communities. Get to know your targetwebsites’ content. Before writing any guest posts, you need to understand the content of your target blog. Explore the audience they write for and the type of content they publish. You should be aware of all these factsbefore writing for them. Explore the guest posts on these blogs. Look through and analyze the guest posts from other writers and compare them with articles published by the owner. Find out whether they succeeded to perform like the owner’s blog posts. For this purpose, see the number of comments and shares. If the audience doesn’t demonstrate a high level of engagement, it’s better to avoid such blogs. They won’t let you establish authority or bring traffic to your website. Find out what types of authors these sites need.Take a look at several bios of experts invited to write posts. It will enable you to figure out what kinds of people they work with: freelancers, bloggers, or business owners. Study their guidelines. Before contacting a blog owner, you should see their guest posting guidelines first and try to follow them when creating a guest post. Be aware of the posts they would like to see, the format, and other essential details. It’s necessary to avoid any complications during your partnership and make a great article. Pitch a great idea for your post and write an article. Once you read the guidelines, you will know for sure what thingsthis or that blog requires. If it mentions submitting a topic idea, you can prepare several of the most appropriate ones. Depending on the quality of thiswebsite’s content, you should prepare a relatedpost. Look through the previous guest posts to create something similar so that your content is relevant. Create a guest bio. This part is the most important for you because it contains self-promotion links.Try to do your best to describe yourself as an expert to gain trust. You can include a link to your site, social profile, or information about your background and experience. Monitor and evaluate your post’s performance. Finally, you need to track the progress of your guest post. If you strive to boost traffic to your site, then measure the results by using Google Analytics. This way, you’ll define the success of your article. It’s time to jump into the next section and walk you through the ways to search for sites that welcome guest posts. How to Find Guest Blogging Sites Sometimes writers have problems with finding the right sites to guest blog. In this section, we’ll unveil several ways to do it. Look for special blogs on Google. You can easily find the necessary lists of sites that allow guest bloggers to write articles for them. Many people have studied this question before and shared their knowledge on Google. This way, you’ll have a quick look at the websites related to your niche and their domain authority. The only thing left is to choose the most appropriate ones for your company. Use special tools. You can research the necessary websites with different tools. For example, platforms like BuzzSumo enables users to search for guest blogs by writing topic keywords + “guest post” or “guest post by.” As a result, you’ll have a list of blogs that allow guest posts. Analyze the activity of your competitors. By using different tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you have an opportunity to take a look at your competitors’ actions and strategies: their backlinks, websites where they guest posted, and see the authority of websites they write for. This analytics is one of the primary sources of guest blogging sites. You can choose the companies that suit you the most and contact their teams. Now let’s figure out how to earn money using guest blogging. How to Make Money Guest Blogging Savvy marketers know the numerous advantages of guest blogging and ways to earn money by implementing this strategy. There are several things you should consider to receive money for your articles. Sell your product. The easiest way to monetize your guest posts is to promote your product and ultimately sell it to a new audience. You can choose an appropriate moment to educate readers about your company and explain what problems it can help solve. For example, if your article is about platforms that help build websites for free, don’t forget to mention that you have such a service with a free plan or trial period and place a link if possible. Offer to create posts for compensation. If you are a freelancer and you are good at writing informative and relevant articles, guest blogging might be your additional source of income. Consider writing posts for influencers, teaching others how to write such blog posts, partnering up with companies and creating content for them, or creating an online course on guest posting. Sell affiliate products. One more great idea to earn money withguest blogging is to sell other companies’ products. You need to masterfully describe them and educate your readers about their benefits. The two main advantages are that the product isn’t yours, so you don’t need to spend extra time on its development, and you get money for its promotion and selling. Put links that lead to these products, promote courses, webinars, and training, or invite them to join online communities. Write sponsored reviews.Companies often need feedback and reviews from experts in the same industry. You can become one and earn some money. However, stick only to honest reviews to avoid harming your reputation. In a nutshell, guest blogging should be a crucial part of a successful company’s strategy. It brings brand recognition and a wide target audience and positively affects SEO. If youaim to become a guest blogger or considering hosting guest articles on your site, just give it a try.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. The video produced by Code School explains how to write HTML emails and provides tips to follow. Create the look of your text; you can use: bold; italics; color of the text. An HTML email is designed like a website with the help of graphics, colors, table columns, and links. You don't need to be a programmer to create it since email marketing services provide flexible campaign builders. Let's create HTML emails! We have an HTML email editor for tech-savvy marketers and drag and drop editor, which requires no HTML knowledge. Register and create an HTML email! Plain text, in comparison, is an email that contains only text and has no formatting. A well-formatted HTML email will yield better results than a plain text format. Some people want their email to look better, more vibrant, brighter. A lot of businesses use HTML emails to make their message look more formal, professional, and often much more in line with their corporate image. If you want to create web sites, you cannot do this without HTML. The basics of HTML will significantly simplify your life, and your website will become much more interesting. The text of a plain email can only contain ASCII characters. This means that the text of the letter will NOT have the following text formatting elements: bold; italics; color; images; font styles. When developing an HTML email,do not forget about simplicity, do not complicate your work, you’d better stick to the option of two columns. The usage of images should be minimized, like Outlook, for instance, does not support background images. You can use background images for decoration, but since the email should be easy to read, it is better to do without it. Because the message view window in email clientsoften takes only a small part of the general window, your email should be no more than 600 pixels wide. After all, nobody likes horizontal scroll bars. Besides, remember to keep proportions.

A hard bounce means that email delivery to a certain recipienthas failed permanently. Most of the time, recipients themselves cause hard bounces to happen. Hard Bounce Causes invalid email addresses; invalid domain names; or the email server of the recipient, by policy, blocks the delivery. It happens sometimes that subscribers, for personal reasons, do not wish to give out their real email address. So when filling in the form on your website or landing page, they insert a random email address just to pass the procedure requirements. However, it may occur that valid email addresses are giving hard bounces, or the subscriber could have unsubscribedby mistake, and this caused a hard bounce. In such cases, the subscriber needs to opt-inonce again to be in your subscribers’ list. In case of a hard bounce, the sender gets an autoresponderemail, also called a delivery notification. With the LIKE.TG Email Verifier, you can decrease the number of hard bounces. The service checks your mailing list and removes invalid email addresses. As a result, you stay out of the spam folder, increase email deliverability and your sender reputation.

Gross Rating Point (GRP) is a ratio used to measure the influence of advertising campaigns on theirtarget audience. It helps companies define their approaches to reach specific target markets and allocate their budgets effectively. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of evaluating your gross rating point and figure out the measures you need to calculate this ratio. Why is a gross rating point important? GRP is an essential measure that enables businesses to assess the success of their advertising campaigns. It measures the number of campaign impressions and identifies the level of advertising delivery and exposure. Media buyers use this percentage to determine the strongest components of their media plans. Evaluating your gross rating point is crucial because it helps measure the impact of your advertising campaigns and messages on people who perceive them. The ratio can be leveraged for various forms of media, such as radio, television, the internet, and billboards. When having GRP, media owners know the approaches they should and shouldn’t consider to win their target market. Moreover, it allows companies to allocate their resources to develop appropriate advertising campaigns that can effectively reach out to people. Now that you know why you need to take this measure into account, we’ll proceed to the calculations. How to Calculate Gross Rating Point By estimating GRPs, media planners can uncover the number of impressions they managed to obtain through specific channels and campaigns. Media buyers can receive information on the audience they succeeded to reach and compare it with the population. If you leverage various types of media and strive to determine the efficiency of your advertising campaigns and the number of impressions, see the formula below. It will help you estimate the ratio easily. Let’s take country A, for example. 60 million of its population are young people aged 20 to 33 years old. A firm’s owner decides to launch a campaign and see its results. It delivers an average frequency of 8 impressions to 1,000,000 young people. Let’s calculate GRP for this business by using the formula above. GRP = (1,000,000 / 60,000,000) * 8 = 1.67% * 8 = 13.36 To sum it up, if it’s necessary for you to know the level of your campaign’s effectiveness, you should calculate your GRP. As a result, you’ll know the approaches that work well with your audience, choose the right channels, and deliver messages that resonate with your target market.

Guerrilla marketing is a marketing field that uses unconventional tactics to promote a product or brand. Brands can hold guerrilla marketing campaigns online, offline, or with a mix of both. In the video below, marketing expert, coach, and blogger Adam Erhart explains what guerrilla marketing is and how it works. This post will concentrate on the practical side of guerrilla marketing. We’ll unpack some strategies and examples and share a step-by-step guide on how to set up your guerrilla marketing campaign. Also, you'll learn a little something about the types and benefits of guerrilla marketing. First, let’s explore the main features of guerrilla marketing. Features of guerrilla marketing Because of its complexity, it’s hard to define the term guerrilla marketing. However, you can recognize a guerrilla marketing campaign when you see one. All you have to do is look for certain features. The element of surprise. This type of marketing offers unusual interactions with potential customers. Often, guerrilla marketing tries to surprise or shock the audience. Cost-effectiveness. Most guerrilla marketing campaigns have low budgets but drive great results. This trait makes guerrilla marketing resemblegrowth hacking. Interactiveness. Guerrilla marketing relies on emotions and experiences and nudges the target audience to participate in a campaign. Used in B2C. Emotions are a great sales driver for B2C. In B2B, decisions are made more thoughtfully and thoroughly, which makes guerrilla marketing less applicable in this sector. Provocativeness. As guerrilla marketing relies on emotional interaction, campaigns are often provocative and risky. Nowhere is the last point more palpable than in the question of the legitimacy of guerrilla marketing. Is guerrilla marketing illegal? The shocking character of most guerrilla marketing campaigns and recurring news about brands being punished for them make people think that guerrilla marketing is illegal. However, that’s not always the case. Sometimes companies get into trouble with the law because of their guerrilla marketing. For instance, many years ago Coca Cola got fined for placing branded graffiti in New Orleans’s historic areas. It turned out that the brand didn’t get permission from local authorities to do so. However, you can stay within the law and still be creative and provocative with your promotional campaigns. To avoid problems, consult a lawyer. They will help you check the restrictions, get permission, and so on. Guerrilla marketing tactics surprise your audience, make them interact with your brand, and provoke emotions, sometimes to the point of being scandalous. The question is are these strategies effective? Let’s crunch some numbers and find the answer. Guerrilla Marketing Statistics Guerrilla marketing is not as holistic a phenomenon as, for example,email marketing or SMM. Thus, it’s hard to measure its efficiency in general. We’ve assembled statistics on using unconventional approaches to brand promotion to find out if it is effective. 27%of decision-makers in Germany use unconventional marketing to promote their brand. Guerrilla marketers spend 90% less on advertising because of using unconventional approaches. Word-of-mouth accounts for 54% of purchasing decisions. Guerrilla marketing can nudge your potential customers towards a purchase and help you save some of your marketing budget at the same time. Still, only a small percentage of marketers benefit from this approach. Read on to find out what positive effects guerrilla marketing can have on your business. Guerrilla Marketing Benefits We’ve learned that guerrilla marketing is a cost-effective and efficient way to promote a business. Let’s go through the other advantages of this approach. Increased brand awareness.Guerrilla marketing is all about creating a buzz around a company. Provocative and unconventional campaigns are the perfect fuel for building brand awareness. Standing outfrom competitors. Bold and memorable guerrilla marketing actions work as well as a unique value proposition does in terms of setting your business apart from competitors. Emotional connection with a brand.Since guerrilla marketing is good at provoking emotions, a single campaign can create a strong connection between a brand and a customer. This connection is the be-all-and-end-all of strong long-lasting relationships with buyers. Building partnerships. Most guerrilla marketing campaigns are complex undertakings, that require collaboration between several businesses or organizations. Hence, guerrilla marketing can be the perfect base for creating partnerships. So, guerrilla marketing can be a game-changer for your business. It can make your brand famous worldwide off the bat without wasting a dime on promotion. Read on to learn about various types of guerrilla marketing you can employ. Types of Guerrilla Marketing Ambush marketing Undercover marketing Ambient marketing Experiential marketing As a complex subject, guerrilla marketing may come in different forms. Let’s discover the most popular of them and find the differences. Ambush marketing This is a high-risk strategy, which occurs when a company interrupts an event held or sponsored by another brand. For instance, if your competitor sponsors a local sports event, you can offer winners or attendees valuable prizes. This move lets you get all of the profit from a rival's activity. This tactic creates a memorable occurrence and gives a brand access to the opponent's audience. However, it may cause problems with the law, as event sponsors often have regulated agreements with event organizers. Undercover marketing This tactic implies making a hidden sale pitch to a prospective customerwithout them knowing it. The tactic aims at creating buzz and a community around the product. The most well-known example of such an approach is product placement in movies or TV shows. You might have seen your favorite characters drinking a beverage from a specific brand or prone to wear shoes by a famous fashion house. Sometimes marketers get more creative with undercover marketing and come up with an unusual campaign, as Sony Ericsson did. The company hired actors, who played tourists. They asked regular people on the street to take their photos with Sony Ericsson mobile phones. Ambient marketing Perhaps, the most popular form of guerrilla marketing is ambient marketing. The term stands for placing a gripping message or imagery in an unexpected place. Hence, ambient marketing takes place fully offline. However, this type of guerrilla marketing doesn’t boil down to placing an ad somewhere unexpected. The message itself should be shocking, surprising, and creative. Experiential marketing The core of experiential marketing is creating a situation where the target audience gets into a memorable situation and connects with something that symbolizes your brand. Experiential marketing campaigns aim at building a close bond between your company and its prospective customers. The types of campaigns listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more ways to do guerrilla marketing; we’ll discuss more strategies further. Now, let’s find out how to launch a guerrilla marketing campaign. How to Set Up a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Get to know your audience Set goals Analyze your environment Come up with a technique Execute your plan Measure results Guerrilla marketing not only requires a lot of creativity but also an action plan. Here are six steps you need to take to engrain guerrilla marketing into your marketing strategy. 1. Get to know your audience Knowing your audience is a cornerstone of your guerrilla marketing success. To trigger emotions with your marketing campaigns, you need to know your audience's desires, fears, and pain points. To learn more about your target audience, explore your current customers. Probably, your sales and customer service teams can tell you who your customers are, why they value your product or service, and what makes them tick. You can also find forums and Facebook groups where your potential customers discuss their problems. To keep the information at hand, craft a customer profile. Our instructive guide on the data to include and the sources of information will help you out. Apply a jobs-to-be-done approach as well. It will help you understand how customers interact with your brand, where you can target them, and what activities or messages you can provide to them. 2. Set goals Although guerrilla marketing is a lot of fun, remember that its main task is to meet your goals. Thus, you need to set specific, measurable, accurate, reliable, and timely objectives for your campaign. Guerrilla marketing often aims at creating buzz and increasing brand awareness. However, you may want to use your campaigns to drive sales as well. Make sure your campaign’s goal resonates with your global business objectives. The best way to set KPIs for your guerrilla marketing campaign is to lean on the previous results. If you’re starting from scratch, benchmark your goals with your competitors’ results – it will give you a clear starting point. 3. Analyze your environment Your task with guerrilla marketing is to catch potential customers off guard in a familiar environment. Moreover, you need to surprise and delight them. Thus, you can’t go without an analysis of thriving trends. Start by learning what people are talking about at the moment. This is where social listening tools will come in handy. Another magic wand for you is Google Trends – a service to analyze the popularity of top search queries. Apart from exploring current situations and trends, learn more about your competitors. Try to find their examples of guerrilla marketing campaigns and analyze them. Both best and worst practices can provide you with valuable insights on how to shape your unique distinguishable action. 4. Come up with a technique If you are floundering to find a technique for your guerrilla marketing campaign, good old brainstorming can help you get the ball rolling. Gather your colleagues together and encourage them to generate some ideas. Set the time limits for a session and make sure everyone enunciates their suggestions. The main rule here is to avoid evaluating the ideas on-the-go – it will impede the creative process. In the following stage, you need to assemble the ideas created before and gauge them. Rely on your customers’ preferences and pains, your business goals, and current trends. Take into consideration the resources you have to bring the idea to life. There is no point in stopping at the viral video creation if you don’t have the team or budget for it. 5. Execute your plan As we said before, a guerrilla marketing campaign is a complex undertaking. It requires you and your partners to consolidate a lot of efforts. For instance, to simply stick a poster in a public place, you need to form the pitch, create the design, print, and glue the poster. Make sure each stage of work is done properly and in a timely fashion. To save your campaign from flopping, take one more critical look at it before executing it. Think of how customers may perceive your message and how they will react. Try to find the possible downfalls and predict how they will affect the campaign overall. Finally, there is always the chance that everything will fall flat. You should consider it, foresee the worst possible scenario and generate a plan B in case it occurrs. 6. Measure results As guerrilla marketing campaigns on average aim at creating buzz, it may seem hard to measure their results. If you are puzzled over how to track them, here are a couple of hints. Keep an eye on your brand’s mentions in the media. A successful provocative campaign will always get a bunch of publications. Use social listening tools. Services like Agorapulseor Mentionwill help you overhear conversations about your campaign on social media and find if it hit the goal. Conduct research. You can survey your customers and random people to ask if they have heard about the campaign and how they perceive your brand after it. Compare “before” and “after.”To evaluate the effect a guerrilla marketing campaign had on your sales, measure them before launching the action and sometime after it. Of course, guerrilla marketing doesn’t allow you to reach the level of precision that digital marketing does. However, the tactics listed above will help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign. With this action plan on hand, you can set up a guerrilla marketing campaign without missing any important part of it. Now it's time to get into details and learn some strategies you can adopt. Guerrilla Marketing Strategies and Tips Open a pop-up shop Use posters and stickers Give samples Be concise and consistent Focus on smaller groups Thinking through guerrilla marketing techniques can get tough. We’ve picked several strategies and pro-tips to facilitate your creative process. Open a pop-up shop A pop-up shop is a temporary store, that businesses can easily set up and take down. Generally, these shops are not used to generate sales but to drive the customer’s attention to a brand. Hence, the key to success with a pop-up shop it’s choosing the best location. If you want to employ this tactic, try to think outside the box and pick an unusual yet well-trodden spot. For instance, you may open a pop-up shop inside another shop or at a big event. Another option is to rent a van or truck and create a mobile version of the store. To achieve your pop-up shop goals, remember to launch a promo campaign. It allows you to embrace a much bigger audience. Consider trying various types of marketing to grab audience attention. For instance, you may employ influencer marketing. Use posters and stickers Posters and stickers are a cost-effective guerrilla marketing tactic. You can offer your clients branded stickers so they can show off your brand to others. An even more effective way to use this strategy is to place your posters in public places, such as walls, pavement, sculptures, and so on. You can also benefit by sticking them on moving objects, such as public transport. Be careful with this tactic. Make sure you aren’t breaking the law or annoying the public by placing your posters and stickers here and there. So, try to be mindful of this tactic and avoid being intrusive. Give samples The effectiveness of samples is based on two principles. The first is people generally love receiving something good for free. The second is after receiving it, they feel obligated to buy something. It’s called reciprocity – a basic human psychology feature, that nudges a person to do someone a favor if they got a favor upfront. If you decide to take advantage of the reciprocity principle, make sure you offer something valuable. People should feel pleased and even stunned after receiving your sample. Offer you samples at events that gather the proper audience. Another option is to distribute your samples through business partners. Finally, you can employ social media marketing and launch giveaways. Be concise and consistent Succinct and consistent messaging is the key to success with marketing tactics. In guerrilla marketing, it is even more important as campaigns catch your audience off guard and provoke an immediate response. So, fine-tune your campaign’s message until it is razor-sharp and unambiguous. To multiply the effect, come up with a follow-up communications plan. For instance, you can add a hashtag to your offline campaign, monitor it on social media, and get user-generated content. Focus on smaller groups A target audience usually consists of several distinct groups of customers. Instead of trying to embrace them all with your guerrilla marketing campaign, focus on smaller segments. This approach will help you create more effective campaigns that drive palpable results. Better yet, it allows you to build sustained relationships with customers easily and raise brand advocates. These tactics and tips have proven their effectiveness. To follow them and keep your campaigns offbeat, you need practice. Guerrilla marketing works better when it’s coupled with other strategies. You can use email marketing, chatbots, web push notifications, and SMS as a part of your campaign. To add these tactics to your marketing strategy in a couple of clicks, sign up with LIKE.TG.

High-low pricing is a widely used pricing strategy that allows companies to charge more for initially introduced products and then sell them at a much lower price during promotional campaigns. These usually include seasonal deals, clearance sales, and markdowns. The primary goal of these campaigns is to increase revenue. In this article, we’ll explain why firms use this method, unveil its pros and cons, compare it to the Everyday Low Prices (EDLP) strategy, and share some examples. Firstly, we’ll uncover the benefits that this strategy provides as well as its shortcomings. Advantages and Disadvantages of High-Low Pricing Almost every retail business selling mass-market products uses this pricing strategy. Promoting a product twice as cheaper as its regular price allows companies to enhance flash sales and impulse purchases. Customers are tempted to buy due to a powerful sense of urgency no matter whether they actually need this item and turn a blind eye to price gouging. For this method to work, both businesses and clients should know the relative price for each item, which is an average price for a product on the market. When launching a high-low pricing campaign, ensure that you actually charge much less than your competitors do. Now you should understand the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy. The benefits you may get include the following ones. Revenue increase.If promoted well, a sharp price declinewill increase your total sales volume, and therefore, your revenue. Selling low-demand products. High-low pricing is your chance to convert old stocks, excess inventory, and slow-moving items into cash. Each firm has items that collect dust on the gloomy shelves of their warehouse. Be proactive and launch campaigns to promote goods that don’t sell and get more space for new arrivals. Boosting website traffic. If you promote your deal via email campaigns, chatbots, and web push notifications, you increase your website traffic naturally, which has a positive impact on your search rankings. Although the advantages seem very attractive, this strategy has drawbacks as well. Check them out below. Customers wait for deals. If you run high-low pricing campaigns on a regular basis, your clients will adjust to this and wait for the deals because of much lower prices, which can hurt your revenue. Customers can doubt your product quality. Clients know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Big discounts make them question the quality of your goods, and they can get rather suspicious of your brand. Marketing costs can be high. Sometimes promoting a product can cost more than selling it at a relative price, and thus, the strategy won’t pay off. However, you don’t need to spend a dollar when promoting your deals with LIKE.TG marketing tools. You can send emails to 500 subscribers a month for freeandinform 10,000 users about your sales via web push notifications. You see that these benefits can be tangible if yougive your campaign a good thoughtand choose a reliable marketing platform. Big brands often combine high-low pricing and Everyday Low Prices strategies. Let’s see the difference between these two tactics. High-Low Pricing vs. Everyday Low Prices (EDLP) While a high-low pricing strategy implies setting a high price initially and then lowering it during promotional campaigns, EDLP allows companies to set a low price without making their customers wait for deals. With EDLP, clients don’t need to compare manufacturers and search for the lowest price since a firm promises to keep prices low during a specified period or even forever. You definitely have a supermarket chain in your region that has established a reputation as the lowest price seller. This strategy was applied by Walmart, Procter Gamble, Food Lion. EDLP strategy allows stores to predict demand and prevent sharp fluctuations that occur during high-low pricing campaigns. Besides, companies don’t have to pay regularly for promoting one-day deals as high-low pricing requires. On the other hand, companies that use EDLP can’t benefit from creating discounts since they will hurt their profit margin. Moreover, if you sell at lower prices, your budget for other essential issues will be rather tight. You won’t be able to invest much in hiring a highly experienced staff to improve your customer service or invest more in a better promotion. Both pricing strategies have pros and cons. If you go for EDLP, you can present your brand as the most profitable choice, while choosing a high-low pricing technique will provide more opportunities to increase sales volume and sell low-demand items. Examples of High-Low Pricing This strategy is widely popular in the fashion and shoe industry. The most famous companies reaping its benefits include Nike, Reebok, and Adidas. Considering the fashion industry, Nordstrom and Macy’s choose this strategy. Their prices are relatively high, but these brands regularly motivate and reward their clients with big discounts devoted to the end of the season. This way, they sell off-season goods, retain customers, and acquire new prospectsto assess their quality at a reduced price. Now that you realize the advantages and disadvantages of high-low pricing, you can start using it in your business with the marketing tools provided by LIKE.TGfor free.

A hard sell is a direct sales approach that uses insistent language, pressure, and aggressive techniques to make leadspurchase a product immediately. It results in customers having negative feelings and impressions about a particular company. In this article, we’ll review several reasons why a hard sell doesn’t work, compare a hard sell and a soft sell, and grab some inspiration from examples. 4Reasons Why Hard Selling Doesn’t Work Companies can choose among a great variety of sales techniques that bring excellent results to their business leaders. However, some sales representatives still use a hard-sell approach. The strategy absolutely ignores customers’ needs and wants and only focuses on the fact of purchase. Let’s find out why a hard sell approach doesn’t work. Insistent language of sales reps. The tactic can intimidate buyers with an often aggressive tone of voice. It leaves negative emotions and impressions about a company and discourages customers from purchasing a brand’s products or services again. The intimidating character of communication with buyers. The method can easily hurt the feelings of buyers because of sales reps’ excessive persistence and the goal of closing a deal. Salespeople as representatives of a company greatly influence the opinion of consumers. Unpleasant communication with sales reps results in a bad impression and takes away the desire to buy something or deal with a brand. Moreover, customers can share negative comments on such companies’ sites, complain about annoying calls, messages, and emails, and, as a result, downgrade their rating and discredit these firms. The absence of information about productvalue. A hard sell focuses primarily on closing a deal. That’s why sales representatives try to sell a product as soon as possible by telling about its features rather than providing its actual benefits and explaining what problems it can solve. Mistrust in what companies try to convey.Sales reps are often insensitive and desperate to sell a product, which can provoke customers’ mistrust and suspicion. As a result, people won’t buy any products from such brands. Now that you know the reasons why it’s better not to consider a hard sell in your marketing strategy, let’s proceed to the difference between a hard and a soft sell. Hard Sell vs. Soft Sell A hard sell is a sales strategy that involves persuading customers to buy products or services. The approach is considered aggressive because of the invasive behavior of salespeople. Sales reps usually use insistent language and strive to close a deal as fast as possible. They often ask prospectsto purchase certain products without explaining their value and the benefits they can bring. A soft sell is an indirect approach that entails salespeople offering products and services to customers. However, in this strategy, sales reps focus on building relationships with leadsand buyers. They aim to gain trust rather than push customers to buyunnecessary goods. To reach their consumers, sales representatives learn about their challenges, interests, and points of view. It helps figure out whether their product or service is a great fit for customers. Moreover, salespeople provide genuine recommendations to help consumers solve their problems. Let’s walk you through some hard sell examples. Hard Sell Examples You can encounter hard sells in some infomercialsyou can see on TV. They are packed with reasons to buy certain products and a call to action so that customers could purchase immediately. These long commercials also include an expert’s testimony to convince a consumer to make a purchase. Let’s take the PajamaJeans infomercial, for example. It includes the features of the product, a special TV offer, and a call to action. To sum it up, if you aim to build trust and strong relationships with your customers and want them to become regular clients, it’s no secret that you should better master a soft sell. Consider using soft language and non-aggressive approaches to not only keep your existing customers but also attract new ones.

Gross profit is a profit that remains after deducting the production costs. It helps evaluate how efficiently a business uses its labor and supplies in the process of manufacturing and get to know the financial performance of a company. Why is it important to measure your gross profit? The measure indicates the revenueacompanybrings to its owner aftercalculating the investmentsin producing and selling products or offering services. It helps evaluate the profitability of a specific company and monitor its financial performance. Besides, it demonstrates the sufficiency of a company in terms of using labor and raw materials. A decrease in gross profit during a certain period helps identify the reasons for this process so that a company can take action to resolve the problem. Indicators that influence gross profit include: changes in the products; the efficiency of company management; changes in accounting policies; the cost of purchasing raw materials; the number of employees; the level of competitiveness of products and services; sales volume. If you want to calculate your company's gross profit, you need to subtract the costs for manufacturing and selling products. These are variable costs, including costs for direct labor, raw materials, shipping, packaging, etc. Afterward, your company can determine whether the business brings revenue. Now let's make the difference between the two main types of profit clear. Gross Profit vs. Net Profit Profit is the money your firm generates. It shows you how efficiently and successfully your company operates by comparing current revenues with the previous ones. If you aim to track your firm's financial performance, you need to be ready to distinguish the two main types of profits. Knowing the difference is essential for investors because gross and net profit help determine whether a certain company obtains revenue. In case it doesn't earn, these parameters also enable investors to figure out where the firm loses money. Gross profit. It is money a company obtains after deducting the costs related to the investments in production and selling the goods and services. It tells you how effectively you use labor and raw materials to produce goods. With the help of this measure, you can evaluate the financial performance of your business. After figuring this out, you can decide whether to cut down the expenses on manufacturing and selling the products or charge a higher price for your goods if the business doesn't perform well. Net profit.If you want to evaluate your net profit, you need to estimate gross profit first and then deduct all operating and interest costs as well as tax expenses over a certain time. This measure helps you monitor the financial health of your firm. Net profit also determines when to expand your business or reduce expenses. If you own a company, you need to calculate net profit because it helps creditors be aware of the state of your business and the cash available. Entrepreneurs would also refer to this parameter when considering investing in your firm. You have to estimate the values of the two parameters to create an income statement, demonstrating your revenue and expenditures. Knowing the peculiarities of these two types of profit enables you to see a realistic picture of your business. To calculate them correctly, you need to have the necessary formula, so let's dive in. How to Calculate Gross Profit One of the essential things you need to know when running a business is how to measure your company's gross profit. This metric focuses on variable costs (alter with the change in output), including direct labor, credit card fees, materials, and shipping. The measure excludes fixed costs, such as property taxes, insurance, rent, and advertising. Below you can see a formula that helps you estimate the metric easily. You need to subtract the sum of money spent to produce and sell products from the revenue you managed to obtain to calculate this measure. Gross Profit Example Now it's time to practice how to estimate gross profit with the help of the example below. Further, we'll compare the gross profits of two competing businesses. Let's imagine that we have two companies that manufacture and sell toys for children. Say, company A obtained its $30,000 revenue in June. The firm spent $20,000 on the manufacturing and selling process to get such a profit. Now it's time to proceed to company B, which also obtained its $30,000 revenue in June, and this firm spent $22,000 to produce and sell the same amount of products. Let's now estimate the gross profit of company B. The calculations above demonstrate that company A has $2,000 more in gross profit. It shows that they use their funds more efficiently to produce the same amount of toys for children in the same time frame. It's essential to know how to increase your gross profit, and that's why we'll offer several tips. 5Tips to Increase Your Gross Profit Increase your selling price Boost sales Reduce the cost of products your company sells Remove products that don't bring profit Get more customers Increase your selling price. Consider increasing the price of your products or services. However, ensure that the cost of such goods is the same. Increasing the price allows you to obtain higher revenue and, as a result, a higher gross profit. You should remember that if you charge your customers a price that is too high, you can face the risk of losing them. Boost sales.Consider implementing different strategies to increase your sales. For this purpose, you can enhance your sales channels and use social media platforms and messengers to offer your products and services. With LIKE.TG, you can use chatbots, email campaigns, and landing pages to sell your goods. Besides, think about promoting your products on various platforms by describing their benefits and the issues they can solve. Make sure that your customer service helps your existing and potential clients with their problems. Reduce the cost of products your company sells. If you can find a way to cut down the cost of goods sold, you will be able to increase your gross profit. You can find suppliers that offer lower prices and use cheaper raw materials or labor-saving technology to implement this technique. However, ensure that it won't influence the quality of your goods because customers can choose your competitors to obtain products of better quality. Remove products that don't bring profit. First of all, you need to identify the products or services that allow your business to benefit and bring good revenue. Pay attention to these certain goods to make the profit even bigger. Secondly, find out which of the goods don't bring you any benefit to learn about the improvements that should be made or consider removing these products. Get more customers. You can reach your potential customers in several ways, such asemail marketing, video marketing, social media, blog posts, etc. With email marketing, you can convert your leads into customers. LIKE.TG allows you to send out a newsletter that includes engaging content about your products. This enables your prospectsto discover more about your company and purchase from your brand. Now you know that gross profit is an essential parameter for any business. If you want to determine whether your company uses resources efficiently and brings you revenue, it would be useful to calculate the measure.

Email greylisting is a method of protecting email users from spam. A Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that uses greylisting blocks a suspicious email with a “temporary rejected” error. In such a situation, a legitimate SMTP server makes multiple attempts to resend a delayed email until it is finally accepted. Servers for mass email spam, on the contrary, usually do not have such sophisticated features. How Email Greylisting Works SMTP rules provide that a greylisting server filters unknown email servers and gives a “temporarily rejection” back to the sending server. Legitimate SMTP servers retry sending after a 15-minute delay by default, on and on. If a greylisting filter considers an email suspicious but lets it through after retrying the delivery, the next emails are going through without delays. This is because the greylisting server remembers the sender’s name and other details and whitelists it without any additional settings from a user. Another positive aspect of greylisting is that for MTAs, sending a temporary error is a cost-effective measure since it doesn’t require much CPU (central processor) power and memory for its performance, unlike most of the other spam filtering programs. Unfortunately, in cases where the sending server is poorly set up, the delay time may be far more than 15 minutes by default, which might irritate recipients if they have gotten used to the instantaneous nature of emails. Another disadvantage is that junk mailers adjust to greylisting and queue spam emails for redelivery, which weakens this anti-spam method. Anyway, the delay buys some time for other systems to identify the suspicious sending server as a source of spam. How to Avoid Email Greylisting Take care of your IP-address reputation Use a reliable domain Sign your email with a real sender’s name Allow instant unsubscribing Format the headings and the message correctly Avoid using stop-words Take care of your IP-address reputation. LIKE.TG ensures a good IP-address reputation, minimizing your chances of getting greylisted. Use a reliable domain. In an email address, the email domain goes after @ symbol, for example, [email protected]. It takes time to earn a reputation for your email domain. Sign your email with a real sender’s name. A real name instead of something like that — [email protected], helps to build trust among your audience and increase open rates. An attractive sender’s name should be like this: Adam at Example.com and influence your reputation in the eyes of both the audience and spam filters. Allow instant unsubscribing. Many reasons may cause users’ intention to unsubscribe, but not allowing them to do so leaves no other choice but mark email as spam. If a critical number of subscribers marked your emails as spam, the chances are that your IP-address reputation will suffer, and greylisting filters will consider emails from you to be suspicious. Format the headings and the message correctly. The headings and the message itself should be formatted, according to RFC 5322 (internet message format) and HTML standards. Avoid using stop-words. Stop words like “Buy,” ”Amazing,” “Free,” “Cheap,” etc., may alarm greylisting filters that an email is not trustworthy. Be extremely careful with emails that are expected to be instantly delivered like welcome, transactional, confirmation, etc.

Giveaway email is a source of holding giveaways. Сompanies use it to inform users about the beginning and ending of the giveaway, keeping them interested with updates and notifications via emails along the way. This video by Teachable explains what a giveaway is and provides 4 advanced tips for gathering more subscribers. Giveaway is a promotion tool for gathering new subscribers which spins around the concept of a gift — some product which companies give away to the luckiest participant at random. It is expected that for the sake of winning the prize people will spread the word about the brand on socials. Why are giveaways important? Engage with an existing audience Accelerate your mailing list growth Improve brand image Gain product exposure Easy and cheap to create Engage with an existing audience. Giveaways are great for refreshing relationships with your subscribers since regular newsletters and promotions are sometimes not enough for keeping people engaged. The hope of getting a free item brings subscribers lots of positive emotions associated with your brand. Accelerate your mailing list growth. Your current audience can generate new entries for you. It happens if you give bonus points for sharing that giveaway on socials, fuelling the word-of-mouth. That is a reason why some giveaways go viral bringing new subscribers in even if there is no audience yet. Improve brand image. When your company gives away something that people need and like, it results in a wave of positive feedback. Giveaways enable you to spread a positive image of your company when people mention your brand in their posts and tweets. Gain product exposure. If you sell electronics and set wireless headphones as a prize, such giveaway will attract much attention to the product. A giveaway may also work as a method of promoting particular products. Easy and cheap to create. There are many services on the internet for creating giveaways. It is also cheaper compared with other promotions since it requires only one product and a little bit of email marketing magic. How to write a giveaway email? Holding a giveaway is not about sending a single email — it requires creativity and a few email campaigns. To create a successful giveaway email strategy, you may utilize the following sequence of emails: Giveaway submission — Notification about expiry — Winner announcement — Thank-you email. If you sell accessories, you can give two items away as a prize: a watch for men and a fitness bracelet for women to cover a broader audience. When you close a giveaway, you have a segmented audience for future email campaigns. Let’s have a closer look at the giveaway email types: Giveaway submission. In this email, name the prize that appeals specifically to your target audience and tell how to take part in a giveaway. Create a CTA leading to the website to show more details on participation terms and leave their personal information like email addresses, names, gender, mailing addresses, etc., to join the giveaway. Send it to your existing audience first, and then set it up as a triggered email for new entries. Notification about expiry. Depending on the sweepstakes’ duration, send an email to tell how many days are left before you choose a winner. Include a timer with a countdown to create that feeling of urgency. The longer the giveaway, the more emails you need to send for keeping participants engaged. Keep on encouraging shares all the time by giving bonus points. Winner announcement. Send an email to inform all participants about the luckiest one. Make a transparent random choice using service like random.org. Add a link to a video in this email to ensure that everything is fair. And don’t forget to mail the prize to a winner! Thank-you email. Follow-up giveaway’s success by sending a thank-you email to all participants. Give a time-limited discount on the product that they have been hoping to get recently to increase sales. You can ask a winner to live feedback, make photo or video, which you can use for increasing trust to the brand. Giveaway email examples Lonely Planet. This giveaway offers a trip for two to the Yellowstone National Park and a complete set of new guides to get the most of it. Apple Music Festival. In this example, free tickets are the prize for the winner. There is nothing but the names of famous bands and musicians that make users click that call-to-action button and take part. Kid Coe. The text “Let’s get lost” is the first thing that gathers users’ attention and reminds about the famous Chet Baker’s song, romantic and lighthearted. The giveaway suggests taking part for the sake of winning one of five tours worldwide.

Green marketing is developing and selling environmentally friendly goods or services. It helps improve credibility, enter a new audience segment, and stand out among competitors as more and more people become environmentally conscious. Why is green marketing important? Our planet is facing a lot of threats such as air and water pollution, food waste, plastic pollution, and deforestation. Chemicals manufactured by factories can be found anywhere, and that is why many companies consider producing their goods in a more environmentally friendly manner. Moreover, the level of ecological awareness among consumers is increasing, and people are eager to purchase eco-friendly products despite their higher prices. Many brands try their best to address the wishes of their customers and have started the production of such goods with respect to their responsibilities as residents of this planet. Green marketing has a positive influence on people’s health and the state of the environment. This type of marketing entails every stage of a business, from packaging to public relations. Let’s walk you through the benefits of this approach to explore this topic in more detail before implementing it into your business. Benefits of Green Marketing With green marketing, companies have an excellent opportunity to change our planet for the better and support people who are aware of the situation to help the environment. By creating sustainable products, companies want to reduce the negative impact of waste products on our nature. Going green enables you to win the trust and loyalty of your customers. It helps you: stand out in the increasingly competitive environment; reduce the negative impact of production on the environment; save energy, reduce the use of natural resources and carbon footprint; produce recyclable products; improve your credibility; enter a new audience segment; ensure long-term growth; implement innovations; obtain a higher revenue. Knowing about the benefits of green marketing may not be enough since you should also be aware of the strategies. Luckily, there are many ways to go green. Let’s review them right away. 4Green Marketing Strategies You can find a lot of strategies related to green marketing that can help you create a sustainable brand to help our planet. Let’s review some of them. Sustainable design. It’s not just about a recycling logo on your product packaging, it’s about a full life cycle of your product in mind. You should pay attention to the details like sources of your materials or workers involved in the process. Moreover, your company should control the amount of waste generated and how your products are packaged and delivered. You have to consider a lot of things that have an impact on our environment when designing for sustainability. Responsibility. If you’re giving a thought to going green, your brand should be ready for a profound change. Green marketing is about becoming conscious of pollution. If you want to prove the sincerity of your intentions, rethink your company in terms of ecological and social responsibility and show customers that you care about our planet. Green pricing. Environmentally friendly products usually have a high value due to the increased cost of sustainable design. However, customers are still willing to pay for themdespite the high costs. Therefore, if you charge high prices for your eco products, ensure to communicate specifics to prove that your goods are worth their price. Keep in mind that the greater your mission, the greater your opportunity to gain exposure for your brand’s goods. Sustainable packaging. The number one reason for the pollution of our planet is the excessive use of plastic. According to Greenpeace, 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the 1950s, while only around 9% have been recycled. Nowadays, consumers are more responsible and try to avoid plastic packaging. That’s why it’s advisable to create recycled or no-plastic packaging for your brand. Now that you know some of the strategies, it’s time to learn how to implement them. 6Green Marketing Ideas Use recycled materials Consider using bulk email service Upgrade your equipment and vehicles Highlight that your company is eco-friendly Invest in social media marketing Support environmental initiatives Sustainable brands admit that environmental protection empowered their companies to obtain even more revenue and a broader customer base. However, becoming an environmentally friendly company is not that easy. You should be ready to utilize green marketing ideas and invest more funds than you expect to get such a long-awaited profit. Below you’ll find great ideas to implement if going green is your aim. Use recycled materials Try your best to use recycled materials and reduce the consumption of virgin products. Recycling reduces refining and processing of raw materials, which helps eliminate air and water pollution. It also helps save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s take Allégorie, for example. The brand uses recycled apple and mango peels to create textiles through eco-friendly processes. Consider using bulk email service Newsletters give you an incredible opportunity to reach your target audience without any necessity in printing promotional flyers, enabling you to save more trees. Besides, email marketing is more effective in obtaining feedback from customers about your campaigns. With LIKE.TG, you can send the necessary number ofemail campaigns to your customer base. You can inform your audience about your decision to produce goods that are safe for our environment. Use our drag and drop editor to create your unique emails. Upgrade your equipment and vehicles The vehicles you usually use to deliver your products have an impact on our environment.It would be great to allocate some of your resources to buy new equipment and vehicles.It’s advisable to change to electrical models and reduce the level of carbon your company produces.Due to this fact, many brands prefer to use fuel-efficient vehicles.Don’t forget to include your logo on such a car. Highlight that your company is eco-friendly If your brand incorporates eco-friendly practices, such as energy-efficient office equipment, collaborating with vendors that prioritize sustainability, or developing an in-house recycling program for paper and electronics, tell people about it. Some customers prefer to purchase green products, so it’s necessary to inform them about your practices. It will give them a wider choice of products and an opportunity to select the best. For example, on the website of Dr. Scholl’s Shoes, a shopper can find all the necessary information about the brand’s sustainability. Invest in social media marketing Sincesocial media marketingis more environmentally friendly and isn’t less popular than offline marketing, it would be a great step to invest in it to reach your customers with your innovative ideas and eco-friendly products. Take a look at The Body Shop’s campaigns against animal testing through its Instagram account. Support environmental initiatives Some brands make donations to support our planet. Some of them even create special foundations and charities. Donating funds allows your company to support environmental initiatives, make our planet a better place, and gain credibility and trust. People Tree, a brand founded in 1991 and known for its clothes from environmentally-friendly materials, supports various initiatives. The company has the People Tree Foundation, an independent charity aimed at promoting environmental justice. With the help of this foundation, People Tree tries to protect our planet and develop awareness about the issues that threaten it. Now let’s see how famous brands implement some of these ideas. 6Green Marketing Examples We’ve prepared several examples of socially responsible brands that protect the environment, oppose animal testing, produce recyclable goods, and advocate sustainable ways of production. TOMS TOMS, a brand famous for its comfortable shoes, uses its business to improve lives and not harm the environment. If you visit the company’s site, you can see that TOMS has been trying to expand sustainable practices in key areas of their business by using Earth-friendly materials like sustainable cotton and reducing waste and energy use over the past five years. Moreover, the brand’s team provides their customers with packaging made from recycled materials. Green Toys The company assumes that to raise a happy and healthy child, you should provide a healthy environment. This makes everybody think about our Earth and how we take care of it. Green Toys are safe for kids and the environment as they are made from 100% recyclable materials. The Body Shop The famous cosmetics brand fights cruelty by campaigning against animal testing and selling 100% vegetarian products. This brand is considered the first international cosmetics company to champion a cruelty-free policy. Boden Universal brands like Boden have to pay attention to the sourcing and supply chain since they significantly influence our environment. That’s why the company follows through when it comes to sustainability and uses sustainable and organic cotton to manufacture clothes. Love Beauty and Planet Unilever is a multinational consumer goods company that has many brands, and Love Beauty and Planet is one of them. The brand was created to make customers and the planet more beautiful. The company assumes that the beauty industry and its impact on the environment are inseparable and design their bottles for shampoos, hand creams, and other products from recycled plastic. Avocado Mattress Avocado, a brand of eco-friendly mattresses, is committed to using organic materials to produce pillows, mattresses, and bedding. The team maintains such practices to safeguard their customers’ health and protect our planet from adverse impacts. Green marketing includes progressive ideas that are necessary for our planet due to water and air pollution, animal cruelty, and other environmental problems. By going green, your brand enables people to live better, conscious, and responsible lives.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service from Google, which is a popular and widely-used service on the web. Watch the video on how to track your email campaign performancewith Google Analytics! The service can be provided on a freemium basis, which means the use of the software is free of charge, with only its basic features available. To get access to more features of Google Analytics, users have to buy a premium membership. This membership is more enterprise-oriented and includes a wide variety of analytical functions. Google Analytics in email marketingserves as a tool to look for the insights of subscribers. How can you get your subscribers’ insight with the help of Google Analytics? 1. Interests Google Analytics gives you an analysis of the pages your audience is visiting and defines the core interests of your website visitors. Based on the information, you can know your audience better and can create proper content for them. 2. Demographics You can find out the age category and gender of your most active visitors to send them relevant content. After you define the critical segment of your audience, you can save it and monitor its behavior. Age demographics in Google Analytics: Gender demographics in Google Analytics: 3. Analyze visitors’ behavior on the website 4. Analyze your conversion paths with the help of MCF Channel Grouping Path Google Analytics helps you to see clearlyif your website ignites people’s interest, which pages need optimization, and which conversionpathswork better for you.

Giffen goods are low-cost goods customers purchase more once their price increases. These products challenge the widely accepted law of demand. The examples include essential products necessary for living such as bread, wheat, and rice. In this article, we’ll review the history and examples of Giffen goods and compare Giffen and Veblen goods. Giffen Goods vs Veblen Goods The terms Giffen and Veblen goods are often used interchangeably, yet they have a slight but significant difference. Let’s review each concept in more detail to find this distinctive feature. Giffen goods are low-priced products, the demand for which rises along with the price. These products are necessary to fulfill the need for food, and they have only a few substitutes. Bread, wheat, and rice are examples of Giffen goods. The thought of Giffen goods undermines the fundamental law of demand. Veblen goods are high-quality premium goods, the demand for which increases along with its price. This is caused by the exclusive nature of these products. Examples include sports cars, expensive accessories (diamond rings, watches, necklaces), luxury couture clothing, etc. The exclusiveness of these goods shows people’s success and demonstrates their wealth. The producers of Veblen goods focus on rich customers who can afford to buy from brands associated with luxury, exclusiveness, and wealth. Simply put, both Giffen and Veblen goods defy the generally accepted law of demand and create a special demand curve. The curve is upward-sloping for these products. Once the price for goods increases, the demand rises as well. However, the main difference between the two is that Giffen goods focus on low-cost products whereas Veblen goods — on luxury, exclusive and premium products. Now let’s dive into the history of Giffen goods. History of Giffen Goods The concept “Giffen goods” appeared for the first time in the late 1800s in regard to Sir Robert Giffen. He was an outstanding economist and statistician who highlighted the concept of Giffen goods that violate the common law of demand. One of the most influential economists, Alfred Marshall, wrote in the third edition of his Principles of Economics that despite an increase in bread’s price, people still consumed it because it was the cheapest compared to other foods. Observations concluded that there are low-cost products that violate generally accepted rules about the demand for products. These goods are usually non-luxury and almost don’t have substitutes. The demand for bread, rice, and wheat increases when they become more expensive and decreases when these goods are cheaper. Now that you know some essential historical facts, it’s time to explore the examples. Examples of Giffen Goods You can find examples of Giffen goods among the primary foods you consume every day. The main product on which Robert Giffen built his theory was bread. From then until now, bread has stayed among the essential goods necessary for our living. Since it was the cheapest product a long time ago, the demand for it rose along with its price. It was caused by poor people’s inability to buy more expensive meat and other products. Products such as rice, wheat, and potato are also Giffen goods. Congrats, now you know the basics of Giffen goods. Hope this information helped answer your questions.

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a detailed plan that encompasses a target audience, a marketing plan, and a sales strategy and allows brands to launch their new solutions successfully to the market. It serves companies as a roadmap, helps them evaluate the chances of product success, and forecasts future performance with the help of available data and market research. In this article, we’ll review the reasons to have a go-to-market strategy, its 4 components, and examples. We’ll also find out how to build this strategy. Why do you need a go-to-market strategy? A well-executed plan is a must when you want to launch a new product, start a new product line, create a new branch of your company or establish a startup from scratch. Some companies break down within the first year of operation because of lack of research, wrong market, inability to develop a product customers need, or ineffective marketing strategies. However, initiating a strategy allows you to avoid such scenarios with your newly created product. To do it, you need to prepare a marketing plan, conduct market research, and select the most effective sales strategy before the actual launch to meet consumers’ expectations and satisfy their needs. With a GTM strategy, you will identify all possible opportunities for further company growth, develop appropriate messaging and product positioning to make your product stand out from the competition. A go-to-market plan enables your marketing team to approach your customers, boost conversions, and establish a strong position within the market. Besides, it allows you to gain a competitive advantage, ensure customer satisfaction, good sales volume, and high profits. Now that you know the reasons to consider a go-to-market plan before a product launch, it’s time to unveil the components of this strategy. 4 Go-to-Market Strategy Components Product-market fit, target audience, competition and demand, and distribution are the main elements of a GMS strategy. Let’s have a closer look at each of them. In a product-market fit section, you should mention the issues your product can help remove. In a target audience section, you need to identify people who might experience problems your product can help solve. You should list the problems your solution can reduce or eliminate. Think of the price customers will be willing to pay for your offer. In a competition and demand section, you should review the list of potential competitors, companies that already market similar products. Conduct research to assess the demand for this product and the number of brands that offer it. You can also analyze their strategies and pricing. In the distribution section, you should find out which mediums are most comfortable for you to sell products and for customers to buy them. Analyze all available marketing channels to identify those you will leverage in the future. For instance, you can develop a website, search for a third-party distributor, create accounts on social media, incorporate chatbots, etc. With LIKE.TG’s landing page builder, you can create an outstanding landing page or online store within minutes. Then, share this link with customers through email or chatbot messages. You can easily connect all channels in LIKE.TG. The elements of the strategy are clear, so let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to build a go-to-market strategy. How to build a go-to-market strategy? Building a go-to-market strategy isn’t difficult, but it requires you to be detail-oriented. You need to consider the most important points that will impact the success of your business. We’ve listed seven essential steps for you to follow and develop a detailed plan for your new product. Outline your buyer persona. Gather your team to figure out the ideal customer you target. You need to identify occupation, goals, pain points, interests, needs, preferences, age, etc. These details will help you present the right product that meets customer expectations. To choose the right sales strategy, you need to understand customers’ motivations and problems. They are the ones who will use your product, so you need to be accurate when defining your ideal customer and developing a buyer persona. Tailor your messaging. To create a relevant marketing message that resonates with your target audience, you need to make lists for each of your personas. In each list, you should mention customers’ main problems they face daily and write down your solutions. You should also list the product's value. The message you create should include both customers’ pain points and product value. Select the most effective sales strategy. Every product needs to have the right sales strategy. The choice depends on the complexity, scalability, and price of your solution. You can choose the strategy after you explore your target audience, positioning, and channels. Besides, your sales strategy should also contain information about your competitor. Carry out inbound and outbound techniques to establish brand awareness. You can use both inbound and outbound strategies. With inbound marketing, potential clients find out about your company from different channels like social media networks, quality content, or ads that bring them to your website organically. Unlike inbound marketing, outbound marketing implies a salesperson reaching leads by phone, sending warm emails, or searching for prospects at events. Allocate enough time to create great content. Informative content can become a magnet for inbound prospects. These people have some knowledge of your industry and know about the problems your product can help solve. So, these potential customers are more likely to buy. Content marketing means a lot for website traffic. If your site has quality educational materials, it can attract interested people. Your team needs to use the right keywords in articles and comply with SEO principles to rank higher on Google. If you do everything necessary, your website will generate organic traffic and bring new customers. Besides, ensure to conduct content and keyword research before writing any blog posts. This step is a must if you want to create relevant articles that will rank high in search results. Remember, to make your content look more attractive and engaging, you need visuals. You can add quality images, infographics, and videos to let users perceive information easier. Look for ways to boost conversions. Once your content is ready, you should pick up key metrics you’ll use to evaluate the performance of your product. Your sales team needs to track conversions and sales volume. Conduct training for your sales team so that they understand how to work with prospects and reduce the sales cycle. Then, you need to assess the work of your sales reps. If they underperform, identify the problems, and eliminate them. Evaluate your sales cycle and shorten it. At this step, you need to find out how long it takes to win a deal. Your team should list the objections sales reps face when they interact with leads and find ways to avoid them. You can consider lead nurturing. It’s time to proceed to the next section to discover some examples.. Go-to-Market Strategy Examples You can find dozens of brands that strive to conquer the market, but only those with a competitive advantage and well-developed strategy succeed. Before entering, companies develop their sales strategy, explore customers’ needs and desires, and conduct market research. They all do it differently yet manage to hook their audiences’ attention. So, let’s review some amazing examples. Baggu Baggu produces simple things people use in everyday life. The company sells reusable bags with prints that can satisfy any taste. Although its products are quite simple, a brand succeeded in creating an excellent GMS strategy and becoming a favorite brand of environmentally conscious customers. In addition to being a sustainable brand, Baggu is also a leader in terms of the functionality and style of its shopping bags. Owala Owala offers customers water bottles. Although it might not look different from other companies in the same niche, it does. In its motto and go-to-market strategy, you can see that these water bottles are the easiest in their use. Owala makes it possible for you to not even open the bottle to have a sip of water. For example, during your jogging, you no longer need to stop to drink water. The brand’s target audience is active people. So, by solving problems of specific audience segments, the company succeeded in surviving and even dominating its competitors. Congrats, now you know the importance of a GMS strategy and how to do it right. Hope our examples above inspired you to create a plan for your business.

Geomarketing is a technique that entails using geolocation to create relevant marketing campaigns and develop strategies. It helps brands provide customers with relevant content, find the right place for a physical store, and improve marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll unveil why brands use geomarketing and its benefits. We’ll also teach you how to implement geomarketing and review some examples. Why do brands use geomarketing? Since the number of smartphone users amounts to around 6.64 billion worldwide, you can hear the term “geomarketing” more often. There’s an increasing tendency of using cell phones to search for specific items, explore product features, and shop online. In this case, location-based technology is crucial. It helps your brand find the right customers and target them with ads. If you plan to run a business, geomarketing insights will help you find out the areas of your target audience. Once you identify those locations, you can choose the spot for your brick-and-mortar store. Location-based insights enable you to unveil customer behavior based on shopping habits. Geomarketing allows you to understand how and where consumers purchase, and how they move between different retail stores. With this information, you’ll know the general shopping patterns of your target audience. As a result, you’ll be able to use this valuable data to craft a relevant offer and target your prospects with appropriate advertising campaigns. Your campaigns based on consumer demographics will resonate with the needs of your leads. Now that you know why brands use geomarketing, it’s time to uncover the essential benefits of this marketing technique. Benefits of Geomarketing Geomarketing will come in handy for both startups and established companies. There are many reasons for businesses to implement geomarketing. It allows marketers to identify customer behavior and shopping patterns; explore competition; unveil market condition; increase sales; target mobile and social media users; encourage customer loyalty; ensure targeted marketing campaigns; find the right place for a brick and mortar store; segment customers; provide targeted relevant content; measure the success of campaigns. Now that you know the benefits, let’s review how to use geomarketing for your business. How to use geomarketing? Since geomarketing empowers you to improve local search positioning, it’s essential to incorporate this marketing method. Let’s explore our step-by-step guide so that you know how to implement it into your strategy. 1. Understand your target audience Start with identifying your target audience. Google Analytics will help you figure out customers’ locations. It’ll also show where the majority of your customers come from. To see this data, navigate to Audience > Geo > Location. By clicking on a country, you can see local areas. Use this information and your buyer persona to get to know your target audience better. 2. Find locations Focus on locations and find the areas your customers live. After figuring out the country and city, you can craft a personalized offer. At this stage, you should also decide which locations to exclude because they won’t help you reach your key goals. 3. Determine your goals The next step is to specify the objectives you want to achieve with geomarketing. As a marketer, you can have various goals: improve brand awareness in a specific state, boost traffic from a specific location, increase the sales volume in a certain area, or improve lead generation in a particular city or state. To reach your goals, you need to identify them correctly. Ensure that your key objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. 4. Create your content Your next task is to optimize your content and website for local marketing. Use schema markup on specific business pages and create listings on Google and Facebook. Optimizing your website based on local SEO principles is crucially important. These steps will simplify the process of using Facebook and AdWords geotargeting. You can create local landing pages based on available information. LIKE.TG’s landing page builder will help you design your landing page within 15 minutes. With our service, you don’t need a developer or code knowledge. 5. Schedule campaigns Plan your marketing campaigns once you receive the necessary information about customers’ locations. Choose the right time to communicate a relevant message. For instance, if you have a cafe and a special promo for lunch, send visitors a message before they have their lunch break. Your geomarketing campaigns will be more relevant if you select the appropriate time. 6. Use personalization and segmentation Pay attention to customers’ history of interactions with your brand when contacting them. People are more likely to buy when they see a brand cares about them by sending personalized messages, offers, and content. Personalization is your best technique to encourage customer action. Consider consumers’ location, experience, and preferences when crafting your offer, email campaigns, and ads on social media. LIKE.TG allows you to segment your subscribers by their location and send them highly targeted email campaigns and push notifications. Choose a mailing list for which you want to add a variable and click the "Create variable" button. Enter a variable name and type. Select the “Available for editing by the subscriber” checkbox to let subscribers edit their data and click “Apply.” Go to the “Create campaign” tab and select a mailing list where you created a variable. Select the “Use segmentation” checkbox to create a new segment. Choose the city variable and write down the conditions. Continue designing your email campaign for contacts from the necessary country, state, or city. Smart personalization means adding subscriber data according to criteria. To put it simply, the variables in your mailing list influence the information you send to subscribers. They will receive emails with different content based on the variables. Now that you know how to use geomarketing, let’s walk you through some examples. Maybe one of them will inspire you to make the most of this technology. Examples of Geomarketing The technique is popular among brands because of the benefits it provides. We’ll explore some of the well-known companies that successfully leveraged location-based technology. Oxfam Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality, poverty, and injustice, succeeded in driving donations and awareness of the negative impact of the Nepal earthquake with location targeting. The organization’s team held various events and included the faces of victims so that people donate money to support people in need. Outback Steakhouse Outback Steakhouse company used data about users’ location to provide them with targeted ads. This way, the brand’s team wanted to reach potential customers located nearby. As a result, the requests to dine in Outback Steakhouse increased. Timberland Timberland targeted adventurers located near the company’s stores. With this approach, the brand managed to increase store visits. The company’s marketers succeeded in driving the visits to their physical stores. Now you know the reasons to incorporate geomarketing into your marketing strategy. Hope you managed to grab some inspiration from our examples.

Global marketing is adjusting a company’s marketing strategy to the specific needs of international consumers. Global marketing aims to reach a wider audience in the worldwide market. In the article, we explain why this process is important and highlight its advantages and disadvantages. We also provide 3 global marketing strategies and describe their usage with examples. Why is global marketing important? According to Business Wire, the global market should grow from $3.2 billion to $6.4 billion from 2021 to 2026. These amazing statistics illustrate the worldwide trend for companies to enter an international market. Nowadays, the influence of globalization is obvious. More and more brands try to sell their product worldwide for several reasons. Firstly, reaching global markets gives companies access to a large customer base. Secondly, it allows business owners to reduce spending by achieving economies of scale. Thirdly, companies that sell goods worldwide diversify their risks and are less influenced by crises in certain countries. Reaching global markets helps increase people’s awareness of the product significantly. You can build a strong reputation as a worldwide-known brand by selling in different countries, which gives you an amazing competitive advantage. Moreover, extending the company brings huge business opportunities and, as a result, new ways of getting income. Understanding all these benefits makes many business owners start selling internationally. However, there are many cultural, legislative, demographic, and political differences that you should consider in your products’ promotion. It is not enough to develop one marketing strategy for all countries. Your company should be flexible to satisfy consumers worldwide, so global marketing is necessary. You should understand all the pros and cons before starting to work with consumers worldwide. Continue reading to discover them in the next section. Advantages and Disadvantages of Global Marketing Working in the worldwide market is the chance to grow and develop for many companies. However, you should understand both the positive and negative peculiarities of international business processes to manage sales successfully. Firstly, take a look at the advantages of global marketing. You can reach a wider audience. If your company grows constantly, you can find out that there are few consumers in the country to increase your revenue. This is the time to start product promotion abroad. Global marketing allows you to sell more products, attract more customers and enlarge your market share in different countries. Your brand influence will increase. Building a well-known brand's reputation gives you a powerful competitive advantage in local markets of different countries. Moreover, by adopting your advertisements to the peculiarities of each culture, you can make the audience more loyal to your company. Brands with a strong reputation, like Coca-Cola or Nike, can influence not only consumers' purchases but their worldview and lifestyle. You can reduce costs on product development. Working with the global market means attaining the economy of scale that helps you avoid overspending, particularly on shipping raw materials. Also, you can locate your plants or factories in the countries with loyal taxation policies to save company's money. Global marketing allows businesses to sell worldwide and reduce spending on raw materials by standardizing. Your company can get much more feedback. This fact will influence the speed of your growth directly. Knowledge of your brand’s weaknesses and problems in markets of different countries means the possibility to improve them much faster. Global marketing can help you gain feedback worldwide in a few clicks, especially by using social media advertising and email marketing. Local crises will not influence your company so much. If you are focused on the market of a certain country, its economic or legislative problems may mean the end for your business. However, diversifying risks will help you make this influence not so crucial. Sometimes, conflicts with political organizations or competitors do not let companies succeed in the local arena. Working with global markets allows businesses to avoid these problems or reduce their influence. Now you understand the advantages of selling to international consumers. Let's take a look at the disadvantages of global marketing. It can be difficult to overcome cultural barriers. Adopting your promotion strategy to the global market means satisfying audiences with different cultural backgrounds. For example, McDonald’s had to change their standard recipe and replace beef with vegetarian cutlets in all their burgers in India because of the national values. If you want to succeed in a foreign market, it is essential to deeply understand people's cultures and privileged consumer behavior types. Some companies may not be so flexible, and it will be a roadblock to their product's promotion in the global market. Your company should adapt to the legislation of foreign countries. It can be costly and risky to start working without understanding the laws and taxations of the new markets. Sometimes businesses need lawyers’ help to make their start abroad smoother and avoid fines. This process may be time-consuming, but it is necessary before launching the promotional campaign. It may be difficult to avoid overspending on buying raw materials. If you start working with foreign markets without proper research, the inventory costs can increase significantly. Firstly, it may be challenging to find the balance between supply and demand because the results of your promotional campaigns will not be the same as in your country. Secondly, if you start working with local suppliers, finding the cheapest resources in the area requires time to save your costs. Now you understand all the benefits and roadblocks of global marketing. In the next section, we provide 3 strategies to promote your products worldwide successfully. 3 Global Marketing Strategies While starting work with global markets, business owners face many difficulties with product development and promotion. In this section, we explain the difference between two approaches to global marketing and provide three widespread strategies to achieve success in the international market. Firstly, let’s take a look at the approaches to doing business while working abroad. These two types depend on how centralized product development is. International approach involves product import and export. Usually, a company's offices and plants are located in a home country while its products are sold worldwide. It allows businesses to have centralized management and make changes in their products faster. Multinational approach means that the company's offices and plants are located in a few countries you work with. In such a way, businesses diversify risks and adapt their products to different markets. Marketing strategy, pricing policy, and product line may vary too. Now take a look at three main strategies of global marketing. They are more focused on the product variety in different countries, not on the location of the company’s capacity. Standardization. This strategy means that the product line, marketing, pricing, and other elements are standardized in different countries. Top managers make the most important decisions in the main office and there is little independence in local markets. This strategy allows companies to save costs on raw materials by standardizing the production process. Also, there are fewer investments needed to develop a product marketing strategy because it is the same in all markets. The most well-known examples of companies with this strategy are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Apple. Diversification. This strategy gives more freedom to the local offices and is often based on the multinational approach. It means that the company may have completely different products all over the world that can be united under the one brand’s name and logo. Such a strategy allows businesses to diversify risks and develop the business in completely new areas. Companies use it when there is a significant difference between the markets they work with. The most famous example is Nokia which produced household appliances, mobile phones, paper products, and many other things at certain times of its existence. Segmentation. This strategy means that the company chooses a certain segment of the audience to work with and produces only products for this segment in all countries. Marketing, pricing policy, and product line can vary, but there is often a piece of standardization. It is the most flexible strategy that gives some independence to international offices but allows to incorporate the best company’s organizational decisions. Congrats, now you know what global marketing is and why it is important, understand the advantages and disadvantages of global marketing, and are ready to use different strategies to promote your company worldwide.

A government market is a market where the main buyers are federal, state, and local governmental organizations. They purchase goods or services from private businesses. This article focuses on the key features of the government market. We’ll also unpack an example of a company that works with governments. Let’s start by exploring the differences between institutional and government markets. Institutional and Government Markets Institutional and government markets are often mentioned together. However, they have fundamental differences. The institutional market encompasses organizations that provide care to people or contribute to society — schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons. These institutions are often private and run on donations from sponsors and funds. The government market includes only government-funded institutions and makes purchases that help perform the direct functions of government. It forms the unusual characteristics of the government market. Government Market Characteristics Specific procurement process Strict contract monitoring Preferences to certain sellers The minor role of marketing Government institutions have to take special care of the legality of their purchases. Moreover, they have to operate under the watchful eye of the public. Hence, the government market acquires specific features. Specific procurement process To avoid accusations of money-laundering, participants of the government market have to perform a specific procurement process. When a government institution needs to buy something, it places a public bid or request. In return, it gets a bundle of offers from sellers. The organization needs to choose among them the one that provides the lowest possible bid. Other criteria might be the company’s reputation on the market or the superior quality of goods or services. Strict contract monitoring Since government institutions have to show their spending decisions to the public, they keep an eye on their contractors. The monitoring encompasses different stages of the contract execution and requires tons of paperwork from sellers. Thus, companies that work with the government often have special departments for these purposes. Long sales cycle The sales cycleof the government market often surpasses that of B2B sales cycles. Accepting bids and choosing between the offers can take several months. During the execution of a contract, bureaucracy and reconciliation also play for time. Preferences to certain sellers Government institutions tend to prefer specific types of sellers. For instance, they often opt for domestic suppliers, even if foreigners provide better options. Moreover, government institutions may rely on non-economic reasons in decision making. They may favor depressed firms and areas, small businesses, minority-owned companies, and businesses that avoid race, gender, and age discrimination. The minor role of marketing Sellers working in the government market may reduce their marketing budget to zero. First of all, they have no need for frequent marketing activities and a robust strategy, as the procurement process does not rely on brand awareness. Secondly, saving on marketing their budget allows a business to lower the price of products. The government market may seem too complicated to work in it. However, there are a great many companies that specialize in state procurements. Let’s see how they make deals. Government Market Example The government units work both with small and large businesses. The prime demand is advanced knowledge and understanding of the government market system. Among the companies that know the rules well is Envisage Technologies – a small software development firm. Envisage Technologies provides training applications and human resource management platforms for federal, state, and local organizations across the United States. The company makes more than half of its deals with the federal government. To get access to these deals, Envisage Technologies monitors the General Services Administration’s website. This platform allows the company to work with smaller procurements. These contracts imply a shorter sales cycle, so, Envisage can receive a response within two weeks. However, large contracts bring more revenue, and Envisage Technologies doesn’t neglect them. The company has a comprehensive bid proposal prepared for this type of deal. This document runs 600-700 pages to fit the federal paperwork requirements. Although marketing is not a primary factor of success in the government market, you may need some of its tools to alleviate your work. For instance, automated email flows may come in handy to stay in touch with customers and provide timely responses. Sign up with LIKE.TG to create email automation that works.

A follow-up email is an email or sequence of emails sent in response to the actions of subscribers. It stimulates them to choose a paid plan instead of a free trial, set up a meeting for B2B, leave feedback, buy another product on an e-commerce website, etc. Why are follow-up emails important? Increase conversion Build trust Filter the audience Automate email marketing Increase conversion. There are many reasons for recipients not to open an email. People are busy, or your emailmay be lost in an inbox among hundreds of other emails. A follow-up email is a way to add value and to assistyour customers inevery step of the buyer's journey. Build trust. With follow-up emails, you don’t send just one cold email hoping that people will take action, but you work hard to put your business in front of them. Follow-up emails show that you care and that your brand stands by a customer-centered approach. It’s a primary concern to make follow-up emails work for the sake of both customers and the brands that send them. Filter the audience. There is no way you will convert people who are indifferent from the beginning. Perhaps they’ve subscribed expecting to have something for free. Follow-up emails sift the engaged audience from the users that will never communicate with your brand. Automate email marketing. Sending follow-up emails is an automated process with LIKE.TG. You can once set up a sequence of follow-up emails to cover a particular scenario. After that, follow-up emails will be sent without your participation. Types of Follow-up Emails Free trial follow-up Lead magnet opt-in follow-up Product Sale Follow-up Free trial follow-up Some SaaS companies offer free trials, letting potential customers test out the value of their software before buying the full version. The primary purpose of this type of follow-up email is to encourage customers to become a paid customer. Free trial follow-up emails ask for feedback about a product and provide tips about how to use their product to achieve better results. And at last, this style of email offers a hint that a user will have more tools in their arsenal within a paid plan. Lead magnet opt-in follow-up People subscribe and provide their email addresses in exchange for a specific reward mentioned in a subscription form. For the second step of thedouble-opt-in, subscribersgo to their email inbox to confirm the subscription. In case something is interrupted in this process, and the potential client left half-way through the process, lead magnet opt-in follow-up remindsusers to finish their subscription.Follow upemails show the value a recipient cangainafter completing their subscription. Product Sale Follow-up An important goalin marketing is turning a one-time consumer into a loyal client. Product sale follow-up emails aim to add more value to the previous purchase. After the sale happened, ask the customers about their experience using the item or service they bought from you, and suggest purchasing some additional products. In a follow-up email, you can propose discounts forproducts that enrich the original purchase. When to Send a Follow-up Email There is no particular time that is best for sending follow-up emails. If you send emails at 3 pm, many people from your audience arelikely busy. So it would be a good idea to send the next follow-up email in the evening. If evening emails have a low open-rate, try sending an email in the morning. Follow-up emails enable you to try different variants until you achieve the desired action from your subscribers. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a “yes” — an open, a click through, forwarding, or a ”no” — unsubscribing. How to Write a Marketing Follow-up Email The three main points that differentiate a follow-up email from any other email campaign are: It’s a set of emails sent with a particular frequency. A follow-up email is a sequence of emails. It is crucial not to send them too often to avoid irritating a user. At the same time, don't send them too seldom, or you may lose the users' attention. You need to determine the frequency that allows you to put your business in front of a customer but is not too intensive. It has the same incentive in different forms. Make the structure of every new follow-up email different from the previous one, but deliver the same idea and value. Describe the particular benefits in various forms. It should be brief. Unlike email newsletters, which are unlimited in length, follow-up emails should be concise and straightforward. It’s necessary to be transparent and honest, especially in B2B communication, where the main idea is to contact a decision-maker. Now, when you know the types of follow-up emails and how to write them, it's high time you chose a marketing service to automate the process. Let's skyrocket user engagement! You can easily automate your workflow by setting triggers and conditions that will send personalized emails to your subscribers. Register and send a follow-up email! How to Create a Follow-up Email Create an automation flow Set up the start of the flow Create your first follow-up email Continue with the second follow-up Send another follow-up email later Imagine that you run an online music shop, and your subscriber has purchased a guitar. You plan to cross-sell a new package of strings, a tuner, and a guitar amplifier. With LIKE.TG Automation360, you can create a sequence of follow-up emails to complete this task. Step 1: Create an automation flow Name the automation, choose the email sender address, and write the sender’s name. Next, choose the dateand time that you want to send your email. Step 2: Set up the start of the flow Click on the element “Flow start” and set it up on the right-hand side. Select the eventthat willbring this automation to life (the trigger). Possible events include “Add Subscriber,” “Special date,” “Contact webhook,” “Change variable,” or any custom event that you create in the Event Manager. Step 3: Create your first follow-up email Drag the “Email” element from the left-hand side and drop it under “Flow start.” Select the sending time — 5 days after the flow starts in this example, type in the subject line, and add an email template. In this follow-up email, ask if everything is okay with the purchase and kindly suggest buying a package of strings with slightly different, more “garage” sound. Step 4: Continue with the second follow-up Add another “Email” element repeating actions from the previous step. Give recipients more time before sending the second follow-up. Seven days after the previous email is a good time to suggest buying a tuner. Perhaps the customer is an amateur, or his tuner doesn’t work. It’s high time for your shop to cross-sell. Step 5:Send another follow-up email later Repeat the actions from the two previous steps. Send this email about a month after the purchase. This time offer something huge, like a guitar amplifier, for instance. Follow-up email best practices Set up automation Use segmentation Create engaging subject lines Pick up the right frequency Request feedback Make your message brief Offer relevant products and services Take a customer-oriented approach Set up automation. It is hardly even possible to create follow-up emails manually. You need to make use of automation because it’s a huge source for improving the buyer experience.Automation will increaseyour potential revenue, as well, because it can send emails for you! Use segmentation. This email marketing tool allows you to make follow-up emails more personalized and relevant. You need to segment your mailing lists and use segments for creating the follow-up email sequence. Create engaging subject lines. The subject line is a critical factor when recipients are deciding whether to open a follow-up email or not. Make your subject lines relevant, and your recipients will understand what benefits are waiting for them in the email. Pick up the right frequency. The best rate is descending. Send every next follow-up email in the sequence within a more extended period. Otherwise, your email marketing will look too intensive. Request feedback. The first follow up email in the series should ask for feedback, ask customers if they like the product or service. Find out if there’s anything that you can do to help them. This is the right approach for building trust with your audience. Afterall, everyone likes to feel like someone cares about them. Make your message brief. A follow-up email is a flexible instrument for convincing someone to do something. It may look like an insignificant message, but the amount of value it provides is a good motivation for people to become more loyal and highly-engaged. Offer relevant products and services. Make sure that your proposals are something that people need. A follow-up email is not about forcing people to take action — it’s about bringing so much value that it’s hard to resist. Take a customer-oriented approach. Summing up the best practices above, the most authentic way to build mutually successful relationships with your audience is to make your customers and their needs the core element of your business. Follow-up Email Examples Netflix.Here is an example of a lead magnet opt-in follow-up. The lead magnet is a one-month free trial. Grammarly. Very persuasive and well-performed free trial follow-up email. The value provided in these emails is massive. Wobbo. This follow-up email is a desperate cry! Little Wobbo asks the recipient to finish what they started.

Fusion marketing involves the cooperation between two non-competitive businesses with a target audience and values that aim at achieving the strategic goals with a minimum, and in some cases, zero cost. It implies a partnership that’s profitable for both parties and the development of a common strategy to attract new customers. Benefits of Fusion Marketing Fusion is an age-old marketing theory that involves using a wide range of marketing vehicles to communicate a brand’s intended message. Fusion marketing campaigns include joint efforts that can be beneficial for you and your partner. So let’s look at several pros of this marketing strategy, it: allows you to reach new audiences; attracts new partners to your business; provides cooperation profitable for both parties; is possible even with a limited budget; brings high ROI; allows to share costs with a partner; helps you educate your audience about the product; improves customer experience with your brand; offers the opportunity to market to an interested audience; allows you to expand your customer base; helps retain customers by providing them a different product ecosystem. Now that you know the main advantages of this marketing strategy, you probably want to figure out the steps necessary to successfully implement fusion marketing in your business. How to Do Fusion Marketing Choose a power partner Determine your objectives Write an agreement Promote your partner Track your results Let’s review the steps to set up a fusion marketing strategy. 1. Choose a power partner To start, select a business professional who is in the same industry and wants to create a partnership that benefits both parties. This partner should have a similar target audience but not compete with your brand. To identify a brand that suits you best, come up with a list of businesses that work in the same direction, and serve similar customers. Next, consider companies that you know and trust. When looking for partners, ensure that these brands share your values, have similar business goals, and are ready to share their target audience, marketing ideas, etc. 2. Determine your objectives You should also define the objectives of the partnership and the responsibilities of each party. This will remove confusion between brands and help you avoid disagreements. Ensure that your objectives deliver results and significant values for both parties. Also, they should include measurable goals to track the progress and success of this partnership. Make sure that your offer can fulfill the needs of your leads and customers. 3. Write an agreement When two companies come together to implement a fusion marketing strategy, it is critical to have a correctly written partnership agreement that contains the terms of the business relationship. An agreement helps you prevent conflicts that may arise between partners based on roles and responsibilities, ideas, and implementation. 4. Promote your partner There are many ways to promote your partner-company. The Internet is teeming with communication channels that allow you to reach your target audience and communicate your message. If you send email newsletters on a regular basis, then choose the type of email where it is appropriate to refer to your partner. For instance, you can mention your partner's latest article in your news digest. Besides, you have social media channels to share some news from the company you partner with. 5. Track your results The last step is to review the progress and assess your partnership. It is important to consider mutual goals and metrics, ensure that both companies receive value, and the partnership is on track to deliver its objectives. The best way to understand how fusion marketing works is to see it in action. Many famous brands have already implemented it in their campaigns. Examples of Fusion Marketing Turkish Airlines and The Lego Movie BMW and Mission: Impossible Uber and Mission: Impossible – Fallout Aquaman and Ocean Conservancy There are several excellent examples of fusion marketing campaigns. Here you can see the most popular of them. Turkish Airlines and The Lego Movie The largest mainline carrier in the world by the number of passenger destinations partnered with Lego Movie twice. Brands collaborated for the first time in 2018 to develop a pre-flight safety video — a colorful film starring the cast and self-referential humor of The Lego Movie franchise. The cast of the movie takes passengers through the pre-flight demonstration. This safety video had massive success as it received 20 million views in one month and won gold at Clio Entertainment Awards. That fact made Turkish Airlines release another adorable safety video in partnership with The Lego Movie 2. BMW and Mission: Impossible “Mission: Impossible” was a commercial success and the third highest-grossing film of 1996. The success of this film spawned a series of action spy films. Moreover, the popularity of this movie made some brands think about a partnership with the franchise. You can find several brands that had a partnership with Paramount’s best-ranked movie “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” If you have seen “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” you might have noticed the car Tom Cruise was driving in Morocco. In this part, you can see the demonstration of a new BMW 3 Series. As the film gained popularity, the German multinational company decided to continue partnering with the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. A luxurious and sporty BMW M5 debuted in the “Fallout,” although you only see it for a few minutes. In the film, you can also notice the classic BMW E28, which Tom Cruise was driving between narrow pillars, and jumping downstairs in Paris. Uber and Mission: Impossible – Fallout Uber and the “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” franchise partnered to create an exclusive behind-the-scenes video with Cooper Adrian, Tom Cruise’s stunt double. The video aimed at highlighting the company's slogan of 'getting your side hustle on.’ In his interview, Cooper said that in his extra time, he drives with Uber to make some money. Additionally, Uber was the sponsor of the red carpet premiere of “Mission: Impossible 6” and provided Uber customers with a chance to win a trip to the film’s world premiere in Paris for two. Aquaman and Ocean Conservancy A major plot point of “Aquaman” explains its cooperation with Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. This organization uses science-based solutions to tackle the biggest threats to our ocean. The team of “Aquaman,” through social media, urged people to participate in the Ocean Conservancy group’s International Coastal Cleanup day, which is conducted annually. The film encouraged people to become Ocean Heroes, download the group’s app, and join this cleanup event. Growing your business is hard. However, you can simplify this process by implementing fusion marketing. It can bring you a good partner, expand your customer base, help you figure out the real needs of customers, receive high ROI, boost sales, and even more.

A fundraising email is an email aimed to raise funds for a specific non-governmental organization, campaign, or event. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and charities often use fundraising emails to attract people’s attention to a problem and encourage them to help solve the issue by donating money, food, or clothes. In this article, we’ll unveil why you should use email marketing for fundraising and how to create an effective email. We’ll also share 10 effective tips to create a powerful fundraising email and review some excellent examples. Why should you use email marketing for fundraising? Email marketing is an effective channel that helps businesses and NGOs reach their key goals. Here are some reasons for you to consider email marketing to raise funds. Let’s discover them all one by one. Wide reach. Email marketing opens you access to a worldwide audience. With email campaigns, you can reach your potential donors instantly and ask them for help. The process is simple and fast. Fundraising emails enable you to interact with people all over the world in real-time. You can send them updates on specific issues, inform them about upcoming events, and ask for donations for specific purposes. Quick deployment. Your non-governmental organization or charity might require instant help and donations at any time. Some fundraising events can come unexpectedly and urge you to collect funds immediately. Email campaigns don’t need special preparations and much time to inform donors about fundraising. Moreover, if you use a special platform to create your email campaign, it will take you minutes to finish your fundraising email. You can react immediately to the needs that arise and promptly respond to them. LIKE.TG offers an intuitive email builder, pre-designed templates, and a free plan so you can create a fundraising email without knowledge of code in 15 minutes. Direct communication. You can communicate directly with donors, supporters, and volunteers through email campaigns. You can send them information they can be interested in. Sharing stories, updates, and exclusive content via email campaigns will help you establish trust and encourage potential donors to participate. By sending emails regularly, you can create a community of people who might help you with their efforts, support, or financial resources. Global reach. Email marketing has no specific geographical locations. It means that you can send emails to people located in various countries. You can reach donors globally, making your audience expand and streamline seamless financial support from all over the world. Moreover, if you have an international NGO, you can participate in solving global problems. Cost-effectiveness. Unlike traditional promotion channels, email marketing is relatively cheap and doesn’t require much effort from your team. With its help, you can reach a broad audience with a few clicks of a button, and a part of the costs can be spent on direct mail or telemarketing. The method is inexpensive, making you allocate your financial resources to other valuable tasks. Personalized interaction. Bulk email services provide such features as personalization and segmentation. They allow you to ensure personalized communication with your donors, supporters, partners, and volunteers. You can tailor your email campaigns and set up the list of receivers based on their interests, likings, and preferences. This way, you can improve open rates and boost engagement related to your NGO. Measurable results. With email marketing, you’ll have access to metrics and analytics that provide insights into the performance of your email campaigns. Once you identify your email campaigns' open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you'll find out what works and doesn't with your target audience. After figuring it out, you can improve your strategy to meet your audience’s preferences. Now that you know the pros of email marketing for fundraising, it’s time to unveil the process of creating an effective fundraising email. How to create an effective fundraising email? The process of creating an effective fundraising email involves a powerful story, a clear and visible call-to-action button, and strategies that encourage people’s engagement. Below is a detailed guide on how to tailor a successful fundraising email, so let’s dive in. 1. Create a compelling subject line The subject line of your fundraising email should be concise, compelling, and relevant to your organization and donors. It will help you draw attention to the issue and encourage people to provide financial support. 2. Craft a powerful opener The first paragraph of your email is the key to enticing people to contribute. That’s why you need to work on a strong opener that immediately catches your attention and encourages users to continue reading and perform the desired action. Consider adding a statement or question that engages readers. 3. Narrate a story showing your impact Before donating, people should know more about your organization and the impact you want to make. For this purpose, you’ll need to share a compelling story with your readers. You need to write about the work of your organization and the impact you’ve already managed to make. Use figures, statistics, and graphs to demonstrate your organization’s contribution. Consider sharing real stories to evoke emotions and connect with your potential donors. 4. Focus on the donor’s contribution Highlight the value donors can bring after making their contributions. You should show how their donations will benefit those people, animals, or the environment in need. Demonstrate the existing problems and how financial support from your donors will help improve the situation or solve specific problems. Instill a sense in your donors that they are part of a significant effort, contributing to positive societal change. 5. Make your emails mobile-responsive Since many people usually check their inboxes from their smartphones, ensuring mobile-friendly emails is essential. When providing mobile-responsive design, you ensure your donors can read your emails without any obstacles. Mobile responsive emails improve readability and provide a seamless user experience. 6. Use bulk email service Creating effective fundraising emails is simple when you use a special service. There are many options when it comes to email campaign builders. LIKE.TG is one of them. The service is user-friendly and doesn’t require coding skills, offering an intuitive email builder. You can design your email by simply dragging and dropping the necessary elements into the editor’s field. Below, you can see how it works in the service. Now that you have your guide at hand, let’s explore some useful tips to help you with an effective fundraising email. 10 Tips to Create a Powerful Fundraising Email Sending a compelling fundraising email is a must for reaching your NGO’s end goals. Use the following 10 tips to ensure that people will contribute to your organization and help you solve more social problems. Write a compelling subject line. If you want donors to open your emails, it’s essential to create a powerful subject line. It should spark emotion and make people open your emails and read them. Make sure that your subject line is clear, short, and sweet. It should communicate the charity character of your email and encourage action that brings impact towards the problems you focus on. Add a clear call to action button. When you create your emails, think of the CTAs you add. You should add a clear and visible call to action button that helps donors take the desired action. For instance, if you collect funds for a specific purpose, consider adding a “Donate” button. Personalize your email. If you aim to build trust and give your emails a personal touch, consider incorporating variables to include recipients' names. It boosts the odds of your emails getting opened, leading to better engagement and, ultimately, more funds raised. Share a powerful story. Transparency and credibility are key when it comes to charity and fundraising. Consider sharing your organization’s story with the audience. You need to communicate your NGO’s impact on society and explain how valuable your donors' help is. Show the real people and their stories and highlight your contribution. Clearly communicate the need. If you want to raise funds for a specific project, you need to share it with the audience. Your potential donors should know the issues they help with. Describe the initiative and unveil the financial support you need to make it happen. Remember to talk about donors' help’s positive influence on society. Offer several donation options. Since people might access your fundraising emails from different devices and in several ways, consider having multiple donation options. Provide potential donors with links to a dedicated donation page and mobile-friendly options. Besides, consider sending information to recipients about the process of donating offline, if such an option is available within your organization. Encourage prompt action. If you require immediate action among your donors because the issue needs fast resolution, encourage urge among your recipients. You can create a sense of urgency by incorporating a countdown or using special words like “today,” “now,” and “urgent.” These approaches will encourage donors to act right away without deferrals. Provide social proof. You need social proof if you want your potential donors to believe you and provide funds. You can present it in various ways, including testimonials, success stories, or quotes. Social proof will encourage trust in your organization and establish credibility. These two factors are crucial for non-governmental organizations. They make people donate and bring change towards diseases, hunger, human rights violations, and many more problems existing until now. Ensure transparency. Be transparent in your email campaigns. Transparency should be present in all areas of your organization, especially funds. Provide donors with reports on funds received and used. Consider sending them a breakdown of costs. You should demonstrate gratitude and proof that their money was used for good deeds. Think of the follow-up series of emails. Sending one fundraising email to your potential donors isn’t enough. You should develop a series of follow-up emails to establish trusting relationships between your organization and your donors. You need to be grateful for every contribution and send “Thank You” emails, update on the changes, and send news. With email campaigns, you should demonstrate that your donors’ help makes a huge difference to the issue your organization is concerned about. Now that you know the tips, it’s time to proceed to the next section and uncover some powerful fundraising email examples. Examples of Fundraising Emails There are many great examples of fundraising emails people receive daily in their inboxes. In this section, we’ll provide you with some excellent urges to donate to get you inspired. So let’s dive in. Autism Speaks Autism Speaks is a non-governmental organization that establishes awareness about autism, supports research, and encourages activities related to the disease. The organization urges people to donate before the New Year and contribute to the autism community. Donors can choose the donation amount and help children and adults suffering from the disease. Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch, an international NGO, also uses email marketing to connect with donors all over the world. The organization encourages people to donate and help individuals suffering in various ways. Their email campaigns are aimed at collecting funds for individuals whose human rights were violated. The example below includes a call to action and a countdown for people to hurry up and help those in need. Feeding America Feeding America is a non-profit organization that ensures that people all over the world have enough food to survive. The organization helps through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and other community-based agencies. It opened access to food for millions of people and went on fighting for their survival. This charity organization operates thanks to donors who provide financial resources and support to food banks. Feeding America uses email campaigns to raise funds and help more people in need. In its last email, the organization urges to give financial support to families facing hunger. The NGO accepts any help in any amount or shape as long as it allows it to save people from starvation. Congrats, now you know what a fundraising email is and why it’s essential for organizations, charities, and individuals. Hope that our tips and examples will help you start encouraging donations through email campaigns. Register in LIKE.TG now to create professional fundraising email campaigns and drive attention to your organization’s efforts and need for support.