Customer acquisition cost is the amount of money you spend to attract each new customer. This metric demonstrates how successful your business model is. In this article, we will discuss the difference between CAC and lifetime value, explainhow to calculate CAC, andprovidefour tips to reduce it. Why is customer acquisition cost important? CAC isthe money spent on marketing and salaries. You can build a marketing strategy, monitor your marketing channels’ effectiveness, and optimize costs without losing customers if you track this metric. Customer acquisition cost is frequently compared with lifetime value (LTV) and is particularly important for SaaScompanies.Here are three more reasons why you should keep an eye on your CAC: It helps optimize the LTV/CAC ratio.Try todo cost optimization regularly. As a guideline, you can aim for a 3:1 ratio. This means that for every dollar spent, you earn $3, which is quite good for anybusiness. You can define and optimize the payback period. If you have just started your business, CAC will give you an idea of ​​how long the paybackperiodcan take. This is especially true for companies that practice the freemium model. CAC shows yourfuturebusiness health. If you want to know what amount of profit you will receive, add upyour CAC for previous months, and subtract the projected revenue. It is vital to understand the difference between CAC and cost per action (CPA). CAC measures the cost of attracting a customer, while CPAreflectsthe cost of a specific action a user performs. For example, if you watch YouTube for free, you are measured using CPA. If you have bought a YouTube Premium subscription, you are measured using CAC. Read onto discover more about the average CAC in different spheres. Average Customer Acquisition Cost The problem with CAC is that some companies calculate their ‘blended’ costs and include the number of customers acquired without taking the funds they invested in marketing into account. However, there are different types of CAC you need to differentiate between: Organic CAC includes the total number of new customers acquired across all channels. Inorganic CAC includes only new customers acquired through paid marketing. Take a look at the table below to discover the average CAC in different industries. We can see that CAC varies for different spheres. Both average organic and inorganic CAC are the highest in the education industry. This means that acquiring newuniversity and college students is the most expensive. Thelowestorganic and inorganic CAC arein consumer eCommerce and retail. Keep in mind that you should not concentrate on your industry’s average CAC. Your companycanreduce customer acquisition costs using some tips we will describe in one of the next sections. There isanother important metric connected with CAC — the LTV/CAC ratio. Let’s find out the difference between the customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. Customer Acquisition Cost vs. Customer Lifetime Value Customer acquisition cost is related to customer lifetime value. LTVreflects how much money you earn from one customer, and CACmeasures how much you invested in attracting them. In other words, the rise of LTV means that your profit is increasing,while therise of CACindicates that it’s decreasing. Tracking these metrics ison the to-do list ofevery successful business owner. We will explain how to calculate CAC in the next section, but now let’s discuss therole of the LTV/CAC ratio. 1:1. Such a model is not viablebecause the company losesthe profit it gained with every acquisition. 2:1. This means that your business earns twice more money than the amount you spend on customer acquisition. You make very little profit. 3:1. You earn 3$ for each 1$ spent on acquiring new customers, which is agood result but not the best one. More than 3:1. Great result! Continue working to maintain this value. The high LTV/CAC ratio is the basis of many successful SaaS projects. Note that you need to calculate both metrics regularly andfor the same period. It’s time to discover how to calculate CAC. How to CalculateYour Customer Acquisition Cost Reducing CAC is one of the ways to earn more from your business. To do it, you need to know how much you spend on customer acquisition. Now let’s have a look at the waysto calculate CAC. There are two methods: basic and complex. The basic formula shows an approximate CAC, as it doesn’t include a lot of expenses. The complex formula includes overhead costs, such as using professional services, sales and marketing wages, software costs, and other coststhat are not incurred in marketing. Use a complex method to get a more exact result anddraw informedconclusions. Basic formula This formula allows you todeterminethe approximate customer acquisition cost for a certain period of time. You cancalculate the total marketing cost for acquiring new customers (MCC) and the total number of customers acquired (CA) — divide the first number by the second one. CAC = MCC / CA For example, you have spent 3000$ (MCC) on marketing for the last three months and acquired 100 customers (CA). So, your CAC for the last three months is 30$ (3000/100). However, you spent much more on customer acquisition than you invested in your ad campaign budget.You cannot ignore the salaries of your employees, premium subscriptions they need to use, and other expenses. These spendings often significantly affect the real CAC. It is reasonable to calculate CAC for each channel. Different channels require different expenses, and they can give different profits. To takethis into account, you need to use a complex formula. Complex formula To calculate CAC, add MCC, wages connected with sales and marketing (W), marketing and sales associated software cost (S), professional services (PS), and other overheads (O), and then divide the result by CA. Don’t forget that you should use all metrics from the same period. CAC = (MCC + W + S + PS + O) / CA Let’s look atan example. You still have spent 3000$ on marketing (MCC), but you have also spent 200$ on wages connected with sales and marketing (W), 100$ on marketing and sales associated software cost (S), 300$ on professional services (PS), and 100$ on other overheads (O). Your company has acquired 100 customers, so your CAC is 37$ (3700/100). Calculate CAC for different channels, and compare the results. You’ll see where you spend less money on acquiring one customer andwill be able to make changes to your marketing strategy. If you think that yourcompany’scustomer acquisition cost is too high, there are effective ways to reduce it and earn more from your business. 4 Tips to Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost At some point, everybusiness owner considers reducing CAC as a way to increase profits. Follow our tips if your goal is to make acquisition costs lower without losing the number of customers. Optimize your sales funnel. Quantify each step of the sales process, analyze the buyer journey, and pay attention to each step. Find the problems and difficulties customers faceto solve them, and test different strategies. YourCAC may grow at first, but you willgradually determine which customer acquisition methods work for you and focus on them. Build loyalty. Loyaltyis a measure of a customer’s likelihood to buy from a company or brand again. It is a wayof improving both CAC and LTV. Segment your clients, encourage customers to give feedback, and act on it to build customer loyalty. People should feel that customer care is a priority for the brand.Check out our article about customer loyaltyto get more tips. Improve your marketing channels’ effectiveness. If you calculate CAC for every channel, youshould concentrate on more effective ones. You need to know your audience, provide quality, write eye-catching titles, and proofread and optimize your content. Remember that content marketing is the way to encourage people to buy as fast as possible. Use CRM marketing. CRM marketing helps you analyze, manage and improve customer relationships. To succeed in it, choose the right CRM system, qualify and segment your customers, use a customer-centric approach, and support clients at each stage of the buyer journey. CRM implementation lets you optimize the sales funnel and reduce CAC. Congrats, now you knowmore about CAC and the difference betweenthis measure and LTV. You also have all the information necessary to calculate this metric and reduce it. Use your knowledge to earn more from your business.

Customer data platform (CDP) is a software aimed at collecting data about the users from multiple tools, centralizing it in one database, and making it available to other systems in real-time. Companies can use information gathered by CDP to create accurate portraits of the customers and improve their marketing and sales strategies. In the article, we explain what a customer data platform is, highlight its benefits and compare CDP with customer relationship management (CRM). We also provide the top 5 platforms to collect customer data. Benefits of Customer Data Platform According to CDP, 81% of users prefer brands that use AI to personalize recommendations. These statistics show how important customer data platforms are to attract more clients and boost companies on the market. It creates holistic images of your customers. CDP allows companies to gain more insight into their clients and use this information to plan their future actions. Understanding the behavior of each separate consumer enables you to increase personalization and improve the customer journey. You can use customer data in product management, marketing, sales, service, and other business departments. It saves your employees time. According to Forbes, companies that use data-driven marketing have a competitive advantage and are six times more likely to increase profits. Such impressive statistics motivate many businesses to gain information about their clients. However, it requires lots of time and effort to collect the data, and organize and analyze it. CDP allows brands to automate this process, making it more accurate and productive. It lets marketers segment their clients. Segmentation of the target audience allows companies to increase the efficiency of their marketing campaigns and attract more clients. CDP can segment consumers based on any actions, create a few groups and even predict their future behavior. It will help you develop more personalized offers and avoid communicating irrelevant marketing messages. It helps to improve customer service and provide a better experience. Consumers may be annoyed by your recurring advertisements or dissatisfied when they have to explain their problem a few times to different managers. Using a customer data platform helps avoid such situations and makes your communication with consumers more effective. It will reduce the churn rate and decrease cases of brand switching. It allows users from different tools to access the data. It is a very useful option when your staff works remotely. It increases the rate of the company’s flexibility and effectiveness. Also, it will save your employees' time because they will not need to ask each other for certain information about the customers anytime they need it. Now you know why CDP is a useful tool to make your business more effective. Let’s go further and discover the difference between customer data platforms and customer relationship management. CDP vs CRM Some business owners do not understand why it is necessary to use CRM and CDP in their companies. However, combining these two software platforms can significantly improve your business processes. In this section, we explain the difference between CRM and CDP and provide some tips on how to combine them effectively. CDP is software that automatically collects data about your consumers’ behavior from different platforms. It gathers both online and offline data, analyzes it, and provides analytics using AI. Data platform creates unified consumer profiles influenced by consumer behavior during the customer journey. Also, it can account for information about anonymous users on your media platforms. CDP helps staff handle the data about consumers’ steps to optimize all processes in the company. On the other hand, CRM allows sales teams to track their interactions with consumers. CRM is focused on direct interactions with consumers and helps analyze the effectiveness of the sales pipeline. You should enter information manually and can track only the data about direct connections with your clients. It can not give you a holistic image of the customers but can provide valuable insights into your sales processes. Understanding these differences is crucial for choosing an effective tool for your business automation. Continue reading to discover the top 5 customer data platforms and how to use them effectively. Top 5 Customer Data Platforms According to CDP, the size of the global market of data platforms will reach $20.5 billion by 2027, which is 34% more than it is now. It may be difficult for business owners to find the best customer data platform for their companies. In this section, we provide 5 CDPs that can help you improve your business processes. Segment This software allows companies to collect, optimize and use consumer data in real-time with one API for any platform. It enables users to customize data pipelines, manage consumer information and use AI to increase client engagement. Below we provide the main features of this service. Collecting the data. You can collect customer data from any application and unify it from all platforms and channels to create a holistic image of the user. Also, Segment allows companies to create a single tracking plan to standardize information. Data warehouse. This platform can automatically send data from any part of the product, such as a website or social media, to the warehouse. Segment allows companies to switch on or switch off collecting of the information. It also backs up the data to your storage provider so that you can download and use it. Personalization. You can build audiences in real-time and use this data in all your tools to make your advertising consistent. Segment allows marketers to personalize messages based on consumers’ behavior and even analyze their initial intentions. You can also track how many times the users have already seen a certain ad and set frequency caps to avoid their irritation. Analytics. This tool allows users to identify anonymous users as new or existing customers and track how they interact with your products. Moreover, Segment provides a wide range of analytics, A/B tests, and studies on how new features affect your KPIs. Data management. This platform integrates with 300+ marketing tools and allows users to add new ones in a few minutes. You can process the data, control its quality, and optimize user requests for deletion in a few clicks. Pricing: Free plan. It allows you to track 1000 visitors per month, use 2 sources of data, and provides integration with 300+ tools. Team plan. 120$/month. You can track up to 10 000 visitors per month, use unlimited sources, and have one data warehouse destination. Business plan. Pricing is discussed individually. It offers everything from the Team plan plus advanced permissions, historical replies, and single views on the customers. Look at the interface of the customer profile in Segment. In this tab, you can see the users’ actions and analyze them to predict their future behavior. Redpoint Global This service provides total control of data security. It uses machine learning to optimize your business processes. Also, Redpoint Global gives real-time access to standardized information and allows companies to exchange data between systems effectively. Discover more about its features below. Data intake. This tool allows users to connect and enrich information at scale automatically. You can also build machine learning models to collect high-quality data faster. Customer profiles management. Redpoint lets companies match customer profiles to identify new or existing visitors. Also, you can automate this process and get access to real-time data by driving machine learning algorithms. Segmentation. This tool also allows companies to segment their clients based on billions of data points. AI helps identify engagement segments and offers the most relevant content to consumers in real-time. Personalization and predicting consumer behavior. Extracting insights from consumer data helps provide more personalized experiences. Moreover, AI allows companies to understand users' intentions and predict their buying behavior to persuade people more effectively. Data management. Redpoint can help you unify all the data sources to create a holistic image of every customer. You will be able to make the customer experience consistent and change future strategies according to incoming real-time information. Pricing is discussed individually. Below you can see the dashboards that help track and identify changes in the behavior of different user’ segments. Redpoint Global uses machine learning and AI to streamline these processes and predict consumers’ future actions. ActionIQ This cloud-based platform provides security and privacy for customer data. It can directly integrate with your business tools to gain insights into consumer behavior. Read more about its features below. Collecting the data. This CDP collects data both online and offline from any platform. You can use historical information, enrich it in real-time, and create holistic profiles of your consumers. Also, ActionIq has proprietary data architecture that allows its user to be more flexible and scale the information. Customer data management. This platform allows companies to stitch variable records to make persistent users’ accounts. You can centralize all the data on ActionIQ to make future analysis easier. Segmentation. There is an ability to create complex audiences based on your customers’. This platform provides predictions of users’ actions based on their intentions, specific needs, and trends in each segment. Management of customer journey. You can test and coordinate unlimited customer journeys to conduct future analyses and make sales more effective. Analytics and reporting. ActionIQ provides reports and operational metrics you can use to optimize your business processes. Also, there are predictive analytics and recommendations on future interactions with every account. Security. ActionIQ conducts security audits and tracks the safety of the data across all parts of the platform. There is a single sign-in and multi-factor authentication to ensure secure authentication. You can also track your employees' access to the data on the platform. Pricing is discussed individually. There is a chart of users’ activity and computing capacity in ActionIQ. You can use it to define the best time to communicate with your clients and promote your products effectively. Adobe Experience Platform This is a tool for data management in both B2B and B2C spheres. Adobe Experience allows companies to collect information from multiple lines, unify consumer and professional data and create hybrid profiles. We provide the main features of this platform below. Collecting and managing the data. Adobe Experience aggregates information about new and existing clients with an AI-powered algorithm. You can use data collecting models across Adobe and non-Adobe connections, standardize this information and activate in real-time using any preferred system. B2B and B2C data management. This platform allows businesses to collect and analyze both consumer and professional data from all channels and create unified profiles. You can also differentiate these two spheres to create holistic images of different types of clients. Instant reactions. Adobe Experience provides users’ profiles that update in real-time. Also, this platform allows companies to react to any changes in the customer data instantly and deliver new experiences from different channels, such as websites, social media, messengers, etc. Segmentation and personalization. There is also a wide range of segmentation opportunities based on the data collected with the Adobe Experience drag-and-drop editor. You can personalize clients’ experiences using data about their intentions from existing profiles. Security. This platform has patented tools that help give consumers control over their information. You can customize the data governance framework and mark data sources to prevent privacy policy violations. Pricing is discussed individually. There is an interface of Adobe Experience tab where companies can manage their audience’s segmentation. You can track the number of consumers, check their profiles, find activated destinations and check the users’ behavior summary. mParticle This is a platform for managing data from mobile applications. It helps simplify data collecting using secure APIs and SDKs. mParticle gives access to A/B testing and more than 300+ analytics that enables you to provide a more personalized consumer experience. Discover more about its features below Data intake. You can capture data from different platforms and load it into a data warehouse in real-time. This platform also allows companies to measure video and audio usage metrics and save them to conduct future analysis. Data management. You can use filters to make collected data more effective, organize it, and transform it at any sales pipeline stage. mParticle allows companies to manage customer profiles and identify key stages of the customer journey. Also, you can integrate this tool with any existing data source or warehouse and control the data flow according to requirements such as GDPR / CPRA. Segmentation and personalization. This platform allows companies to create personalized experiences based on historical and real-time consumer data. You can create segments of clients and enrich them with computed fields to get more insights into people’s behavior. Unified customer journey. This AI-powered platform gives companies a complete view of their customer actions. You can identify the roadblocks, discover the trends in your consumers’ behavior and understand how people engage with your brand to improve your future strategy. Security. There are also regular tests of mParticle’s security that helps this platform avoid phishing attacks and save clients’ data. Pricing is discussed individually. Below you can see the activity tab in mParticle. This platform allows companies to track the time, location, and device consumers use to make an action. You can also set up filters to get more specific data. Congrats, now you know what a customer data platform is and its benefits and understand the difference between CDP and CRM. Also, you have discovered the top 5 consumer data platforms and are ready to choose one of them to improve your business processes.

Customer expansion is a process of generating maximum value for current customers and encouraging them to purchase more. It enables brands to retain customers and save costs on customer acquisition. In this article, we’ll cover the importance and 3 types of customer expansion. We’ll also review how to use customer expansion to increase sales. Why is customer expansion important? Companies spend a lot of money to acquire new customers and boost their revenues. Yet if you have an established company, many cost-effective strategies will help you get most of your existing customers. As a result, your sales volume and profits will increase. Customer expansion focuses on creating more value for current consumers and encouraging them to perform more purchases and use a product or service regularly. If you succeed with your customer expansion strategies, you’ll retain existing customers and avoid spending costs to acquire new consumers. To increase revenues, you need to ensure a seamless customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and provide additional value to your clients. You can hook your users’ attention with an upgraded version of your product, complementary products, or additional features for subscription-based services. Now that you know the importance, let’s dive into the 3 types of customer expansion. 3 Types of Customer Expansion We can distinguish three main types of customer expansion: add-ons (a company offers additional features to improve product customers already use); upselling (a company encourages customers to buy a more expensive premium version of the chosen product or service); cross-selling (a company offers complementary products to a chosen item). Let’s take a look at each of them in more detail. Add-ons It’s a great idea to use add-ons if customers already use your product. You can provide users with the opportunity to upgrade a product by purchasing add-on plans. Below you can see Zoom’s optional add-on plans. Upselling Upselling is an excellent sales technique that helps you find out more about your clients’ needs to provide them with the best solution to reach their goals. After exploring consumers’ preferences and desires, a salesperson contacts customers and offers an upgrade or premium version of a product or service. If you succeed in providing the solution people are looking for, you can establish strong relationships with customers and boost sales. For example, Tesla allows clients to make custom orders. For an additional cost, you can choose wheels and autopilot features. Cross-selling Cross-selling implies offering products related to an item customers want to purchase. When current clients see complementary products, especially with a discount, they consider buying them together. For instance, Amazon encourages customers to purchase complementary items, which users can see under the main product card. Let’s explore some effective customer expansion techniques to increase sales. How to use customer expansion to boost sales? To increase your sales volume and profits, you need to select productive approaches to reach customers and make them engage. We’ve prepared several techniques for you to consider. Drive fear of missing out. Marketers use different FOMO techniques to signal customers to shop for limited offers as soon as possible. You can set time limits, offer product bundles, use several channels to push consumers towards purchasing. These methods appeal to customers’ desires and evoke the feeling of regret if they don’t buy something. This way, you can boost sales in a short period of time. If you succeed in creating a proper message and offer, consumers will make impulse purchases. Provide customers with trials of premium features. Sometimes the most effective way to make users upgrade a product or service is to offer a free trial of these premium plans. Once your clients try, they can know the value the plan brings and the benefits they obtain. After the free trial expires, they can purchase your premium plan to reach their goals. Update customers on your new products and premium plans. If you have some new products or plans, you should inform your customers. When they explore your new products, they can purchase or upgrade their plans to more expensive ones with more features. Use social media networks, send email campaigns, implement web push notifications, and chatbots to reach your audience. Send email campaigns to upsell. If you want to upsell, consider email marketing. Research consumer needs before sending email campaigns. Once you do it, you can notify customers about your offers. With LIKE.TG, you can create professional email campaigns and send them to customers on your list. You can choose one of the available email templates or create one from scratch in our drag-and-drop editor. Congrats, now you know a cost-effective way to boost sales. Make use of the techniques above to increase your company’s profits.

Customer equity is the sum of customer lifetime valuesfor every client of a particular brand. It is the potential profit that all of the company’s customers can bring during the business-customer relationship. Why is customer equity important? Companies often face the challenges of increasingly discerning customers and extremely high competition in the market. Each brand’s survival over its surrounding competitors depends on its ability to increase customer equity. In today’s market, customer equity is essential because it helps you estimate the financial profit you can obtain from all your customers during your relationship. This allows companies to estimate their customer asset value and make sound financial decisions regarding add-on selling, retention, and acquisition. It focuses on every customer and uses interactions with consumers that aim at strengthening communication. Nowadays, a company's success depends on its ability to generate as manyloyal customersas possible. To understand what customer equity is, it's useful to explore the difference between customer and brand equity which are oftenconfused although each hasdistinctive features. Customer Equity vs Brand Equity Both customer and brand equity underline the level of loyalty a client has toward a brand and the value consumers add to a specific business. The two concepts have something in common, but customer and brand equity have different features and goals. To understand the difference, let’s analyze each of them. Many brands pay attention to customer equitybecauseit defines the financial success of a certain brand. The higher the customer equity, the higher the revenue a company receives and the more valuable it becomes on the market. Brands like Levi’s and Burger King have high customer equity and an excellent competitive advantage. Brand equity defines the level of influence a company’s name has on customers. This is based on the way customers perceive a particular brand and their positive and negative experiences purchasing from it. You can create this value by offering recognizable and high-quality products to your customers to increase brand recognition. Besides, companies provide customers with excellent experiences that entice them to continue purchasing with the brand. Companies with positive brand equity benefit in several ways. Firstly, customers are more likely to purchase from a brand they know and admire even if it has higher prices. Secondly, they won’t buy from competitors because they know that their brand sells the best quality products. Thirdly, since consumers are ready to pay a premium price for products, the brand can receive high profits. On the contrary, if a brand disappoints buyers to the point that they won’t recommend purchasing from this particular company, it will obtain negative brand equity. As a result, such brands are deprived of several benefits mentioned above. Now that you know the difference, let’s walk you through a start-to-finish guide on how to calculate customer equity. How to Calculate Customer Equity Determine the budget necessary to acquire a new customer Calculate how much money your brand spends on customer retention Estimate the approximate amount your client spends each year Find out how much money you receive from each customer List the cash flow of an average customer for a specific period Separate the cash flow for each year Sum up the present values of all the cash flows throughout the defined period Throughout company-customer interaction, consumers generate a value called customer equity. Consider the steps below to calculate it. Determine the amount of money your company spends to acquire a new customer. For instance, if your brand spends $60,000 a year on pre-roll ads that attract 600 customers, you spend approximately $100 oneach new customer. Calculate how much money your brand spends on customer retention. Customer loyaltyprograms, member cards, customer education programs, holiday marketing, andreactivation emailsrequire additional spending. For instance, you may pay $200 per year to send your email campaigns. Estimate the approximate amount your client spends each year. Let’s imagine that your average customer purchases with your company 10 times a year and spends $10 on every purchase. The annual spending would be $100. Find out how much money you receive from each customer. For instance, if you spend $4 for every $10 you earn, you would have a profit margin of 60%. List the cash flow of an average customer for a specific period. Set your expectations about every customer. For instance, you expect a customer to stay with your company for five years. Create a chart listing the estimated cash flow you'll receive over the years. Separate the cash flow for each year. Starting from the first year (plus your discount rate), divide the cash flow to calculate today's cash value. The discount is based on your circumstances. Sum up the present values of all the cash flows throughout the defined period. To get the customer lifetime value for your business, add up all the present values for a given period of time. To increase customer equity, let’s proceed to five tactics that will help you in this process. 5 Tactics to Increase Customer Equity Show your clients that you appreciate them Be more convenient than your competitors Be ready to solve problems Provide customers with unique value propositions Ensure to provide the best quality There are several steps to help you improve your company’s customer equity. Show your clients that you appreciate them. To keep loyal customers, you should regularly improve your brand. Before implementing any innovations, find out what your clients want instead of just going with your gut. For instance, create a poll containing some of your ideas and send it to your customers via email campaign, blog post, Instagram, etc. It’s crucial to let clients make suggestions and share their ideas. Don’t forget to thank them for participating in the poll by giving a small gift. Be more convenient than your competitors. Ensure that your customers can obtain the product they need as fast as possible. For example, if your client needs a new pair of contact lenses necessary to finish their work immediately, they don't have time to call and wait for hours to make an order. So it’s useful to consider using automatic orders, refills, and reminders to make the purchasing process fast and convenient. Be ready to solve problems. Ensure to provide customers with everything necessary to solve their problems through all the available channels. If social media platforms or your blog aren’t your main channels, you still need to be ready to bring the solution using these channels. Provide customers with unique value propositions. This step isn’t about the discounts that every company offers to the customers, but about features, services, resources that can bring value. Be ready to provide incredible value to a particular group of clients who can become your loyal customers in the nearest future. If you can’t do that, try to be as useful as possible when your clients need help. Ensure to provide the best quality. If your product is the best on the market and you keep improving it, you have the opportunity to obtain loyal customers. People always want to have high-quality things, and when they know that the product is the best, they will purchase it. To conclude, the customer equity metric enables you to track customers with different engagement levels, different spending habits, and the profit your customers bring to your business. The tactics above will help you acquire positive customer equity.

A curated newsletter is an email campaign that marketers produce based on the most helpful industry-specific content. To create curated newsletters, companies sift through tons of materials from other brands, news, events, etc., add the essential information into the email, and often comment on every bit of content taken from elsewhere. A mixtape or a playlist is made out of the best songs of various artists within a particular genre. Just like this, curated newsletters are made out of the top content and news from a specific niche. Let’s learn why you should use curated newsletters in your email marketing strategy. Why are curated newsletters important? Sending curated emails is a great way to show your expertise and enrich your email communication. Curated newsletters help you build authority, become a thought leader, and entertain your subscribers by providing the information they don’t have time to search for. This type of email is designed to increase top-of-mind awareness of your brand, which results in better user engagement, spreading your brand via word-of-mouth, and a larger number of sales. Curated newsletters make you think outside the box and enable you to improve relationships with the audience. Let’s analyze some curated newsletter examples. 3 Curated Newsletter Examples We’ve taken three examples from ReallyGoodEmails. They show that curated newsletters are useful for various industries and are very flexible since any brand can quickly adapt this type of message to any circumstance. The first email is from SkillShare. The service uses a curated newsletter to support its subscribers by sharing motivation and tips on how to spend quarantine time productively. The recipients can visit online creativity classes, learn how to turn their homes into a calm and comfortable place, and get helpful tips on how to work from home effectively and enjoy it. SkillShare supports every paragraph with descriptive text, relevant images, and a CTA button with a link. The following curated newsletter is designed by FlyWheel. It offers a collection of skimmable e-books to help subscribers create the perfect website for their businesses. The e-books are displayed as a gallery of images with download links. Here’s the last curated newsletter from Unti-Tled. It guides people through all art exhibitions that take place in New York City. The first thing to catch your eye is a provocative design with bright colors and small images as if the email was poorly formatted. There are one- or two-word descriptions that give people the general idea about specific events. All the words and images are clickable and lead to more details about each exhibition. We hope these examples inspire you. Let’s find out now how to find materials to add to your newsletter. How to Collect Articles for a Curated Newsletter Subscribe to all industry leaders Visit relevant on and offline events Go beyond the first search engine results page Build on ties with companies from related industries Learn to connect events that influence the entire world with your topics To sift through lots of materials from your field and pluck out the best content, you need to be open-minded and stay focused on providing value to your audience. Here’s what you need to do to collect up-to-date articles for your curated newsletters: Subscribe to all industry leaders; Visit relevant on and offline events; Go beyond the first search engine results page to bring overlooked resources to people’s attention; Build on ties with companies from related industries to be the first one to break the news; Learn to connect events that influence the entire world with your topics. Let’s find out how to build your audience to send curated newsletters. How to Get Subscribers for Your Curated Newsletter Place a subscription form on your site or blog Use a lead magnet Create an opt-in page Send to your existing audience You can collect email addresses using subscription forms, lead magnets, and opt-in pages. Let’s have a closer look at these options. Place a subscription form on your site or blog The most common way to attract new subscribers is to place subscription forms on your site. Follow this guide to easily create a subscription form with LIKE.TG, like the one below. You just need to select the layout, add all the necessary fields, a background image, and text telling subscribers-to-be what types of emails they will receive. Use a lead magnet You can also collect email addresses with the help of a lead magnet. It’s like a subscription form, but it offers a valuable incentive that encourages subscriptions. Lead magnets are extremely flexible in structure. Below is a lead magnet on Neil Patel’s website, which is a wheel of fortune. It’s hard to miss this one and many users enter their email addresses to try their luck. Create an opt-in page This page is explicitly designed for converting site visitors into subscribers. Similarly to a lead magnet, it offers users something valuable in exchange for their subscription. Unlike a lead magnet or subscription form that can be embedded or pop up on any page, an opt-in page is a separate webpage that usually contains a lot more descriptive information. Here’s an opt-in page made by Hitenism. It offers an e-book in return for an email address and uses social proof to solidify the value proposition. Send to your existing audience You can also send curated newsletters to your existing audience. However, before you hit the send button, don’t overlook these three things: Announce the new format of communication to your subscribers. Sending curated newsletters adds one extra email from your brand to their inboxes. This may irritate some users. To prevent unsubscribes and spam complaints, explain why your curated newsletters are worth reading. Come up with the right frequency. It is best to send curated newsletters regularly. You should ask yourself how much information you are ready to sift through. Sending curated newsletters even once a month is better than sending them every once in a while without a defined schedule. Allow subscribers to manage their email preferences. Some subscribers may dislike this format of emails. Users should be able to subscribe to different types of emails separately, including curated newsletters. This way, they can easily unsubscribe from curated newsletters if users don’t like them, but stay tuned to the rest of your emails. Let’s consider the technical side of things now, and learn to send these emails. How to Send Curated Newsletters Upload your email list Create an email template Create an email campaign Schedule your curated newsletter or send it right away It’s easy with LIKE.TG and requires no coding skills. You just need to take four simple steps: Step 1: Upload your email list You can upload your list of contacts in a CSV, XLS, or XLSX file, import them from MailChimp, ConstantContact, GetResponse, etc., or enter them one by one. Here’s how your email list will look with LIKE.TG. Verify your mailing list to remove invalid email addresses. Our email verifier allows marketers to stay out of the spam folder and keep their sender reputation high. Step 2: Create an email template You can create an email template in three ways with LIKE.TG: Create an email template using our handy drag and drop editor; Choose one of our pre-designed email templates; Save any email from your Gmail inbox as a customizable template to your LIKE.TG account with our Chrome extension. All these options are free of charge with LIKE.TG. Here is an example of a curated email created with LIKE.TG in less than an hour. It has three blocks and each one shares the latest news from the automobile industry. Step 3: Create an email campaign Choose an email list and an email template you’ve just saved, create a subject line, and run an optional anti-spam check to ensure better email deliverability. Here are LIKE.TG’s anti-spam recommendations regarding sender data and email body structure. Step 4: Schedule your curated newsletter or send it right away You can schedule your message for any desired date and time. Just choose the time and date in the small pop up calendar. As you’ve learned pretty much about curated newsletters, let’s finish this guide with some killer tips. 6 Best Practices for Making a Good Curated Newsletter Choose a specific topic Use exciting content Send curated newsletters regularly Number your curated emails Include user-generated content Try affiliate marketing practices We’ve collected six simple yet efficient tips to help you succeed in sending curated newsletters. Here they are: Choose a specific topic. Focus on content that is relevant to your field. Choose a very specific topic for every curated newsletter you send. If you are in the healthcare industry, you can share articles about Nobel Prize winners that changed the course of science as we know it. In another email, share vegan diet tips. Don’t mix everything in one message. Use exciting content. It’s okay to only add a few pieces of content in your curated newsletter. What matters most here is the quality of these materials. Your message should add value to being on your email list and not waste subscribers’ time. However, if there is a lot of exciting stuff going on, it’s okay to share it all with your audience. Send curated newsletters regularly. As mentioned earlier in the article, it’s crucial to have a repeating day and time for sending emails, so that your subscribers get used to it. If you deliver fresh content weekly, users wait for it week after week, and you shouldn’t disappoint them. Number your curated emails. It makes your curated newsletters look more professional, especially if the count goes over a hundred. Some companies even add this number to their subject lines for better open rates. Include user-generated content. Information in your curated newsletter will look more trustworthy with UGC. Let’s get back to our healthcare company example. The readers will better engage with your email if it contains feedback and before/after photos from people who used the brand’s vegan diet recommendations and improved their health. Try affiliate marketing practices. Add materials created by the companies related to your field. For instance, add information about good vegan shops to supply your subscribers with helpful details and get paid for this promotion or ask for an advertisement for your business in return. Congratulations, now you are prepared to send perfect curated newsletters and engage with your audience in a new way. Start sending these emails with LIKE.TG today! Send curated newsletters

Cross-promotion is a set of actions aimed at promoting products from different brands with similar audiences that are not in competition. It helps promote products and services, generate leads, boost sales, and establish brand awareness. This video contains 5 cross-promotion examples for local businesses. Check it out to find out more. Why should you use cross-promotion? Sometimes, you can see one brand promoting another brand’s goods or services in banner ads on websites, posts on social media, mentions in articles and videos, recommendations in email newsletters, and more. You have probably asked yourself why companies do this. Brands that have common interests and audiences that don’t compete with each other can cooperate for mutual benefit. According to Partnerize’s research, 54% of companies mentioned that partnerships drive more than 20% of total company revenue. Cross-promotion is a convenient and profitable way to promote products. Because it is quick and effective, cross-promotion became especially popular during the financial crisis. If a partnership is built right, it can help double your audience. During this collaboration, companies exchange knowledge and ideas, give advice, and mention each other in articles on their websites, social media pages, and in emails, all while developing their promotional programs. So, now let’s highlight the main benefits of cross-promotion: an influx of new leads; increased brand awareness; increased sales; audience growth; lower advertising costs; improved reputation. To cross-promote, companies need to choose channels that their audience prefers. The right channels will generate the most profit, engagement, or achieve a specific goal. Different channels are suitable for different purposes. To drive traffic to your website, you should think of referrals, email campaigns, guest blogging, mentions in articles, and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you aim to boost sales, you can focus on channels such as blogs, mobile apps, conferences, webinars, and social media like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. To increase brand awareness, we recommend you use podcasts, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, guest blogging, webinars, conferences, and more. According to Databox, organic content, email marketing, and social media are the most effective channels to reach your target audience. Let’s walk through the 3 steps of cross-promotion. They will help you start a mutually beneficial collaboration and reap the benefits. How to get started with cross-promotion Set goals Choose the right partner Select channels If you want to benefit from implementing cross-promotion into your business, you should follow several steps. Consider these to succeed. 1. Set goals When you are thinking about cross-promotion, it is critical to define your goals. Decide what you are trying to achieve: expanding the market reach of your product, creating a positive image, or increasing sales. It will also help to correctly layout the tasks you will need to complete to achieve your goals, as well as determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) you should monitor. 2. Choose the right partner It’s all simple in theory, yet there are a lot of factors you should take into account when choosing a partner for cross-promotion. To achieve your goals, select a compatible and reliable company. Firstly, consider brands that don’t compete with you. The most successful examples of partnerships happen when products or services are complementary. For instance, the collaboration between Spotify and Uber drove awareness, increased recognition, and expanded the audience. This partnership allowed users with Spotify Premium to listen to the music from the playlist in their Uber driver’s car. As a result, Uber users were eager to pay for Premium accounts on Spotify, and Spotify users booked vehicles from Uber. Secondly, remember that you can cross-promote to generate leads, expand your target audience, and as a result, boost sales and establish brand awareness. That is why you need to make sure that the products you and your partner are promoting are of good quality and will be useful for your target audience. One of the conditions for successful cross-promotion is satisfied customers. When choosing a brand for collaboration, make sure that it shares your values and conveys the same marketing message. Besides, keep in mind that the reputation and professionalism of the company that decided to cooperate with you are essentially important. Promoting their products or services means endorsing them. This indicates that you guarantee the quality of their products, recommend this brand to your clients, and you are confident that it is a reliable company. 3. Select channels One of the keys to becoming well-known online is choosing a platform that works for you. While YouTube may be more effective for video promotion, a blog can help deliver advice, instructions, or a guide. So it’s up to you to decide which channel is the best for achieving certain goals. The only thing you need to do is figure out what works well for your products. You can also cross-promote using guest blogs, mentions, and links in articles, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, referral programs, webinars and conferences, podcasts, and more. Also, consider social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. In addition, use various social media tools: Instagram Stories and IGTV, Facebook ads, giveaways, live videos, tags, and hashtags. You should also consider email marketing since it is the third most popular distribution channel. Statistics show that 87% of marketers use this type of marketing to promote companies. Furthermore, emails deliver some of the highest ROI among other channels for cross-promotion. LIKE.TG offers an email service that doesn’t require any technical skills, and it’s free for small businesses. To sum up, when thinking about collaboration, choose a reliable partner with a good reputation, define what you are going to achieve, and what channels are a great fit for it. These are the points that will influence your brand and pave your way to success. Next, we’ll suggest several ideas for cross-promotion. Cross-Promotion Ideas Influencer posts Promotional videos Giveaways and contests Guests on podcasts Email marketing Webinars There are a lot of ways to collaborate with a brand. When implemented correctly, your collaboration will be mutually beneficial. Let’s consider the most popular strategies. Influencer posts An influencer is an individual who affects the purchase decisions of people due to their authority. Research says that opinion leaders are good at driving purchases. According to statistics, 58% of people buy a product based on an influencer’s recommendation. So, consider such a collaboration to increase your sales and brand awareness. This personality can show off your product by creating a post or video and sharing it on various channels. Here is an example of cross-promotion between La'mariette and Selena Gomez. La'mariette is a swimwear brand that tries to convey the idea that all bodies are beautiful. For one of their recent promotions, they collaborated with Selena Gomez, a singer and influencer who has 195 million followers on Instagram. Selena posted a picture of herself posing in one of La’mariette’s swimsuits. With this post, she introduced the brand. Also, she tagged La’mariette and placed a link to their Instagram account. The brand, in turn, posted Selena's photo on their website. Promotional videos Sometimes cross-promotion campaigns also involve creating videos for your target audience. Video highlights the benefits of both companies and showcases the product from all angles. Here you can see an example of such a promotion from Adidas and IVY PARK. To attract the viewer’s attention, they use recognizable aspects of these brands. In the case of Adidas, these are white stripes and sneakers that differ from other brands. At the same time, in this video, you can find clothes and accessories from IVY PARK and frames with its logo. Giveaways and contests Giveaways and contests are interactive content forms that are extremely engaging. Additionally, giveaways and contests are cost-effective and may even increase your audience very fast. According to Tailwindapp, an Instagram contest or giveaway can help you increase your number of followers 70% faster in three months. Moreover, contests have a 34% conversion rate. By incorporating giveaways, you have the chance to demonstrate your products, generate leads, make your followers more active, and show that you care and appreciate them. At the same time, contests, and giveaways allow you to create lasting impressions, build loyalty, boost sales, and make memories. To run a contest, you need to select a goal for your giveaway, choose a good prize, define the rules for your competition, promote your giveaway and, finally, choose the winner. Often, companies conduct giveaways when they introduce new products or when these products aren’t popular among buyers. You can see Fabletics and Bliss’s collaboration for their giveaway on Instagram. By doing this, they increased their number of likes, comments, and subscribers on Instagram. Guests on podcasts According to Medium, approximately 155 million people listen to podcasts at least once a month. So, it's a great possibility for you to develop your brand. An authoritative person can promote your brand by talking about it, and sharing your values to generate new leads. One of the greatest examples is Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS, on the Tim Ferriss Show. This show is the number one podcast on Apple Podcasts that gave Blake the chance to talk about TOMS and Madefor. As a result, the equity of his company was boosted. Mycoskie, in turn, notified his followers on Instagram about the podcast. This allowed Tim Ferris to expand his audience as Blake’s followers listened to the podcast to increase the popularity of the show through Mycoskie’s post. Here you can see a post on the Tim Ferriss’ page on Instagram. It informs them about the new podcast episode with Blake. Email marketing Use email to build a partnership and provide customers with valuable information. This channel allows you to nurture prospects, promote partner companies, inform subscribers about upcoming campaigns, sales, invite them to events, and make personalized offers. McKinsey Company research says that email is one of the most effective ways to acquire customers. With our service, you can create an email newsletter without any knowledge of code or technical skills. You can use ready email templates, personalization, segmentation, and other tools. Here is an example of a LIKE.TG email template. On the left, you can see the necessary elements which we drag to the working field, on the right, we design them. Webinars There are many alternatives to replace traditional events for your cross-promotion. As an option, consider online events such as webinars. A webinar is an online event hosted by one or more companies to convey information, provide value, or promote products or services to the target audience. Here is an example of collaboration between Wistia and Mention. As you can see, the primary goal is to teach viewers how to boost social media efforts by creating the right videos. At the webinar, companies cover five types of videos that work. Now that you found out a few cross-promotional ideas get inspired by successful brands’ collaborations. Examples of Cross-Promotion Adidas and IVY PARK The partnership between these two companies had excellent results. Adidas and IVY PARK perfectly complement each other because Adidas focuses on selling sneakers whereas IVY PARK promotes clothes. Beyonce, as a brand ambassador and influencer, drives purchase decisions and establishes brand awareness among her followers on social media. She tries to promote brands in several ways. Here you can see an example of cross-promotion on Beyonce’s Instagram account. She placed a post wearing clothes from IVY PARK and sneakers from Adidas and tagged these companies. Here is an example of a promotion on Adidas’ website. You can see Beyonce wearing products from IVY PARK and Adidas, which means that she as an influencer recommends these brands. Apple Watch Nike Collaboration between Nike and Apple brought a new product to its consumers. Together they managed to create the Apple Watch Nike. These partner companies claim that this watch, along with the Nike Run Club app, will be a great fit for runners. Customers can find this product among a series of watches on Apple’s website. On the website, this multinational company describes the new product, and at the same time, promotes Nike by mentioning the Nike Run Club app and Nike Twilight Mode, which this new watch has. This brand also allows clients to create their style by choosing any Nike case and pair any Nike band. Apple’s website includes many visuals that demonstrate the product. You can find the same information about this new product and visuals on Nike’s official website. Whirlpool and Swash Swash is a laundry detergent designed to care of your clothes and belongings. Whirlpool is a multinational manufacturer of home appliances, among them, washing machines. As these brands are complementary, a collaboration between them is a step towards success. So here is an example of Swash promoting a manufacturer of washing machines by posting a picture where customers can see Whirlpool’s logo. At the same time, Whirlpool recommends Swash by placing its picture on the website and providing a discount for the first bottle of this laundry detergent. Moreover, the manufacturer of home appliances suggests a promo code to redeem the offer. Cross-promotion provides great results for brands: improves their reputation, increases brand awareness and sales. To achieve this, you should define your goals and choose a reliable partner for collaboration. Together you can provide consumers with outstanding products and achieve your goals.

A custom email template is an email templatethat a company creates using its brand identity — colors, fonts, etc. — to use multiple times by adding different text and images to meet the particular email marketing goal. Why you need a custom email template? Speed up email campaign production Improve your email marketing consistency Easy to create Speed up email campaign production. A custom made email templates increase your opportunities in crafting email campaigns and make the whole process a lot faster. No knowledge of code required. Improve your email marketing consistency. After you gain some experience with creating emails, you will know better how your emails should look to provide your subscribers with valuable and exciting content via emails. Custom email templates mastery leads you to a more automated email marketing in general. Easy to create.A drag-and-drop editor is a convenient and user-friendly tool for anyone. It is like a toy constructor, where you construct emails — homes for your brand. How to Create a Custom Email Template Open layout template editor Drag and drop the elements in an email Customize elements Preview and test Step 1: Open layout template editor There are five predesigned structures for creating email: empty, basic, news, commerce, and text. The "Empty" option allows you to start from scratch, "Basic" is for small and useful for some text bites and a couple of images, "News" is specifically designed to highlight news, updates, and create digest emails, "Commerce" serves well for sales, discount announcements. Select one according to your goals. Step 2: Drag and drop the elements in an email Choose elements on the left-hand side and drop them whenever you need them in the template. The components to use include: Text, Picture, Button, Separator, Video, Social, and Checkout. Besides, you can “Add new section” and use predesigned blocks consisting of text and images to speed up the process. Step 3: Customize elements All components in the Layout Template Editor are movable and modifiable. Change colors, contours, fonts, sizes, alignments, and other options for adjustment of the elements on the right-hand side. You can edit the email body there, as well. Then, fill the elements in the templates with your text and images. Step 4: Preview and test You can preview the email and send the test email to see how it looks in the flesh. How much a custom template costs If you have no time to master your email creating skills, LIKE.TG is there to help! Order a custom email template, and our team of passionate designers will handle it for you. The cost per custom email template is $175.

If you don’t want to use ready-made templates, then you can import your custom HTML code to create a unique custom-coded email template. LIKE.TG enables you to create email templates using four methods: "My Templates and Import," "Layout Template Editor," "Existing Design Templates," and "HTML editor." To create a custom-coded template, use the method "My Templates and Import." In the tab "My Templates and Import" you can choose one of these three options Upload a file of any type: HTML, zip, rar, or 7z. The file size should be less than 5Mb. The images and the HTML file must be in the archive root directory. Import from a URL. Paste the HTML code. Only those templates that meet the following demands will be correctly displayed to every email client. Use the table layout. Insert a style sheet using the inline style. Don’t save the separate style sheet file with a .css extension. For every block element, specify the font style (font size, font family, line height, etc.). The size of the letter shouldn’t exceed 100 kB. Please note that a significant part of the style attributes do not work with some email clients.

Cross-selling is a sales tactic that is used to increase income by encouraging customers to buy complementary products in addition to their order. Remember the last time you bought a smartphone or ordered a burger. You were definitely offered a case or fries and a Coke. That’s the way cross-selling works. However, there are a lot of facts and details related to this sales tactic. That’s why it’s a good idea to get acquainted with them before you develop your own cross-selling strategy. Why do you need cross-selling? Let’s look at the advantages of a well-thought cross-selling strategy. There are a lot of reasons why your business needs cross-selling. Have a look at the most important ones to make sure this sales tactic is just what you need. ROI increase An obvious advantage of cross-selling is that it will increase in both the conversion rate and revenue per sale. According to data provided by Amazon, 6% of its revenue is the result of upselling and cross-selling. By implementing this technique, managers can constantly improve the financial outlook of a business. Contribution to Customer Loyalty The main benefit of cross-selling is the opportunity to offer your customers things that may come in handy. If you provide them with really useful items, your clients will see that you take care of their needs. That’s why cross-selling is directly linked to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Your main task is to inform your customers about items that may stand them in good stead. With the help of cross-selling, you can cope with this task. Furthermore, it’s a sure way to establish good relations with your clients and provide them with an option to select the best products available. What’s the difference between upselling and cross-selling? First of all, you need to understand that both upselling and cross-selling are used to increase your income and improve the buying experience of your customers. Nevertheless, there are some differences between these techniques. Upselling encourages people to purchase a better version of the same product or pay for its upgrades and improvements. For instance, if your client buys a mobile phone, and you offer them a newer model instead of the chosen device, you are upselling. At the same time, cross-selling is used to promote more items within the common product category. For example, if a person buys a mobile phone, you also can offer a wireless charger or a phone case. How can I cross-sell effectively? You can offer complementary items right on your product page, at the checkout, in an order confirmation email, or post-purchase email. With the help of emails and direct calls, you can convince your clients to purchase more useful products. However, it’s important to follow the two guidelines explained below. Know your clients You won’t be able to sell anything to a person if you know nothing about them. First of all, you should create your buyer personas. This is a generalized representation of your customers that includes information about their social status, interests, work, etc. You need a buyer persona to better understand your customers and their demands. Always consider your customers’ feedback. It’s a sure way to improve your services and products. Remember that only when you know everything about the problems and desires of your clients, will you be able to cross-sell items that bring them the most benefit. Plan your customer journey Developing your customer journey map will give your company a chance to discover your client’s pain points and needs. With the help of it, you can offer them items to solve their problems. In addition, you’ll be able to identify the exact moment to cross-sell to your customers. To send automated cross-selling emails, you need a reliable email service that provides all the necessary tools. We’ll show you how to create a cross-selling campaign with LIKE.TG. How to cross-sell with LIKE.TG With LIKE.TG, the cross-selling process is as easy as ABC. Automation 360 tools allow marketers to automate sending cross-selling emails after a purchase. Register with LIKE.TG. Go to “Automations” and choose “Event Manager”. Create an event “Purchase”. Create your cross-selling email flow. Select the purchase event that will trigger email sending and choose the mailing list. Then, drag and drop the email to your working field. Choose an email template and write your cross-selling offer. We created a cross-selling email for you to see how easy it is. You don’t need any coding skills to use LIKE.TG. Here’s a step-by-step guide to sending automated emails. Best Cross-Selling Strategies and Examples to Boost Sales Send cross-selling emails with product recommendations Provide additional services Make use of discounts and free shipping Create complementary item suggestions If you combine advanced tools provided by LIKE.TG with the best cross-selling strategies, your business is bound to succeed. Right now, you can get acquainted with wonderful practices you can start using after reading this article. Send cross-selling emails with product recommendations Using cross-selling emails is one of the most popular and easiest ways to encourage your customers to buy additional items. For example, you can send emails that provide people with a chance to buy various items and accessories to complement what they’ve already bought. Check out how Amazon uses this technique. Provide additional services Offering a case and a special guarantee when selling a smartphone perfectly illustrates this strategy. Your task is to provide really valuable services that users will need when using your product. Apple offers an extended warranty and repair coverage when buying an Apple Watch. Make use of discounts and free shipping Everyone wants to save money, provide discounts to your customers from time to time. For example, offer them to buy an additional item and free shipping. At the same time, you may offer them to get 3 similar items for the price of the one to encourage them to make more purchases. Create complementary item suggestions You can offer your clients products that are usually bought together. Monitor their purchase history and create combinations of items that complement each other. Check out the way iHerb puts this technique into practice. As you can see, cross-selling isn’t only a great chance to increase your income, but also to satisfy your clients and provide them with useful products. There are no doubts that if you follow all the strategies and tips provided above, you’ll manage to increase your sales level in no time. Besides, don’t forget to use both cross-selling and upselling strategies to reach the best results.

Сrowdsourcing is the process of exploring customers’ ideas, opinions, and thoughts available on the internet from large groups of people aimed at incorporating innovation, implementing new ideas, and eliminating product issues. In this article, we’ll uncover how crowdsourcing works and what benefits it brings. We’ll also compare crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, and explore the types and examples. How does crowdsourcing work? With crowdsourcing, companies can collect information from customers and use it to their advantage. Brands gather opinions, ask for help, receive feedback to improve their product or service, and drive sales. For instance, Lego conducted a campaign where customers had the chance to develop their designs of toys and submit them. To become the winner, the creator had to receive the biggest amount of people’s votes. The best design was moved to the production process. Moreover, the winner got a privilege that amounted to a 1% royalty on the net revenue. By using people’s skills, work, and opinions, businesses manage to save their time and resources on developing a product or improving it. Often, people from outside the company can provide brands with amazing ideas, skills, and knowledge they can use to convert more customers and receive bigger profits. Now that you know how crowdsourcing works, it’s time to explore the benefits. The next section will unveil why you should consider this technique for your company. Benefits of Crowdsourcing With crowdsourcing, business owners can reap various benefits, from saved costs to employee salary. However, these aren’t the only advantages. In this section, we’ll review all pros you can obtain after a successful implementation of crowdsourcing. First, this marketing approach helps you find solutions to problems your team has worked on for a long time. These solutions are often out of the box and enable brands to drive customers’ attention fast. Many famous brands rely on experts outside the company to change the usual way of thinking and ideas. New people solve existing problems, provide different solutions, and bring new ideas to a business. As a result, brands gain new approaches to various difficult situations with products and clients. By engaging people outside the company, a business can create marketing buzz around its product. Crowdsourcing causes competition among customers and word-of-mouth marketing. Let’s take Lay’s ‘Do Us A Flavor’ campaign which was widely discussed by people. They encouraged buzz by inviting people to create a new taste for Lay's potato chips. More people were willing to participate in this competition and win it. Customers strived to try the new release. Companies have more customer insights. After gathering data from customers, brands manage to understand customer preferences, needs, and desires. As a result, they can offer personalized solutions. Customer satisfaction increases, and sales rise. Now that you know the pros, let’s proceed to the difference between crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Since there’s often confusion between these two terms, we need to uncover the difference. Crowdsourcing vs Crowdfunding There’s a big difference between crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, so it’s essential to understand each term in detail. We’ll unveil the distinctive features so that you can differentiate them. Crowdsourcing is a marketing technique that seeks experts outside the company and searches for opinions, customer feedback, and solutions. It helps entrepreneurs get new ideas for their companies and reach their business goals. With the help of experts outside the company, business owners can bring new thoughts and strategies. Crowdfunding is a marketing approach that seeks resources for various projects like charities, startups, and other initiatives. People who contribute to these projects don't expect any money back. Everything is done on a volunteer basis. Examples of such platforms include Indiegogo and Kickstarter, where people can donate money to charities, projects, and individuals. Now that you know the difference, let’s jump into the types. Types of Crowdsourcing There are four main types of crowdsourcing. In this section, we’ll review each of them in detail. Wisdom of the crowd. It’s a collective opinion of different individuals gathered in a group. This type is used for decision-making since it allows one to find the best solution for problems. Many brands pay attention to the collective opinion of their customers because they help bring their businesses new ways of thinking, ideas, and strategies. As a result, the overall performance of a company improves. Crowd creation. This type involves a company asking its customers to help with new products. This way, companies get brand new ideas and thoughts that help a business stand out. For instance, McDonald’s is open to new ideas from its consumers. The famous fast food company asked customers to create their perfect burgers and submit their ideas to the brand. The company released winners’ burgers each week, including the creator's short bio. Crowd voting. It’s a type of crowdsourcing where customers are allowed to choose a winner. They can vote to decide which of the options is the best for them. This type can be applied to different situations. Consumers can choose one of the options provided by experts or products created by consumers. For instance, if a brand asks its consumers to create a new taste, package, or design of a product, other consumers vote to identify the best one. Crowdfunding. It’s when people collect money and ask for investments for charities, projects, and startups without planning to return the money to the owners. People do it voluntarily. Often, companies gather money to help individuals and families suffering from natural disasters, poverty, social problems, etc. Now that you know the types, it’s time to discover the examples. They will inspire you to create your own unique crowdsourcing strategy. Examples of Crowdsourcing Cost and time-efficient crowdsourcing is widely applied by big brands. Companies strive to do everything possible to meet customers’ requirements and they can do it with crowdsourcing. In this section, we’ll unveil several examples that demonstrate how the technique works and review the benefits it brings. Lay's Lay's, the world-known producer of potato chips, created the ‘Do Us A Flavor’ crowdsourcing campaign. The campaign lasted for around ten months and aimed at finding a new universal taste its customers would love. The brand encouraged consumers to think of a new taste of chips they would like to eat. After voting, customers identified ‘Cheesy garlic bread’ taste as the winner of this competition. After its release, Lay's had an 8% increase in sales. Waze Waze is an app that provides users with information about closed roads, traffic jams, and the fastest routes. The company is based on crowdsourcing because it receives current information about traffic from people. Users update the app on closed roads and in traffic jams. Moreover, the platform calculates the average drivers’ speed to identify overcrowded roads. Congrats, now you know what crowdsourcing is and why it’s essential. Hope that our examples inspired you to use this marketing approach for your business.

CTOR or click-to-open rate is an email marketing metric that helps you monitor your subscribers’ engagement with your content. CTOR is a ratio between the number of unique email opens and the number of clicks on the links within your emails. An email campaigns’ efficiency depends on subscriber engagement, the number of recipients, time of the year, and many other factors. The open rate and click-through rate only partially measure user engagement. To have a better idea of how your emails perform, you need to use the click-to-open rate. Why is tracking your CTOR important? CTOR is among the most crucial marketing metrics because it allows marketers to analyze your content quality and understand if it meets user expectations. That’s because this metric only considers users who open emails, thus they are interested from the beginning. If your CTOR shrinks, it means the content is poor or your offers are irrelevant. Let’s analyze the graph provided by MarketingLand, which shows the performance of three different campaigns. Email 3 seems to be the most successful, Email 1 is less effective, and Email 2 is a complete failure. This is true only from the quantitative side of things. If we talk about the content and creative quality measured by CTOR, we can see that Email 2 outperforms Email 1, though it has lower open rates and a lower CTR. That’s because Email 2 has a higher CTOR, thus we know it is more engaging and has more relevant content. Email 2 was sent to a larger mailing list, which included unengaged subscribers. This caused a drop in opens and resulted in a lower click-through rate. By tracking CTOR, you can see that subscribers who opened Email 2 were more engaged compared to the user engagement with Email 1, which was sent to a regular mailing list. If you overlook the CTOR and only analyze CTR, you can miss such a change and misjudge Email 2 as a disaster. However, in most cases, CTOR correlates proportionally to click-through rate. The second graph compares metrics of eight consistent email campaigns. In this case, the CTOR is a reflection of the CTR results. As you can see, this metric can be crucial in some cases, so it’s essential to back up your standard metrics, like open rate and CTR with CTOR. Let’s learn to measure the click-to-open rate. How to Calculate a CTOR To calculate this metric, you need to divide the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Here’s the formula for a click-to-open rate: CTOR = № of unique clicks / № of unique opens x 100. If your email has 525 unique opens and 35 unique clicks, the CTOR is 6.67%. Now, let’s find out what to consider a healthy click-to-open rate. What is the average CTOR? Like other email marketing metrics, a “good” CTOR varies from industry to industry. Here’s Campaign Monitor’s report on various industry average metrics, including a click-to-open rate. It claims that the largest CTOR, above 15%, is seen in media, entertainment, publishing, and retail industries. In contrast, the lowest CTOR, below 10%, is seen in automotive, food and beverage, and professional services. Despite the numbers you see in this report, email marketing metrics depend on various factors, including your business size, your mailing list, your unique value proposition, demographics, seasons, etc. It’s okay to know the average showings in your industry, but it’s best to define what a normal open rate, CTR, and CTOR is for your business, and improve your email campaigns with that data. Let’s finish this guide with some actionable tips. 4 Best Practices to Improve Your CTOR Send Relevant Emails Remove Unengaged Subscribers Use Email Design Hacks Use Active Language To improve your click-to-open rates, you need to work hard on the overall quality of your email content. The four following best practices will help you achieve that goal. Send Relevant Emails Collect user data to send personalized and relevant emails to your audience. Find out users’ engagement level, buyer’s journey stage, demographics, and behavior patterns. Based on user actions, like cart abandonment, you can send triggered emails that help you automatically return clients to shopping with your brand. Here’s an abandoned cart email flow created with LIKE.TG. Messages are connected in a series, and each email is automatically sent after a predefined period based on user behavior. Creating such an email only takes four steps with LIKE.TG. Here they are: Create an event and place the code we generate on your website; Create email templates; Set up a series of emails; Add previously created templates to every email in the flow. Here’s an email from Adidas. It has a hilarious heading “Is your WI-FI okay?” and appeals to users’ emotions with social proof — the photos of the product generated by other shoppers. Remove Unengaged Subscribers Inactive subscribers are useless for your business. You only waste resources by sending emails that they won’t read or click through. To identify unengaged subscribers on your email list, segment your audience based on engagement level. Next to the segments of engaged users, you will have one with subscribers that have been inactive in recent months. Reach out to them for the last time and ask if they want to stay in touch with your brand. Such a message is called a re-engagement email. Remove those who ignored this email from your list, and start nurturing those who opened. Here’s a re-engagement email from SkillShare. It aims at returning Premium users with a beneficial, time-sensitive offer and reminds them about all features available for such users. Use Email Design Hacks CTOR helps you check how effective your email design is. Here’s what you need to do to make your emails look professional and trustworthy: Make use of ready-made email templates. With LIKE.TG, you can use over 130 pre-designed responsive templates. Select one based on your goal and customize it to your liking. Another option is to use our drag and drop editor to create stunning email templates. Master mobile-friendly email design. Make your email width 600px, use a short subject line, stick to a single-column layout for your email to be easy to read. Optimize your images for faster loading. Use 13-14px font size so that users can easily tap the buttons. Leave some white space around the CTA to make it more eye-catching. Avoid placing links and menu bars as they are too difficult to tap on a smartphone. Write the subject line properly. Do not use CAPS excessively and note that 30-50 characters is the optimal length for email subject lines since longer ones may not display correctly on tablets and smartphones. Another great option is to use emojis to grab subscribers’ attention and stand out from your competitors in the inbox. Add the perfect preheader. It should be short and to the point. Stick to 40-70 characters. Ideally, your preheader and subject line should complement each other Craft the ideal footer. An excellent footer should contain the brand’s contact details, links to the “About” and “Privacy Policy” pages on your website, social sharing buttons, and an unsubscribe link. Remeber that the last one should be visible and easy to tap on a smartphone. Here’s a well-designed email from Sonos. It has quality images of the product in the interior and close-ups. The copy is short, and the font is large, making it easy to digest. The CTAs are also highly-visible. Check out some email design best practices and improve the visual side of your messages. Use Active Language Only write a powerful copy in your emails. Pay attention to your CTAs since they are a critical factor that makes people click-through your email. Use active language in your calls to action, for instance, “Learn more,” “RSVP now,” or “Download the catalog.” Here’s a great example from a Vanmoof email. It has the classic CTA “Shop now.” It’s yellow and contrasting to the background, and it has a little arrow that draws even more attention to it. Congratulations, you’ve learned what a CTOR is, why it’s important, and got a few tips on improving this metric and your emails. You can send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers each month at no cost with LIKE.TG, so check out our service.

Crowd marketing is a technique that implies using industry-specific forums and social media networks to contact the target audience and directly promote a product. It encompasses a marketer participating in organic discussion related to the company’s unique value proposition. Crowd marketing helps generate leads, encourage referrals, establish brand awareness, improve SEO, and boost traffic. In this article, you’ll discover how crowd marketing works and review its advantages and examples. How does crowd marketing work? Crowd marketing starts with marketers developing the strategy, working out the messages they want to communicate to the target audience, and deciding on the proper channels. These platforms should be quality and with comments available. They include relevant review websites, forums, blogs, QA services, social media platforms, etc. After brand reps choose the platforms and develop the strategy, they interact with the audience on industry-specific forums, review websites, and social media to promote a product. They take part in discussions related to their brands and communicate the company’s value proposition. Companies focus on the distinctive features of their products on forums and review sites. Since these platforms have mass access, brands can reach target audiences and other people who might consider buying from their brands. This way, brand representatives strive to shape positive first impressions, drive interest in a product, build brand awareness, and boost website traffic. As a result, brands reach the masses and increase their customer base. Now that you know how crowd marketing works, it’s time to unveil the advantages you can obtain once you implement crowd marketing. Advantages of Crowd Marketing Startups and large companies need crowd marketing techniques to successfully market their new products or product lines to large groups of people. By submitting reviews on websites and distributing comments and content on forums, brands establish authority and credibility and keep their companies top of mind. Marketers who adopt crowd marketing techniques have the chance to build a loyal following. Companies build brand awareness by using a cost-effective marketing method. With brand awareness, the number of prospects who consider buying a product grows. They visit the company’s website to find out more about your brand and a product promoted on a forum, review site, social media networks, etc. Crowd marketing is perfect for driving brand engagement. It allows marketers to communicate directly with leads, deliver the right message, convey the benefits of a product, share their experience, and prove their point of view. Brands’ representatives leave feedback, impressions, and reviews and drive users’ engagement. Finally, people who want to become customers will visit the company’s website. They’ll explore a product and content and then take the desired action. As a result, the customer base will increase. Now that you know the pros, let’s review some examples to figure out how it works in real life. Examples of Crowd Marketing You can find many amazing examples of brands that successfully implement crowd marketing techniques. Let’s dive in. Creating spaces for customers to leave reviews is critical since they will positively influence prospects’ purchasing decisions. Consider third-party review websites like Yelp, Facebook, Google, Better Business Bureau, and Amazon. Your brand representatives should be highly responsive and interact with customers when they leave both positive and negative reviews and answer their questions. Marufuku Ramen You can find hundreds of reviews of restaurants on Yelp to decide where you want to have breakfast, lunch, or dinner tonight. Customers share their experiences and help others make their choices. For instance, Marufuku Ramen has almost 4000 reviews users can explore. One of the customers felt happy with the ramen served in this restaurant. He shared his opinion about the dishes, and the choice of beverages, and recommended visiting the place. Amazing Lash Studio Amazing Lash Studio effectively implements crowd marketing techniques by providing users with the opportunity to find answers to their questions. If these questions are related to the work of the studio, they will receive a response. Below you can see that a visitor asks about eyebrow correction and its price, and the company’s representative shares the price and also recommends employees that specialize in this field. Companies should manage both positive and negative reviews and Amazing Lash Studio does it well. Below you see negative feedback from a customer who tells about the high price, schedule issues, and problems with eyelashes extension. The business manager replied to the comment and invited this customer to contact the studio and figure out how to make everything right. Crowd marketing techniques bring businesses many benefits in terms of customers, traffic, brand awareness, and authority. Hope our examples will help you make the right decision and leverage different platforms to reach your target audience and connect with them through a direct conversation.

Cross-marketing is a promotional method that implies collaborating with another company or several businesses to increase the target audienceor sales of all parties involved. In this article, we’ll shed light on the benefits of cross-marketing, explain how to choose partners for collaboration, and share some examples of world-known brands that work together. Benefits of Cross-Marketing Cross-marketing is a relatively new promotional technique. It allows brands to join forces and reach common goals. This is possible only when their target audiences are similar in terms of age, social status, income, and needs. If companies develop a well-thought-out cross-marketing plan, they will manage to reap the following benefits: Increased brand awareness and recognition. This can be a goal for both big corporations desperately looking for brand-new approaches and enthusiastic startups. Sales growth. Brands with clear buyer personas and enough data about their clients seek other companies with similar customers. Knowing people’s needs and wants is the key to selling more. Improved credibility and loyalty. If your brand is a leader, source of expertise, and authority in the industry, clients will trust your recommendations. In this case, people will believe that you won’t put your reputation at risk for advertising purposes. Advertising costs reduction. If you collaborate with other brands for common goals, it means that you share both the responsibility and advertising costs. Hence, you can try some advanced and more expensive promotional techniques. Expanding the range of goods.Brands often cooperate to release a joint product, which is common for sportswear and apparel brands. As a result, companies manage to create buzz around their businesses and increase their income. Building long-lasting relationships.Brands that initially plan to conduct an advertising campaigntogether often remain partners for a long time. Such cooperation brings a lot of new customers, joint projects, and support. Now that you know the benefits you can get while implementing cross-marketing, it’s time to learn how to find partners. How to Find Partners for Cross-Marketing Choosing the right partner is the key to successful cooperation. If you only aim to generate more money, your clients will definitely feel that, and your reputation may suffer. Do your best to find a company that shares your values, mission, and philosophy. For example, if you own a cruelty-free brand and collaborate with a company that tests its products on animals, you can completely destroy your reputation. To avoid such fatal mistakes, follow the tips below. Set your goal. It’s vital to be clear and precise about your primary purpose. Avoid setting three or even more goalssince you won’t be able to focus all your efforts on reaching the main aim. For example, if you want to increase your target audience or the number of followers, ask your partner to recommend your company via their email campaigns or publications on social media. Ensure that people realize the value of this recommendation and can easily follow you or subscribe to your newsletter. If you aim to sell more items, consider creating profitable bundleswith your partner’s products. Offer a reduced price to provide customers with an additional incentive. Conduct a thorough analysis of your target audience. Are your customers male or female? Youth or adults? What is their income level? Are they vegetarians, vegans, or animal rights activists? The more information you have, the bigger your chances of understanding the actual value of your product. Consider dividing it into smaller segments for better targeting. This way, you’ll succeed in satisfying the needs of different audience segments. Look for potential partners. Remember thatthe point of cross-marketing is not to compete but to cooperate. Your target audiences need to be similar but not identical, and your products should complement each other. Ask your loyal clients about their favorite brands and companies they would like you to collaborate with. Customers can be interested in this cooperation more than you do if they realize their profits. Make sure that you have a valuable offer for these companies to work with you. Conclude an advertising contract.Sign an agreement to protect both parties and ensure that all conditions are met. It should include all the responsibilities of both companies as well as your expectations and budget. Now let’s check out the brands that work together successfully. Examples of Cross-Marketing Campaigns The most successful corporations include brands from the same segment since their clients can be confused otherwise. Take a look at the examples of brands that implement cross-marketing. Louis Vuitton and BMW The car manufacturer launched the BMW i8 in 2014 and collaborated with Louis Vuitton to promote it. Thefashion brandproduced the four-piece set of suitcases and bags designed specifically for this new car. As a result, both brands increased their recognition and audiences. Burger King and McDonald’s These two competing brands collaborated for a good cause. Burger King, known for its provocative marketing campaigns, encouraged its clients to buy Big Mac from McDonald’s instead of Whopper to raise money for charity. Now you know why brands use cross-marketing and have some inspiring examples and helpful tips at hand. We hope that they helped you make the right choice!

CSAT is a marketing metric that allows business owners to measure their customer satisfaction scores. It’s one of the easiest ways to evaluatecustomer satisfactionwith a product or service. In this article, we’ll consider the importance of CSAT, uncover the difference between this metric and NPS, show you how to calculate the score, and provide some tips on how to improve it. Why is CSAT important? Every business strives to deliver the best customer experience. It helps companies grow, build loyalty, and blow up sales. To learn whether customers are satisfied with their products and services, brands use different types of surveys, for example, NPS and customer satisfaction surveys. CSAT allows companies to improve the customer experience they provide at different stages: acquisition, onboarding, ordering, post-purchase service, etc. All of these stages make up their customer lifecycle, which means that brands monitor this score regularly to ensure a smooth customer journey. Almost every business will have to deal with the problem of customer churn at some point. The good news is that you can predict and prevent it by asking your clients directly if they’re satisfied with your product and service. After analyzing the results, you can act on them and focus your efforts on dissatisfied clients before they leave you. Lastly, regular customer feedback analysis allows businesses to have a clear picture of their position on the market and in clients’ minds. Tracking CSAT regularly enables stakeholders to deliver the best customer experience and reduce their churn rate. It was mentioned that CSAT and NPS are the most popular surveys among companies that help them reveal their clients’ attitudes towards their brands. Let’s take a closer look at each metric. CSAT vs. NPS Customer satisfaction scores enable companies to determine the current level of their clients’ satisfaction with a product or service. Brands can offer this kind of survey to their customers at each stage of their buyer journey and after each touchpoint, for example, after a sale or at the end of their onboarding process. This way, marketers can reveal their weak points and get more point-in-time feedback. NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. This metric allows companies to find out if their customers would recommend the brand to their friends. With NPS, you can discover the number of Detractors (dissatisfied clients) and Promoters (enthusiasts who are ready to recommend the company). With this survey, you can have more insights into the long-term relationships with your customers. The core difference is that very satisfied clients are not necessarily promoters. Hence, NPS is more about measuring your brand loyalty. Now that you know the benefits of CSAT, you might be interested in how to calculate it. How to Calculate CSAT First of all, you need to create a survey to collect feedback. You can provide users with an automated in-app survey that they can take after each interaction with your brand, for example, after a conversation with your customer support agent, after a sale, after creating the first landing pageusingyour service, etc. Take a look at several examples of such surveys. Generally, they ask users if they are satisfied with a product or service. Brandsoftenoffer a 5-point scale to assess the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Canadian fast-food restaurant AW offers its customers to take this kind of survey after each visit. Clients only have to choose happy or sad smiley faces. This survey provides the company with general customer feedback. Starbucks, a world-renowned coffee chain, offers its customers to assess their satisfaction on a 5-point scale. This survey provides a more in-depth look at customer experience. After you receive your clients’ feedback, you need to count the number of all customers who are satisfied and very satisfied. Then, count the number of all users who took your survey. Now you cancalculate your CSAT with the formula below. CSAT = (Satisfied customers/Total customer surveys)*100 The score will be expressed as a percentage. Say, 250 users took your customer satisfaction survey. You used a 5-point scale, so the number of satisfied and very satisfied customersis 135 (45+90). Hence, your CSAT is 54% ((135/250)*100). This result indicates that although the majority of your customers are satisfied, you need to make some improvements. In the next section, we’ll share some tips on how to do this. How to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score Follow our tips below to make customer satisfaction a priority for your business. Provide multichannel customer support. People are different, meaning that they solve problems in different ways. You should keep this in mind if you want to satisfy them. If a client needs a consultation, an email won’t be the best choice. Let them call you.Similarly, a chatbot or alive chat can be the best option for customers’ FAQs. With LIKE.TG, you can create a chatbot and a live chat for your website for free. Remember to provide your clients with an opportunity to choose. Provide immediate support. Clients expect businesses to answer immediately. If they fail, customers might choose a competitor. To avoid this issue, provide 24/7 customer support and enough human agents. You can automateyour communication with clients and create a chatbot for Facebook, WhatsApp, andTelegramwith LIKE.TG. This way, you can delegate some routine tasks to a chatbotand let customer care agents solve more complicated issues. Act on feedback timely. Customers appreciate brands that care. To be such a brand, show your clients that their opinion matters. Thank them for their feedback, and fix the issues they have immediately. Create a workflow so that each problem is directed to the department responsible for it. For example, if a client complains about some bugs, report this to your product development team. If a client requests a personalized premium plan, let your customer success team contact them. Monitor complaints regularly to act on them.Clients who are not supported properly often share their negative experiences on social media. This can be very harmful to a brand’s reputation. Use special tools to monitor your brand’s mentions on Facebook, for example. Once you see a complaint, act immediately. Respond to every user, and be thankful for their positive reviews as well. This makes them feel like you care. Offer users customer satisfaction surveys regularly.Regular collection ofclients’ feedback will pay off. You’llbe able to identify their common behavioral patterns, problems, and needs. This information is pivotal for every brand because it provides insights into your performance from firsthand experience. Congrats, now you know why CSAT is important andcan measure and increase it. Make use of LIKE.TG tools for effective communication with clients, and improve your products and services every day!

Cost per lead (CPL) is an advertising pricing modelthat involves an advertiser paying a pre-defined price for eachgeneratedleadto a certain platform during a marketing campaign. This is also a marketing metric that allows companies toevaluatetheir campaigns’ cost-effectiveness. In this article, we’ll explain why cost per lead is important,how it works, share a formula to calculate it, and offer some tips to reduce your cost per lead. Why is it important to know your cost per lead? Businesses rely on this online advertising pricing model todetermine whether this or that campaign is profitable. This metric shows how much money it takes to bring in new leads. Let’s figure out how a cost-per-lead model works. First, you ask a third-party platform to place your advertising on their site. When users click on it, they’re redirected to your site where they need to perform a particular action, for example, sign up for a newsletter, register for a webinar, or buy a discounted item. After they opt in, they become your leads, and the publisher gets a commission. With this metric, you can learn whether you allocate your advertising budget wisely. Hence, you’ll be able to discover the channels that bring you the most leads and reduce investments on less profitable channels. Now that you know why cost per lead is essential, let’s find out how to calculate it to discover the cost-effectiveness of any marketing campaign. How to Calculate Cost per Lead It’s pretty easy. You need to know the number of leads generated (both marketing and sales qualified leads) and the amount of money you’ve spent on this particular campaign. Cost per lead = Total marketing spend/The number of leads generated For example, you’ve spent $600 on an AdWords campaign. It brought you 45 leads, so your cost per lead is $13 (600/45). Compare this price to the price of your average product to discover whether it’s expensive for your business or just right. It’s vitally important to know where your leads come from. Don’t play a guessing game because you can waste your budget. Discover the most profitable channels, and concentrate your resources on them. If the cost per lead seems too high, follow the tips to reduce it. 4Ways to Reduce Your Cost per Lead Follow the tips below to reduce your cost per lead and invest money in your business development. Run retargeting campaigns.You’ve probably noticed that a big part of users who view your products or even add them to their shopping cart leave your website without buying. A complicated checkout, total sum, or even their own business can stop them from converting into a client. Therefore, instead of acquiring new leads, you can drive these users back by providing the last push — a retargeting campaign. When they visit different sites, they can see your relevant ads encouraging them to make an order. This way, you’ll spend less money on converting warm leads. Narrow down your demographics. To sell your products effectively, you should know to who you sell them.Analyze your reports to find out which demographics engage with your advertising the most. Check these people’s gender and age, and think about why other users don’t interact with your campaigns. Hence, you’ll be able to identify people who are not interested in your products and stop wasting your budget on them. Reduce the number of fields. Look attentively at your opt-in form as if you were a user. Answer all the questions todetermine how much time it takes to fill them out. Make sure you only ask for important information. Filling in long forms makes site visitors tired and can even irritate them, so make sure to limit the number of fields. After all, you can ask them for more data later. Optimize your page loading speed. Recall the last time you followed an ad link. How much time did you wait for it to load? Would you wait for 5 or even 10 seconds? The more people have to wait, the more potential deals companies lose. It’scrucialto regularly check your page loading time and work on its improvement. Congrats, now you know how to calculate your cost per lead and have some tips to reduce it.

Cost per view (CPV) is a pricing model used in performance marketing. Google charges advertisers each time a user watches a video or interacts with it. In this article, you'll get to know the way cost-per-view advertisements work, how they differ from CPM ads and get the formula. How do CPV ads work? CPV ads include in-stream and in-display advertisements. Users see in-stream ads before or after the video and have to watch them for at least 5 seconds before skipping them. Advertisers can add their advertisements with a clickable link to the video they want. This way, a user will be able to open it anytime while watching the video. According to this pricing model, an advertiser is billed after a user watches a video at least for 30 seconds or interacts with it. Interaction means following the link from the CTA button, product card, banner, etc. This metric allows marketers to analyze user commitment providing valuable insights. To create a CPV ad, advertisers bid the same way as placing PPC ads. The only difference is that they need to select TrueView video ads. Then the algorithm is the same: you set the maximum amount of money you're ready to pay for the necessary keywords. The higher the competition for a specific keyword, the more you will pay within your initial bid. To create effective cost-per-view ads, you need to select specific and narrow audiences to show your ad to. This ensures better engagement, higher conversions, and involvement, but you'll pay more for such targeting. While analyzing the performance of the ads with different pricing models, marketers usually compare CPV ads to CPM. So, let's see the difference. CPV vs CPM While the CPV pricing model makes advertisers pay after users watch the video or interact with it, the cost per mile (CPM) model charges a specific amount of money for 1,000 ad impressions. Each time users see the ad, it counts as an impression. With this model, businesses can increase their brand recognition and awareness. Even though the CPM model doesn't belong to performance-based marketing, it enables businesses to identify top-performing channels for promoting their product. The choice of a model depends on your goals. You can combine CPV and CPM to get more accurate data about your potential clients and boost brand awareness. It's time to learn how to calculate CPV for your advertising campaign. How to calculate CPV? The amount of money to pay is usually set by the publisher, so you can negotiate the price. To evaluate this pricing model for your business, consider the formula below. CPV = advertising costs/video views Say, you've spent $200 on advertising and got 3,000 views. CPV = $200/3,000 = $0,06 So your cost per view is $0,06. If you want to improve the performance of your CPV advertisements, read the following section. How to optimize your CPV? If you want to reduce your CPV, consider improving the quality of your ad. Mind that it should be relevant to the video you're going to place it on. The more relevant your ad, the less you will pay. To meet your goals with CPV ads, target broad audiences. Remember that choosing this model already means targeting engaged users interested in your brand, so consider expanding your audiences. Create short but informative ads since they perform better than complicated and long ads. Ensure that your call-to-action button is straightforward and users know what to expect after following the link. Google recommends that advertisers use advanced settings while creating a campaign for better performance. You can set the necessary language in campaign settings to target the right audience. Consider the scheduling option to manage the time your campaign is running. You can choose the days of the week and specific hours when your viewers are most likely to engage. With a frequency cap, you can control the number of times a user sees your ad. This way, you can increase your outreach to new audiences. Congrats, now you know your cost-per-view advertisements work, the way they differ from CPM ads, and how to calculate CPV and optimize your efforts.

CRM marketing, or customer relationship management marketing, is a business approach that implies analyzing, controlling, and improving customer relationships. The bottom line of this type of marketingrequiresusing CRM systems – special software developed to automate communication with clients. In this video, Caleb Smith, a LIKE.TG marketer, talks about the benefits of CRM marketing. Why should I use CRM for marketing? The key advantage of applying CRM to your marketing strategy is the control a CRM tool gives you over your communication with customers and prospects. With CRM software, you can see your customer's profile, their history of interactions with your brand, service issues, and more. All that data is stored in one place and can be accessed anytime. Having information about clients on hand allows your team to tailor their marketing activities and strategy to make them more relevant. Apart from that, using CRM for marketing has the following benefits: Enhanced segmentation and personalization help target the most profitable customers and make relevant offers to them. Relevant marketing campaigns. You can conduct activities that fit your customer's place in themarketing funnel. Increased customer satisfaction and retention.Building quality relationships with customers improve theirsatisfaction with your service and boost lifetime growth. Biggermarketing ROI.CRM marketing boosts your customer lifetime value, in turn bringing in more revenue. As we've unpacked a few benefits of CRM marketing, there is no doubt that you need it. However, the question remains what automation softwareshould you choose. Be careful here: CRM is not the same as marketing automation software. CRM vs Marketing Automation At first sight, CRM resembles marketing automation software. Both of them seem to do identical things: manage leads, collect and analyze data, and automate the process of communication. However, CRM is more sales-focused, while marketing automation software is marketing-focused. In other words, marketing automation software aims at managing marketing tasks, and CRM platforms are focused on interacting with customers and prospects, activity tracking, lead scoring, and so on. Applied to the marketing funnel model, these two groups of software manage leads at different stages of the buyer's journey; marketing automation software takes care of customers at the top and the middle parts, and CRM helps to manage prospects in the bottom stages. Nevertheless, marketing automation software and CRM work better together. They should share data for the best results. Some companies on the market – such as LIKE.TG, Hubspot, or Salesforce – have already merged these two into a single solution. Others offer integrations with other software. To choose the CRM system that best fits your business goals, check out our compilation of free CRM software. Eager to build your CRM marketing right now? Let's dive into tactics that will help you craft your marketing strategy. 6 Tactics to Create Your CRM Marketing Strategy Choose the right CRM system Qualify your customers Segment your audience Use a customer-centric approach Communicate swiftly and regularly Set KPIs for your CRM marketing Building your CRM marketing strategy can feel like a tall order considering the scarcity of information about it. Consider applying the following tactics to get the ball rolling. 1. Choose the right CRM system The speed of order processing, the method of collecting customer information, and the coordination ofyour team's work depend on the correctly selected CRM system. First of all, focus on your niche and business size. If you have a small or medium business, you canchoose a free system. You can start using the LIKE.TG CRMsystem for 5 users in your account at no cost. Our CRM system allows you to manage sales and communicate with your audience on one platform. You can collect information about your customers; and send messages to a chatbot in Telegram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram,as well as via email. The effectiveness ofthese messageswill impress yousince you respond to a message from a client who initiated communication through this channel. You can also accept orders, create quick deals, and receive them automatically through the chatbot or workflows created using Automation 360, change their status, delegate tasks, and assign a person responsible for a deal. Contacting a client has never been easier. You just need to select the desired channel in the deal card. See how the process of working with deals in LIKE.TG looks like. They are located on the Kanban board, making it easy to track their status. By clicking on a deal, you will open its card, where you can see the history of work with it, order information, status, and the person in charge, as well as add a comment and contact the client. As you can see, it is easy to monitor the progress ofclosing a deal in LIKE.TG. You will find more useful information on working with the system in our Knowledge Base. Since the service is intuitive, you can try to create a deal right now. 2. Qualify your customers Roughly 50% of prospects are a bad fit for companies. If you're targeting the wrong group of clients, you risk wasting time and money. Before building strong relationships with your customers, you need to decide which of them are the most valuable for your business. To spot the perfect prospects, follow these three techniques: Make a list of your current key customers and find out what they have in common. Then, look for these features in all your future clients. Research your competitors' audiences. Chances are, they will find your product or service more attractive. Set the qualifying criteria for your prospects. It may be their occupation, marital status, income, and so on. When you pinpoint your audience, align your messages with their needs. Keep your customers' peculiarities in mind when you form your value proposition, pricing, and other product features. 3. Segment your audience CRM software storeshuge amounts of data about every customer. Use this data to eliminate the ineffective one-size-fits-all approach; and address each customer's unique needs instead. Start with segmenting your audience. Identify what communication channels your customers prefer, learn how they interact with your website and social media, and track their purchase history. Pay attention to demographic data, such as age, gender, location, occupation, and so on. Use the most suitable channels to interact with each audience segment. To create personalized email, SMS, messenger, and push notification campaigns, try LIKE.TG. Our segmentation feature allows you to import data from your CRM. Apart from that, you can create new segments according to your subscribers' actions, such as email opens or clicks. Subscribers are rated in your LIKE.TG mailing list based on their interactions with your marketing campaigns. You can use this rating tocreate segments based on the activity of your subscribers. So, you can send different campaigns to users with different ratings and demographics to get better marketing results. 4. Use a customer-centric approach CRM marketing strays away from the traditional buyer-seller model and places customers at the center of the business strategy. Using a customer-centric approach allows you to not only obtain a customer but also to retain them and increase their lifetime value. To succeed in CRM marketing, communicate not about selling a product but about accomplishing your potential buyers' goals. Hard selling will provoke their rejection. However, correlating your product's benefits with customers' problems will improve your offer's credibility and boost sales. Pay special attention to your prospects' pain points. Build your pitch around the problems your product helps eliminate. It's a psychological trick that boils down to our brain's predisposition to react more to potential losses than gains. For more psychological tricks, follow our email marketing guide. Hacks from thispost apply to any communication channel. 5. Communicate swiftly and regularly Speed and efficiency are core principles of customer relationship management. Technology can help your business perform efficientlyand make interaction with your clients seamless. To achieve regularity, automate your audience interactions. Adjust your activity for different customer segments to make them happy with your brand's communication strategy. Prioritize the communication channels your prospects prefer and build a timeline of customer interactions. Tailor communication to match thesales funnelstage of your customers. To make things easier, after gathering data about preferable channels, frequency, and more, build an automated communication flow with LIKE.TG. 6. Set KPIs for your CRM marketing To measure the effectiveness of your CRM marketing, set key performance indicators. Keep in mind that they vary depending on your business goals. For instance, you might want to obtain more new buyers. In this case, go for customer acquisition metrics, such as customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, and churn rate. To dive deeper into this subject, follow our guide on customer success metrics. After you've spotted your keyperformance indicators, it's time to adjust your CRM marketing activities to leverage them. If you went for customer acquisition metrics in the previous step, you might benefit from applying these techniques: Add new marketing channels to obtain more customers. Send re-engagement email campaigns to decrease your churn rate. Launch a loyalty program to increase customer lifetime value. Now you have your five tips on how to set up your CRM marketing strategy. It's time to put them into practice.Let's look at some inspiring examples from brands that squeezed every bit of value from their CRM marketing efforts. 4 Examples of CRM Marketing Chatbots for better customer interaction Loyalty programs for building retention Personalization for a better user experience Referrals for higher conversions The old adage says that practice makes perfect. To get a bit closer to perfection, let's discover how popular brands and services approach CRM marketing. Chatbots for better customer interaction When it comes to keeping in touch with customers, swiftness is crucial for maintaining good relationships. According to Statista, 18% of social media users worldwide expect brands to respond to their complaints or questions immediately; 28% want to be answered within an hour. To keep pace, companies have to hire more employees and enlarge their customer support costs. Applying chatbots to their marketing strategy helps solve this problem and decreases customer support costs by 30%. All you need to do is gather data about the frequently asked questions your customers have from CRM, write relevant answers, and feed your chatbot with them. As a result, you'll get fewer support tickets and more happy customers. The QA website for programmers, Stack Overflow, knows a little something about how overwhelming users' queries might be. To reduce the number of repeated questions and provide viewers with easy access to answers, the company launched a Telegram chatbot. Chatting with it, the user can ask any question. The chatbot will offer similar queries with answers from the website. If there is a match, the user can choose the right question from the list and see the whole conversation on the website or look for only the answer, for example, the highest-rated one. Besides customer support, chatbots can increase your buyers' engagement, lead nurturing, and speed up the payment process. More importantly, your audience loves them – 21% of consumers believe chatbots are the easiest way to contact a business. To implement one into your marketing strategy, register with LIKE.TG. Our service helps you build chatbots for Telegram and Facebook Messenger for free in just a few clicks. Loyalty programs for building retention Most companies focus on obtaining new customers rather than keeping the old ones engaged. Meanwhile, customer retention is five times cheaper than acquisition. Loyal customers tend to drive more revenue for your business; they spend 67% more in the third year of their relationships with the brand. To keep your buyers engaged, set up a customer retention strategy. It may include practices like asking for reviews and referrals, up-selling and cross-selling, thank you emails, and loyalty programs. The beauty brand, Khiel's, shows an excellent example of such a program. The company gives customers reward points for each cent spent on its cosmetics, each social media share, and each friend invited. In return, loyal clients get gifts, early access to new products, complimentary shipping, and more. Personalization for a better user experience Personalized customer communication is key to successful CRM marketing. A considerable part of your buyers would love to get personalized purchasing experiences. CRM services help obtain all the data necessary for it. Use your customers' gender, location, purchase history, and other information to tailor your email and messenger campaigns, web push notifications, and website. Online retail giant Amazon gained its market leadership by putting its customers' interests first; personalization plays a special part here. Amazon encourages every new buyer to create an account. Once they do, the website tracks their activities – items browsed, purchase history – and makes product recommendations based on that data. Amazon shows new recommendations that may interest you each time you visit the website. Moreover, the website shows related products according to what other customers who bought the same products as you, purchased in addition. In the example below, you can see the items Amazon recommends based on the viewer's browsing history. Apart from goods a customer probably would like for themselves, the website offers gift ideas. The last trick helps to increase cross-selling even more. Referrals for higher conversions CRM marketing is a perfect way to boost your conversions and get more revenue for the same marketing budget. Building customer relationships and providing them with seamless experiences helps you obtain brand advocates. Satisfied buyers share their stories with their friends and families. Referrals convert 30% better than other marketing methods. The referred customers are more loyal and have a 16% higher lifetime value. A killer offer is the first step to raising your loyal customers. Learn how tokiller proposals from the financial service Acorns. The company offers a generous gift for referring friends. For each friend invited to try Acorns, the company gives the user $5. Apart from that, Acorns puts an extra $100 on your account if you've invited ten friends. Along with such an irresistible offer, the company uses a time limitation – customers can get extra money only in June. This trick plays on a basic psychological trait to crave for things that are harder to get. Apart from referral programs and limited-time promotions, you can apply other hacks to boost your conversions. Follow our guide on conversion rate optimization to improve your landing page and email performance. It's challenging to imagine strong customer relationship management marketing without regular well-produced communication. To handle the latter, consider using several channels, such as email, messenger campaigns, web push notifications, SMS, and chatbots. To apply them to your marketing strategy, sign up with LIKE.TG.

Critical success factors (CSFs) are the elements that help companies reach their mission and goals. They allow a brand's team to identify the areas they should focus on and track the progress. In this article, we'll unveil the importance, types, and examples of critical success factors. We’ll also compare critical success factors and KPIs and uncover how to identify these factors for your company. Why are critical success factors important? Critical success factors directly relate to a business strategy and can be defined as systems that help brands reach their goals. You can take all the necessary measures to bring all your efforts to succeed. A detailed plan covering factors enables you to gather all your company’s capabilities to focus on the key goals. As a result, your employees' tasks will be aligned across different departments to reach your objectives as soon as possible. The reasons to have your CSFs listed are clear, so we have to explain the difference between critical success factors and KPIs. Critical Success Factors vs KPIs Since many business people use the two terms interchangeably, we need to clarify the difference. This will help you become closer to your key goals and finally reach them. Critical success factors are vital elements of a company that enables business owners to achieve the goals they set for the future. If project managers list the right factors that influence the achievement of long-term and short-term goals, they can succeed faster. These factors are more general than KPIs. For example, “increase revenue.” KPIs are measurements that help assess the success of a company. With key performance indicators, entrepreneurs can evaluate the overall performance of their brands. They can analyze a company's overall effectiveness and specific departments' progress. KPIs are detailed and quantitative. For instance, “increase profits by 20% in the European market within six months”. The difference seems small yet significant. That’s why you should be familiar with the terms when starting a business. Now it’s time to review the types of critical success factors. Types of Critical Success Factors You can encounter different types of CSFs your team should be aware of. We’ve prepared a list of the main types for you to consider. Strategic factors. These factors depend on your company’s competitive strategy. You need to define the way you market your company and product and the position you want to occupy. For instance, you can position yourself as a high-cost producer of quality products that manufactures a limited number of valuable items. Environmental factors. These include factors your company doesn’t have direct control over. However, marketers still need to track them and take action to stand out and keep the leading position within the market. Environmental factors include public policy, competitor actions, the economy, and new technologies. Industry factors. Companies should be ready to do specific tasks to have a competitive advantage in their respective industries. Your team should watch industry trends to figure out what to do to achieve goals and remain competitive. Once you identify the most relevant, you’ll be able to make a list of tasks to do to be closer to your long-term and short-term goals. Temporal factors. Most factors are tied to a company’s goals and terms, yet some situations might require instant attention and solution. That’s why managers should be ready to solve problems effectively. They cover internal changes within a company. Once marketers face challenges, they need to develop critical success factors. For instance, if a brand grows fast and prospers, it might need to enter a new market and present its product to a wider audience. Now that you know the types, let’s discuss how to identify these factors for your company. How to identify critical success factors for your business? If you need to determine factors to increase the chances of success for your company, follow our short guide. Analyze your mission, vision, and values. First, you need to determine your company’s mission and determine current targets and challenges. You can take your business through a PEST analysis to identify external market factors that impact your brand. Besides, consider conducting a SWOT analysis to discover your business's strengths and weaknesses, potential opportunities, and threats. Determine main strategic goals. You need to figure out your strategic objectives closely related to your company values and mission. After, you need to outline the ways to reach them. It might require you to perform several actions to achieve your key objectives. Let’s say you want to become an environmentally friendly brand. Once you identify such a goal, you’ll need to determine critical success factors. This scenario might include creating recyclable packaging, investing in renewable energy sources, and reducing carbon emissions. Identify the essential critical success factors. Once you have your critical success factors, you need to determine those with higher priority. Identify the essential factors to focus on the areas important for your success. Besides, during the analysis, you might find some unnecessary and erase them from your list. Inform stakeholders. Once you find out what steps you should take, you need to think about which departments can help you attain your CSFs. After you decide on the teams responsible for reaching these objectives, you need to update stakeholders on your critical success factors. Ask for their feedback to get some new ideas and identify challenges that might arise on your path toward success. Find a way to track and evaluate your progress.Setting KPIs is one of the most effective ways to assess your progress. For example, suppose you want to reduce negative influence on the environment. In that case, you can write down a KPI and make a more detailed statement, “change 100% of packaging to recyclable within five years.” You can also assign a special task to one of your employees or teams to track the progress. Now that you know how to identify these elements, it’s critical to see some examples to figure out how everything works in real life. Examples of Critical Success Factors Business owners striving to prosper their businesses must define critical success factors. Let’s review several examples to clearly understand factors that can help make your business more successful. CSFs vary based on your end objectives. For instance, if you want to increase conversions by 10% within two months, you might face the necessity to provide a higher quality of service, more effective marketing techniques, make more customers happy, etc. Suppose you want to attain specific goals in terms of sales. In that case, you might need to establish stronger relationships with customers through different channels and strategies, improve interactions between departments to align tasks, and work towards the achievement of common goals. You might need to increase the quality of products, conduct a more profound research, or reduce production costs to increase the efficiency of your business and attain the necessary objectives. Defining the right critical success factors will pave the way to the completion of your mission. Congrats, now that you know the peculiarities of critical success factors, you can cooperate with your company’s team to outline factors that will help you reach your deliverables. Hope that our examples gave you a hint on where to start.

Cost per click (CPC) is an advertising pricing model that allows advertisers to pay publishers for each click made on their ads. This model is used by Google AdWords and Facebook. This is a great way to correlate your advertising investments with the ROI you get. In this article, we’ll explain the way cost-per-click advertising works, shed light on a good average cost per click, share a formula to calculate this metric, and offer some tips to reduce your cost per click in Google Adwords. How does cost per click work? Advertisers can use two cost-per-click models. The first one is fixed. It implies cooperation between an advertiser and a publisher without any third-party platform. They agree on a price an advertiser pays for each click on their ad. The second model is based on bidding. Bidding means the maximum budget an advertiser can afford to pay for each click on their ad. They use keywords to place bids. If several advertisers use the same keyword, the future of their ad depends on the auction. The maximum bid and quality scoreare the main factors that Google takes into account to determine which site will get the higher position on its SERP. Hence, the more an advertiser is willing to pay for each click and the better their site is, the more chances their ad has to make it to its target audience. By this time, you should be very interested to know more about your average cost per click, so let’s dive in. What is a good average cost per click? It depends. There’s no fit-for-every-business answer. You should take into account your industry, type of product, target audience, type of advertising, etc. Nevertheless, the average cost per click in AdWords is $2,69 for search and $0,63 for display. According to Google AdWords industry benchmarks, consumer services and legal services have the highest cost per click — $6,40 and $6,75. If you deal with eCommerce or travel and hospitality, there’s good news for you. These niches have the lowest cost per click — $1,16 and $1,53. Check out the report below for more details. Now it’s time to find out how to calculate your cost per click. How to Calculate Cost per Click Recall the cost-per-click models we’ve mentioned before. If you use the model based on a bid, your cost per click will be either less or equal to your maximum bid. This is predetermined by your quality score, your competitors’ bids, and their ad rank as well. If you cooperate with a publisher directly, you can calculate your cost per click when your advertising campaign ends. For this purpose, use the formula below. Cost per click = Ad cost/Number of Clicks Hence, if you spent $500 on your campaign and received 114 clicks, your cost per click would be $4,3 (500/114). This information allows you to understand whether this campaign was effective and make the necessary changes to your promotional strategy. Now that you know more about the average cost per click and can calculate it, we’ll share some effective tips that will help you decrease your cost per click. How to Reduce Cost per Click in Google AdWords Follow the tips below to optimize your advertising investments. Use keywords with low competitiveness. It’s no wonder that the higher the competition for a certain keyword, the more you’ll have to pay for it. Consider low-competitive keywords to save more money. Use long-tail keywords. Such keywords can save you a fortune. They havelow search volumes but represent a clear user intent. Hence, they cost less than generic ones. Besides, this type of keyword has a positive impact on your quality score, which, in its turn, can lower your CPC. Work on improving your quality score. This is one of the major factors for Google when determining your cost per click. To increase your quality score, pay special attention to your keywords, ad text, and landing page. All these elements should be relevant to each other. However, don’t forget about your CTR. If it’s high, Google understands that users find your site useful,making it easier for you to promote. Schedule ads. There’s no point in posting your ads 24/7 since you can spend your budget in vain. Instead,try to research and analyze the necessary data to find out the days and times when your audience is the most active and engaged. Hence, your audience will see your ads only when they’re most likely to convert. Make use of geo-targeting. Focus your efforts on certain areas with the most engaged audience. You can select a country, city, area, regional code, and even radius to create highly targeted ads. Create a list of negative keywords. These queries have nothing to do with your business but can appear on your list. For example, let’s say that you sell eyeglasses. It’s essential to add wine glasses and drinking glasses to your list of negative keywords. Otherwise, you’ll spend money in vain. Congrats, now you know how CPC works, know the average cost per click for different industries, and have a formula and six tips to reduce your cost per click.

CRM, or customer relationship management, is an approach companies use to maintain their interactions with customers and streamline business processes. The core of this approach is CRM systems – special software for managing leads, tracking customers’ activities, and automating communications. LIKE.TG provides a built-in CRM system to effectively manage your sales process and communication channels in one place. In this video, Caleb Smith, marketer at LIKE.TG, explains how to use LIKE.TG CRM. Why is CRM important in marketing? CRM software gathers data about each customer in one easily accessible dashboard. With this information on hand, your team can keep track of each buyer’s journey and make the best offers at every stage. As a result, yoursales cycle can shorten by 8–14%. CRM helps define your customers’ interests and preferences. Thus, you can provide personalized experiences and launch relevant marketing campaigns. 47% of companies believe that CRM marketing increases customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty. Eager to know how customer relationship management achieves these impressive results? Let’s give a once-over to the functions CRM systems have. What does CRM do? The CRM software market is full of various solutions; they provide different opportunities for different types of businesses, from large enterprises to small businesses. However, there are basic tasks every CRM should perform: Consolidate customer data. The CRM platform should gather your clients’ contacts, demographic information, and other data to provide easy access to them. Track interactions and activities. CRMs let you monitor your communications with customers via phone, email, live chats, support tickets, and so on. Measure performance and productivity. A good CRM lets you get data-heavy yet clear reports on the efficiency of your interactions with customers. Automate routine activities. Marketing and sales automation is the bread and butter of CRM solutions. CRM systems may tackle different issues businesses face. Read further to unpack the main types of customer relationship management software. Find out how a CRM system can streamline your tedious routines: «Key CRM Functionality for Small Businesses and How It Can Support Your Growth». Types of CRMs Across-the-board CRM is a rare thing. On average, certain software performs one task better than others. According to its main strengths, CRM software falls into one of the following categories: Operational CRMs. This type pivots on your company’s day-to-day operations and automates routine operations. Analytical CRMs. In a nutshell, these are huge databases with detailed information about your customers and processes. Collaborative CRMs. These solutions help improve interactions between different departments of your company. We’ve quickly looked at customer relationship marketing, its functions, and the main types. It’s time to delve into specific solutions and find the best options for different business goals. 15 Best CRM Systems Sales CRM Systems CRM Systems for Marketing CRM Systems for Small Businesses CRM Systems for Social Media CRM Systems for Real Estate Every business issue requires a specific solution; what works for marketing purposes may not be a good fit for customer service. Thus, we have divided the best CRMs into groups according to their business needs. Follow our listing of the most powerful tools for sales, marketing, small businesses, social media management, and real estate agencies. Sales CRM Systems Sales-focused CRM software lets you transform a complex selling process into a cinch. It simplifies lead nurturing, tracks a prospect’s way through the sales funnel, and shortens the sales cycle. The must-haves for sales CRMs are routine tasks automation and powerful analytics, which helps keep tabs on your performance and identify bottlenecks in the sales process. Let’s unveil the top-3 sales CRMs we’ve picked for you. Salesforce Salesforce offers a cloud-based highly-customizable solution for even the most complicated sales processes. This CRM lets you automate tedious tasks and processes, enabling you to work from anywhere via the mobile app. The tool supports integrations with Outlook, Google Apps, LIKE.TG, and other services. The strongest part of Salesforce CRM is its AI-based Einstein Analytics, which provides you with detailed data on each deal, customer, and stage of the sales process. Better yet, it predicts sales outcomes and gives precise recommendations on how to achieve your business goals. With Salesforce, you can manage the entire sales cycle, score leads, access customers and sales details, forecast sales accurately, and more. The home tab lets you keep track of tasks, events, recent records, and activities. Here you can also see a pipeline and potential revenue source diagrams. Free plan: 30-day trial.Paid plan: from $25 per month for one user. Zendesk Sell Zendesk Sell is a model operational CRM that allows you to call customers, send them emails, and schedule meetings in one place. You can automate communications out of the box or with external services, such as Mailchimp, Pandadoc, and your own apps built with the Zendesk Apps framework. This tool gives great opportunities to manage leads, from creating precise customer profiles to prospecting across multiple channels. Zendesk Sell has a built-in database with over 20M businesses and 200M professionals so that you can find leads based on your customer profiles. Another prominent advantage of Zendesk Sell is its profound analytics, which includes 30+ ready-to-use reports and customizable dashboards. The latter lets you keep an eye on sales activity, call count, sale duration, outcomes, and more. As shown below, you can monitor and compare the most important metrics with your financial goals in real-time. Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan: from $19 per month for one user. Pipedrive Pipedrive is a visual, easy-to-use, and highly-customizable operational CRM. Like Zendesk Sell, Pipedrive lets you call, send emails, and plan meetings from the dashboard; here, you can also store documents for easy access. The CRM system provides you with adjustable reports and robust integrations, including native mobile apps, Google and Microsoft services, and 150+ extraneous apps and tools. Pipedrive lets you create a chatbot for your website or connect a live chat for easy lead grabbing. The service has an AI-powered sales assistant, which recommends ways to automate processes for more effective work. Better yet, it gives you behavior-based hints on how to boost your sales results. Pipedrive allows you to adjust the pipelines in the CRM according to your sales cycle. For example, here is a way to organize the process according to your sales team’s interactions with a lead. Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan: from $12.50 per month for one user. CRM Systems for Marketing If you consider using CRM for your marketing needs, you can ignore sophisticated pipelines or built-in calls. Focus on detailed data about interactions with customers and the robust automation of marketing processes instead. Discover the best CRM systems for marketers. LIKE.TG LIKE.TG is a great choice for anyone looking for a tool with effectivemarketing automation features. You can create professional multichannel subscription forms, pop-ups, and chatbots on social networks to generate leads. Build automatedworkflows to nurture leads, send messages in response to users' actions, and save time. The service enables you to create a live chat for your website to communicate with your visitors to support them and convert them into customers. The LIKE.TG CRMis perfect for those who have not tried using CRM yet and keep records of sales on paper. You can start using our CRM for free for 5 users in your account. An intuitive interface in the same style as other services will help you easily understandhow things workif you have used LIKE.TG before. In our CRM, you can store and update customer information, create deals and, control the process of their conclusion, add the statuses you need to visualize the processes on the Kanban board. By clicking on the deal card, you will see full information on it: data about the client, about the deal (when it was created, manually or automatically, the history of its movement by stages), the specialist responsible for its conclusion, and comments. You can edit it and add the required fields, leave comments, and contact the client via email or chatbot if they initiated communication through this channel. Tags will help you quickly find the right contact and segment customers. If you send email campaigns via LIKE.TG and use chatbots, you can send automatedmessages directly from the CRM by a trigger. This can be the creation of a deal, that is, when the user clicks the "Buy" button in the chat with your bot, or the transition of the deal to a new stage, for example, "Waiting for payment" or "Ready for shipment." You can also add your team members to the CRMto assign specialists responsible for each deal.They willsee and work with all deals, but you can restrict their access to other LIKE.TG services. HubSpot HubSpot CRM tries to embrace the needs of different departments, including sales, service teams, and operations managers. For marketers, the company offers tools for lead generation and management. Among this powerful set of additional features, HubSpot offers live chat and chatbots, email, an ad management system, and more. On-site analytics allow you to track offers and traffic sources that drive the most conversions. To obtain new customers, HubSpot lets you craft attractive landing pages with its landing page creator and set up PPC campaigns with ad management tools. HubSpot will automatically convert all visitors into qualified leads, organize them inside the CRM, and track each contact, as shown below. Free plan: Available forever.Paid plan: From $40 monthly. Agile CRM The cornerstone of Agile CRM is its web engagement tool, which grabs website visitors with subscription forms or exit-intent popups. The CRM automatically segments them according to their behavior and responds to their actions, such as clicking links or filling in forms. To take lead acquisition to the next level, Agile CRM personalizes messages both for anonymous visitors and known contacts. The system automatically pulls a new lead to the right campaign. For instance, if a visitor views a pricing page, they will stick to a selling campaign in CRM. The service also allows you to craft, launch, and track social campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms. Among other Agile CRM features are automated email personalization, A/B testing, and visual analytics. For instance, the service shows reports on deals, contacts, tasks, revenue, and email campaigns in this picture. Free plan: Available forever for up to 10 users and 1000 contacts.Paid plan: From $8.99 per month. CRM Systems for Small Businesses Not only enterprises take advantage of CRMs. Small businesses and startups benefit from this tool too, as long as it helps them tackle their special issues. CRM systems for SMBs should fit the following criteria: affordable price; simplicity; high customization opportunities; integrations support. Let’s zoom in on the three best CRM solutions for small businesses and find out what opportunities they offer their audience. Apptivo This CRM wins SMB with its affordable price and ease of use. The most prominent part of Apptivo is integrations and customization opportunities. This simple yet well-working tool gives you ready-to-use apps to expand your opportunities. You can add contract and competitor management tools, a sales planning app, resources handling add-ons, and more. Apart from that, Apptivo offers integrations with 40+ third-party services to cover business demands end-to-end. You can connect this CRM to G Suite, PayPal, Dropbox, Slack, WordPress, and plenty of other tools. Apptivo users get a standard set of lead-capturing and tracking features out of the box. They can provide automatic lead creation, flexible pipelines, sales forecasts, and team performance analytics. Here is an example of the results and prediction report in the performance tab. Free plan: Available forever for 3 users. Paid plan: From $8 per user. Freshsales This tool combines an easy-to-use interface, a reasonable price policy, and numerous customization opportunities. Freshsales’ unique feature is their adorable AI assistant Freddy. This little buddy focuses on closing deals faster and helps you prioritize leads and forecast revenue. Freshsales has built-in mailing and phone options, a comprehensive lead management system with scoring, and simple lists of tasks and appointments, as in the picture below. The service also offers well-working analytics with visualized reports and integrations with Trello, Mailchimp, Zapier, Facebook, and more. Free plan: 21-day free trial.Paid plan: From $12 per month per user. Less Annoying CRM The Less Annoying CRM founders are a team of salespeople, so they tried to create the most stress-free customer relationship management software. This tool is perfect for collaboration. You can add as many users as you want, give them various access rights, and let them work simultaneously on the same page. This CRM software offers an easy-as-pie mobile website implementation to let you work from anywhere. You can log into the system from any device without syncing or installing anything. The main advantage of Less Annoying CRM is its intuitive interface. The system aggregates everything a salesperson needs in one place, as you can see in the example below. After a quick glance at the dashboard, a user knows their schedule and tasks for the day, current pipeline results, and additional sales activities. Free plan: 30-day free trial.Paid plan: $15 for a user monthly Perhaps, the solutions listed above still seem too pricey for a small business that operates on a tight budget. If that’s the case for you, check out our compilation of free CRM software. CRM Systems for Social Media Adding social networks to CRM boosts the sales team's productivity by 26.4%. However, the marketing and service teams benefit the most from applying social CRM. This tool allows them to schedule posts, obtain reports on their SMM efforts, react to users' queries rapidly, get insights about the brand reputation, and more. We’ve picked three CRMs, which enrich your leads and help manage social media activities. Sprout Social Sprout Social is a market giant with a robust set of features both for social media and customer relationship management. This tool works with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+, allowing you to collect contacts from these networks into a smart inbox. The CRM notifies you about incoming messages and bursts of activity to help you respond to urgent situations. Out of the box, you can assign tasks to specific team members; for instance, you may delegate a certain message to the system administrator. The system enables you to build a chatbot for quick responses to customers’ queries. Sprout Social has a powerful tool for scheduling posts and monitoring social media with keyword, hashtag, and location searches. This CRM provides your team with in-depth analytics on each post and overall team performance. For instance, here is a report on Instagram business profiles. The tab shows data about impressions, engagements, clicks, and followers and a graph of audience growth. Free plan: 30-day free trial.Paid plan: From $99 per month per user. Zoho The paramount advantage of Zoho is its lead acquisition options. You can define certain social activities, such as likes or comments, and automatically get new connections based on them. Add these connections to your CRM as new leads or contacts and segment them. The system will provide you with suitable offers for these leads according to their behavior. This platform focuses on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ but allows integrations with other services, such as Slack, Zapier, and Zendesk. Zoho offers social monitoring, quick responses to customers’ queries, and profound analytics. Zoho helps you identify the most profitable social channels by showing the revenue you get from them, as in the example below. Free plan: 15-day free trial.Paid plan: From $10 per month. Includes 1 brand (7 channels) and two team members. eClincher eClincher’s number one priority is simplifying social media management. This CRM tool covers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google My Business, Yelp, and Blogger. The CRM’s helpful features include connecting with influencers and getting content suggestions. To enter this service from anywhere, consider using the Chrome extension or a mobile app. eClincher provides the standard set of tools, encompassing a post scheduler, social monitoring, comprehensive analytics, social inbox, and more. In the publishing tab, you can see the list of connected accounts, the entry field for a new post with its preview on various social networks, and a calendar. Free plan: 14-day free trial.Paid plan: From $59 per month. Includes one user brand and ten social profiles. If you haven’t found the perfect solution for your business in the list above, consider reading our fresh guide on the best social media marketing tools. To expand your social media presence without paying a dime, get to know LIKE.TG’s chatbot builder. It allows you to create Facebook and Telegram bots and send up to 10,000 messages per month for free. CRM Systems for Real Estate CRM systems for real estate should allow you to create flexible pipelines adjustable to specific purposes, enable top-notch team collaboration, automate routine processes, and let a realtor work on a road. Any CRM that provides these opportunities will do, but there are tons of real-estate-specific solutions on the market. Let’s discover the best of them. The Wise Agent This CRM system underlines its ease of use, automation options, and pre-designed materials. The Wise Agent offers plenty of real estate marketing opportunities, including a bundle of ready-to-use adjustable email templates, flyers, and newsletters. The Wise Agent has a contact and lead management system, which adds new prospects to a call list, and sends them automated email campaigns or SMS. The system automatically matches property with clients’ specific requirements. Among other useful features are property alerts, an appointment calendar, document storage, a landing page creator, social media enhancement, real estate reports, and more. In the picture below is the dashboard The Wise Agent users see at the beginning of their day. Realtors know their schedule for the day, week, or month, see a daily calling list, and get notifications about new leads. Free plan: 14-day free trial.Paid plan: From $29 per month. Propertybase The Propertybase aims to simplify the real estate business and help you build lasting client relationships. The system gathers and scores all your leads from different sources in one place. You can send email campaigns based on property views, saved searches, your buying timeline, and more. Propertybase allows you to enrich property listings with multimedia content, including videos, 360˚photos, and virtual tours. You can promote them on popular real estate portals or social media easily. Propertybase adjusts your dashboard to meet your needs. In the picture below, you can see the interface from the agents’ perspective. They have analytics on lead activity, upcoming tasks, and recent listings in one place. The dashboard version for business owners also shows website performance reports and commission volume. Free plan: Demo.Paid plan: On request. Respacio Built with real estate professionals’ needs in mind, Respacio focuses on increasing sales. This end-to-end solution offers a simple and powerful interface, customizable pipelines, and integrations with websites, property portals, MLS systems, GSuite, Facebook, and more. With Respacio, you can create a well-designed website to grab more leads. The service offers a huge range of automated marketing tools, such as email campaigns and social media. Among other opportunities are routine task automation, responsive property lists, customizable processes, analytical reports, and more. In Respacio, you can keep your prospects’ contacts perfectly organized, as shown in the example below. The table contains a customer’s name, email, phone number, and lead source. Free plan: 14-day free trial.Paid plan: From $29 per month for one user. We’ve unpacked fifteen CRM systems perfect for various business needs. Keep in mind that even the most robust solution may not be ideal for you out of the box.Enjoy the benefits and usability of our CRM. Create your first deal now! Try our CRM

Cross-channel marketing is the combination of multiple promotional methods to ensure that prospects smoothly progress from one stage of the sales funnel to the next. In cross-channel marketing, businesses leverage various strategies such as promotional emails, bulk SMS, web push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and so forth. The adopted methods are used in unison so that they complement each other to amplify their overall impact. An interconnectedness among the marketing methods makes it easy to view the strategies cumulatively. This allows a business to calculate and comprehend marketing ROI easily. Businesses can implement effective cross-channel marketing campaigns using LIKE.TG. The service offers a multi-channel functionality that enables marketers to send relevant messages to both leads and customers. Apart from email, LIKE.TG allows businesses to send their customers promotional SMS, web push notifications, and personalized marketing messages using Facebook Messenger. Why use cross channel-marketing? Boosts engagement with customers Improves customer loyalty Tracks their ROI Businesses cannot afford to ignore cross-channel marketing. Not when they can use it to: Boosts engagement with customers. Cross-channel marketing enables businesses to personalize the various ways they interact with and relay information to both prospects and customers. By sending targeted and relevant marketing campaigns, businesses achieve better response and engagement rates. Improves customer loyalty. When businesses leverage cross-channel marketing, they show customers that they genuinely want to meet their needs. The clients, in turn, feel appreciated and delighted with the brand, which makes them more inclined to stick with it over time. Tracks their ROI. Cross-channel marketing allows marketers to understand various metrics that make up the success of their marketing campaigns. Businesses can quickly determine CTA impressions and open rates for their email marketing campaigns,opt-in rates for web push notifications, SMS delivery rates, etc. Benefits of Cross-channel Marketing Smooth buyer journey Effective customer service Improved brand image A better understanding of customers Cross-channel marketing has a lot of real benefits for a company. Here are some of them: Smooth buyer journey. By effectively integrating cross-channel communication in the marketing strategy, businesses get to improve the buying experience of their customers. It will be easy for customers to access support and product information, which makes their cooperation with the brand more pleasurable. Effective customer service. Cross-channel marketing enables a company to interact with its customers on several platforms at a time. By sending the right message using the most suitable channel, businesses improve the relationships they have with prospects and customers. Improved brand image. Cross-channel marketing yields an enjoyable buyer journey, which goes a long way in generating customer satisfaction. As all marketers know, satisfied customers impact a business’ brand positively as they will highly recommend the company’s products or services to their friends and family. A better understanding of customers. With cross-channel marketing, businesses can quickly gather information about their existing customers from several communication channels in one place. After that, companies can use the data to create segmented and relevant offers. How to Get Started with Cross-channel Marketing Integrate the data Determine the customer segments Unify interactions with smart content Optimize When launching cross-channel marketing, businesses should be prepared to tweak their strategies as well as make suitable optimizations along the way. That said, here is how to start with cross-channel marketing: Integrate the data The first thing to do when setting up cross-channel marketing is to unify data within a CDP (Customer Data Platform). For any business,CRM is excellent for handling this data. However, no matter the CDP a company chooses, its marketers should have access to analytics data that reveal all lead touchpoints. Determine the customer segments After unifying the data, businesses should understand the different segments within their target audience. Marketers can scrutinize touchpoint data to determine whether there are evident failures, trends, or successes. By assessing customer data and getting a clear picture of the existing segments, businesses will know what channels to prioritize and the type of message that performs best across the various communication channels. Unify interactions with smart content Now that your customers are segmented, companies need to customize their content to match the needs of customers. The best way to do this is to use smart content – dynamic messages determined by a particular set of criteria. Simply put, smart content is something like, “if a customer does A, show them B.” With smart content, a business will quickly determine what a customer has done; hence, all future interactions with the client will be based on known touchpoints. Optimize To get the most out of cross-channel marketing, businesses need to continuously analyze their strategies to ensure that necessary optimizations are made. Experiments such as A/B testing, use of CTAs, and modification of ads on Facebook Messenger can help marketers gain valuable insights, which in turn enable them to make appropriate adjustments on their marketing efforts for even more effectiveness. How to Do Cross-channel Marketing with LIKE.TG With LIKE.TG, businesses can step up their marketing efforts across various communication channels. Let’s highlight these methods and how companies can leverage them: Email. LIKE.TG has a comprehensive email service that enables businesses to create and send successful email marketing campaigns. For better performance, make use of personalization, segmentation, A/B tests, and other instruments. Web push notifications. Businesses can re-engage with and drive customers back to their site by using this feature. Some of the advantages of using web push notifications by LIKE.TG include offline notifications, easy personalization, and in-depth segmentation. SMS. If a company is keen on incorporating effective text communication into its communication channels, then this feature will come in handy. It allows a business to send marketing SMS campaigns across the globe fast. Chatbots.With LIKE.TG, you can create chatbots forFacebook Messengerand Telegram app.Chatbots help promote products, automate answering users' everyday questions, collect their orders, and register them for events. It is worth mentioning that marketers can use Automation 360 feature to send triggered emails, SMS, and web push notifications depending on events, variables, and actions that their subscribers take. Doing this amplifies the overall impact of the cross-channel marketing strategies a business adopts. Cross-channel Marketing Best Practices Here are the essential things you should do to get the most out of cross-channel marketing: Define the most effective channels for your audience. Choose a professional marketing platform that is integrated with analytics, marketing automation software, and a retargeting tool. Segment the audience wisely to nurture leads effectively. Optimize and develop customer touchpoints. Eliminate departmental bottlenecks that hinder effective coordination of cross-channel campaigns. Cross-channel Marketing Examples Below are some brands that run effective cross-channel marketing. As evidenced by these pictures, KFC implements cross-channel marketing by using email and Facebook advertising, among other methods. Netflix advertises its products via email and Instagram, among other effective communication channels.

Сorporate sales are sales done from one business to another. They are also called business-to-business sales. In this article, we’ll unveil how to do corporate sales. How to do corporate sales? You should prepare a well-thought-out strategy and a team of professional corporate sales representatives. We've listed the steps you need to take to win business-to-business sales. Make sure your sales reps know the peculiarities of your product. People getting into sales need to learn the product’s features, benefits, and value. If sales representatives explore the product for the first time, they need to have enough time to adjust to the requirements of your company. Ensure that your salespeople are ready to promote your product, communicate its benefits, and explain its value to businesses that want to purchase it. Take appointments. You'll need to be ready to work with rejections at this step. People won’t take your offer seriously before they understand that your product will become a perfect solution to their problem. To make customers change their minds, you should develop a great sales pitch and excellent product knowledge. You need to be persuasive, friendly, and sympathetic. Prospects should feel you care and sell your product because it can help. Be polite and tell potential customers the information they need. Convey the product’s benefits, features, and value. Understand your customers’ needs. Ask potential customers questions that will help you understand their needs and prepare them for the main sales pitch. You should ask about the number of products needed, budget, requirements, features, delivery, etc. This information will help you figure out the needs of your customers. Prepare your pitch. After you understand customers’ requirements, you need to start your pitch. The perfect pitch is a one-minute pitch that covers all your ideals, product, and company information. However, you should be ready to adjust to customers’ questions and needs during the conversation. If you see that your potential clients care a lot about the price, you should adapt your speech to uncover your pricing. When prospects have specific goals, you need to tell them about your product’s features that can help them attain these targets. Send email campaigns. If you have qualified leads, you can close deals fast. However, usually, it takes a company some time to win new customers. Consider sending follow-ups or making calls. The follow-ups are designed to receive a positive answer from customers as soon as possible. So, you need to prepare quality email campaigns encouraging prospects to buy. With LIKE.TG, you can design excellent follow-up emails in no time. Ensure excellent after-sales service. Your corporate sales reps should realize that after-sales service is vital. Customers’ experience with your company influences their future decision to continue purchasing your products or services. That’s why make sure to provide customers with all the necessary assistance and help. You need to make them come back. Congrats, now you know what corporate sales are and how to do them. Hope that our short guide will lead you to successful deals with other companies.

Copyright is the type of intellectual property that provides creators of tangible goods and authorized representatives with a right to reproduce original materials and distribute them to the public without the fear of being duplicated. It protects intellectual property from any possibility of other individuals or businesses copying or using it to their advantage. It applies to literary works, music, films, and software. In this article, we’ll review the purpose of copyright and find out how to check the copyright status of a work. What is the purpose of copyright? The copyright’s key purpose is to protect intellectual property from being copied or used by parties that have no legal right to it. When a person or a company implements an idea into life or develops some kind of product from scratch, it requires a lot of work, effort, and mental activity. Since creating something new and unique is a time-consuming and painstaking process that involves a lot of work, there’s a necessity to protect the right of creators to use this material for their own purposes without the fear of being copied. With copyright, individuals and companies can protect their creations from unauthorized duplication, reproduce them as many times as they need, distribute copies, and display their intellectual property to the public. By giving authors special rights, the government hopes to encourage the emergence of new unique works and spread them to the masses. Many people now develop original products that require a lot of time and effort invested. These products are intellectual property that is often copied or stolen from their owners. That’s why there’s a necessity to have a law that protects it. With copyright, other people or businesses can only use a particular product if they have permission from its creator. Now when you know the purpose of copyright, it’s time to figure out how to check its status. How to Check the Copyright Status of a Work If you need to receive specific data about copyright ownership, publication, and derivative works, you can turn for help to the Copyright Office and explore its records. In case you search for some general data like the author, publisher, date of publication, or topic, better consider the catalog of the Library of Congress. You can use the following strategy: visit the Library of Congress to find out some general facts, and then make use of the information you have found to seek the records of the Copyright Office online. To effectively look through the records and find the required data, you should have your goal clearly defined. This will simplify your search. If you search for the owner of a copyright, pay attention to certificates of registration and assignments. When you need to figure out whether a work is in free access, check copyright registrations or other records with the date of first publication. To search records online for free, go to the official website of the Copyright Office, and then explore the public catalog to find the necessary files. In a nutshell, copyright gives creators legal rights for their work, protects it from duplication, and encourages people to produce more original and unique software, films, literary works, songs, etc. Hope our information helps you find the copyright status of the required material.

Cost per impression (alsoknownas cost per mille, CPM) is a marketing metric that allows advertisers to evaluate their campaigns'effectiveness. Thismetrichelps you calculate how much you will have to pay for 1,000 impressions. In this article, you'll get to know why the cost per impression metric is important, discover how to calculate it, and get some tips on how to reduce it. Why is CPM important? Using the cost per impression metric, you cancalculate how much you haveto pay fora thousand impressions. One impression stands forone ad view, so every time a user seesan ad, it counts as one impression. This pricing model is typically used for Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads. CPM is a valuable metric for marketers since it helps themweigh up the efficiency ofeach promotional channel. For example, if 1,000 impressions on Google cost you less than the same amount of impressions on Facebook,Google ads are probably a better fitforyour strategy. Still, low adcostsdo not necessarily meansuccess, as they may be a sign of poor traffic quality.You might want tofind out more about each publisher before placing your ad on their platforms to avoid wasting your budget. Other than that, keep the following factors in mind, as they influenceyourCPM rate: industry; demographics; location; season; website topic (the relevance ratio of a website's andyour ad's topics); website traffic; ad quality; device whereyour ad will appear; number of ads on a page; time of day. The cost per impression metric is essential for startups and businesses releasing new products since it increases brand awareness and recognition. Placing CPM ads on relevant websites allows advertisers toreach out to relevant audiences, increasing their campaigns' effectiveness. If you have tested several ads and identified one thatbrings more conversions, you canimplement itusing a CPM pricing model, ensuring a higher ROI. Now that you know the peculiarities and advantages of the cost per impression metric, it's time to find out how to calculate it. How do you calculate your cost per impression? Thecost per impression formula is pretty straightforward: CPM = (Total ad spending/Number of ad impressions)*1000 You need to divide your campaign costs by the number of ad views and multiply by 1,000. Let's say you want to spend $100 and get 3,000 impressions on a certainresource. CPM = ($100/3,000)*1000 So, your CPM will be $33,3. Remember that there’s no good or bad CPM rate since it’s different among businesses and industries. Still, if you’re looking for ways to reduce your expenditures,readthe next section to get some tips on how to do it. How do youlower your CPM? We’ll share some tips you can use to save money when working with Facebook and Google ads. Craft highly relevant ads. Each social media platform and search enginewants its users to have the best experience. Advertising algorithmsmake sure that peoplesee only the ads they might be interested in, so you should take Google Ads Quality Score and Facebook Relevance Score seriously. 10 points mean that you can perfectly meet your potential audience’s preferences. The higher the score, the less you’ll need to pay. You can segment users by location, interests, age, and other categories to create highly relevant and targeted campaigns. Choosethe right number of ads. This step will help you prevent users from being annoyed by your ads. The best number of adsfor one user is considered to be 3— ithelps users remember your brand without being intrusive. Besides, if users don’t engage with an ad when seeing it for the 4th time, it means that it is not relevant to them. As a result, your CPM rate will increase. Make use of social proof. People are eager to trust other people more than companies, especially when dealing with a new product. So, you canmention that your product is recommended by a well-known opinion leaderoran established brand or add some short testimonials from your loyal customers. Arrange a special offer. Social media users see hundreds of ads every day andrarely expect to get something valuable from them. Break this stereotype and offer a deal people will find difficult to ignore.Analyze your competitors' offers to come up with something better. Your task here is to engage users and bring them to your business — you can do this by offering asubstantial discount or a free trial. Gathera lookalike audience on Facebook. This is a great chance to lower your cost per impression since Facebook wants to provide its users with the best experience. A lookalike audienceincludespeople who share your existing customers’characteristics. If lots of your clients aremiddle-aged men from Australia whoenjoy traveling, peoplewith the same characteristicsmight also be interested in your company. Add a CTA.This seems pretty simple, but many advertisers forget to addCTA buttons or don’t know which one to choose. As a result, people skimmingyouradwon't know what they should do next and just scroll down their feed, ignoring your message. State what users should do nextclearlyand encourage them to start communicating with your brand.Personalized CTA buttons seem to strike the right chord with customers, but you also cannot go wrong with something classic, like“Learn more.” Increase your ad relevance score. We’ve already mentioned that search engines and social media want to meet their users’ needs, so they reward advertisers with low CPM rates. The higher your ad relevance score (10 is the highest), the less money you’ll pay. To get more points, analyze your audience thoroughly before advertising something. Let’s say that you are promoting your forest resortand target peoplebased on their locationto choose those who live near your resort. This might be ahuge mistake. First,learn more about your typical clients'age and income— your resort might be a premium offer, which is probably not the best fit for young people. Second, consider your audience'sinterestsandtake the ad relevance score seriously. Congrats, now you know why the cost per impression metric is essential for marketers andcan calculate and lower it. So, follow our tips to create a relevant ad campaign for social media!

Content marketing strategy is a set of actions to organize your content production and publishing so that it increases your market share, improves your brand image, and increases sales. In this video, a LIKE.TG marketer, Anna, explains how to create a powerful content marketing strategy. Why is content marketing strategy important? It helps you build trustful relations with your audience It helps you improve your site ranking on search engines It helps you generate leads It helps you show your expertise According to SmartInsights, 69% of B2B companies produce their content based on documented strategies. HubSpot claims that 70% of companies around the world invest in their content marketing. This means that planning your content efforts will be worth your while as it works for businesses of any size and industry. Let’s see why developing a strategy for your content marketing may help your business prosper: It helps you build trustful relations with your audience. Content that effectively addresses your target audience’s questions and helps relieve their pain points is a great foundation for building long-lasting relationships. People like to consume high-quality content, so, if you produce it, they are more likely to purchase products from you. It helps you improve your site ranking on search engines. Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to determine which content is best. To rank high, you need to produce well-written content, relevant to users’ search queries. Content marketing strategy is the thing that will help organize your content production so that you only share interesting and helpful information at the right place, at the right time, to the right audience. It helps you generate leads. The higher your content ranks on Google, the more traffic you receive. Place subscription forms and lead magnets on your best-performing pages, and you’ll convert your site visitors into marketing leads and eventually sell them your products or services. It helps you show your expertise. You need to produce high-quality content to share your knowledge in a specific business field. By sharing helpful and impactful content, you support your audience and prove that they can rely on your company. Let’s analyze what makes up a content marketing strategy. 6 Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy Define your goals Develop your buyer persona Brainstorm content ideas Define the best channels for sharing content Choose a CMS Create a content calendar Here are six universal steps that any business takes to organize their content marketing from a clean sheet into a structured strategy. Here’s what you should do: Define your goals. There are four most common goals that content marketing strategy may help you achieve: increase brand awareness, nurture loyalty to your brand, educate the audience, and increase customer engagement. Ideally, you need to combine all these goals in your strategy since they fit different buyer journey stages. Develop your buyer persona. Find out what barriers may stand in your buyers' way and how your product or service may help them overcome these issues. Also, analyze the age, gender, location, and other demographics of your customers. Once you develop your buyer persona, it will give you insights into what types of content to produce and how to present them to your audience. Brainstorm content ideas. For ten minutes, write down as many content ideas as you can. Then read your ideas out loud and sort them into three groups: poor, okay, and great ideas. Finally, you can narrow down the list of the best ideas you came up with and choose the most relative ones. Define the best channels for sharing content. Find out which channels your target audience prefers for communication. It’s best to publish your content on the channels with the highest engagement level. If your audience is mostly young people, it’s best to communicate your ideas on Instagram. If your target audience is businessmen who rely on data, facts, infographics, etc., it’s best to post comprehensive articles and rationalize why and how your products can solve their problems. Choose a CMS. A content management system is a platform for creating, publishing, analyzing content on your website. The most popular CMS platforms are WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify. Create a content calendar. It’s better to have your content organized in a schedule then simply have a chaotic to-do list. This allows you and your team to keep an eye on deadlines, visualize your progress, and plan with ease. You can also start your calendar by optimizing your existing content if there’s any. Let’s find out which types of content you can build your strategy upon. What content can you use in your content marketing strategy? Posts on social media Blog articles Emails Videos You can create and combine different content types based on your goals, budget, and target audience’s preferences. Let’s review some most common content types that you can utilize in your strategy. Posts on social media Everyone hangs out in socials these days, so posting your content there is a good idea. On each social media, you can reach different goals, so your content production depends on the platform you choose. For example, Yoga and diet coaches often create educational and helpful content on Instagram, supported by well-looking photos. Check a post from midnshapeyoga. The model shows a specific yoga pose, while the text describes its advantages and gives tips on how to perform it. Unlike Instagram, Facebook posts usually contain more text, and you may add videos longer than one minute. Here’s an example of a Facebook post from the yoga training industry. Blog articles Blogging is a way to communicate ideas more comprehensively to your audience. It takes more time and effort to produce detailed guides, instructions, service comparisons, etc. To create relevant blog articles, you need to find out which keywords people use when searching for specific answers, and give them those answers in your content. Put all your knowledge and experience into your articles, because engaging and helpful content has better chances for ranking high on Google. It will be easy for users to find your site, and they will be more likely to buy from you. Aside from educating and entertaining your audience, blog articles allow you to convert readers into leads. This format allows you to promote your business more naturally compared to internet advertising. Organize your blog into several categories and join relevant articles using tags so users can easily navigate through your content. SkillShare blog shows new articles in the carousel and offers few categories of articles to jump into. Under each category, you can find articles and CTA that encourage users to join the brand’s community. Emails This digital marketing channel has one of the largest ROI. It allows you to nurture leads, promote products, host events and giveaways, notify your audience of any updates by sending professional-looking emails to your opted-in subscribers. You can also show your authority by sending curated newsletters. This email type helps you keep your audience updated about the latest news and trends in your industry, so it’s not directly promoting your business. Check a brilliant email from SkillShare that shares great ways to spend time with an advantage during the coronavirus quarantine. With LIKE.TG, you can generate leads, create and send all kinds of emails, including automated welcome, abandoned cart, reactivation, confirmation emails, and more. Our Free plan allows you to send 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers per month at no charge, so check it out. Videos Videos are more easy-to-digest that allows you to convey more information compared with all kinds of text content. According to Wyzowl, 87% of marketers claim that video content drives more traffic to their sites, while 89% say they are satisfied with their ROI from video content marketing. You can post video content on YouTube and other video hosting platforms. Create videos, like vlogs, webinars, tips videos, and how-tos, to educate and entertain your audience. Here’s LIKE.TG YouTube channel where videos are divided into playlists. Each playlist gives more information on each feature of our service, “Marketing 101” and “Email marketing in 5 minutes” playlist are designed to help entry-level marketers. You can share your videos and blog articles via emails, posts on social media, Facebook and Telegram chatbot campaigns with LIKE.TG. It’s up to you to decide which types of content to utilize in your strategy, and it mainly depends on your budget and goals. Don’t try to succeed using all possible channels at once because it’s better to gradually build your strategy and implement one channel after another. Let’s now find out how to monitor your content efficiency. How to Analyze your Content Marketing Strategy Success Monitor your organic traffic Analyze your email statistics Track shares and virality on socials Use Google Analytics When you set your content marketing strategy up and running, you need to pay close attention to your performance. Check out some ways to do it. Monitor your organic traffic Organic traffic is the number of users who visit your pages after searching for information on Google. This is the most crucial criteria to evaluate your content performance. You can track it with Ahrefs, SemRush, and other digital marketing analytics tools. Ahrefs shows how much organic traffic sites get from each country every month. It also shows the number of keywords that rank on search engines, the number of referring domains, backlinks, etc. You can also monitor specific KPIs for particular pages and get great insights. Analyze your email statistics You can track your email engagement by monitoring open rate, CTR, and unsubscribe rate. This data is crucial to understand what kind of content works best with your audience. If you send your email campaigns with LIKE.TG, the statistics tab will look like this in your account: Track shares and virality on socials If you have a business account on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, you can track your productivity similarly to Google Analytics for website traffic, but in socials. It includes detailed data about demographics that allow you to adjust your content to be more exciting for your target audience. Check the statistics in Facebook Insights. You can monitor the number of people who saw, liked, and shared your posts. Use Google Analytics Google Analytics allows you to monitor user behavior on your pages, including time spent on the page, the number visited of pages per session, bounce rate, etc. You can also track your lead generation success by checking the number of subscriptions to your emails and blog articles, conversions from blog and videos, the number of registrations from opt-in pages, etc. In the screenshot below, you can see a report on session duration. It says how many users spend a specific amount of time on your pages. The more data you analyze, the more specific and effective your content strategy will be. Let’s finish this guide by checking some actionable tips. 5 Best Practices to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy Post consistently Use tools for SEO Use exclusive content to generate leads Leverage UGC Segment your audience We’ve collected five actionable tips to help you build an efficient content marketing strategy without much sweat. Here they are: Post consistently. Build your strategy in a way so that you can always provide your audience with helpful information to keep them up to date. You don’t have to do it every day, but there should be some stability. Aside from that, you need to be creative and innovative. Consistently come up with new content formats so that your brand looks fresh in the eye of your target audience. Use tools for SEO. We mentioned SEO-oriented tools, like Ahrefs and SemRush. They will help you analyze your traffic as well as get specific content ideas. You can find some relevant keywords searched by many people, analyze the competition for these keywords, and, based on that data, list content ideas with the most potential for your business. Use exclusive content to generate leads. You can also use ebooks, infographics, case studies, etc., as an incentive to join your community. For instance, you can offer an ebook in exchange for a subscription to your emails. If the ebook is a killer, you both provide a lot of value and open the doors for relationships widely. Leverage UGC. It’s content produced by your audience, like feedback, reviews, photos, videos, related to your brand. You can include user-generated contentto your content marketing strategy as social proof: your content looks more trustworthy if your words are proved with your customers’ experience. Segment your audience. Use your audience’s demographics and placement in the lead funnel to develop more relevant and convincing content. Cold leads, for example, need more nurturing and educating before they are ready to buy products. Warmed-up leads are more likely to engage with promotional information in your content, but you also need to provide more sophisticated and exclusive information for such users. The last and evergreen tip is to monitor content marketingtrends regularly. We hope you’ve got acquainted with the concept of a content marketing strategy, and this guide will help you create your own.