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Distance learning
Distance learning is the process of teaching students online, which implies studying from home and receiving materials and lectures via the internet. It allows learners to take classes in colleges and universities, training, and online courses in any country. You can create an online course for free with LIKE.TG without any technical skills.
In this video, a LIKE.TG marketer, Anna, shares the perks of monetizing your digital education expertise and tips on switching to teaching.
In this article, we’ll uncover the pros and cons of distance learning, its types, and the 3 best platforms. We’ll also compare distance and online learning.
Why is distance learning important?
Due to COVID-19 outbreak, the process of learning has changed. Colleges, universities, and schools have switched to distance learning to ensure education for students. Distance learning is a perfect alternative to traditional education, where students and teachers should interact face to face. Educators can utilize technological innovation and inspire students to study hard to reach their goals.
Now people can find various courses, training, and master classes to obtain new knowledge and skills. They can master new professions remotely from any location. For example, influencers with millions of followers share their success stories and the power of Instagram. They teach how to write posts, pose for photos, and increase social media engagagement.
With distance learning, students can earn their degrees without any need to leave their homes and move to a new city. They can stay in their comfort zone and save money on paying for a room in a dormitory. Online classes allow students to stay flexible and combine work with their studies. Moreover, the price of online learning is lower than offline.
Now that you know the importance of distance learning, it’s time to uncover more reasons to consider making an online course for your business, school, college, etc.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Distance Learning
eLearning brings many benefits to students and teachers. We’ll review them all so that you can decide which type of learning you would like to implement.
The advantages for students include:
flexibility (can access the class anytime from anywhere);
lower price (distance learning is usually more affordable than offline);
technological innovation (teachers use all advantages of technology and the internet to provide the best knowledge);
saved time on getting to the classrooms of universities and colleges;
The advantages for educators include:
various formats of lessons;
flexibility (different schedules: asynchronous and synchronous learning);
saved time on traveling to class;
the opportunity to teach from anywhere in the world;
space for the application of theories;
time to answer students’ questions in private messages or group chat.
Each approach in education has both pros and cons. Since you need to be aware of both sides of this business, we’ll unveil the drawbacks.
During online classes, students can
get distracted by their devices;
lose their focus because of big amount of information;
have a lack of face-to-face interactions with teachers and students;
have a poor internet connection;
feel isolated;
have a laptop without necessary characteristics;
face technical problems.
During online classes, educators can’t
prevent cheating;
communicate with students in person and explain complex material;
focus on practice;
have full control of students who neglect assignments.
Now that you know the benefits you can reap after incorporating distance learning, let’s compare distance learning and online learning. People often suppose these concepts are the same, although they aren’t.
Distance Learning vs Online Learning
In this section, we’ll clarify the difference between distance and online learning, so you don’t misinterpret the terms. The concepts are different in terms of location, intention, and interaction. Let’s start with distance learning.
Distance learning is a learning process that involves an educator teaching and students studying remotely. Students visit online classes via the internet, and teachers check assignments online. The participants of the learning process can join the class from anywhere in the world. The process doesn’t include any in-person interaction.
Online learning is a learning process that implies students studying and communicating with a teacher in real time. A teacher has an eye on their progress. Students join lessons through Zoom, Google Meet, or Cisco Webex. Learners can communicate with teachers live, ask questions, and share opinions. Students can also request a teacher to explain some unclear points.
Simply put, distance learning is solely remote learning where students access real-time or recorded lessons, while online learning is real-time exclusively learning..
Now that the difference is clear, it’s time to proceed to the types. The next section will help you decide which distance learning format fits your main goal.
Types of Distance Learning
There are four main types of distance learning. Let’s review each of them to find out the details.
Synchronous distance learning. Educators deliver information to students in real-time using special video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex, and Skype or chatting online. Usually, participants connect with each other using video. Synchronous learning implies live communication online and it is less flexible than other forms of distance learning. The platforms help students and teachers communicate and see each other in real time.
Asynchronous distance learning. Teachers provide students with materials and deadlines to complete the tasks. Students work on their assignments on their own in their free time but they still have the opportunity to contact their instructors. Once they complete the tasks, they submit them through universities’ sites. Students only get access to a new module after completing the previous one.
Hybrid distance learning. It’s an integration of synchronous and asynchronous distance learning. Hybrid distance learning is the most popular form of distance learning that implies students accessing the course at a designated time and pre-recorded lessons. Instructors provide learners with pre-scheduled classroom activities they should complete to proceed to the next section. Students might be given tests, quizzes, surveys, and other forms of assignments after completing a lesson or section. These courses encourage interaction between students and communication with experts. Students can ask questions and share their opinions. These courses have little space for independent work.
Now that you know the types and can decide which one you prefer, it’s time to explore the platforms. One of these services will come in handy when you are ready to create an online course.
3 Best Distance Learning Platforms
The choice of distance learning platforms is vast. Your main task is to select the one that suits you in terms of short-term and long-term goals, usability, price, number of students, and courses. We’ll now review the 3 top services for you to consider. They are affordable, easy to use, and have an intuitive interface.
LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is an all-in-one marketing solution that will help you create online courses, promote them, and manage communication with students. The platform offers you to send email campaigns, web push, SMS, and set up chatbots. For an affordable price, you’ll be able to create online courses for different purposes: online schools, employee training, customer onboarding, etc.
You can share your expertise in an interactive way by using LIKE.TG’s drag and drop editor to add multimedia. The service allows you to apply plenty of content formats like videos, audio, text, PDFs, downloadable items, infographics, and other images. This way, your course will look more attractive and exciting to students.
If you have no intention to develop the course by yourself and you have a team of professionals, you can add instructors. They will manage different tasks, including program development, creating lessons, designing tests, monitoring students’ progress, and issue certificates of completion. With the help of the platform and your team, you’ll be able to create a course from scratch and provide an exceptional experience to students.
Once you build a course, think about the channels you prefer to use for promotion. Use LIKE.TG to send email campaigns informing your subscribers about your upcoming course, set up chatbots to share the details about the start, and deliver SMS to remind them about the event. Since you don’t need to change the platform to perform different tasks, you can save your time on adding information.
With LIKE.TG, you don’t need to think about how to accept payment from students. The service has integrations with famous payment systems like PayPal, Stripe, and Liqpay.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in the service.
Free plan: 3 courses, 200 students, 1 instructor, and 1 GB of file storage space.Paid plan: From $42 for unlimited courses, 1,000 students, 10 instructors, 15 GB of file storage space, personalized course link, and no LIKE.TG branding.
Ruzuku
Ruzuku is a platform that focuses entirely on creating, selling, and teaching online courses. The service provides training to its users, so you will figure everything out very fast and be ready to build courses. The interface is user-friendly, so you’ll create and launch eLearning in no time.
With Ruzuku, you’ll be able to design a visual course and encourage students to remember the essential information. If you have your materials ready, you can add them to the course so that it looks more interactive. You can diversify text with videos, audio, and PDFs in minutes. The platform provides students with space for their opinion. The service allows users to leave comments and share ideas under the course’s images. This way, you can make sure that students are involved in your learning process. Ruzuku helps build both classes and communities for like-minded people.
The service has integrations with universally accepted payment solutions. You can accept payments from students through Stripe and PayPal or add another payment method.
Below you can see how to create a lesson in Ruzuku.
Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan: From $99 per month for unlimited courses, students, and 1 instructor.
Systeme.io
Systeme.io is a multifunctional platform that enables you to send email campaigns, create websites, run evergreen webinars, and build online courses. The service is simple in use and doesn’t require any technical skills. The platform’s team worked at your convenience and took care of your product promotion. Once you build your course, you can create a website, integrate course access and payments, and sell it to students.
The solution is fully integrated. It means that you can use all features without any need to input information several times and save your time and effort.
With Systeme.io, you can grant access to a course for students on a specific date. The platform allows you to register students for your courses by giving them full access or drip content. Full access implies having instant access to all lectures, while drip content implies accessing classes in progression. With drip content, students have to complete the lesson to proceed to the next one.
Drag and drop the elements you want to add to your course. You can use videos, podcasts, text, and images to draw attention and increase memorability.
To receive payments from students, consider using Paypal and Stripe integrations. They will guarantee your money is safe.
Below you can see how to build an online course in Systeme.io.
Free plan: 1 course, unlimited students, unlimited storage space, and assistant accounts.Paid plan: From $27 per month for 5 courses, unlimited students, storage space, and assistant accounts.
Congrats, now you know what distance learning is and why it’s essential. Hope that the list of recommended services will be useful when you decide to develop your course!
DKIM
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the technology that helps to reduce spamand phishing. It allows companies to vouch for their email messages. Technically, it can be done with the help of a cryptographic signature linked to a domain name instead of the traditional IP address.
Follow this video guide to create SPF and DKIM records with LIKE.TG.
For example, if you deal with banking and you sent mailings from the address [email protected], to prevent your subscribersfrom spamming and phishing, you should prove that domain, "vipbank.com," belongs to you. If you don’t set DKIM, there is evidence that email services like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail deliver your mailings to the spam folder. It happens because there are a lot of attempts to steal users’ passwords or financial details from email messages. Phishers often send emails on behalf of large companies and ask users to "verify their account" or "confirm their billing information," and then use the subscribers’ accounts for fraudulent purposes.
DKIM technology determines who the sender of an email is. That means that the email you send will not be regarded as an email from phishers, and so email services will deliver it to the "inbox." The sender authentication with DKIM is implemented by a digital (cryptographic) signature – a hidden code that is added to the email. The signature confirms that the email was sent from an email address in the particular domain.
Direct response advertising
Direct response advertising is a short-term strategy that entices leadsto take immediate action. Its main goal is to convert a lead into a client, and hence, drive sales.
Direct response advertising is a concept that is opposite to branding. While both approaches are aimed at promoting a brand, there is a key difference between them. Branding is a long-term strategy that implies investing money into several techniques to establish brand awareness. Direct response advertising is a short-term strategy that enables marketers to drive as many conversions as possible with the help of a single marketing campaign.
Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of a direct response ad.
Benefits of Direct Response Advertising
This marketing strategy allows companies to reap several benefits.
Powerful lead generation. Brands that strive to bring in a lot of new leads as soon as possible opt for direct response ads. They create high-converting landing pages, enticing lead magnets, and targeted ads on social media.
Quick revenue growth. Quick decision-making means moving leads down the sales funnel faster. You should ensure that your users are qualified enough to make a purchase to enjoy this benefit. The more they know about your products, the more chances you have to close a deal. Thus, this strategy is especially popular among marketers who drive clients back to their abandoned shopping carts, offer customers to buy their favorite items at a reduced price, and inform them about the products that are back in stock. Email marketing is an excellent choice in this situation.
Segmentation opportunities. You can target your direct response ads to specific market segments for better performance. This way, you can communicate your offer to the warm leads who are likely to buy from you. LIKE.TG allows you to segmentyour subscribers based on their gender, location, age, occupation, and activities.
Easily traceable results. It’s easy to measure the conversions of each advertising campaign. You can monitor the number of users who filled out yoursubscription form, followed a link from an email campaign or web push notification, and clicked on your banner. This will help you identify the most profitable advertising mediafor your business.
Direct response advertising has a lot of advantages that can help you bring high revenue. Send promotionalemail campaigns with LIKE.TG for free. Segment your mailing listand track results immediately with the help of reports. You don’t need any special skills or HTML knowledge.
Now that you know the benefits you can reap with direct response advertising, let’s have a look at some examples.
Examples of Direct Response Advertising
In this section, we’ll share several examples of direct response ads that make users take action. Check them out to see what benefits they can bring.
Below is a behavioral email triggered by an abandoned shopping cart. Patagonia’s team reminds their client about an item left in the cart, states its price right in the email, informs about two-day free shipping, provides an option to contact their support team, and offers to complete the order right away.
TopShop’s team uses Instagram Stories in their marketing strategy. They share news about new arrivals in Stories and enable their customers to check them by including a swipe-up link to their site.
Below is an example of display ads. The festival is promoted in a California-based newspaper and targeted at Californians.
Now you have some examples of effective direct response advertising at hand and know about its benefits. Choose the best media for your business or create a killer promotion mix for better performance. With LIKE.TG tools, you can communicate your message to the target audience for free,so start right now.
DMARC
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is an email-validation system designed to detect and prevent spamand phishing.
The Purpose of DMARC
With the growth of the internet, spammers and phishers more often attack users’ accounts and steal passwords, bank accounts, and credit cards. Emails are sent on behalf of a well-known company or brand, and it is easy to forge emails. That’s why phishers use mailings for fraudulent purposes. Email providers are forced to track whether emails are from real companies or fake ones, and decide to deliver such messages or not because it might harm users. DMARC helps email senders and receivers work together to better secure emails, protecting users and brands from painfully costly abuse.
How does DMARC work?
A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their messages are protected by SPFand DKIMand tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes (such as junk or it rejects the message). DMARC removes the guesswork from the receiver’s handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user’s exposure to potentially fraudulent and harmful messages. DMARC also provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and fail DMARC evaluation.
DMARC focuses on two existing methods: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM). It allows the administrative owner of a domain to publish a policy on which mechanism (DKIM, SPF, or both) is employed when sending email from that domain and how the receiver should deal with failures.
Read the DMARC official sitefor more detailed information.
Direct email marketing
Direct email marketing is a method of email marketing where email campaigns are sent directly to prospects.This marketing approach isaimed not only on selling goods and services but also on improving relationships with your customers.
Goals of Direct Email Marketing
Establishing relationships with yourprospects;
Drawing the attention of consumers;
Monitoring the success of productswith clients;
Tracking feedback from customers;
Increase brand awareness and customer loyalty;
Optimization of current email marketing strategies.
Stages of Direct Email Marketing
Creating mailing lists.
Developing an email marketing strategy.
Creating a special offer.
Selling products/services.
What is essential in direct email marketing?
The success of sales depends on your mailing lists. A product of high quality, an appealing offer, and a well-written advertisement isuseless if sent to the wrong people.
Segment the audience!
It is essential to segment your mailing lists properly.
The mailing list is irrelevant if:
There are no appropriate people. Never buy mailing lists, since people on the list will not be interested in your products. Only a few of them are likely to buy something; in this case, your money was spent in vain. Do your best to create a segmented mailing list, understand your clients.
You don’t have a clear idea about people on yourmailing list. The more you know about your prospects, the more chances you have to succeed.
You don’t pay attention to details. For example, if you try to sell fur coats to vegetarians. Is it relevant?
Pros of Direct Email Marketing
You can establish relationships with your prospects. If your segmentation is relevant, people will need your products and services.
You can personalize emails, emails tailored to each recipient will increase email open rates.
You can estimate the results by checking your email open rates, click-throughs, andconversions. These metrics allow you to optimize your work and make it better.
Cons of Direct Email Marketing
If your mailing list isn’t correctly segmented, it won’t bring in any results, and you will have spentyour money in vain.
People who are not interested in your products may not only ignore your email but even send it to their spam folder.
Thus, make sure your emails don’t look like spam, don't use: spam-like words, overly attractive offers, CAPS LOCK, exclamation points, or colored fonts.
Be creative while working on your subject line!
Digital marketing strategy
A digital marketing strategy is a set of planned actions performed online to reach specific business goals. In simple terms, this means performing consistent actions at the right time via the most suitable online channels to increase revenue and improve relationships with your audience.
In this video, Alex, a marketer at LIKE.TG, shares creative ways to make your business digital.
The complexity of a digital marketing strategy primarily depends on the size of your business and your long-term goal. If you have just launched your business, you may only need to make a few simple steps using one or two digital channels.
So, let’s discuss why you should plan your digital marketing activities.
Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?
It motivates you to learn more
It provides real data
It structures your actions
It helps to increase ROI
It helps you reconsider your relationships with the audience
Generally, making a strategy helps you move more consciously and thus more confidently no matter what you do. When it comes to digital marketing, building a strategy can help you in the following ways:
It motivates you to learn more. When you start to develop a digital marketing plan, you need to think through every aspect of your business. You also have to thoroughly analyze your audience, competitors, trends, and neighboring niches to create a polished and up-to-date digital marketing strategy. Developing a plan is an amazing chance to get more in-depth knowledge of your business!
It provides real data. During the analysis, and after turning your strategy into action, you will get a lot of comprehensive data about what works well for your brand and what doesn’t. Empowered with that information, you’ll have a catalog of options for improving your business.
It structures your actions. Developing a digital marketing strategy avoids the chaos of making blind guesses that you have to make without having a plan. If you create a strategy, you will get a better understanding about how to combine various marketing channels and realize the full potential of your company.
It helps to increase ROI. Once your actions are structured, you make fewer actions and fewer mistakes. With a well-crafted plan, you will be able to detect your weaknesses, predict problems, and quickly react. You will save time, money, and efforts to increase margins as a result.
It helps you reconsider your relationships with the audience. A digital marketing strategy gives you a fresh look at your communication with prospects and customers during all of the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you make a business plan, you need to focus on your customers, find ways to add more value to your relationships, and develop new ways to engage with them.
So, now you know that you need a digital marketing strategy, let’s sketch a general digital marketing strategy.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Research and define your goals
Collect data about your audience
Generate leads
Nurture leads
Take care of returning clients and advocates
Set up marketing automation
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for developing a digital marketing strategy. Keep up with your critical thinking while following our suggestions and choose tips that resonate with your brand the most.
Here’s a step-by-step scheme.
Step 1: Research and define your goals
First of all, ask yourself if it’s possible to optimize your existing content to rank higher on Google. Here’s what you can do with it if we focus on SEO strategy:
Structure your content according to Google’s algorithm to rank higher;
Reduce the weight of your images to make your page load faster;
Get linked by relevant and authoritative websites to signal that you have a good reputation.
Then try to compare your content against the competitors’. Perhaps they’ve covered relevant topics that you didn’t think existed. With the help of tools like Ahrefs or Moz, you can analyze which of your competitors’ pages rank in the top 10 for specific keywords and use these insights to cover these topics yourself.
Perhaps your observations will tell you to share more video content or add more customer feedback throughout your pages.
By the way, It’s okay to ask people to share their feelings about your brand and what they’d like to see changed in your mutual relationship. Yes, you won’t have a 100% response rate, but chances are you will get a lot of fresh insights to use in your digital marketing strategy.
Importantly, be sure to choose digital marketing channels that best fit your business. Don’t work with too many channels from the very start, but gradually implement one channel after another only when necessary.
So after you’ve done your research, set up your realistic goals based on the insights it gave you.
Step 2: Collect data about your audience
The second thing you should think about is the target audience for your product or service.
Develop your business’s buyer persona — a portrait of your regular customer, that includes data regarding their preferences, behavior on your website, and habits as consumers. You can combine your assumptions with real data collected using Google Analytics, for example.
All the data you gather can help you create highly relevant display ads, use personalized email campaigns, and perform behavioral segmentation.
Step 3: Generate leads
Your next step will be to optimize lead generation and search for new ways to do it.
You can start by gathering subscribers with the help of LIKE.TG’s free subscription forms. This form allows you to get users' email addresses, names, phone numbers, and other personal information for further communication. Create multichannel forms by adding links to your messengers. Here’s the layout of our intuitive subscription form builder:
You can also collect subscribers using highly targeted display advertising with Google Ads. This service allows you to display relevant ads based on the user’s search history, which is called retargeting.
Below is an example of such an ad, it is displayed because the user previously searched for copywriting courses on Google.
Facebook is another great channel for growing your audience. It allows you to show relevant advertising in the Newsfeed and Messenger Chats based on the large amount of data Facebook collects about its users. Below is an example from the Masterclass ad based on the previous website visits.
You can also suggest that your existing audience communicates with you on another medium to refresh your relationships. For instance, you can ask your Facebook audience to share their email address in a chatbot. Alternatively, you can suggest that they subscribe to your Facebook chatbot in an email newsletter.
There are also some ways to generate leads based on virality. For instance, you can run giveaways that target interested people and incentivize them to join your mailing list.
Maybe a combination of Facebook or Instagram with giveaway emails to serve the giveaways and send notifications. Below is an example of a giveaway held on Facebook used to increase the number of subscribers and make the brand more recognizable.
Another way to build your audience is via influencer marketing. This is when a popular person, respected by thousands of subscribers, shares information about your brand and encourages their audience to check it out. It is an effective marketing approach because people regard it as a recommendation from someone that they trust more than advertising. Below is an example of an influencer marketing post on Instagram.
Learn more lead generation best practices here.
Step 4: Nurture leads
Lead nurturing moves leads towards a purchase after they’ve started communication with your brand. You can do it with the help of emails, chatbots, socials, but what matters most is how you do it.
You need to educate your audience, add value to their presence in your contact list, and at the same time, try to promote your brand in a non-intrusive manner.
For example, try to ease their onboarding with a welcome email, like in the screenshot below.
You can also ask your audience to share more data in exchange for better-personalized content and offers. Sending a survey email, for instance, is a great way to engage, entertain, and nurture your subscribers. Just ensure the recipients know that they won’t need to spend too much of their time on the survey, just like MobileMonkey did in the screenshot below.
In addition, it is wise to share content based on the user’s stage in their buyer journey. Gradually change the purpose of your content from educational to conversion-focused based on how close people are to making a purchase.
Here are some essential lead nurturing best practices.
Step 5: Take care of returning clients and advocates
Once a user has made a purchase from you, it shouldn’t be the end of your relationships. Be sure to thank your client for their purchase, ask for feedback or a review, and try to cross-sell in the follow-up email.
To generate return customers, provide an excellent customer experience and quality products. Make them feel like a VIP with exclusive personalized offers and unique content for loyal customers.
You can also motivate customers to become brand advocates by offering them discounts for referring other people.
Here are some customer retention strategies to ensure that you keep your customers for life.
Step 6: Set up marketing automation
When you realize what works, and what doesn’t, for your digital marketing strategy, you need to optimize processes by automating them.
You can easily create automated email workflows to send sequences of emails to support subscribers at various stages — onboarding, purchasing, cart abandonment, etc. The example below shows how to deal with an abandoned cart.
You can create an email workflow with LIKE.TG in less than an hour by following this guide.
Chatbots are also a great tool in terms of releasing stress from your sales and customer support teams.Chatbots in Facebook Messenger and Telegramcan answer FAQs, help users book a room in a hotel, or even support a job application.
LIKE.TG allows brands to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger and Telegram without having to code. With our intuitive builder, you can easily design auto-replies for your chatbots.
Here’s a great example of a chatbot from booking.com, where a virtual assistant helps you choose a place for vacation and book a room.
Scheduling may also be beneficial. On the one hand, you can schedule SMS and web push notifications and always be prepared in advance, without creating campaigns in a hurry. On the other hand, you can set up auto-posting in socials and in a Facebook Messenger chatbot. It allows you to plan your marketing campaigns.
If you are searching for a marketing automation tool, LIKE.TG provides all the features mentioned earlier and more. Learn more about our features here.
Final Thoughts
A digital marketing strategy can do a lot for your business. There are plenty of online channels to choose from. They all vary in price, outreach potential, usability, and purpose. What you need is a solid combination of channels that best fits your business.
Whatever the channels and approaches are, we recommend not sticking within the bounds of a single plan, especially if it doesn’t work as expected, leave lots of room for experiments, so stay open-minded.
Direct marketing
Direct marketing is a type of promotion that entails communicating information on a product, service, or company directly to the customers. All promotional information is relayed without intermediaries and any third parties.
Emails, online adverts, flyers, database marketing, promotional letters, newspapers, outdoor advertising, phone text messaging, magazine adverts, coupons, phone calls, postcards, websites, and catalog distribution are some examples of direct marketing strategies. Now, while other advertising methods aim to educate prospects about a brand’s services or products, direct marketing solely intends to persuade the recipient to take a specific action. This strategy achieves this by providing calls to action (CTAs) that prompt the customer to act.
Examples of CTAs used in direct marketing include:
Visit our website or store.
Call us to get more info on our products or services.
Subscribe with your email address.
Purchase from us.
The success of direct marketing strategies is measured by tracking the achievement of the goal. Note that when targeted lists of prospects are used, direct marketing is more effective. Also, picking the appropriate communication channel for a specific business is necessary for success.
Today, many companies that do direct marketing practice permission marketing to eliminate any friction with leads and customers. Moreover, many businesses are turning to services such as LIKE.TG to boost their direct marketing campaigns. With this service, a brand can effectively promote its products via SMS marketing, email marketing, and web push notifications.
Why is direct marketing important?
It helps marketers reach customers fast
It is an efficient promotion strategy
Direct marketing can be customized
Direct marketing allows measuring its efficiency
It helps marketers reach customers fast. A direct marketing campaign is sure to reach the potential customer quickly. For instance, a marketer can create an email marketing campaign now, and merely two hours later, it will be in the recipients’ inbox.
It is an efficient promotion strategy. Unlike other strategies, direct marketing allows companies to create targeted campaigns that reach audiences that are genuinely interested in their products or services. This focused nature of these campaigns ensures maximum efficiency when sending out promotional messages. With direct marketing, marketers are saved from sending advertising content to regular lists that are not refined in any way.
Direct marketing can be customized. Direct marketing allows businesses to create personalized messages using customer data. For example, a company can access useful information such as age, income range, reading and browsing habits, etc. and then use this data to create tailored marketing content for their prospects and existing customers.
Direct marketing allows to measure its efficiency.Companies and businesses that implement direct marketing techniques can track the success of their campaigns by analyzing things such as the number of customers who have responded to their ads, the revenue earned, and the overall return on investment. Moreover, direct marketing enables marketers to learn how much their prospects are willing to spend on particular products or services.
Features of Direct Marketing
Since direct marketing strategies are focused on communicating a brand message directly to customers, there are certain characteristics that help us differentiate this type of promotion from others.
Targeting. Direct marketing is successful only if it targets the right people. If you're going to promote your offer to your entire audience, you risk spending much money in vain. For that reason, direct marketers work with the most interested customers and rely on segmentationtools.
Database segmentation. Marketers divide their customer base into small groups with some common characteristics which include age, gender, occupation, location, interests, needs, income, etc. This allows them to craft highly personalized offers that will be relevant to each segment.
Tracking responses. Without monitoring customer responses, you will never know which strategies perform best for your brand. Online direct marketing channels allow users to easily respond to marketing campaigns as well as they let brands to monitor the entire process. Users can communicate with companies via emails, social media channels, chatbots, etc.
Advantages of Direct Marketing
Targeted advertising
Budget marketing
Boosts sales to existing and lapsed customers
Improves customer loyalty
Helps in pushing new business
Allows to measure product performance
Direct marketing comes with an array of useful benefits for both businesses and companies. Here are the most useful ones.
Targeted advertising
Direct advertising allows marketers to target particular groups of customers with customized promotional messages. In turn, businesses are likely to achieve high conversions since they focus their messages on people who are most likely to need their products or services.
Budget marketing
Direct marketing that focuses on a particular demographic can help businesses set plausible sales goals and also improve sales results when on a tight marketing budget. With direct marketing, companies can run effective and enterprising marketing campaigns at a small fraction of the cost of mainstream broadcast promotions.
Boosts sales to existing and lapsed customers
Customers are often ready to welcome businesses that show that they understand users’ needs and also those that are keen on building personal relationships. Direct marketing allows to increase sales to existing customers by maintaining their customer records and selecting simple, thought-out marketing techniques for their audience.
Direct marketing also shines when it comes to re-establishing relationships with all customers who have not returned to a company in a while. It helps businesses understand why customers chose to move on and what can rekindle these lapsed relationships. When a business learns what they need to do to improve sales from previous customers, it can keep accurate records to ensure that returned customers get to stay.
Improves customer loyalty
Direct marketing is excellent for building and maintaining relationships with customers and prospects. It allows marketers to personalize both advertising messages and offers to create solid links with customers and also strengthen existing personal connections.
It is good practice to combine direct marketing techniques with customer loyalty programs to increase the bond. Examples of customer loyalty strategies include giving discount offers, sending birthday cards, and inviting customers to upcoming sales events.
Helps in pushing new business
Direct marketing gives business owners an excellent launching pad for their companies. It enables them to effectively communicate with their target market, thus bringing their businesses more sales. Moreover, when marketers implement effective direct marketing techniques for customer acquisition, they can generate genuine fans of their brand and thus grow sales. This strategy also helps new businesses to adapt and respond to market demands.New businesses can also use direct marketing to:
Improve sales of specific products.
Clear discontinued stock.
Renew sales.
Increase customer retention and loyalty
Follow up on promotional offers.
Allows to measure product performance
Direct marketing is an excellent way of evaluating the appetite customers have for particular products and services. Moreover, this strategy enables marketers to try out new markets, evaluate sales results, and gauge the effectiveness of their sales and promotion tactics. In turn, marketers can easily tweak their campaigns to ensure success. Each time marketers run advertising campaigns, they should monitor and analyze their results so that they can use this information to improve subsequent campaigns.
Direct Marketing vs Indirect Marketing
While direct marketing involves exactly communicating with customers and prospects in a one-on-one manner, indirect marketing entails all marketing techniques that are broadcast to audiences randomly.
How do these marketing strategies compare? With direct marketing, businesses can reap the returns way faster. Moreover, the gains can be measured easily, particularly so if the marketing campaign was thought-out and received well by the audience.
On the other hand, indirect marketing techniques require much time before a business notices gains. For instance, it takes a lot of time to grow a brand on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And it takes a while too to get used to things such as Search Engine Optimization and hashtags. Thus, a business should be ready to wait for a long time to see any returns with indirect marketing.
Which is better? Well, there is no telling here. However, a combination of both approaches proves to be more effective than either of the methods on their own.
Types of Direct Marketing
Email marketing
Mobile marketing
Web push marketing
Messenger marketing
Let’s discuss some of the most popular direct marketing techniques implemented by businesses today.
Email marketing
Email is a simple, affordable, and measurable method of communicating with customers. Promotional emails, ads in business emails, newsletters, transactional emails are examples of email marketing strategies that work.
Mobile marketing
This form of direct marketing involves sending promotional material to users on their mobile devices. Marketers launch mobile marketing to tell about the best deals and sales and to inform about the order status.
Web push marketing
Web push notifications are messages that appear in small rectangular sections at the corner of a mobile or computer screen via the browser a person is using. Web push notifications enable marketers to establish one-on-one communication with subscribers without the need for an address or any other consumer data. Subscribers are simply identified from the information stored in the browsers they use.
Messenger marketing
This type of direct marketing approach entails creating a chatbot for messaging apps like Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp. It allows brands to put answering everyday customers' questions on autopilot, make it possible to order right from the messenger and find out more information about a brand.
Tieks by Gavrieli share their recent release of shoes via a Facebook Messenger.
Swelly allows users to make better decisions in a matter of seconds via their Telegram chatbot. It contains a question and two options. Check out below.
Other Forms of Direct Marketing
Social media
Telemarketing
Direct selling
The list of direct marketing forms does not end there. Some of the other marketing types businesses can use include:
Social media. Businesses promote and grow their audiences via social media. Social media also helps customers get feedback regarding their products in the form of comments.
Telemarketing. This approach involves reaching out to potential customers over the phone in a bid to sell specific services or products. It is an excellent tool for finding prospects and following up on marketing campaigns.
Direct selling. It entails posting mail that promotes brands, products, and services. Direct mail includes catalogs, envelope mailers, and postcards.
Direct Marketing Tools
Email marketing
SMS marketing
Web push marketing
Messenger marketing
LIKE.TG has a variety of useful direct marketing tools that help in promoting businesses, various products, and services. These are:
Email marketing
Marketers can implement a successful direct marketing campaign using LIKE.TG email service. It offers a convenient drag-and-drop editor to create a professional email template without knowing HTML. With Automation 360, marketers can also set up event-based campaigns. You can start direct marketing with the LIKE.TG email service for free after the registration.
SMS marketing
LIKE.TG SMS service allows marketers to send promotional SMS that sell their products or services to 800 mobile networks across the globe. Some of the benefits of working with LIKE.TG when sending SMS campaigns include:
Fast delivery of SMS globally.
Easy-to-implement automation.
Marketers can send personalized SMS by adding customers’ personal info.
Web push marketing
With LIKE.TG web push notifications, businesses and companies can promote their products and services even if they do not have consumer addresses. Marketers can personalize, segment, and quickly set up their notifications.
Messenger marketing
LIKE.TG also provides marketers with an easy way of creating chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram. With chatbots, you can collect orders, let users register for your event and provide the answers to frequently asked questions. You can create three chatbots totally for free and send 10,000 messages per month to unlimited subscribers.
Direct Marketing Strategies
Issuing loyalty cards
Guerilla marketing
Branding of clothes
Issuing coupons
Promotional gadgets
Issuing loyalty cards. It entails giving loyal customers membership cards. Customers can then use these cards to access price discounts, free trials, and other offers.
Guerilla marketing. Small businesses with tight budgets often implement this approach. It involves adopting unconventional low-cost promotional strategies that yield maximum results, for example, outdoor installations, stickers, contextual marketing, etc.
Branding of clothes. Companies can make customized clothes with marketing messages. These clothes can then be gifted to prospects, customers, or staff members.
Issuing coupons. It involves a business giving documents and tickets to targeted customers. These cards are then redeemed for discounts or at times rebates when purchasing a product or service.
Promotional gadgets. In this strategy, a business sets out to market its products by giving specific devices to customers. By doing so, the company provides its customers with an opportunity to test out their products and get an idea of how they work, their benefits, and so forth.
How can you get started with direct marketing?
Register in LIKE.TG
Choose the best channel or mix them
Create a mailing list or collect contacts via a subscription form or a script for push notifications
Send a campaign
Analyze your results with the help of reports
Register in LIKE.TG. To start direct marketing at LIKE.TG, sign up.
Choose the best channel or mix them. Select an appropriate marketing channel or pick a combination that is best for your particular business.
Create a mailing list or collect contacts via a subscription form or a script for push notifications. Input prospects’ emails or upload a file containing them. Alternatively, create multichannelsubscription formswith LIKE.TG for free and use them to collect email addresses.
Send a campaign. Once you’ve checked all the details, roll out your campaign.
Analyze your results with the help of reports. Check out LIKE.TG reports to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Direct Marketing Examples
Below is an example of a marketing email from Chewy.
And here is a marketing SMS from Starbucks.
Eddy Travels Telegram bot helps find a ticket for any flight. Look below.
Finally, a push notification from Wanelo on a mobile device.
Direct Marketing Tips and Best Practices
Check out some best practices for direct marketing:
Personalize and segment your marketing content
Consider lead nurturing programs
Write effective CTAs, relevant both for prospects and loyal clients
Always update your data
Integrate various marketing techniques for better performance
Launch your direct marketing campaign with LIKE.TG to promote your business, services, and products to the right customers effectively!
Direct costs
Direct costs are expenses that can be easily assigned to the production of a specific product or service. These costs are often variable and fluctuate based on the production level. Examples include expenses on raw materials, manufacturing and packaging supplies, credit card fees, etc.
In this article, we’ll compare direct and indirect costs and review the examples. We’ll also unveil how to calculate and reduce direct costs.
Why are direct costs important?
Knowing direct costs helps you make the right business decisions and develop a relevant marketing strategy. Before producing the products and selling them to your customers, you need to calculate your expenses for the manufacturing process. After you identify the total spending, you can determine the price and the number of items you need to sell to cover the expenses and receive good revenue. So to recoup the costs, you need to be aware of each dollar you spend to produce goods.
You should keep an eye on direct costs to determine whether the production price stays the same or increases. When the expenses for product manufacturing rise, you should review your product pricing. If you don’t monitor fluctuations in the prices of supplies, your profits might decrease. To avoid this scenario, estimate direct costs every month to make sure that they have no changes.
Now that you know why it’s vital to keep track of your direct costs, it’s time to get to know the difference between direct and indirect costs. After reviewing the next section, you’ll see distinctive features and will be able to differentiate them in your business.
Direct Costs vs Indirect Costs
Entrepreneurs often neglect the difference between direct and indirect costs. However, it’s essential to identify and be aware of these expenses. In this section, we’ll make the difference clear.
Direct costs are expenses directly associated with producing a specific product or service. These costs tangibly contribute to the manufacturing process. Examples include commissions, raw materials, labor, transportation, fuel, certain utilities, etc. For example, a brand needs cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and sugar to produce chocolate. To print books, a company needs paper and ink.
Indirect costs are expenses that can’t be directly tied to the manufacturing process of a specific good or service. However, they are critical since support the existence of a business and fulfill operational needs. Examples include business insurance, building rent, office equipment rental, security costs, accounting, maintenance, administrative costs, etc. For instance, if a company has problems with equipment, having business insurance will prevent it from huge repair expenses. Insurance doesn’t have a direct connection to the product, but a company can’t freely operate without it.
Now that you know the difference, let’s review how to estimate direct costs. It’ll help you identify your major expenses and find ways to reduce them and optimize your budget.
How to calculate direct costs?
Direct costs make up the most significant part of your budget for product manufacturing, so it’s critical to track them. The easiest way to estimate these costs is by summing up all money you spend to buy raw materials and pay wages. Identify all expenses that directly contribute to the production of your product. Since calculating direct costs is essential for your marketing strategy, pricing, and revenue, we’ll provide you with a short step-by-step guide.
List all costs associated with the manufacturing process. Before preparing a budget, you need to consider all possible costs involved in the production process of your goods. Make sure to list all of them to calculate the right price for your products. Pay attention to materials’ cost, labor cost, sales commission, packaging supplies, etc.
Write down the value of each. Find the accurate prices for all supplies and mention them in your list. To optimize expenses, you need to have exact figures.
Sum up all expenses on your list. Add up all costs you spend to manufacture your product. The sum of these contributes to the manufacturing of your goods. With this indicator, you can make the right business decisions regarding pricing, materials, vendors, salaries, and profits.
Let's imagine you have a company with the following cost object.
So, the total of your direct costs will be $1,660,000. You need this sum of money plus indirect costs to produce your products.
Now that you know how to estimate production costs, it’s time to unveil some examples. With their help, you’ll make sure that the expenses you identify as direct are right.
Examples of Direct Costs
Direct costs are the basis of proper company operations. They play an important part in budget calculations, price determination, revenue estimations, and more. This section will review some prominent examples of direct costs that can be easily identified within a specific product or service.
The production of a specific product is possible when the company has all the necessary raw materials. The quality of materials might vary, but a company should have them. For instance, to make tables, a business needs to buy all the materials, including wood, glass, stainless steel, etc.
Transportation costs are also examples of direct expenses. These costs are associated with specific ready-to-use items moved to their owners. Every dollar spent is included in the cost of the product. The shipping of materials and changes in production and sales locations are calculated as transportation costs.
Now that you know the examples, it’s time to jump into the next section. After reading it, you’ll figure out how to reduce direct costs and increase revenue.
How to reduce direct costs?
Constant changes within the market, fluctuations in prices, and customer demand urge companies to keep an eye on direct costs. This enables them to adapt their pricing and receive profit from sales. Once identified, entrepreneurs search for ways to reduce direct costs and encourage business growth. We’ll provide you with the steps that will help you with this.
Negotiate with suppliers. You can reduce direct costs by reviewing your contracts. Revise the list of your vendors and the prices they offer. If you think that some suppliers' prices are too high and influence the profitability of your business, conduct negotiations. Ask vendors to provide you with discounts for making big orders or long-term cooperation. You can also talk with them about free shipping. If the answer is negative, then consider other suppliers and their offers. Once you find vendors that meet your expectations in terms of price and quality, consider cooperation with them.
Manage inventory properly. To avoid big inventory expenses, ensure you don’t have overstocking. Customers won’t buy an old stock at full price and you can have problems with revenue. To save yourself from unnecessary costs, always consider customer demand. Research what products and in what quantities are sold fast and which are rarely bought. Make demand forecasts to identify the number of products your company needs. Consider using software to track stock in real-time and take action when you have overstock. It’s critical to sell old items with discounts, special offers, and seasonal sales to get your money back.
Ensure proper logistics. All parties involved in the production process should have access to the transportation information. This way, they’ll make sure that goods are manufactured, packed, and shipped to end users without delay. Your company needs a centralized logistics hub, insurance, and trusted carrier.
Now you know what direct costs are and why they are critical for business. Hopefully, you’ll implement our tips right to prevent a decrease in business profitability, wrong budget calculations, and wrong business decisions.
Digital marketing plan
A digital marketing plan is a document that outlines the marketing goals pursued by a company. It encompasses strategies, timelines, channels, and budgets.
In this video, Alex, a marketer at LIKE.TG, talks about ways to make your business more digital-friendly.
Why is it important to have a digital marketing plan?
Although only 37% of marketers document their actions, data shows that recording your strategies increases the chances of business success. An accurately designed plan contains a "map" with step-by-step instructions for achieving goals. Here are the main advantages a marketing plan can bring to your business.
Understanding of the target audience. A well thought out marketing plan begins with research to define your target audience. With a specified target audience, you will understand the behavior of your customers and adjust your sales model to help them purchase; speak one language with a customer and provide real help during the buyer journey; better understand the needs of your audience and prepare relevant product launches.
Efficient use of resources. Having a plan prevents you from spending money on things that are unnecessary for business and were not mentioned before. You can also manage your time properly by having clearly defined deadlines in your marketing plan as well.
The same direction for all company departments. Since all members of your company can access the plan as a coordination tool, it allows your company’s team to communicate and accordingly move in the same direction.
So, a digital marketing plan will guide you to your goals and help you benefit from your business. Next, we will discuss the components of a marketing plan.
Components of a digital marketing plan
Content marketing
Email marketing
Advertising
Mobile marketing
Reputation marketing
Social media marketing
Video marketing
Search engine optimization
Web analytics
The components presented here communicate their message in several ways. Now let’s take a closer look at each of them to understand how they work.
Content marketing
The main goal of content marketing is to attract a customer’s attention, educate newcomers, and nurture leads. With this marketing strategy, you can nurture and educate your potential customers by providing them with the necessary content, guide them through the sales funnel, and finally make them take a desirable action.
Content can be presented in the form of case studies, blog posts, articles, reviews, surveys, white papers, quotes, charts, glossaries, dictionaries, webinars, newsletters, how-to guides, and more. It aims to convey important information and educate leads about your product. There are some of the reasons companies prefer content marketing:
target audience growth;
new leads;
higher customer engagement;
more loyal customers;
re-engaging passive clients.
Here is a great example of content marketing from HubSpot’s blog. HubSpot educates readers about their tools and services such as HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Service Hub and provides instructions on how to use them.
Let’s take a look at webinars as a form of content marketing. A webinar is an event held online that enables companies to connect with existing and potential clients. Webinar marketing allows you to present content in the form of a seminar or product demonstration in real-time. Nowadays webinars are considered cost-effective and convenient for presenters as they can reach a big audience from a single location. They help drive viewer attention, warm up leads, bring conversions, and generate leads as well.
To stay in touch with clients, Bain Company constantly conducts webinars on critical issues for global businesses. Their webinars on various topics enable clients from all over the world to receive the necessary information.
Email marketing
Email is a worthwhile marketing tool that involves sending promotional content to your clients. 3.9 billion daily email users make this channel the most popular for eCommerce businesses. It allows marketers to send personalized campaigns, segment their audience, and create relevant content for them.
You can easily create professional emails without any technical or coding skills. Add text, video, or images and design them to your liking.
With LIKE.TG, creating a successful email marketing strategy is easier than you think. Automation 360 allows you to send emails automatically in a response to your clients’ actions.
Advertising
Advertising is a powerful tool that helps promote your business, find a customer base, and expand revenue streams. There are many advantages that internet advertising can bring to your business, it:
helps to greatly expand a diverse audience;
increases traffic to your website;
allows targeting and retargeting;
enables you to track the efficiency of your efforts using web analytics tools.
Nowadays, the Internet offers different ad formats to reach customers. So, it is crucial to know the types of advertising that exist on the Internet. Here are the most popular types:
social media ads;
search engine marketing;
email marketing;
display ads;
native ads;
video ads;
web push;
mobile ads.
Here is a great example of a pre-roll video from Artgrid. It offers unlimited downloads of footage with the help of video advertising on YouTube. This pre-roll ad starts before the main video and actively promotes the benefits of this website.
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is an advertising activity aimed at promoting products and services via smartphones. This type of marketing also involves optimizing sites, content, landing pages, and emails so that a person can freely use it on mobile devices.
Companies use SMS marketing as an effective way of promoting their products. Here you can see how Domino’s Pizza uses SMS to inform customers about their 25% discount.
Reputation marketing
Consumer feedback is essential both for brands and potential customers. Nearly 3 out of 4 customers trust a brand if it has positive reviews. That is why positive online reviews are important for a brand's success. With reputation marketing, you can highlight positive consumer reviews of your brand and strengthen your image through both digital marketing and traditional channels. This type of marketing is aimed at enhancing the reputation on the market and increasing sales of the brand.
Below you can see the way GreenBay supermarket asks for feedback and shows reviews from their customers. Reviews help clients get acquainted with the main advantages and quickly decide on a purchase.
Social media marketing
There are 3.5 billion people that use social media for different needs, they make up 45% of the world’s population. Social media marketing means using social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, Tumblr, and LinkedIn to connect with their audience. It is aimed at building a brand community, boosting sales, increasing traffic to websites.
To reach your goals through social media, don’t forget to publish relevant content, pay attention to the preferences of your followers, and try to engage them in several ways. Finally, analyze your results.
You can use LIKE.TG’s chatbot builder to create auto-reply flows for Facebook Messenger and Telegram.So, let’s walk through the steps on how to create a chatbot:
If you don’t have a LIKE.TG account yet, register. If you already have one, just log in and go to the "Messengers" tab. Afterward, click the "Connect channels" button.
Sign in with Facebook to create your first bot.
Subscribe to your chatbot so that you can test the system by sending automated messages and campaigns to yourself.
Set up welcome messages to be sent to your clients.
After creating a trigger, design an automated flow. When creating a flow, you can use trigger words, quick replies, input elements, buttons, and more. Once all of the elements you need are added, save the flow and link it to your trigger. Follow this step-by-step guide to create an automated chatbot flow.
Here you can see a sequence of predetermined auto-replies that simulate real-life conversations. This particular chatbot allows users to look for realty, both private and business premises.
Video marketing
According to statistics, 54% of consumers prefer videos over other types of content from brands. This means that if you want your business to go viral, you should try video marketing. It helps companies provide step-by-step instructions, demonstrate their products or services, show an event, or make a particular announcement as well as share behind-the-scenes.
YouTube, with over 2 billion monthly users, is a great example of a channel widely used to share and advertise products and services. Pre-roll ads are the best way to bring your product to customers.
Here you can see how HM’s video marketing on recycled clothes works. The video demonstrates the processes that take place after they collect used clothes. With this video, HM tries to promote such clothes.
Search engine optimization
SEO is about optimizing your site and improving organic traffic. Commonly, digital marketing managers pay attention to cross links and backlinks, keywords, and unique content to maintain high rankings. It increases the visibility of the website. Remember, the better visibility, the more customers you can attract.
For instance, when you are searching for a grammar checker, it is obvious that you will pay attention to the website at the top of the search engine results page.
Web analytics
This is a way to track the activity of users on web pages. It enables companies to access information about the preferences and behaviors of customers. Analytics platforms usually report on the number of visitors and pages they visit on this site, the duration of their visit, and more. Tools like Google Analytics, Coremetrics, and Adobe Analytics are the most popular for a website traffic analysis.
For instance, Google Analytics gives you all insight into your site performance. This software helps you receive information about site visitors, segment them according to their interests, age, and gender; analyze visitors’ behavior and conversion path.
Below you can see Google Analytics’ dashboard where you can find the following information: demographics (age and gender), interests, geo (language and location), behavior, technology, mobile, custom, and benchmarking. In the section below you can get to know the average age of your site visitors.
Today, it is essential to know the components of a digital marketing plan. Besides, it is equally important to know what to do to design a plan.
How to create a digital marketing plan?
Outline your brand
Define the audience
Establish your goals
Select a digital marketing strategy
Create a budget
Evaluate the results
This step-by-step guide will walk you through the process of creating a well-thought-out digital plan. Follow the 6 steps below.
1. Outline your brand
To create a successful marketing plan, first of all, you should outline your brand. It includes the ins and outs of your business to effectively sell it to your customers. Secondly, you should mention the benefits of your company. This will give you an idea of what makes you unique and helps to stand out from competitors.
Also, create your unique selling proposition (USP). It establishes the image of your brand and makes customers trust and choose you over others.
2. Create your buyer persona
A buyer persona is a fictional person that embodies an ideal customer. It enables you to target prospects and develop a product so that it could satisfy the needs of your customers. To create a buyer persona, you should know the background of your clients including their job and family, as well as demographics such as gender, age, location, and income. Ideally, you would know about their interests and communication preferences.
Below, you can see an example of an online shop that knows its target audience. TheVeganKind Supermarket provides customers with cruelty-free products. Although the supermarket is located in the UK, and they are ready to ship to every European country. TheVeganKind donates money to animal charities. So, their team focuses on vegan customers from Europe who are animal lovers.
3. Establish your goals
Before you decide to enter the market, make sure the goals are set. Your goals will define your tasks, means, methods of achieving them, and channels of communication with the audience. Make sure that both long and short-term goals are set because they are equally important.
You should establish relevant, timely, specific, measurable, and attainable goals so that it is clear in what direction to go. Also, it will be easy to track your implementation and performance. Remember to track goals regularly, if you are eager to improve your strategy, tactics, and methods.
4. Create a digital marketing strategy
Once your objectives are set, you should think about how to accomplish them. Select a digital marketing strategy that suits your company. When creating a marketing plan, it is essential to consider which strategy is the best to reach your buyers. Let’s take a closer look at the main steps of building a marketing strategy.
Make sure your goals are defined. Ask yourself what you are trying to achieve by using this strategy. For instance, if you need to drive more traffic to your website, it is clear that an SEO strategy will be a great fit for you. Then, correctly formulate the goal for your strategy, for example, increasing traffic to a certain page by 50% in 6 months. It should be specific and spelled out.
Analyze your target audience. The second point you should consider is whom you are trying to reach. Creating a buyer persona will help you portray your ideal client as it contains information about preferences, behavior, and habits. After this, the acquired information will help you personalize your email campaigns, create relevant display ads, and segment your customers.
Generate leads. This step includes collecting subscribers. This can be done by applying LIKE.TG’s free subscription forms or using online and offline events, social media accounts, contests, landing pages, surveys, quizzes, and partner websites for list building.
Nurture your leads. Chatbots, SMS, emails, and social media will help you move your leads towards a purchase. Educate your leads and show them how to use your product to get the most out of it.
Retain your customers. Thank them for every purchase made, ask for their feedback or reviews of your product. You can retain your customers in several ways: provide previous case studies to demonstrate the way you communicate with your audience, set expectations, create a roadmap for clients to be informed about their relationship with your business. Moreover, you can create memorable events, develop loyalty programs, and ask consumers to rate your products and services.
Set up automation. After understanding what works well and what doesn't, you can automate email workflows to support subscribers during their buyer’s journey. Also, you can create chatbots on Facebook Messenger and Telegram that answer FAQs. You can also schedule sending SMS and web push notifications to your customers. Automation helps you save money and time on routine tasks and devote it to more important things and creativity. LIKE.TG enables you to create email workflows easily by following our guide.
5. Create a budget
Before implementing your strategy, you should be aware of how much you need to invest. A well thought out budget helps you distribute money properly. You can divide the budget for your business into several parts and direct them to different channels. Figure out how much you are eager to spend to gain some positive results.
You need to consider paying for SEO, social media and email marketing, website design, paid advertising, and more. LIKE.TG helps small businesses get started for free. You can send email campaigns and create chatbots at no cost.
Here is an example of money allocation. You can enter your company’s name, monthly and yearly budget as well as spending on tools, services, channels necessary for your business success.
6. Monitor the performance
Lastly, to make sure that you have selected the right strategy and it’s effective, constantly track your performance. This will help you find problems and improve your tactics on the go. Besides, you should also track your organic traffic and virality on social media.
Now you are acquainted with the points important to know when developing a successful plan. LIKE.TG will help you advance your business at any level of its development.
Differentiated marketing
Differentiated marketing is a strategy that involves a company creating marketing campaigns that appeal to two or more segments of theirtarget audience. It helps companies improve brand recognition, reach a wider audience, meet customers’ needs, and increase revenue.
Nowadays companies use various strategies to reach customers and achieve their goals. There are three main marketing approaches: differentiated, undifferentiated, and concentrated marketing. To start, let's dive into the advantages and disadvantages of differentiated marketing and then take a look at several examples.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Differentiated Marketing
Before launching any marketing campaign brands determine their target audience. Based on the offer they have for their customers, companies segment their audience according to common characteristics. Afterward, they communicate their offer and message to the selected segment to drive conversions. To create an effective campaign, each company selects the most relevant target market strategy, among them differentiated marketing. This strategy has the following advantages:
the opportunity to clarify the actual needs and expectations of your customers;
the chance to choose clients based on your brand's capabilities;
offering the appropriate products to the right people;
exploringthe market and the position of your competitors within it;
efficient use of company resources;
increased revenue;
fulfilled needs of customers.
However, as with any marketing strategy, differentiated marketing has its cons too. Some of the disadvantages of differentiated marketing include:
increased costs on advertising to reach each market segment;
customers may respond differently;
limits in your business growth that may occur when targetingsmall groups of customers;
a high level of competitionamong companies that provide consumers with products at a lower cost.
Now that you know the details of a differentiated marketing strategy, let’s find out the difference between the two target market strategies.
Differentiated Marketing vs Undifferentiated Marketing
When a brand creates campaigns for two or more segments of their target audience, it implements differentiated marketing. By targeting customers with certain common characteristics, companies manage to meet the needs and requirements of clients by providing them with relevant offers.
Differentiated marketing is a great fit for wholesale and retail businesses since they can reach different segments of the audience. When using this strategy companies rely on various promotion channels giving preference to platforms that meet customers’ needs. By doing this, brands are able to deliver more personalized messages and an exceptional experience. The strategy helps resonate with the needs of each segment and obtain loyal customers who will eventually recommend your brand to friends and colleagues.
Unlike differentiated marketing, undifferentiated marketing appeals to a wide range of people. Its main goal is to reach the maximum number of customers with one product, one price, one placement strategy, and one promotional campaign. In this strategy, the image remains important. Brands focus on quality, affordability, or a certain feature of their product. By providing customers with the best quality, brands aim at gaining a competitive advantage.
Undifferentiated products usually have a wide customer base. By using this strategy brands try to show that they offer products that people need in their everyday life. For example, personal care products. The advantages of undifferentiated marketing are recognition, getting a larger reach, and no need for research or specialized criteria of a specific campaign.
So now let’s jump into a differentiated marketing strategy and the steps necessary to create it.
Differentiated Marketing Strategy
By using this marketing strategy, a brand can create several campaigns that communicate a message to at least two segments of their audience. Let’s take an accessories store, for example. It could create an email campaignto promote a limited-time offer and appeal to people in different countries and cities, or clients from different age groups.
With this approach, your company can target even more segments. Shoe brands often develop marketing campaigns that aim at not only men and women but also customers from various age groups. Besides, companies can create different messages in the same campaign to reach various segments.
To create this target market strategy, consider several steps:
Determine your target audience. The most essential step is to define who your main customers are. For this purpose, you need to single out the main traits of your customers such as their age, location, gender, marital status, employment, income, and all the necessary information that can help you segment them into groups.
Define the unique needs of your customers. With the help of surveys, for example, find out what products your customers prefer and what services help them deal with their problems. Additionally, use analytics tools to track your consumers’ buying habits to figure out which products they purchase regularly.
Create offers for different segments. Now that you know the needs of your customers, it’s time to provide them with your unique offers. For example, imagine one of your target segments prefers to purchase organic food. Keeping this in mind, and you can develop a special offer for this segment.
Identify the promotional channels you want to use. To reach your customers, you need to select the appropriate ways to promote your products. For example, if your target groups most often use social networks then give a thought to developing promotional and advertising campaigns for social media channels.
Developing this strategy requires following the steps above. To see a differentiated marketing strategy in action take a look at several examples.
Examples of Differentiated Marketing
The options for effective differentiated marketing are endless. Check out these examples to grab some inspiration.
Let’s look at Lilly Pulitzer, a famous beachwear brand. In 2015, the company cooperated with Target to launch a more affordable line of clothing, cosmetics, and other goods. By providing customers with more affordable prices at more locations, the brand was able to drive demand, and acquire newloyal customers.
Let’s imagine a running shoe brand. The company specializes in designing sustainable sneakers from recycled and renewable materials forathletes who care about our environment. Additionally, they produce performance models of running shoes with less cushioning for those who are concerned with speed. It demonstrates that the company divides customers into segments to fulfill each consumer's unique needs.
For example, imagine a new hotel was opened. The hotel targets families with children. To satisfy the needs of their visitors, it provides parents with a special area designed for their children to play different educational games. Also, hotel residents can find a garden with custom-made swings for children. Moreover, it also allows people to bring their pets. For this purpose, the owners designed special pet-friendly rooms. By doing this, the hotel tries to target different segments.
Let’s take a ski resort, for example. They decided to create a promotional video to attract more clients during the bulk season. To target two segments, marketers created two promotional videos: the first one shows young people snowboarding, in the second one shows families skiing. Therefore, using both ads, this ski resort can appeal to younger and older people.
Differentiated marketing is a widely used strategy that helps companies reach different target markets and increase revenue. By creating differentiated campaigns, brands meet the needs of different segments.
Demand generation
Demand generation is using inbound marketing to create interest in a specific product and boost brand awareness. It helps companies generate more qualified leads and revenue.
In this article, we’ll unveil why demand generation is important and how it works. We’ll also compare demand and lead generation and cover 8 effective strategies.
Why is demand generation important?
Each company develops marketing and sales initiatives that impact the stages of the sales funnel. This way, brands strive to create awareness of the product they sell and show customers its value, and drive interest. Once they succeed in communicating their offers, businesses can create demand for their products. Their target audience will be aware of companies’ perks, their teams will have a longer list of qualified leads, and their owners will have higher profits.
By creating interest among your target market, you can obtain a strong position. With demand generation, your team will focus on prospective customers and their needs. You’ll ensure seamless communication with potential clients, optimize interaction with them, and identify their pain points. As a result, you’ll be able to solve problems.
Now that you know why demand generation is important, it’s time to figure out how it works.
How does demand generation work?
To make your demand generation strategy work, you need to complete several steps. First of all, you should create a consistent brand with a clear voice, style, branding, brand personality, and messaging across different communication channels. Every piece of content you publish on your website and social media should comply with your brand values. Secondly, work in hand with your sales team to align all your marketing efforts. Make sure to include a visible call to action button on your website so that your prospects can make the desired action.
Your company should have an accurate buyer persona to meet the needs of customers. Identify their pain points to solve problems quickly. Many businesses leverage special software to reduce the number of tasks during the demand generation process. Once you implement your campaigns, analyze the results. Since demand generation is data-driven, you should pay attention to the effectiveness of your offers, messages, and conversions.
Now that you know how demand generation works, it’s time to proceed to the next section to make the difference between demand and lead generation clear.
Demand Generation vs Lead Generation
Since there’s only a slight difference between demand and lead generation, we’ll review each of the terms in detail to see their features.
Demand generation is a marketing strategy that encompasses businesses using inbound methods to reach new markets and communicate their offers. It enables brands to boost awareness and trust and educate potential customers about products. With demand generation techniques, marketers can make more people aware of the product and its benefits and generate customers’ interest.
Lead generation is a process of nurturing prospects to convert them into customers. Marketers collect contact information of potential customers through lead generation forms, email campaigns, and lead capture forms. Companies provide users with various incentives and content in exchange for their contact information (emails, names, phone numbers, etc.).
Demand generation focuses on making people aware of the company and generating interest, while lead generation aims at converting leads into customers by gathering contact information.
The difference is clear, so we’ll cover 8 effective strategies.
8 Effective Demand Generation Strategies
There are many ways to hook the audience’s attention and drive their interest in your product so that they want to purchase. We’ve prepared a list that consists of 8 effective strategies to boost demand for your product.
Implement blogging. Quality blog posts are the source of helpful information in which customers can find solutions to their problems. Blogging is one of the marketing strategies that help drive traffic to your website and social media platforms, convert prospects into customers, build trust, and encourage customer loyalty.
Conduct webinars. Real-time conversation with potential customers allows you to share the necessary content and provide information about your product. During the registration, participants provide you with contact information. You can use this data to complete your buyer persona and reach prospects through available channels.
Create podcasts. Podcast marketing is increasingly popular among companies now. You can use paid ads on famous podcasts or create your audio to educate people about your industry and product. Once you succeed in making quality audios for your brand, you can establish personal connections with your target audience, generate traffic to your website, have a wider reach, and build brand authority and awareness.
Upload educational videos on social media. A short informative video always catches the eye of a customer. If you manage to develop great videos to inform people about your product and communicate your main message, you can increase your customer base. With visual content, customers will remember you and recall your brand in the future.
Consider email marketing. Since there are around 4.3 billion email users worldwide, to your leads. Email marketing is a traditional yet effective way to reach your potential customers at the right time, collect feedback, generate traffic, and increase sales.
Run social media campaigns. Once you identify the social media networks your target market prefers, use them to connect with your prospects. Make use of paid ads to target potential customers, conduct engaging campaigns to encourage the use of your branded hashtag, and consider influencer marketing. Chatbots enable you to run your campaigns on the necessary social media networks. With LIKE.TG, you can have a wider reach by implementing our chatbots in messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Instagram.
Collaborate with influencers. You can consider influencer marketing so that an opinion leader can endorse your product to followers. This way, you can boost brand awareness, reach more people, increase sales, and gain credibility and trust.
Offer free tools. You can encourage customers to register with your service to try it by providing a free tool. If people enjoy your tool, they will recommend it to their friends. As a result, your reach will expand.
Use our strategies to make your demand generation effective. Hope that our information will come in handy when you decide to improve your business.
Demand-side platform
A demand-side platform (DSP) is a platform that empowers companies to buy advertising inventory and manage it by using one interface. It helps control multiple ads in real time, monitor, and improve their performance.
Companies try to optimize their advertising processes to reach theirtarget audienceproperlyand get the desired result. The process of buying and selling ads has become even easier with the help of DSP. In this article, we’ll unveil how a demand-side platform operates, discover the difference between a DSP and a supply-side platform (SSP), and see several examples.
How does a demand-side platform work?
If you implement demand-side platforms, you don’t need to pass through some additional independent networks since these platforms operate without their help. For example, in case you leverage Facebook Ads Manager, you can buy impressionsdirectlyon Instagram or Facebook.
DSPs allow media buyers to purchase display, audio, and video ads, analyze, and manage them on various networks by using a single platform. First of all, platforms provide adbuyerswith information about ad purchases from a publisher.
The systems don’t imply buying ads directly from publishers or owning them. Companies should be aware of the fact that DSPs connect with SSPs via ad exchange to decide on the details of an impression. DSP has to bid higher for the impression if it’s a marketing manager who has already visited a company’s website.
Now let’s make the difference between DSPs and SSPs clear.
What is the difference between a demand-side platform and a supply-side platform?
The key difference between a DSP and an SSP is that they network with the different parts of the programmatic ecosystem. The first service is leveraged by companies, agencies, and publishers to manage the purchasing process of ads. Using a DSP enables companies to reach different publishers from a single platform. The second platform is used to optimize the selling process of ad space. With an SSP, ad sellers can reach a bigger number of buyers through different ad exchanges.
Now let’s jump into several examples.
Examples of Demand-Side Platforms
Amazon Advertising Platform
Choozle
Facebook Ads Manager
If agencies, publishers, and brands manage campaigns through different networks, DSPs help control everything by using a single dashboard. This is one of the reasons many brands turned to the following platforms for help.
Amazon Advertising Platform
As an advertiser, you would probably like to reach new audiences and obtain more customers. With Amazon DSP, you have a great chance to buy advertising at scale on Amazon and other websites to reach people worldwide.
Choozle
With Choozle, you don’t need to worry about campaigns at scale because you can run them smoothly. Businesses can easily optimize their digital advertising with the help of the service. You can access targeting tools to optimize your digital advertising and evaluate its performance on Choozle.
Facebook Ads Manager
Open Facebook for business to explore Facebook Ads Manager, a typical example of a DSP. It allows companies and individuals to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. The service empowers advertisers to monitor the performance of their marketing campaigns and figure out the improvements to be made.
To put it simply, DSPs allow businesses to simplify the process of negotiations between buyers and sellers of ads. As a result, advertisers can choose and purchase advertising inventory on a single platform. The service also empowers companies to monitor the results of each campaign by providing companies with reports and analytics.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing is using different promotion instruments involving online marketing channels to establish customer relationships.
In this video, Alex, a marketer at LIKE.TG, talks about ways to make your business more digital-friendly.
Why is digital marketing important?
If you still don't take advantage of doing digital marketing, you lose potential opportunities to acquire more leads and retain customers. With the correct strategy, digital marketing allows pursuing lots of goals.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Wide outreach
Lower cost compared to traditional marketing
Easy to measure results
Decreases the selling cycle
Helps build brand loyalty
Retains customers
Stimulates sales
To make use of these benefits, one should define the types of digital marketing to use. They are the channels at the same time. Each type helps achieve different goals, so while crafting a strategy, it should be taken into account.
Types of Digital Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Paid Search
Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing
Display advertising
Affiliate Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
This involvescreating useful and relevant content to rank high on the search engine results page. By optimizing your website or blog content, you get more organic traffic. This way, the page will have more chances to attract users’ attention.
At the top is the paid search where you should pay per click. Under it, there are search engine results, click-throughs from which you get for free, and they make up organic traffic. When optimizing your website or blog, take into account both on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO
It implies on-site optimization.Take care of the following factors.
Title tag. It’s a clickable headline for each result in the search query. It is vital for both user experience and SEO, as it is a short description of your page content, which is helpful for web spiders and the users. To be displayed correctly, keep in under 60 characters. Don’t forget to insert the keywords into the title tag.
Heading. It appears at the top of a page. Make sure that each page has only one heading, including your targeted keywords, and it should reflect the page content.
URL. It should reflect your page content as well. Include targeted keywords, but don’t change your current URLs as they may have backlinks and carry both authority and traffic.
Page content. It should correlate with the search query to satisfy the users’ needs. Make sure that your piece of content provides site visitors with the necessary answers. Google has specific algorithms to check whether your page is beneficial.
Pageload speed. Google strives for the best user experience while searching. That’s why it ranks fast-loading pages higher in the search results.
Internal linking. It’s important for both site visitors and search engines. Internal links mean that all the content on your website is coherent so that the users can find the answers to related questions.
ALT text for images. An alternative text aims to provide with good user experience, as well. It’s visible for users when the images fail to load and help the crawlers understand what this particular image is about.
So, the purpose of an on-page SEO is to help both the users and the search engines. If all the factors mentioned above are okay, search engines will index your page without much effort.
Off-page SEO
It aims to increase your website authority. It is achieved by getting high-quality links from other websites. The more relevant links you have — the higher your domain authority is. To build links, create valuable content, increase social media shares, and get into guest blogging. Keep in mind that Google penalizes for manipulating the page rank by buying links.
Advantages of SEO
It allows you to reduce costs spent on every engaged client.
The achieved results will help you gain traffic for rather a long time.
Disadvantages of SEO
The result is not visible immediately. Increasing of clickthroughs will be in 3-4 months.
If you have excellent skills in SEO, you may unintentionally re-optimize your website by stuffing too many keywords or creating the content for search engines but not for users.
Paid Search
This is sponsored advertising, where youonly pay if a user clicks on your ad, that's why it is also called "pay-per-click." Website owners choose a keyword that, as they think, will be typed by the target audience in a search engine and place a bid on it.
PPC channels
Google Ads
Paid ads on Facebook
Sponsored messages on LinkedIn
Promoted tweets on Twitter
Advantages of paid search
Allows to get conversions quickly
Provides with detailed statistics: you can find out which ads bring you income, which ones are loss-making, hence, remove them from the search engine results page
Disadvantages of paid search
Expensive
Highly competitive keywords require higher bids
Not easy to implement
Customers' clicks do not mean sales
Click fraud
People tend to trust organic search results rather than paid ads
Social Media Marketing
SMM is establishing relationships with customers and gaining traffic via social networks. Every social site gives its high chances to attract new customers, promote your brand, and boost sales.
Social media marketing channels
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram
Pinterest
Google+
Advantages of SMM
Cheap
Makes it easier to develop relationships with the target audience
Allows to conduct market research
Disadvantages of SMM
Nobody is immune to negative feedback
Time-consuming
ROI is difficult to define
Email Marketing
With email marketing, you can establish trusting relationships with the clients, build brand awareness, retain customers, stimulate repeated sales, re-engage the passive clients, treat each client individually.Discover more benefits of email marketing in this article.
LIKE.TG allows you to get into email marketing without breaking a sweat. You are welcome to combine email, SMS, web push notifications, and Facebook campaigns for better performance. After the registration, you can send 15,000 emails to500subscribers every month absolutely for free.
Use email to:
Greet new subscribers
Nurture leads with relevant content
Notify about sales, top-rated items or articles on your blog
Cross-sell and up-sell
Keep customers informed about their order or shipping status with the help of automated email sending
Re-engage passive clients
Email is the cheapest way to promote your brand, so don’t miss a chance to use it for free!
Display advertising
Display advertising is a kind of pay-per-click advertising, shown on related websites. It aims to grow the target audience by appealing to visual perception, create brand awareness, and monetize the traffic.
Advantages of display advertising
Wide outreach
An opportunity to display ads on thematic websites only due to several targeting types
Great chance to build brand awareness
Disadvantages of display advertising
Expensive
Click-through rate and conversions are lower
Often ignored by users or even blocked
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing allows promoting goods and services on the Internet by paying money for actions that facilitate promotion and sales. Usually, the mechanism is the following: website owners create links, and after a customer clicks it to buy something, they get referral fees. It is a common practice in Amazon.
Advantages of affiliate marketing
Target audience growth
Quick and easy income without much effort
Disadvantages of affiliate marketing
Website owners should spend much time to find conscientious partners with reasonable offers
Partners may also deal with dishonest websites
How Digital Marketing Works
To illustrate the mechanism of digital marketing, remember the last purchase you’ve made. Suppose it was online. Try to recall all the stages you had come through before making a buying decision.
Firstly, we usually look for reviews and testimonials. So, think over the websites which provide them. Then, we examine a particular site that gained the highest mark based on reviews and find it on socials. Meanwhile, don’t forget about SEO — it should be easy for users to find your website. Make sure that your product page answers all the questions a potential buyer may have. At this point, a user contacts you if they’re interested, and email marketing comes into play. It gives lots of opportunities to turn a user into a client.
Offer a lead-magnet for a subscription. It may be a discount, free shipping, a check-list, etc. Get some useful insights from our blog on how to use lead magnets effectively.
After subscription, greet them and share the most favorable goods or content that you’re proud of.
Send triggered emails. They are sent automatically and based on subscriber behavior so that each user will be treated differently. Don’t be afraid. It’s not rocket science — LIKE.TG takes care of all the technical side of things.
This is just an example of how digital marketing works. Indeed, it depends on the industry, type of business, target audience, and the buyer persona.
How to Do Digital Marketing: Digital Marketing Strategy
Analyze your current marketing situation
Set the goals
Work out a strategy
Manage the workflow
Before choosing a digital marketing strategy, make sure that you need it. Research to discover the number of your potential customers online. After that, choose the most relevant digital marketing channels. Certainly, you may combine them but don’t get into each one of them — find out the most beneficial types for your business. Now, it’s high time to plan a strategy. No matter which one you choose, the general algorithm is the following:
Analyze your current marketing situation. First of all, assess what you have: your current business model, the essence of goals, competition, online presence, strengths, and weaknesses. This analysis will allow you to compare it with a new digital marketing strategy further and discover if the game is worth the candle.
Set the goals. This is a crucial stage. Make sure that your goals are realistic, measurable, specific, assignable, and time-related. Decide upon KPIs to monitor and control the fulfillment of the purposes.
Work out a strategy. It is a plan following which you’ll manage to accomplish your goals. Specify all the tactics and methods to do it, taking into account the period needed. Describe in detail how you’re going to attract new leads and move them down the sales funnel.
Manage the workflow. Delegate the responsibilities among your team, hire the specialists if you lack them. Mind that every digital channel needs a person to be responsible for it. Correct and optimize your strategy on the go to avoid the pitfalls.
Digital Marketing Tools
SEO
Paid Search
SMM
Email marketing
Display Advertising
Affiliate marketing
SEO. To evaluate the effectiveness of your search engine optimizations, make use of MOZ, SEMrush, Screaming Frog. These tools will give you insights into your technical SEO audit, position tracking, ideas for increasing organic traffic, backlinks analytics, and more.
Paid Search. It allows promoting your business on partner sites on sponsored listings. You can pay per click, pay per thousand, or pay per call. Create PPC campaigns with the help of Google Ads.
SMM. The most popular tool is BuzzSumo. It allows us to discover the current trends, find out which type of content performs better and learn the influencers who share it. It’s a real helping hand to draw inspiration from while crafting a social media campaign.
Email marketing. With LIKE.TG, you can bring to life all your plans. You can start from afree email service plan or web push notifications. You can send web pushes in LIKE.TG for free if your database is less than 10,000 subscribers. Combine email, web push, and SMS in one campaign for better outreach. Set automated email sending, and LIKE.TG will make your campaigns deliver.
Display Advertising. AdRoll helps target the right users based on their behavior and boost sales. Attract new users, convert them into shoppers, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns.
Affiliate marketing. CJ Affiliate helps publishers and advertisers connect to raise brand awareness and sales as well. Advertisers pay per lead, a phone call, or a site visitor.
How to measure digital marketing success?
Keep in mind that any digital marketing activity should be measurable; otherwise, you spend time and money in vain.
Digital marketing KPIs
Traffic by channel
The number of website visitors
Unique visitors
Cost per acquisition
Cost per lead
Customer lifetime value
Return on ad spend
Time spent on a site
Bounce rate
Click-through rates
Shares
Follows
Return-on-Investment
I hope this article will prove to be useful. If you are not in digital marketing yet, start from email marketing.
Start digital marketing
Direct competition
Direct competition is a market situation in which two or more businesses provide customers with the same product or service and have the same target audience. In direct competition, these two or more rivals often have similar price points.
In this article, we’ll compare direct and indirect competition and review several examples.
Direct Competition vs Indirect Competition
Since people often misinterpret the two terms, we need to discover the difference. In this section, we’ll have a closer look at the direct and indirect competition and their distinctive features.
Direct competition is a market situation in which two or more brands offer the same product and have the same target audience. They compete with each other to win customers’ attention and persuade consumers to purchase. For example, if you want to buy a smartphone that meets all modern requirements, you can consider Apple or Samsung, which offer phones with the same characteristics. When you want to eat a burger, you choose between the following fast-food companies: McDonald's, KFC, and Wendy’s. They are direct competitors because they offer similar products: burgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, ice cream, etc.
Indirect competition is a market situation in which two or more companies offer different products or services yet can provide customers with a solution and meet their needs. An indirect competitor helps consumers reach the same goal. Indirect rival has a different approach to the target audience and provides customers with alternative products. For instance, if you want to have a coffee drink, you can go to Starbucks and buy one, or you can install UberEats and order an iced latte at a local coffee shop and have it delivered.
Now that you know the main difference, let's look at several examples of direct competition from well-known brands.
Examples of Direct Competition
Every company has its direct competitors. You’ll probably recognize the well-established brands in our examples. Let’s explore their competitors in more detail.
McDonald’s and Burger King
McDonald’s is the most popular fast-food company not only in the US but also outside the country. The brand conquered customers with its quick, tasty meals and affordable prices. However, consumers’ tastes change, and new players enter the market. Although McDonald’s does its best to meet the changes in demand yet, people still strive to try something new. Burger King became McDonald’s direct competitor since it produced similar products and targeted the same audience. Their burger battle “Whopper against the Big Mac” is still severe.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi
The competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi is an excellent example of a duopoly. These two big rivals dominate the market and don’t let anyone else in. They share the same product — soda-flavored cola and audience. Moreover, both brands have similar price points, so it’s up to customers to decide which one they prefer to choose. They create new tastes, develop new marketing strategies, and provide customers with zero sugar drinks to hook the attention of the audience and encourage them to buy.
Boeing and Airbus
Since the 1990s, these two manufacturers of jetliners have shaped a duopoly with their big market shares. Boeing and Airbus offer a wide range of products — aircraft with different capacities. However, their products are similar, so the companies fight for precedence.
Now you’ll be able to identify the direct competitors of your business. Hope that our examples showed the features of direct competition.
Delivery rate
Not only your email copywriting matters but the email service you've chosen matters, as well.The domain reputation of your email serviceplays a huge rolein your campaign's success.Using an email service with a good reputation allows your emailsto pass through spam filters without a sweat.
How to Calculate an Email Delivery Rate
Email delivery rates are calculated by dividing the number of emails sent minus bouncesby the number of emails sent. You should remember that the number of emails sent is not the same as the number of emails delivered because when you send mailings, some emailsmay have bounced.
Bounces are emails that can’t be delivered to recipients’ inboxes.
Email Bounce Classifications
Hard bounce
Soft bounce
Hard bounce
This happens when an email can't be delivered because the recipient’s address is invalid, or the email domain doesn’t exist. Find out more.
LIKE.TG offers an Email Verifier for you to check your mailing list before sending a campaign. This tool detects invalid email addresses and removes them from your mailing list. As a result, you send emails to valid addresses and your email deliverability is high.
Soft bounce
This happens when an email can't be delivered because of one of the following reasons: the recipient’s inbox is full, your email is too large, or the server is down. Find out more.
As an email marketer, you should always track the delivery rate of all your email campaigns. Your goal is to achieve a delivery rate of 95% or higher.
If the delivery rate of your email campaigns is reduced each time, then it’s time to examine your mailing list. Maybe it has too many invalid email addresses. Also, pay attention to your subject linesand content. Perhaps they consist of words that ESPsusually block, equating these messages tospam.
With our service, tracking your delivery rate is a simple process. You need to open your statistics report.
LIKE.TG has a high reputation score, which helps increase the open rate of your email campaigns.
Let LIKE.TG deliver your emails!
Our sender reputation score is high, so there's no need to take extra measures. Send emails from LIKE.TG and enjoy high email deliverability.
Register and send an email campaign!
Try it for yourself with our free pricing plan for small businesses. If your mailing list has fewer than 500 subscribers, send up to 15,000 emails totally for free every month. Make use of marketing tools like personalization, segmentation, subscription forms, A/B testing, ready-made email templates. Enjoy them at no cost!
Create an email campaign
Customer support chatbot
A customer support chatbot is a chatbot designed to provide customers with instant answers, support them 24/7, recommend products, receive payments, and answer FAQs. A customer service bot enables companies to reduce the workload of their customer service agents, incorporate consistency, ensure instant answers, and secure payments.
In the video below, Alex reveals 3 powerful ways to enhance your customer support with chatbots. Check it out!
In this article, we’ll explain why you should use chatbots for customer service and how you can do it to improve your customer service. We’ll also unveil how to create a customer service chatbot with LIKE.TG and review three successful customer service chatbots.
Why should you use chatbots for customer service?
Business owners incorporate chatbots to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their customer support service. They help provide instant answers, assist customers 24/7, and make bookings. Companies can reap even more benefits after incorporating chatbots into their businesses.
First of all, chatbots help you provide customers with instant answers on autopilot. You don’t need to involve your customer support agents in the process, and customers don’t depend on your business hours. Since the chatbot can function 24/7, your clients will receive responses and solve their problems in seconds.
Secondly, bots enable you to reduce the workload on your team by replying to routine, repetitive questions. Your agents can focus on urgent tasks while your chatbot will handle the rest. The bot will be an excellent tool for managing FAQs.
Thirdly, chatbots are cost-effective. Incorporating a chatbot is cheaper than hiring customer support agents to handle repetitive tasks and inquiries. You don’t need a team of professionals to reply to FAQs because you can delegate it to your chatbot. After paying a specific sum for a monthly or yearly subscription, you can create chatbots and improve efficiency. While bots handle FAQsб your customer support team focuses on more urgent and complex issues requiring their immediate attention.
Now that you know the reasons for implementing a customer support chatbot, it’s time to unveil the best ways to level up your customer service with bots.
12 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service with Chatbots
Incorporating customer support chatbots can help you improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. In this section, you’ll find some effective ways to use them for your business.
24/7 availability. With chatbots, your company will be able to ensure round-the-clock support. Since the work of chatbots is not tied to business hours, customers can turn to help at any time of the day or night. As a result, you’ll no longer have dissatisfied clients who waited for hours to get the responses of your customer support agents. Use bots to quickly manage repetitive tasks and issues related to the product or service without human intervention.
Instant answers. Consider incorporating a chatbot to provide instant responses with effective solutions. The bot reacts to customers typing their inquiries very fast, so they’ll need to wait seconds or minutes to get their resolutions. Timely responses will help you improve customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Multi-channel assistance. You can use chatbots for various channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and your website. You have no limitations on the channels and their number. Identify the preferred channels for your target audience and add a chatbot to them to ensure consistent support. By engaging with clients on different communication channels, you improve accessibility and customer satisfaction.
Consistency of responses. Customer support agents' answers might vary and differ, while chatbots send consistent responses based on scenarios. This prevents human error and inconsistency that might lead customers to a dead end. That’s why we advise using bots to ensure standardized customer service and accurate and reliable information.
Handling of repetitive tasks. Chatbot is a perfect solution for managing routine tasks like FAQs, order tracking, and basic issues. In addition, agents have time to handle complex issues. Consider assigning these repetitive tasks to your chatbot to improve the efficiency of your customer support.
Improved customer engagement. Teach your chatbots to engage with customers conversationally and interactively, making their experience with your brand seamless. Clients will be happy to communicate with chatbots trained to provide accurate and polite responses.
Feedback collection. Use chatbots as tools for feedback collection. You can gather feedback and information about customer interaction. This information will help understand clients’ preferences, common issues, and trends.
Post-purchase support. Interaction with customers is essential to sell products and keep up with them after the purchase. Using chatbots for post-purchase support enables you to improve overall customer experience and help solve customer issues that emerge after the sale. The bot can also manage such things as order status tracking, returns, exchanges, product usage, etc.
Handoff to human agents. If you want your chatbot to provide comprehensive customer support, consider enabling handoff to human agents. If your bot is unable to solve the issue, customers can click “Connect agent” and receive all the necessary assistance and answers.
Integration with CRM. Consider integrating your chatbot into your CRM. After finishing the setup, you’ll be able to ensure seamless customer data access, provide personalized customer interactions, effectively qualify leads, streamline customer support workflows, and follow up with customers after they purchase. Customer data from chatbots will get straight into your CRM, making it unnecessary to do it manually. With LIKE.TG, there’s no need to change platforms to integrate chatbots with CRM because the service offers all the necessary tools for marketers. You can seamlessly use its CRM and chatbot builder.
Multilingual support. If you have customers from different countries, consider providing multilingual support with your chatbot. This way, clients can express their concerns and problems more easily. They can explain the issue in more detail so your chatbot will be able to help.Onboarding. Since chatbots can guide customers through simple processes according to specific scenarios, consider using them for onboarding. The bot will help clients start using a product or service. It’ll help you provide your customers with clear and accurate instructions, and they will understand your product faster. In addition, it’ll reduce the workload on your team.
Now that you know how to improve customer support, let’s create a chatbot with LIKE.TG.
How to create a customer service chatbot with LIKE.TG?
Many services help you create and manage chatbots, and LIKE.TG is one of them. Indeed, the platform has all the necessary marketing tools to streamline customer service processes and improve efficiency.
In this section, we’ll unveil the process of designing a customer support chatbot with LIKE.TG in detail so you can use it as a guide. Creating a bot in the service is simple, so no coding skills or special knowledge are required. The intuitive interface will guide you through the process without the involvement of specialists.
We’ll combine the tips and best practices to build a Telegram chatbot and ensure seamless customer service for your clients. Let’s start with the first step.
Step 1. Connect your Telegram chatbot
Register in LIKE.TG or log in to your existing account. Go to the “Chatbots” tab and click the “Manage bots” button. Your next move implies creating and connecting your Telegram bot. Make a new bot using @BotFather and connect it to LIKE.TG with a token. Once you finish this process, start building your chatbot flow.
Check out the detailed instructions to easily create a Telegram chatbot in LIKE.TG. You can do the same for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Step 2. Add triggers
Create triggers for your customer service chatbot. Think of the words that should trigger the flow and add them to your chatbot. When users type these words, they will launch the flow, starting with a welcome message.
Step 3. Add a welcome message
Imagine you are going to create a customer support chatbot for your business. You need to start creating your flow with a welcome message — this is where you’ll include your FAQ buttons and quick replies.
Below, you can see an example of a welcome message for your business with quick buttons like “Product Catalog,” “Pricing,” “Blog,” “Knowledge Base,” “Other,” etc.
We have two parts of our customer service bot welcome message. They have some quick replies leading to some basic and specific issues. You need to add and connect the “Flow” element to ensure that once users click one of the buttons, the flow will continue correctly.
Step 4. Add various elements to your flow
Drag and drop all the necessary elements for your flow from the left panel to your editor’s field. It will help you diversify your chatbot and provide users with all the information and steps.
Below, you can see an example with the “Action” element that allows users to connect with your human support agents if users need some specific help chatbots can’t provide.
Consider expanding your chatbot flow with images, GIFs, audio recordings, and other files. It’ll help make your bot more engaging. Check out these instructions for a more detailed guide to building a chatbot.
Hope that LIKE.TG and this guide will help you create an outstanding chatbot that helps address customers’ concerns fast. Let’s check out some great chatbot examples to grab some inspiration for future help desk achievements.
3 Customer Service Chatbots
Today, lots of companies implement customer service chatbots for multiple purposes. We’ll provide you with three excellent examples of chatbots that work and bring positive results for businesses and seamless experiences for customers. Let’s check them out.
AirAsia — Flight Reschedule Refund
Malaysian multinational low-cost airline AirAsia has a great chatbot for customer support. The bot manages multiple tasks and helps solve problems regarding flight changes, double payments, name amendments, flight refunds, flight status, flight delays, and others. Bo bot ensures that customers have all the necessary information provided. The chatbot helps instantly manage refunds, reschedules, and other changes to their AirAsia flights. It also sends all the necessary links for customers to access.
Paula’s Choice — Order Status
A well-known skincare brand incorporates a chatbot to help customers with order status, return policy, and product recommendations. The bot is straightforward to use. A user needs to choose one of the fast buttons to receive information about specific matters. If you want to check your order status, the bot will ask you for your order number and email to track the progress of your order, making the conversation personalized. Sharing information with customers only takes minutes.
HM — Survey
HM’s chatbot helps gather customer feedback. After interacting with its chatbot, users can provide information about their experience with a brand. This way, the company strives to improve various areas of its business, including customer support.
Congrats, now you know what a customer support chatbot is and why it’s important. We hope that our best practices and LIKE.TG will help you create a helpful bot for your business and customers. Register in LIKE.TG now to develop your perfect customer support chatbot in minutes.
Demand analysis
Demand analysis is the research conducted by companies that aim at understanding customer demand for a certain product. Businesses generally use it to determine whether they can successfully enter the market and obtain the expected profit. During this process, the management decides on cost allocation, production, advertising, pricing, etc.
A new firm can easily figure out if there's a significant demand for the product they offer and receive information about the number of competitors, the growth of the industry, etc. Demand analysis techniques allow entrepreneurs to determine the main business areas with the highest demand.
Low demand for a specific product indicates that it does not fulfill customers' needs and perhaps has little value for them. Some of the causes of low demand include the incompatibility of products with the market, poor digital marketing, competitors that offer better alternatives, etc.
Why is demand analysis important?
A company's success or failure depends on the ability to identify and satisfy customers' needs. In today'smarket, every business needs to understand consumer behavior and hold inventory accordingly. Demand analysis brings many insights essential for the decision-making process. After conducting research, companies obtain knowledge crucial for sales forecasting, product pricing, costs on marketing and advertising, financial decisions, and production.
Let's take financial decisions, for example. The demand for a product affects the financial decisions of a specific company. Suppose there's a high demand for a firm's product, and it's constantly growing. In that case, it requires additional costs on the production of more products and quality improvement, advertising to reach more customers, and boosting the marketing team's capabilities.
The pricing policy of a company also depends on consumer demand. Understanding the trend of customer demand helps businesses decide whether to increase or decrease the price of their product.
If you aim to understand your leads and customers and succeed in your industry, demand analysis should be an integral part of your business. We've already revealed the importance of this process, so now let's take a look at its objectives.
Objectives of Demand Analysis
Evaluating customers' response towards a product
Formulating a pricing policy
Sales forecasting
Establishing a production policy
Any business can fail when they don't fulfill consumer demand. Hence, some of the decisions a company makes can be at risk. If your company aims to eliminate this possibility, you can use demand analysis to determine customer demand for a particular product. This process has several objectives.
Evaluating customers' response towards a product.Gaining and monitoring customer feedback is vital if your goal is to see customers' reactions to your new product. This is a great way to find out whether consumers are satisfied with your goods or if there's still something you can improve.
Formulating a pricing policy. You can set the prices after having analyzed the demand thoroughly. Understanding the trend of consumer demand allows you to quickly decide whether to increase or decrease the price for a particular product. Remember, companies can't set prices without understanding the inclinations of their target audience.
Sales forecasting. It enables you to make informed business decisions and predict your company's performance. With a detailed analysis, you can estimate your future sales. Sales forecasting can give you insights and tips on managing your firm's cash flow, resources, and workforce. Besides the proper allocation of resources, it helps you predict sales revenue.
Establishing a production policy. It enables you to define the gap between demand and supply. You can estimate the necessary number of raw materials to maintain the regular supply. Besides, your company can utilize resources to the maximum if your operations are based on forecasts.
Now that you know that demand analysis can bring a lot of valuable data for your business success, let's review how to perform demand analysis.
How to Do Demand Analysis
Identify the market
Assess the business cycle
Create a product that meets a particular niche
Define your advantage
Determine your competitors
To define whether a company can easily enter the market and obtain the expected profits, businesses use demand analysis that helps understand the customer’s need for a product or service. There are five steps to consider.
Identify the market. The first thing you should do is to identify the market you would like to target with your new goods. For this purpose, firms conduct market surveys to receive feedback from customers about the product and understand the level of customersatisfaction. If clients demonstrate dissatisfaction with it, companies try to develop a product so that it meets the customer demand.
Assess the business cycle. Once a market is defined, you can proceed to evaluating the stage of the business cycle. It has three stages. In the first, emerging stage, there’s high customer demand and a low supply of goods. In the second, plateau stage, the supply of products meets the market demand. In the third, declining stage, the demand for the products is lagging.
Create a product that meets a particular niche. You need to create a product that suits a certain niche within the market. Develop your products so that they can meet the needs of your consumers. Also, customers should be able to distinguish your goods from competitors’ alternatives.
Define your advantage. Developing products that can resolve customers’ problems allows you to create a sense of usefulness and increase demand. Let’s take iPods or iPhones, for example. These products increased the demand by entering the personal electronics market because they were perceived by customers as useful products.
Determine your competitors. Define the number of your competitors and their market share. It depends on the stage of the business cycle you’re in. For example, in the emerging stage, you’ll have fewer competitors which will allow you to obtain a higher profit margin.
To sum it up, demand analysis is an essential step before making any business decisions. Companies should understand consumer behavior that defines the demand for a specific product within the market.
Delivery errors
Delivery errors are the reasons that your email campaign wasnot delivered. To investigate errors, you can view the statistics report.
Common Errors withEmail Campaign Delivery
"Temporarily unavailable" means that the sending failed because the recipient’s email server was unavailable or rejected the message.
"Address doesn’t exist" means that the email address is not on the domain. This error happens because users may have mistakenly entered the wrong email address on the subscription form. That is why it’s best to use a double-opt-inform of subscription in which the subscriber confirms his or her desire to receive your mailings by clicking the link in the opt-in confirmation email.
"Spam" means that the recipient’s server rejected receiving your email, equating it to be spam.
"Mailbox full" means that the subscriber’s inbox is full and has no way to receive your email. In this case, resending can be done after three days.
"Marked spam by user" means the user marked your letter as spam, and his or her email address will be automatically transferred to the list of consistently unavailable emails.
LIKE.TG offers an Email Verifier tool that helps marketers remove invalid email addresses from their lists and keep an email deliverability rate high. Follow this step-by-step guide to verify your email addresses.
Data-driven marketing
Data-driven marketing is a strategy that requirescollecting customers’data, analyzing the history of their interactions with a company, monitoring their behavior on a site, and tracking previous purchases. This allows brands to create targeted and personalized offers, increase sales, and improve user experience.
In this article, you’ll get to know why data-driven marketing is essential, unveil its benefits, and learn how to implement it.
Why is data-driven marketing important?
Promoting and advertising the same product toyour entire audienceis a thing of the past. People appreciate brands that care about them, know what they like and dislike, and remember their preferences. By putting a customer at the center of your business, you decide to establish long-lasting relationships with your audience.
Implementing data-driven marketingallowsyou to have a clear picture of your ideal buyer. You’ll discover your top-performing strategies, find out why some leadsdrop off, and manage to be at the right time and in the right place with the best offer. No more guessing games. Every marketing effort and campaign will be based onyourdata analysis results.
Torecognize the opportunities data-driven marketing provides, let’s uncover its primary advantages.
Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing
To understand the way data influences yourmarketing efforts’ performance, we’ll compare the process of creatinga campaign to cooking. Both processes are a kind of art in a certain way.
To cook a delicious dessert, you need fresh and high-quality ingredients— they make up 50% of your success. The secondcrucial step is following theingredient proportionguidelines.With marketing,it meanscollecting only the data that matters and ensuring its high quality and reliability.
Now that you know the recipe for an effective data-driven campaign, let’sdiscover which benefits you can reap.
Allocatingyourbudget more effectively. Marketers who try to use more channels and methods to succeed drain their advertising budget pretty quickly. As a result, they don’teven know which investments perform better. When implementing a data-driven marketing strategy, you will use an analytics tool thatcan help you keep a record of your expenditures, so you will see which strategies bring you more money and which are not worth your investments. As a result, youwill be able to distribute your advertising budget more wisely.
Understanding your buyers’ journey. Since data-driven marketingrequires monitoring user behavior on your site and recording all of their interactions with your brand, you will learn which landing pages and calls to action perform better and where your leads get stuck and leave your site forever. By collecting valuable data, you willdiscover your clients’conversion path and act on this data to improve your campaigns.
Analyzing your target audience. Your customers are so different. They live in different countries or even continents. They use different devices and channels to buy your product andtake different steps before they make a purchase. With all this data at hand, you can predict their behavior and create different selling scenarios.
Crafting relevant offers. With the help of marketing and analytics tools, you can divide all users into segments by various criteria. This way, you’ll be able to create targeted messages for each group. You can take into account users’ previous experiences and design acampaignthey will love. Once you create several campaigns this way, you’ll manage toperform this task on autopilot.
Improving user experience.If youdeterminewhy you lose leads and single out the problems they face when using your product, you’ll be able to eliminate all of these issues. As a result, you’ll improve users’ experiencewith your site.
Increasing sales. Collecting customer data enables you to create targeted offers for different audience segments. This way, your marketing campaigns will be more relevant, and you’ll manage to sell more products.
Now that you know how to boostyour sales with data-driven marketing, we’ll share some tips that will help you get started. You’ll also learn how to implement this approachwith LIKE.TG.
Howdo you get started withdata-driven marketing?
Implementing data-driven marketing requireslots of time and dedication and a data analyst in your team. There is no one-fit-all approach since all companies are different, but there’s a standard algorithm. Check it out below.
Setyourgoals. Developing any strategycalls for defining your objectives first. You should understand what you want to achieve, as your goals predetermine the type of data you will collect. For example, if you aim to increase user engagement, you need to collect behavioral data. Mind that your goals should beSMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Gatherdata. We can divide this stage into two steps.First, you need to decidewhich type of data you need and collect it. Everything depends on your goals. If you want to have a clear picture of yourcustomers’ behavioral patternsand create a profile, you needtheir personal information. You can directly ask clients to share it. If you want to increase sales, you need to get more attribution data and define your data sources. They can include website analytics, social media data, transactional information, customer feedback, etc. You can get this data with the help of Google Analytics, inbuilt social media analytics tools, social media monitoring and listeningtools, your contacts’CRM cards, tracking pixels, customer service software, etc.
Process the data. Now that you have some data on hand, you need to manage, organize, store, and analyze it. There are lots of tools that can help youdealwith these tasks. Choosing such a tool might be challenging, sodecide on yourdesirable features and pricing beforehand and see whether you need some learning curve to start using the service. Consider Google Data Studio, Google BigQuery, Kissmetrics, and Stitch. It will be great to choose a tool that can both process your data andprovide reports. Mind that the more data you collect, the more complex your system will be. Your chances of making mistakes get higher, so hiring a data analyst to implement data-driven marketing correctly is an excellent idea.
Use the data. Now that you have collected and processed all the gathered data, it’s time to build a hypothesis and test it. This will require you to test your assumptions regarding a specific parameter. The purpose of this process is to find out if there’s statistical evidence that proves your belief.
Evaluateyourperformance. To evaluate the results, you need to check your dashboards regularly. If your goal is to increase profitability, monitor your conversion rates and ROI. If you aim to increase brand awareness, track brand mentions, discussions, and impressions on social media.
LIKE.TG allows its users to work effectively using the power of data-driven marketing. No matter which service you work with — email, web push, SMS, orchatbot builder—you can collect customer data and store it in the LIKE.TG CRM. Each contact card contains data about your client, the history of their interactions with your company, purchase history, and any other information you add. You can access it anytime and use it to move a lead down the sales funnel. Below you can see what LIKE.TG’s CRM contact cards look like.
You cangather this data automatically via chatbots. Once a user makes an order,gives their phone number, or shares their preferences via a chatbot, this information will be stored in the system. You can also assign tags to segment your customers and provide them with personalized offers.
Congrats, now you know the benefits of data-driven marketing,understand how to get started, and can use this approachwith LIKE.TG. Start increasing user engagement and sales right now!
Dedicated IP address
A dedicated IP is a feature offered by an email service by which you can send out all your mailings from just one specific IP address. In this case, no other users will be sending emails out from this address.
This will have a positive impact on the reputationof your mailings, as well as on the percentage of emails openedand the number of conversions.
This is generally something that mailing list services provide for an additional fee, or it is activated for free at higher rates.
In this video, you'll get to know the benefits of a dedicated IP address.
Deceptive pricing
Deceptive pricing is a method in which traders use deceptive means such as “original”, “former”, or “regular” pricing quotes for the bulk of a season to mislead prospectsand customers into thinking that they’re paying less money for products. The Federal Trade Commission prohibits companies from using such deceptive practices towards consumers.
4 Deceptive Pricing Practices to Avoid
Former price comparison
Drip pricing
Pressure selling
Strikethrough pricing
Nowadays, when market competition is high, brands resort to different methods to attract the attention of customers. This includes various methods of marketing or pricing practices to drive the interest of as many people as possible and thus increase revenue. Many of these methods are against the law and violate consumer rights. Such practices may be subject to enforcement action so it is critical to be aware and avoid them. We’ll consider the most popular practices to avoid when buying products from different brands.
Former Price Comparison
In this case, a retailer offers a bargain on certain items by informing customers that its price is lower than a previous one. The company proves that the product is "discounted" by placing the inflated former price to show the difference.
Drip Pricing
This practice means only a part of a product's price is advertised with the total amount revealed at the end of the purchasing process. Additional costs such as local hotel taxes, booking fees, or resort fees are often not included in the ad or “dripped.”
This deceptive pricing practice is often associated with the hospitality industry: airlines showing the price of a ticket excluding some mandatory fees, hotels not including local taxes, etc.
Pressure Selling
Some companies use emotional manipulation, limited-time offers, and long monologues from sales reps to make people buy products. High pressure can help generate more sales and increase revenue. However, these manipulative steps are illegal and violate customers’ rights.
Strikethrough Pricing
Cross-out or strikethrough prices are presented in the form of pricing comparison to attract the attention of consumers. Saving is made in comparison to the manufacturer’s recommended retail price. Companies use strikethrough pricing to win more customers since they see a tangible reduction in price.
There are many types of pricing practices that mislead customers into thinking that they obtain items for a lower cost. We've mentioned the most popular that you can see in everyday life. Now let’s find out how to fight these deceptive actions.
How to fight deceptive pricing
Sometimes you may overpay because of the deceptive pricing practices used by some retailers use. However, fighting back can feel impossible since these actions are hard to prove. As soon as you notice that some of the retailers are breaking the FTC rules, you can take several measures.
Collect evidence. The first thing you need to do is to collect all sorts of evidence that indicate there was price deception. It may be anything that can prove the deception by the seller: advertising in a newspaper or magazine, a TV commercial, post on social media, etc. You need to get a recording, screenshot, or an article in the newspaper that supports your claim.
Submit a complaint. As an option, you can file a complaint to the FTC, an independent agency responsible for consumer protection. You can submit it online by following the instructions or reach an agent by phone. Yet there is no guarantee that this organization will investigate your case and return your money if you’ve overpaid.
Ask for a refund. If a company acted unfairly towards you, as a consumer you have the right to ask for a refund. Firstly, contact customer service by using live chat, email, or calling them. Explain the situation and ask them to resolve it. If they don’t react to your complaints, you can also use social media to prevent other people from getting into the same situation. Many retailers avoid this scenario as it may damage their reputation. So they will help you with your problem quickly.
Now that you know how to fight deceptive pricing and defend your consumer rights, let’s proceed to the examples.
Deceptive Pricing Examples
Many cases demonstrate brands misleading customers into believing that they’re buying products at a discount. The price may remain the same or even increase. This can happen due to a price increase before a discount or additional mandatory payments. So let’s consider several examples where deceptive pricing occurred.
Hospitality industry
This industry is often associated with drip pricing. Airlines may show discounted ticket prices but exclude baggage fees, seat selection fees, taxes, and other costs required to travel. Hotels show the prices on rooms without including local taxes or resort fees.
May DF department store
In 1989, the Colorado Attorney General's office accused a unit of the May Department Stores of practicing deceptive advertising in its home department. Since 1986 May had used exaggerated former prices as a basis for comparison against prices after a discount.
Since deceptive pricing practices arise quite often, you need to be able to identify and unravel them. Consider the three steps above to protect your rights and fight deceptive pricing.
Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is a shopping event that usually lasts for 24 hours and is created to encourage customers to shop online. It falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Customers can purchase the necessary products with great discounts, get special offers, and receive bonuses and gifts online.
In this article, we’ll discuss the history of Cyber Monday and make the difference between Cyber Monday and Black Friday clear. Next, we’ll review seven great ideas and examples of successful Cyber Monday campaigns.
The History of Cyber Monday
The term first appeared in 2005 and was used by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation. It highlighted that, for several years in a row, online purchases reached their peaks on the first Monday after the famous US holiday, Thanksgiving. The organization had two main theories that explain this phenomenon.
According to the first theory, customers search for products in retail stores and malls on weekends to buy them online later. Since people didn’t have access to smartphones, tablets, and high-speed internet in those days, they had to wait for the beginning of their working week to use office computers toshop online.
Another theory suggested that the phenomenon occurred due to the unpleasant experiences people had during the weekends after Thanksgiving when everybody wanted to grab a huge discount and the best deals. Cyber Monday was an alternative to the general chaos happening on Friday and the upcoming weekends. Itprovided an opportunity to avoid long queues to get some goods at a discount and purchase useful items via the internet while sipping a cup of coffee.
Now that you know the history of this busy shopping day, let’s move to the next section to make the difference between Cyber Monday and Black Friday clear.
Cyber Monday vs. Black Friday
Cyber Monday usually lasts 24 hours and falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. It offers huge discounts, great deals, andpromo codes to encourage people to buy online.
Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days in the US and is conducted on the day after Thanksgiving. On this day, retailers provide customers with huge discounts, best deals, bonuses, gifts, and promo codes to encourage people to purchase both in stores and online.
In a nutshell, the main difference between Cyber Monday and Black Friday is in their dates and the fact that customers can find appropriate items online and in stores on Black Friday, whereas Cyber Monday welcomes online shopping only.
Let’s grab some great ideas for your Cyber Monday campaign.
7Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas
Run a campaign on social media
Make use of email marketing
Improve your website
Invest in paid advertising
Send SMS campaigns
Ensure you have enough stock to meet the demand
Team up with another company
Companies come up with many unique ideas to surprise their customers and provide them with the best online shopping experience at the same time. We’ve prepared the best of them to satisfy customers and lure them into coming back soon.
Run a campaign on social media
Since the majority of people prefer to scroll feed on social media to find out about sales, best deals, discounts, gifts, and bonuses, there’s a point in running campaigns across the most popular platforms of communication. You can also leverage influencer marketing and ask opinion leaders for help.
Let’s take Karen Millen, for example. The brand of women’s apparel promoted its sale in an Instagram postand mentioned a 70% discount to let followers use it and buy goods at low prices.
Make use of email marketing
4.03 billionusers worldwide make email marketing the most popular and reliable channel. Brands have been using email campaigns to inform subscribers about great sales for years. Don’t miss your chance to leverage the most effective marketing channel to reach your customers and increase sales on this year’s Cyber Monday.
For example, Steve Madden used an email newsletterto popularize the brand’sCyber Monday campaign and provide customers with more detailsabout its 40% discount and promo code.
With LIKE.TG, you can send Cyber Monday email campaigns to your customer base for free. Make use of our ready-to-usefree email templates or design your own from scratch by using our drag-and-drop editor, and update customers on your Cyber Monday sale on time.
Check out our article to learnhow to create email campaigns with our service.
Improve your website
When people come to your site to shop from different channels, you should be ready with several things:
make sure that your website is responsive to let customers purchase from smartphones and tablets;
test and optimize your website speed so that visitors can load your website in two seconds;
check if your website is ready to handle high traffic to avoid any errors emerging on users’ screens.
Invest in paid advertising
Paid ads bring a lot of benefits to your business. They target specificaudience segments, broadcast your Cyber Monday sale through the most popular mediums, increase website traffic, and bring measurable results. Many brands successfully implement paid advertising and obtain significant changes in Cyber Monday campaigns’ performance.
Send SMS campaigns
Although SMSmight sound old school, they are effective. According to TechJury, SMS campaigns’open rateis 98%. Moreover, 60% of clients read these short text messages within 1-5 minutes after receiving them. That’s why you should think of sending SMS campaigns to your customers.
LIKE.TGallows you to create and send SMS campaigns toyour customers within minutes. Add sender name,enter yourtext, add the list of recipients, and set up SMS send-out.
Check out our article to learn how to create SMS messages step-by-step.
Ensure you have enough stock to meet the demand
If you want to increase customer satisfaction with your brand and provide a seamless experience, make sure you have enough inventory to meet the demand of many consumers. Bear in mind that there might be more shoppers than you expect. Get ready to meet the demand and make your clients happy.
Team up with another company
Consider partnering with another company to get extra exposure and reach more followers. If a brand is popular and has a lot of subscribers, it will help you promote your business and your Cyber Monday deals.
For instance, Bliss, a famous brand that focuses on producing skincare products, offered its subscribers a 30% discount on its products if they buy online from another brand, Ulta Beauty.
Let’s see how these Cyber Monday ideas work in real life.
Examples of Successful Cyber Monday Campaigns
We see hundreds of effective campaigns that drive organic traffic, boost sales and revenue, reach new consumers, and prosper every year. Now let’s take a look at some of these campaigns.
Ulta Beauty
The chain of beauty stores that provides its clients with skincare, fragrances, and cosmeticspopularized its upcoming sale on the most popular marketing channels, including Instagram. Customers can find a link in Ulta Beauty’s bio to shop its products online.
Udemy
The famous American online course company uses an effective way to distribute information about its Cyber Monday — with an email campaign. Since this online shopping day usually lasts only 24 hours, itmotivatescustomers to hurry up and grab an attractive offer. That’s why Udemy used a countdown timer to draw the attention of subscribers and evoke the fear of missing out.
If you are interested in tools that help create a countdown timerfor your campaign, check out our article.
To conclude, Cyber Monday is one of the busiest online shopping events and the most appropriate time to grow your business, increasing yoursales volume and revenues. Get ready for the next Cyber Monday with our best ideas!
Customer support automation
Customer support automation is the process of replacing human customer support agents with technology. It implies no human intervention when managing customer inquiries. Rule-based chatbots, email automation, knowledge base, and ticketing system help reduce the workload on the company’s customer support team, increase customer satisfaction, provide instant answers 24/7, and generate more leads.
In the video below, Alex explains how to automate customer support using chatbots. Check it out!
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of customer support automation and tasks that should be automated. We’ll also explain how to automate customer service.
Why is it important to automate customer support?
By automating customer support, you increase the productivity of your customer support agents. With instruments like chatbots and bulk email services, you can reduce human intervention in communication with clients and their workload. Artificial intelligence takes care of customer questions and troubleshooting issues.
According to statistics, marketing automation enables companies to boost lead generation by 80%. ¾ of businesses succeeded in increasing conversions. As you can see, marketing automation instruments like email marketing solutions, chatbots, and CRM enable brands to reach multiple business goals. The same thing happens when you implement customer support automation. Prospects and clients have your support 24/7 and instant answers. Clients are happy with your company and service.
With automation, you can provide a seamless customer experience without spending much money. You also save time and effort for your customer service team. They can prioritize more important tasks and ensure that all serious issues with the product are solved. The response time of your customer support team improves, and clients are satisfied with your brand.
Useful tools such as chatbots unlock the ability of your team to provide instant answers through multiple channels. You can set up chatbots for messengers and social media platforms you use most often. Among them are WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram.
If leads are satisfied with the instant answers of your customer support automation, they can convert into customers. So, this technology also serves you as a lead generation tool that improves the conversions and revenue of your company.
Now that you know why it’s essential to incorporate customer support automation, it’s time to explore the benefits in more detail. They will help you decide whether your business needs innovative methods for your customer service.
Benefits of Automating Customer Support
Customer support automation can bring many advantages to your business. In this section, we’ll uncover them so you can know which areas of your customer support you can improve with this technology.
Reduced workload on your customer support team. First, customer support automation helps your team avoid answering repetitive questions and reduce the workload. With this tool, customer service agents can focus on urgent tasks that chatbots can’t solve. Chatbots allow your company to deliver real-time support instantly, provide all the necessary information, and be online 24/7. You don’t need to waste your customer support agents’ time answering basic questions about pricing, features, and how-to guides. Customer support agents can focus on customer cases that require human intervention. When your company expands, you won’t need to hire new customer support agents to manage many basic inquiries. Chatbots can do this for you.
Higher customer satisfaction. If you want happy customers and conversions, there’s no way to let users wait for hours for your customer support agent to answer. To increase customer satisfaction, you need to provide instant answers. Chatbots can do it for you 24/7 on weekdays and weekends. Since potential customers can have questions any time of the day, your company needs to be online. If you manage to do it with chatbots, you can boost satisfaction with your brand.
Improved response time. When your customer support agents are not supported with technology, it can be difficult for them to manage all inquiries. When all the agents are busy with urgent tasks, there’s nobody left to answer the generic questions. It can make prospects wait for hours. To prevent such scenarios, you can incorporate chatbots. With their help, users will receive all the information they need quickly. As a result, the response time improves. Customer support agents continue working on complex customer cases while the AI chatbot answers FAQs.
Omnichannel support. Automation can be applied to several channels. As a result, you can provide your customers with omnichannel support. You can automate communication on your website, messengers, and social media. The choice depends on the communication channels your target audience prefers the most. Your chatbot can handle direct messages on Instagram and messages on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram. This way, you help your customer support team and clients. Consumers can use the channels they are used to and receive information, whatever is convenient. As a result, prospects and clients have excellent customer experience with your brand.
Fast feedback collection. Chatbots and email campaigns can be perfect tools for gathering customer reviews and feedback after interacting with your company or product. Your agents don’t need to spend time on calls to get the information. Just send them automated messages through chatbots or emails.
Reduced costs on customer support. Customer support automation enables your company to reduce costs on salaries for customer support agents. With chatbots, you don’t need to hire new specialists to answer repetitive tasks. That’s how your costs can decrease. Moreover, chatbots help encourage more conversions. Proactive bots contact prospects at specific touchpoints of their buyer journeys and provide help. They don’t wait for leads to ask for assistance. This way, the possibility of conversion increases. Even more, AI chatbots can identify users who are more likely to make a purchase. It usually happens after the bot analyzes shopping behavior and questions. The bot can detect a high shopping intent and provide all the necessary materials like product catalogs, specific product information, and personalized assistance.
Now that you know the benefits, it’s time to find out where to apply this technology. We’ll uncover some excellent ideas in the next section.
What customer service tasks should be automated?
In this section, we’ll provide some ideas of tasks that can be automated in your customer service. Let’s dive in.
Routine inquiries. With chatbots and virtual assistants, you can easily manage FAQs without human intervention. Users receive instant and accurate answers to their queries, and customer support agents focus on more complex tasks. Bots can manage questions about product features, pricing, installment, etc.
Appointment scheduling. Customer support automation enables you to make appointments on autopilot. Customers can contact you through WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger and make appointments and reservations through the chatbot. With the bot’s help, you can also schedule service calls online without the involvement of customer support agents.
Order status updates. By incorporating automated systems, you can ensure that your customers will be updated on their order status, shipping notifications, and delivery estimates. Setting up triggers will deliver the notifications to customers once the order's status changes in the system.
Password resets. Technology allows customers to reset their passwords without human help. Whether customers forget their password or just want to change it, they can do it freely through the chatbot or email. The bot will guide them through the password reset process. This way, clients don’t need to wait for customer support agents to join the chat.
Payment processing. You can set up your chatbot to receive payments. This way, you can automate common transactions, billing inquiries, and payment reminders. When transactions are successful, customers will receive payment receipts.
Knowledge base access. The chatbot enables you to connect your knowledge base so that users can search for the necessary information by themselves. The search feature will help them find all the materials to make positive customer decisions.
Feedback collection. After interacting with users or after they perform purchases, send clients automated surveys or feedback forms. It will help you figure out whether customers are happy with your product or service. They can share their opinion about your customer support, product features, or delivery. As a result, you’ll be able to assess the quality of your service or product.
Email responses. Email marketing platforms help you send automated emails after your company accepts payment, sends a product, or asks for feedback. This way, you acknowledge that the payment was received or the product was sent.
Issue routing. You can use automated platforms to assign different inquiries to appropriate company departments on autopilot. The system will analyze the nature of the inquiry and route it to the agent responsible for this task.
Returns and refunds. Chatbots can handle returns and refunds without your customer support agents’ involvement. It makes the process so much easier for your team and customers. Clients can initiate returns online without long calls and unanswered emails. Once their inquiry is approved, they will receive automated updates on the status of their request.
Social media engagement. With social media monitoring tools, your team can automatically react to customers’ feedback, reviews, and comments on your posts. Send automated responses to users’ comments to acknowledge that you hear what they say and value their feedback. Handle complaints on Facebook and Instagram with bots to provide instant responses and show that you care.
Analytics and reporting. Automatically gather information about customer service (call center metrics, customer satisfaction scores, and performance analytics). This way, you’ll be able to identify gaps and find areas for improvement of your services.
Now that you know where to apply the technology, let’s learn how you can automate customer service.
How to automate customer service?
Automating customer service involves incorporating technology to manage repetitive tasks without human intervention. Here’s a short guide on how to improve your customer support and increase satisfaction.
1. Determine areas of need
The first thing you should do is to focus on the areas of your business that need automation. Maybe your business is growing, and the number of customers has increased, so you have to automate communication with clients on WhatsApp. Some companies might need to automate their email campaigns because it’s the most preferred channel for communication with the target audience. Think of the areas where automation can bring real change.
Analyze which channels your audience prefers the most. You might need automation for these messengers or social media platforms. Remember that omnichannel support is always needed. You can set up chatbots for multiple channels to make sure that clients feel comfortable contacting your customer support. Focus on customers’ preferences to provide the best experience with your customer service and company in general. You should select the right platform to bring all your ideas to life.
2. Choose the appropriate platform
Once you figure out what kind of automation you need, it’s time to select the platform that covers all the features. When choosing software, pay attention to details like your budget and pricing, features, and automation you need. All these factors will influence your buying decision. If you want to automate several channels, select an omnichannel platform. This way, you’ll be able to avoid unnecessary spending. LIKE.TG is a multichannel software that empowers you to automate communication in messengers and social media. You can send automated email campaigns and manage inquiries in its built-inCRM. The service lets you set up chatbots for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. It makes it so much easier for you to handle repetitive questions and some basic inquiries.
Below is an example of a chatbot that updates customers when an order is sent.
With customer support automation, you can drastically increase the quality of your customer support, improve response time, and ensure support 24/7. As a result, higher satisfaction with your brand and more happy customers. Hope that our ideas will help you figure out how to incorporate automation into your business. Register with LIKE.TG to enjoy the benefits of automation for free.
References:
This article defines the term and unveils the pros and examples of customer support automation.
In this article, you’ll find how automation helps your customer support team.
Database marketing
Database marketing – isa type of direct marketing, focused on personalization, based on using personal information about subscribers. A database is not the mailing listyou have.
A database is an information stored about consumers and leads. It is the representation of relationship history between the company and a consumer. The main purpose of this information is to be relevantly used while doing business. This is a tool, with the help of which you can establish and develop your relationships with the clients.
What should a database contain?
Since it is a representation of relationship history, the database should contain essential details during all the history. There are to be answers to such questions as What? Who? Where? When? How often? How many? A client, having worked with your company for a while, expects you to remember him and your relationships.
Traditionally, databases keep information about places where the products were bought, who bought them, prices and sales dates. Now, such information is just the initial step, which is to be carried out for effective relationship management with the consumers.
Database Information
Sales history
Feedback
Relationships between members of the database
Marketing communications
Clients’ calls to the technical support and the results
Demographic characteristics
Other additional data
Marketers think that a good database allows you to determine a targeted segment more precisely than a traditional segmentation. Databases help companies to hold buyers’ attention to their offers, developing different methods of stimulation and encouragement basing on the analysis of consumers’ individual needs and preferences.
A database allows you to develop a marketing strategy based on the differences among the consumers.
Brand experience
Brand differentiation is an essential aspect of a brand marketing strategy. It enables companies to reveal their profitable qualities that help develop a unique selling proposition. This way, they understand their competitive advantage and stand out among competitors.
Why is brand differentiation important?
Customers don’t value brands that sell the same items and don’t provide them with new solutions. It makes them believe that these companies are easily interchangeable. This can cause a price war among brands because the only thing left to compete for is the price. As a result, undercutting your competitors’ prices leads to lower net profit.
Companies need their brands to stand out to avoid predatory pricing. This strategy provides them with both short-term and long-term goals. The main one is to find your competitive advantage — a unique offer that your business opponents don’t have. It will help boost your market share in the long term. As a result, you’ll increase your targeted audience, sales volume, and revenue.
In addition, a clear and valuable unique selling proposition will help you build an army of loyal clients who love your brand not only for your product but for the positive user experience and values you share. Hence, it’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your potential clients to reveal their problems, wants, and needs. This way, you’ll create a successful brand differentiation strategy.
Let’s find out how to create one for your business.
5Brand Differentiation Strategies
Become an innovator
Choose a winning pricing strategy
Solve clients’ unique problems
Appeal to emotions
Deliver unique customer support
In this section, we’ll share some ideas that will help you differentiate your company from competitors.
Become an innovator. This method is a surefire way to stand out. You can either create a product that people have never seen before or optimize and improve an existing one. For this purpose, you need to carry out research to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc. Brands that bring innovations to the market are the most successful, remarkable, and trusted.
Choose a winning pricing strategy. You can make your brand stand out eitherwiththe lowest price for a high-quality product, which will make you a leader in the mass market, or you can become a premium brand charging more for a better experience like Starbucks does.
Solve clients’ unique problems. You may successfully occupy a concentrated niche offering an exceptional quality that your competitors don’t provide. Today custom T-shirt design or sewing lingerie according to personal measurements is not surprising, but someoneoncecame up with this idea. Hence, you can also create a better product.
Appeal to emotions. People will definitely remember such a brand and come back for an extra dose of dopamine. These brands sell not products but experiences customers have after buying them. Coca-Cola is associated with joy, happiness, and holiday; Nike motivates people to take action with their “Just do it”; Apple makes its clients feel like they belong to something huge by selling products that have their own ecosystem.
Deliver unique customer support. While taking care of a prospectbefore the purchase is mundane, do your best to support your client after the sale. You can offer a prolonged guarantee or any special and personalized services depending on your product type. Customers appreciate brands that care about them after they’ve paid.
Congrats, now you know why brand differentiation matters, can use its benefits, and have five effective strategies at hand.
