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Variable costs
Variable costs are regular expenses of every business. Their total amount is proportional to a company’s production and sales level. If it goes up, variable costs increase, and if sales decrease, so do the costs. These expenses include raw materials, commissions, transaction fees, direct labor, utilities, etc.
In this article, we’ll explain why variable costs matter, review the difference between variable and fixed costs, show how to calculate this type of expense, and share some tips to reduce them.
Why are variable costs important?
If your sales increase, you may decide to produce more units to skyrocket your revenue. At the same time, you need to buy more raw materials, pay more for utilities, and spend more budget on wages. As a result, this can lead your business either to the ultimate breakthrough or some tangible losses. This is a reason why you should regularly calculate your variable and fixed costs.
If you manage to get more sales and find ways to reduce variable costs, you’ll save a lot of money that you can invest in improving your product or expanding your product range. Everything depends on your strategic goals. Lastly, variable costs are crucial when pricing your product. The higher your expenses are, the more money you’ll have to charge for your goods, which may negatively impact your position in the market.
Variable costs are not the only expense an entrepreneur has to cover. They go hand in hand with fixed costs, so let’s make the difference betweenthem clear.
Variable Costs vs. Fixed Costs
Variable costs mean expenses that are affected by the changes in production and sales. If a company increases sales, it will increase production to earn more money. Hence, it will have to spend more on wages, utilities, shipping fees, buy more raw materials, pay more for packaging, etc.
Conversely, fixed costs are not affected by the production level. They are set for a specified time period within a contract agreement and don’t change along with sales. They include basic costs of every company, such as rental lease payments, insurance, property taxes, interest expenses, and depreciation.
Now that you know the difference between these two types of costs, let’s find out how to calculate variable costs.
How to Calculate Variable Costs
To find out your variable costs, you need to keep a record of them and add them all to see how much it costs to create one unit of your product.
Let’s see an example.
Say, you own a bakery and want to discover the price of one strawberry charlotte cake that weighs 500g. You should take into account the following expenses:
direct material costs per unit: $13
utilities: $5
the total cost of labor: $10
It means that your company should pay $28 ($13+$5+$10) for variable costs to produce one cake. High production levels will decrease your total costs, but you should not forget about fixed costs. Hence, to cover all your expenses, you should get the money needed for investment, have a net income, and know how to reduce your variable costs.
5Tips to Reduce Variable Costs
In this section, we’ll offer you some tips that will help you decrease your variable costs and invest money in your business development.
Ask your suppliers for a discount. The larger the volume of raw materials you buy, the bigger your provider’sdiscount is. Don’t forget that they are as interested in this deal as you are, and negotiate some mutually beneficial terms and conditions.
Outsource some labor if possible. If you work with digital products, you should definitely consider this point. Since freelancers work remotely, you can pay them less than your staff members. The only trick here is that you’ll probably need some time to find an experienced specialist.
Invest in high-performing products. Check which products bring you the most sales and which have a low-profit margin. Maybe you need to reduce the production of slowly-moving products or even stop manufacturing them, concentrating on your bestsellers. This way, you’ll stop wasting your budget.
Invest in technology. Look for the process you can automate with the help of technology to eliminate the need to hire a person. For example, you can save some money on customer support staff by developing chatbots that automatically answer clients’ frequently asked questions.
Update your machinery. Look attentively at the tools vital for production. Do you maintain them correctly? Are they enough for your production volume? Are they updated? Why don’t you buy the latest model to speed up production?
These are some essential tips to reduce your variable costs. Don’t forget to monitor all your business processes, check if your staff members are doing their best, take the recruitment process seriously, and regularly calculate these expenses.
Value pricing
Value pricing is a pricing strategy in which prices are set according to the client’s perceived value of a product. Customer-centricity helps benefit businesses that offer unique and valuable features and provide excellent performance.
In this article, you’ll learn the advantages, disadvantages, and examples of value-based pricing and get to know how to implement it.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Value-Based Pricing
Often price formation is a difficult process. Based on your prices, customers decide whether your product is worthy or they can easily find a substitute product from a competitor at a lower cost. Companies with products or services that have some distinct unique and valuable features can reap several advantages after carrying out value-based pricing. In this approach, the customer is the top priority. Brands charge people a price based on the value a customer assigns to a certain product. The actual or perceived value of a product and the client’s evaluation is essential.
With this pricing strategy, you won’t have any limitations and can increase your sales volume and revenue. Over time, you can earn even more when you get to know your customers better and what they value. Your offer will become even more personalized, and customers will be eager to purchase more. Eventually, you can even raise prices if the product's value increases (new features, services, and upgrades).
Customers who get the best option out of all available appreciate the brand for providing the best services. They become loyal and purchase often. If they are very satisfied with your product, they will recommend it to friends and refer them. As a result, your customer base will expand.
When you know your customers and their preferences well, you can craft an exceptional product that brings value. One more advantage of value-based pricing is the opportunity to provide products people need. Researching before you set prices will help determine the features you can add to make people happy.
The disadvantages include a limited number of customers who can purchase a product, a highly competitive environment, high production costs, and difficulties during business growth.
Now that you know the pros and cons, let’s discover how to make value pricing work for your business.
How to implement value-based pricing?
To implement the strategy, you need to be aware of the key processes. Our guide will help you do everything step by step and achieve the necessary result.
Determine an audience segment you want to target. Since value-based pricing focuses on the value your product can provide to certain customers, you need to choose a specific audience segment. This way, you’ll be able to meet their needs and address their desires. However, if you want to reach several audience segments at once, you’ll need to shape a value-based strategy for each.
Check out the price of the next best alternative. You need to find a proper alternative for your product. Study competitors’ products to select the one with similar features and can be a perfect substitute. This product or service should bring the same benefits yet differ in performance. Once you identify such an item, check out the prices. It will help you determine the prices for your product. Customer research will come in handy to discover the prices.
Identify your product’s value. You need to identify aspects that differentiate your product from the alternative. Focus on the performance aspect.
Calculate the price your product is worth. At this stage, you need to determine the unique features and performance that provide you with a competitive advantage. These features are essential for setting the price. The more value your product brings to customers, the higher the price they can pay.
It’s time to delve into some examples to figure out how it works in real life.
Examples of Value-Based Pricing
Once you know how to implement the strategy, but are confused about where to start, consider reviewing the examples. Many companies operate based on value pricing and have happy customers. We’ve prepared several examples of famous companies to inspire you.
Louis Vuitton
The well-known fashion house is often associated with luxury and wealth. The strong brand image and famous logo are associated with stylish and expensive clothes and accessories in regard to its strong brand image and the famous logo. The brand has premium pricing, and not every person can afford to purchase from Louis Vuitton. However, many loyal customers are still willing to pay more to receive high-quality and fashionable clothes, jewelry, and bags.
Unlike other modern brands, LV stays classic and uses a recognizable color scheme and logo. People appreciate the fashion house for exclusivity, gender-neutral design, and more affordable price compared to more expensive brands.
Apple
You can’t skip an excellent example of a technology company that brings valuable products to the target audience. The brand succeeded in winning loyal fans worldwide. When creating and selling its products, Apple focuses on customers. Its team designs iPhones, iPods, and Macs that are simple and easy to use for clients. Now the company holds 39% of the US market share. People consider Apple’s products valuable because of their simple and modern design, familiar iOS and macOS, and seamless work.
Framer
The next outstanding example is Framer. This design tool helps create websites and apps in minutes and communicate with a team to stay consistent. The service doesn’t require you to pay or insert credit card details to start a free trial. This company allows users to try a free plan. However, users will need a more advanced plan with a certain monthly fee to get more valuable features. So before making a purchasing decision, customers can decide whether this service suits their purposes. Users can also watch the educational video to understand how everything is organized. Different plans target different audience segments. Framer prepared a plan for teams and organizations.
Congrats, now you know how to use value pricing. Hope our examples inspired you to develop a unique strategy for your company.
User experience
User experience (UX) is an overall experience a person has when using a product or service. By providing good UX for visitors, companies can increase customer retention and market share, invest less in acquiring new customers, build customer loyalty, and improve theirSEOand sales.
In the video below, you’ll find some interesting facts about user experience.
When you hear about user experience, you probably associate it with platforms, websites, smartphones, and laptops. However, this concept covers a lot more than you think. It’s about dozens of experiences you have every day when you go shopping, drive a car, and cook dinner.
In this article, we’ll unveil why you should care about user experience, provide you with some tips to make your UX better, explore ways to measure it, and review several examples.
Why should you care about user experience?
User experience comes in a variety of forms that help satisfy customer needs: great customer service, an excellent and easy-to-use product, a platform that allows a customer to solve their current problem, etc. It includes everything that creates a good impression about a brand. A positiveuser experience drives more attention to a company, while a negative one scares off buyers.
Poor user experience evokes negative emotions like anger, frustration, and impatience. They discourage the majority of consumers from coming back for a product. You definitely remember your bad experience with a company since it makes you avoid its services in the future.
If you don’t want the same future for your business, then strive to provide a seamless user interface, good customer support, and an easy-to-use product. You will be able to drive more traffic, attract newleads, attain more customers, develop customer loyalty, and increase yoursales volume. After improving your UX, you’ll notice some positive changes in your SEO, customers’ first impression,word-of-mouth, and investment costs.
Now that you know the reasons to care about the user experience you provide, let’s move to the next section to explore ways to improve it.
9Tips to Improve User Experience on a Website
Use a visible call to action
Leverage white space
Optimize your website speed
Ensure mobile-first design
Use lists
Apply visuals reasonably
Maintain consistency during your buyer journey
Ask users for feedback
Remove 404 error
Your website is a very powerful tool for obtaining leads and retaining existing customers. Make sure that you have an excellent UX for the constant growth of your company. Check out our tips to figure out whether your site complies with customers’ needs.
Use a visible call to action
The effectiveness of a marketing campaign very often depends on the quality and thoughtfulness of itsCTAbutton. This written directive encourages users to perform the desired action on your website.
A good visible call to action button tells what to do next, creates a sense of urgency, and, as a result, increasesconversions. To create a great CTA, make it concise, and ensure that it informs users what to do next and leads immediately to the right place.
When you open Shaw Academy’s website, you can instantly see a clear, large, and visible CTA that encourages visitors to take four weeks of online certified courses for free. In this call to action button, you can notice the value the academy provides.
Leverage white space
Graphic designers often use white space to balance elements on a web page. White space makes your website look fresh and modern and increases customer concentration. The technique also enables website visitors to freely navigate the software and have some space for action. Besides, it improves readability, which allows visitors to comprehend your content easily.
Apple did a great job by implementing white space into its website design. As a result, visitors can easily navigate, scroll down the website, and take the desired action.
Optimize your website speed
One of the most frustrating things is visiting a website that takes forever to load. According to Think with Google, the possibility of bounce increases by 32% when page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
To improve page load time, consider eliminating unnecessary elements, optimizing images, hosting videos on third-party platforms, such as Wistia, YouTube, or Vimeo, using browser caching, and reducing JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. You can leverage a special tool like PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or GTmetrix to check your website load time.
Let’s find out the speed of Monki’s websitedesktop version. You can see the results and suggestions that help improve your load time.
Ensure mobile-first design
Mobile-first design implies developing a website that users can access from their smartphones. It ensures that your site has a responsive web design, so you don’t need to worry about people who visit your platform from different devices. Besides, it simplifies the perception of content you post there.
Let’s take Pixelgrade, for example. This design studio has a responsive web design. When visiting the website, you can see a visible call to action button in the center and a convenient menu. To find out more about the platform, you just need to scroll down the site or tap on the hamburger menu.
Use lists
With lists, you can put together related information, guide users, and make your materials more readable. By using checklists, you provide your visitors with an opportunity to quickly scan the text and remember the most useful facts.
For instance, HubSpot uses the technique to list the features of its software and encourage users to take action.
Apply visuals reasonably
Visual content is essential for keeping your visitors engaged and moving them through thebuyer journey. Informative visuals can tell even more than long articles. Remember that images can also influence customer decisions. Much depends on the aesthetics of your site and whether it can evoke trust in your company.
Shopify wisely uses images to demonstrate the examples of great business websites, sales features, and tools that help run a startup. The eCommerce company shows visitors how it helps start or grow a business.
Maintain consistency during your buyer journey
Being consistent isn’t an easy task. However, to make people recognize your product among hundreds of others, you need to use the same or similar color, font, and visual elements across all communication channels and promotional campaigns.
Let’s take LIKE.TG, for example. The platform is designed in blue color, which can be seen across its marketing channels.
Ask users for feedback
In general, feedback and reviews are some of the most important sources of information about your products and services. Listen to your customers’ recommendations and comments to figure out the areas you need to improve.
For example, Thrive Market enables customers to leave comments about the service on its websiteand also includes product reviews under the product card of each item.
It’s also a great idea to post product reviews on your landing page. They motivate leads to buy and help relieve their fears and objections.
For example, when you open Yelp’s website, you can instantly see the reviews of different restaurants in your area.
Remove the 404 error
The last thing users want to see is a 404 error when accessing a link or image. Avoid any problems with your website to satisfy customers with the sources and information they need.
Now when everything is clear with the best practices, let’s walk you through the ways to measure UX.
4Ways to Measure User Experience
As a creator, you want to see whether your product satisfies and brings value to a customer. To obtain this information, you need to evaluate user experience. This is how you can do it:
Retention rate. When we speak about retention rate, we mean a percentage of customers who stay with a brand for a certain time. The metric enables an entrepreneur to find out how important their product is for buyers. Different actions, such as visiting a web page, logging in, and using certain features, might show a product’s usefulness.
Level of satisfaction. To measure a customer’s fulfillment with your product, you can evaluate their level of satisfaction with your company. You can do it in various forms: social media monitoring, satisfaction surveys across different marketing channels, customer satisfaction score (ask consumers to rate their overall satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 5), and net promoter score (ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your company, and let them rate you from 1 to 10).
Conversion rate. The rate shows the percentage of visitors who take a certain actionat each stage, from registration to purchasing. By monitoring your conversion rate, you can easily determine whether the UX you provide is satisfactory or poor. Check out the article to find out more about thismeasure.
Task completion time. It shows the time a user needs to complete a specific task. For sure, different visitors need different amounts of time to handle the same task. However, you can still evaluate it by calculatingcustomers’ average completion time (only those users who succeed to do a task), monitoring the time it takes for a customer to give up on completingit, and using the time customers usually spend on a task.
Now that you know the ways to measure UX, let’s explore several excellent examples.
Examples of Good User Experience
To understand what to do for your business to provide a seamless UX, have a look at the examples below.
Duolingo and fast language learning
Duolingo is an excellent platform that both effectively teaches different languages and cares about user experience. The website tries to simplify everything for its users as much as possible. The only thing beginners should do is choose their path from already available options, and advanced learners need to take a test.
Google Maps and people who get lost
Google Maps care about people for whom it’s hard to find their way in busy city streets and unfamiliar locations. In 2019, the app’s team decided to test a new feature that enables users to see a live view of the street with arrows and street names floating on their phone screens. This way, creators strive to make it easier for people to use maps.
To put it simply, a great user experience is one of the key components of your business’s success. Grab some inspiration from the examples above to create your unique UX.
Vertical marketing system
A vertical marketing system is the type of cooperation between the members of a distribution channel. It includes a producer, a wholesaler, and a retailer collaborating to deliver necessary products to their customersand aims at achieving better efficiency and economies of scale.
In this article, we’ll review the benefits of a vertical marketing system and its types and grab some inspiration from ourexample.
Advantages of Vertical Marketing System
Companies preferred a conventional marketing system earlier. It can be described as one where retailers, wholesalers, and producers operate independently to earn better profits, even at the expense of one another. The system caused a lot of conflicts between business partners and reduced ROI. To avoid such consequences, some companies decided to switch to a vertical marketing system.
In a vertical marketing system, manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers participate together in the production and distribution process. Therefore, business owners can manage their businesses efficiently and obtain a more significant market share. A vertical marketing system tries to eliminate competition and conflict that often arise between companies. As a result, there’s better efficiency and a reduction in product costs.
In this system, producers, wholesalers, and retailers cooperate to reach their business objectives and gain increased profits for all parties involved. Besides, each member has the power to control channel activities.
This cooperation allows businesses to control all aspects of a company, helps solve problems, and boosts efficiency. However, to achieve success, the system requires good communication and coordination skills.
Different types of businesses can use vertical marketing systems. Whether it’s a small firm or an enterprise, the system helps create a strong bond with suppliers, distributors, and retailers.
Now that you know the pros, let’s proceed to the types of this marketing system.
Types of Vertical Marketing System
The system can be divided into three main types. Let’s review each of them in detail and with examples.
Corporate. This type involves a single company that has ownership over all stages of the supply chain. Although there’s only one business that controls all the production and distribution processes, each organization inside this channel continues to manage the project. One of the examples is Amway. It’s an American marketing company that manufactures beauty, home care, and health products. The brand belongs to a corporate vertical marketing system because it sells products only through its authorized stores. Hence, the company plays the role of a producer and distributor of its goods.
Contractual. In this system, every member of the distribution channel performs as an independent entity. They integrate their pursuits to achieve higher efficiency and obtain value for all companies involved in the process. Firms sign contracts with large distributors to sell their goods and stay competitive. Working with a franchise is an example of a contractual type. To open one of such stores or cafes, individuals purchase a license. However, they have to follow the standards, practices, and guidelines of a franchisor. The famous examples of franchises are Pizza Hut, Dominos, and McDonald’s.
Administered. The activities of companies involved in the production and distribution channel are affected by the size and power of one of them, although there’s no contract. Simply put, a large company that has the most influence dominates the activities of others. For example, Procter Gamble. This consumer goods corporation commands a high level of cooperation.
Now that you know a lot about this system, it’s time to explore an example.
Example of Vertical Marketing System
You can find a lot of examples among modern companies. This is because the system allows firms to manage the costs and logistics of a distribution channel to improve their efficiency and reduce product costs.
Let’s take Zara, for example. The brand has complete control over all activities of the supply chain. This prevents the company from having any conflicts. Zara owns all stores, so they follow the same marketing strategy. Complete integration of all activities removes reasons for conflict between channels and stimulates maximum efficiency.
Simply put, a vertical marketing system is an alternative to a traditional marketing system. It ensures the cooperation between several companies and helps them meet customers’ needs, gain more profits, and reduce costs.
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is original content that is created by the audience of a brand. This content can be anything, from comments on a blog to photos and videos. The company can use it for its purposes — on the site or on social networks to promote its brand, and often the UGC is much more efficient than conventional content.
The use of UGC is beneficial to both parties — companies, and users. The company benefits from a fantastic amount of fresh ideas and unique content, for the generation of which itmay take many sleepless nights. Besides, most often, user content does not require a large cash investment. To users, the creation of UGC allows them to collaborate with their favorite brand, express themselves creatively, get various rewards and discounts for it, and even make some, even small changes in the company. Unlike usual advertising campaigns that are focused on sales, campaigns using user content are based on honesty and sincerity.
Pros of User-generated Content
Credibility
Reaching new users
Potential to go viral
Positive impact on SEO
Encourages users to make a purchase
Credibility
One of the most valuable bonuses that can be obtained with the use of user content is the trust of users. When you show interest in some of their thoughts, ideas, feelings, show your openness, attention, and respect for them, you will generate confidence in your company.
Reaching new users
When some people start to trust you, others will see it, and there is an excellent chance that they will be interested in your company. This phenomenon is called social proof, which you have probably heard of more than once.
According to a study conducted by Nielsen, 92% of users believe content shared by their friends and relatives, more than any other messages from the brand itself. The second most important source is considered to be the opinion of strangers about a particular product.
Social proof has a strong influence on people, and with the help of it, you can significantly expand your audience. People tend to believe other people more than brands and companies. Thus, UGC allows you to not onlystrengthen relations with existing customers but also to reach new users.
Potential to go viral
Most likely, the virality of user content will be higher than that of ordinary content, as people tend to share their creativity with friends, relatives, and acquaintances.
Positive impact on SEO
UGC also has a positive effect on SEO. KissMetrics revealed that if we consider the top 20 brands in the world, their results in the ranking are higher by 25% due to successful user content. This means that a large amount of organic traffic and content is associated with links to the site (mainly backlinks).
Encourages users to make a purchase
The most challenging task for brands is to make people buy their products. According to a report from L2 Inc, when a user is in the process of thinking over the purchase faces UGC, it increases the conversion rate by 4.6%.
The Main Types of UGC
Comments
Reviews
Photo review
Video review
Ideas for new design
Comments
Comments help identify whether the product or service is helpful or not, whether people managed to find what they had expected.
Reviews
Think about the process of making an online purchase. You visit a website, open the page with a necessary product, scroll down to find clients' reviews. We do it unconsciously. Why do we look for them? We want to discover customers' experience in dealing with a company.
Photo review
We want to discover the way our product looks in real life without ideal lighting and presentation since very often, a product ona website and real-life may differ.
Video review
Video review is another excellent kind of UGC because it allows you to see how the product is used in real-life. It is especially crucial for gadgets and household appliances.
Ideas for new design
UGC is an excellent variant when you are in search of newand fresh ideas for your products' improvements. Use social networks and ask your clients to create a unique design for a reward. We offer you two helpful examples of such practice.
Starbucks offered its clients to create a new design of their white cups, to post them for collecting likes and shares. As a result, 4,000 people participated, and the number of clients grew by five times.
Heineken also asked their clients for new ideas and used them successfully.
How to Start Collecting UGC
Analyze your target audience to find better places for UGC
If your target audience consists mostly of young people, use social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you work with both youth and adult people, create a special place on your website for leaving feedback. Its interface should be user-friendlyand simple toreview. Offer your clients a chance to leave their feedback after a purchase.
Be creative and original
Make regular competitions for your subscribers, and don't forget about rewards. Create a page on social networks and post there new arrivals, posts, questionnaires, competitions. Ask your clients for likes and shares. Another great idea is to do a giveaway. People will be delighted to get something for free, and you can also ask them tomake a post with a unique hashtag.
Creating high-quality content takes a lot of time, money, and energy. Therefore, user-generated content is hugely beneficial — with the help of it, you can save a lot of money and, without much effort, get a lot of fresh and unique ideas, increase customer loyalty and brand awareness.
Value analysis
Value analysis is a set of techniques, knowledge, and skills used to improve the value of a product by eliminating unnecessary costs or improving its functions without compromising its quality, reliability, and performance. It involves understanding the components of a product and related costs.
In this article, we’ll review the benefits of value analysis, compare value analysis and value engineering, unveil several techniques, explore the steps of value analysis, and see an example.
Why is value analysis important?
The technique is valuable for businesses since it helps reduce costs and improve the quality of products. Besides, it enables a company to increase business efficiency and effectiveness of all processes involved. The approach implies breaking down operational processes into smaller components and improving or removing them to ensure the increased value of a product in the future.
Since analysis allows firms to break down their product or service into smaller components, they can evaluate their importance and performance. As a result, businesses obtain a clear picture of the components that are unnecessary and can eliminate them to save costs.
Value analysis brings several benefits to your business, so let’s review them.
Benefits of Value Analysis
As we’ve mentioned before, value analysis is crucial since it identifies possible problems and suggests improvements that should be made in your company. This process helps:
reduce costs;
maintain high quality;
provide an opportunity to use new technologies;
eliminate waste;
encourage new ideas;
improve brand image;
improve design.
Now that you know some fundamentals, let’s explore this topic in more detail and make the difference between value analysis and value engineering clear.
Value Analysis vs. Value Engineering
It’s essential to understand the difference between these two processes since they play a great role in your business. To start, let’s review value analysis.
Value analysis implies analyzing existing products and evaluating them to improve their functioning or reduce cost. A step-by-step plan helps assess different aspects of a product, such as functions, alternative components, design, and costs. Value analysis includes function analysis, during which a product is broken down into components that are reviewed later.
Value engineering appears during the development of new goods. A company uses teamwork to analyze and evaluate the product to improve its functions and reduce costs. This process is conducted before any investments in tooling, equipment, or plant are made.
Now when you know the difference, it’s time to proceed to the techniques.
3Value Analysis Techniques
Value analysis involves many various techniques that simplify the process. We’ve prepared the main three for you to consider.
Be specific.Companies often try different methods and then report that none of them works. You should be specific and not make vague statements to prevent this situation. A careful manufacturing process requires accurate examination before it starts.
Obtain data from authentic sources. Different types of data should be received from reliable sources. You can use a questionnaire to obtain accurate information on costs, methods of manufacturing, and packing. Prepare accurate and relevant questions on topics you find relevant.
Use creativity.If you aim to find the unnecessary costs, you need to develop new ideas. By doing this, you can eliminate the previous problems and implement some valuable improvements. Besides, it enables you to discover how to simplify the existing component of a product and reduce costs.
Now it’s time to explore the steps of this process.
5Value Analysis Steps
We can distinguish the five main steps of value analysis. So let’s jump in.
Gather information. During this step, the main aim of your team is to understand the purpose of a project. Team members collect project data and concepts and try to understand the project scope. They analyze budget, risks, costs, and other issues, visit sites, and study various project documents.
Determine and analyze the function of a project. First of all, your team identifies the primary and secondary functions of the project. Next, team members should determine value-mismatched functions to improve them.
Generate new ideas for improvement. This step is for team members to create and develop improvement ideas. They should find alternatives so that the project could perform the same functions.
Evaluate these ideas and develop them. Team members discuss each idea in detail and identify the costs. They review all the possible risks and choose the most relevant and suitable ideas. Once ideas that make sense are identified, it’s time to work with them. Your value engineering team develops the options and passes them back to the project team. These ideas should be thoroughly explained so that project owners and stakeholders can understand them.
Present improvements. At this stage, the ideas are presented to stakeholders. The best salesperson is responsible for the presentation.
To understand how value analysis works, we need to proceed to an example.
Value Analysis Example
Let’s imagine that there’s a motor manufacturer that asks an engineer to conduct a value analysis on the motor casing and all that is required to build it.
During this analysis, an engineer discovers that there should be three different sizes of nuts and bolts and that it takes time to insert them. The specialist finds out that after a redesign of the casing, it’s necessary to use only one size of the bolt with threaded bolt holes, and nuts aren’t needed. As a result, the manufacturer can see clear savings in time and costs.
By doing a value analysis, companies can receive information about the out-of-date practices businesses use and replace them with new approaches that will bring visible results. That’s why many companies use this technique.
User onboarding
User onboarding is the process of users getting acquainted with an app, platform, or service and becoming proficient in it. It involves initial experience, training, and goal setting.
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of user onboarding and how to use it. We’ll also review how to measure user onboarding success and provide some examples.
Why is user onboarding important?
Showing customers how to use a product is essential since it helps them realize the value of your product fast. To reduce customer churn and dissatisfaction, you should design a seamless and fast user onboarding strategy. Since the competition is increasingly high, you need to be ready to provide consumers with all the necessary materials to become proficient in using your product.
A huge number of SaaS products and low switching costs enable users to change companies without losing a thing. So, if they don’t instantly see the value of your product, they can decide to search for another brand.
Effective onboarding allows users to handle the product fast and learn everything they need to obtain value. This way, you’ll increase customer satisfaction and productivity. With successful user onboarding, customers won’t need to spend extra time to figure out how your product works and how to make the most of it.
Now that you know why user onboarding is crucial, it’s time to unveil how to do it.
How to do user onboarding?
To bring customers all the benefits of your product, you need to ensure a healthy onboarding process. We’ll show you how to combine your efforts and knowledge to provide value and increase productivity.
Ask customers why they need your product. Since user onboarding focuses on customers’ success and value, understanding customers' needs is your top priority. Usually, consumers have several goals they want to accomplish with your product. If you want them to stay with your brand as loyal customers, you need to help them attain their targets. There might be different goals: personal, social, and functional. To find out these details, consider interviewing existing users. Ask why they choose your product and identify their successes with it.
Find out what success means for users. To develop onboarding flows for different situations, you should know the final goals. You can’t create a user onboarding strategy that meets all use cases. However, you can show customers the solution they look for. The faster you show it, the bigger the chance of them becoming your long-term users. You should be ready to provide each user with a solution. For instance, if you teach users how to use your CRM, you can help them reach several goals: monitor all deals and their statuses, store users’ information securely and track the changes in orders.
Break tasks into small steps. You don’t need to overwhelm users with excessive information. Onboarding should be step-by-step. Break down complex tasks into pieces so that users can finish them without feeling tired. Ask for simple actions customers can complete. During this time, your users can discover some new features by themselves. It helps them know your product better and perform tasks they need.
Show customers’ progress. If you want to motivate users during their journey, share their progress and appreciate their work. Demonstrate the number of steps users have to take to finish the task. It will help you figure out the time they need to complete a specific number of steps. Ensure that your tasks are skippable. If prospects aren’t prepared for the task, they can proceed to the next one. Every user wants a short onboarding, yet it’s necessary to pass through several modules to reach success fast.
Ensure educational content. If you don’t provide your users with engaging content, they can get bored and finally stop discovering your product. You need to find a balance. Don’t leave users alone, and don’t overperform with tasks and materials. You should guide your customers through your product and provide them with time to explore the features independently.
Give them some time to learn additional materials and find something useful. Once you identify your users’ intent, you can ensure the information they need. Let’s say you have an online course builder and want to guide your users through the process of creating appealing courses. For example, there’s a user who wants to find out more about the process of designing tests. Provide this person with all the necessary materials. You can invite this user to watch a tutorial, send useful links, and share some important facts.
Track the user’s onboarding process. Besides having personalized onboarding, you should also have a tracking system. It will help you understand who and when churns out. Moreover, monitoring users allows you to understand how people use your product, what issues they face, and what initiates disappointment with your onboarding. Having all these facts in mind enables you to improve your user onboarding strategy and reduce the churn rate.
Now that you know how to onboard, it’s time to find out how to measure it. The following section will help you figure out whether the process you design satisfies your customers.
How to measure user onboarding success?
You need to track multiple metrics to understand whether your user onboarding strategy is healthy and successful. We’ll list crucial measures you need to ensure an excellent experience discovering your product.
Identify engagement rate. The engagement rate highlights the percentage of active users of your product. To calculate the measure, consider segmenting users into groups based on the date they started onboarding. Afterward, find out the percentage of users who use your product every day, week, or month. You need this metric to change your onboarding strategy and see if it’s successful. After optimizing it, you’ll be able to increase user engagement and the quality of your onboarding process. Moreover, fewer people will churn out.
Find out the retention rate. This metric indicates the percentage of people who stay with your product over a specific period of time. To estimate the retention rate, you need to divide the number of users who signed up on a specific date and haven’t churned out yet. If the percentage of users retained is low, you need to work on your short-term retention rate. Consider simplifying your onboarding and improving user experience and see the reaction of your users. If they are satisfied, your retention rate will improve.
Check out the free trial conversion rate. It’s the percentage of users who joined the onboarding after signing up for a free trial. These people turn from free trial users into paid customers. After you get paid customers, you can ask for feedback and find out whether your onboarding communicates the value of your product.
Monitor the completion rate. The completion rate indicates the percentage of users who passed the onboarding. This metric tells about the effectiveness of your onboarding and the number of users who plan to convert. If you see that many potential customers don’t complete the onboarding process, it means they have some complications. You need to fix the problem so that they don’t leave your company.
Now that you know the indicators you should track to assess the effectiveness of your onboarding strategy, it’s time to see some examples. The next section will inspire you to ensure seamless user onboarding for your potential clients.
User Onboarding Examples
You can find numerous examples of successful user onboarding. In this section, we’ll review several of them to inspire you to provide an exceptional experience with your brand.
Duolingo and product experience
Duolingo has nothing similar to other language learning apps. It incorporates gradual engagement which starts with user onboarding and then invites users to signup for the platform. This is a very clever step since people can test the app before registering. Deferred account creation enables users to postpone the signup process until they are sure the app is their perfect solution. Potential customers are allowed to use the core features to learn a new language without having to register. This way, people can understand the product’s benefits and obtain the desired value.
TikTok and value
TikTok unveils its algorithm during the onboarding. To improve users’ experience, users have to watch, like, and comment on videos they like. This way, the platform will understand their preferences and find the necessary materials. When new users onboard the platform, they are explained how to switch videos. Moreover, TikTok doesn’t require users to instantly register within the platform unless they want to like and comment.
Tumblr and personalization
Tumblr focuses on ensuring personalized experience and uncovering product value. Once users decide to sign up, they can see explanations of a platform and set their expectations. To provide a personalized experience, Tumblr asks users to choose multiple interests.
Congrats, now you know what user onboarding is and why it’s essential. Use our guide to make your onboarding seamless.
User story mapping
User story mapping is a tool that outlines a customer’s interaction with a product and things the company’s team should do next to ensure a great user experience. It enables brands to unveil possible risks, reach a consensus, and provide an excellent customer experience.
In this article, we’ll uncover the purpose and advantages of user story mapping. We’ll also review when and how to do user story mapping.
What is the purpose of user story mapping?
Producing a product customers appreciate requires companies to work hard on different aspects of their businesses. People choose specific brands for the value and benefits they provide. To meet expectations and bring value to your target audience, you need to know them better. User story mapping helps you with it. A marketing team creates an outline of customers’ interactions with a product and decides which steps to take next to achieve the necessary outcomes. As a result, all your team members understand your clients and can work towards the achievement of their goals.
With a user story map, you’ll identify the value that plays the most important role for your customers. The departments of your company will know the steps they should take to resonate with the audience and encourage them to take the desired action.
Now that you know the purpose of user story mapping, let’s explore the benefits.
Benefits of User Story Mapping
Businesses spend a lot of money to create a great product. Besides, it’s a time-consuming process. Yet it’s a must if you want your brand to thrive and prosper. One of the things we recommend doing is user story mapping because of the pros it provides.
This tool focuses on the value user can obtain from your brand. A product team creates the map to figure out how customers perceive a product, how they react, and how they perceive specific options. With its help, companies can identify the steps they need to take next to provide clients with the best products. Also, departments can prioritize their work and determine the tasks they should perform immediately. An accurately developed plan allows businesses to find potential risks that should be eliminated before they escalate. Finally, your teams reach a consensus and act towards the achievement of common goals.
It’s time to unveil when to do user story mapping.
When to do user story mapping?
The product development stage is the most appropriate time for companies to create user story maps. They encourage discussions between team members and try to align them. Maps cover user experience and ways to solace customer problems. You can develop maps both for your new product and the existing one.
Now that you know when to create a user story map, let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to do it.
How to do user story mapping?
If you need to make a user story map for your new or existing product for the first time, you need to stick to several steps. Follow our guide to do everything right and obtain excellent results.
Define the problem your product helps solve. You need to know the problems your product can solve and the value it brings to consumers. Think about it because it’s essential both for your customers and business. A product should give customers the benefits they need. If it satisfies users, they will come back.
Understand your customer. If you know your audience, you understand how to approach them and address their needs, expectations, and desires right. Your audience segments are different; that’s why you need to analyze them all. As a result, you’ll have a clear picture of how to solve their problems and resonate with their needs.
Identify customer actions. Identify customers who interact with your product and analyze their activities. Users can filter items to find the cheapest ones, add and delete products from their shopping carts, and finish buys. This information will give you reasons why some users leave your website without purchasing.
Search for user experience stories. When customers perform certain actions, they can encounter different problems. As a result, you’ll have different stories about their user experience. For instance, a user might face problems with adding more products to the shopping cart.
Identify issues. A story map is an excellent way to identify problems and risks that might influence user experience later. There might be various problems, from missing information to technical requirements.
Work on product releases. Finally, the product team collects all the information to find out what things should be improved first. The product should pass all the levels of improvement to provide customers with a seamless user experience in the nearest future.
Consider a user story map if you create a new product or improve an existing one. Hope our information will help you do it right.
UX design
UX design is a process that involves creating an easy-to-use product that can satisfy customers and provide them with pleasure and value while interacting with it. It helps enhance customer satisfaction and loyaltyto a certain brand.
The video below will help you figure out what UX design is and what UX designers do to provide the best experience for customers.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of UX design and its five principles. Next, we’ll unveilsixtips to improve your site’s UX designand review three great examples.
Why is UX design important?
UX design encompasses customers’ motivation to use a product, its excellent functionality, and meaningful experiences. UX designers ensure that customers can access and use products seamlessly from any device. They take care of the values, features, accessibility, usability, and aesthetics of a specific product.
By developing great UX design, companies enhance the flow of visitors and increaseconversions. They ensure that leadsand customers obtain all the necessary information aboutthem and theirproducts. User experience design also influences SEO, especially ranking. As you know, Google pays attention to website speed, mobile-friendliness, and user-friendly URL structure when prioritizing sites.
Designers develop products that are easy to useand high-quality and bring delight when consumers interact with them. With great UX design, a company can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as meet consumers’ needs.
Now it’s time to move to the next section and discuss UX design principles in more detail.
5UX Design Principles
UX design is a constantly evolving process. However, there are some principles thatremain unchanged,meaning that every UX designer should follow them to make customers happy.
Customer centricity. This principle is the most important for UX designers. They come up with impressive websites and easy-to-use products to provide clients with a seamless user experience. When creating a website, you should remember that your user is your top priority. To ensure the best experience, you need to think about how customers interact with your company, their goals, and how they achieve them. Keep these points in mind during product and website developmentto create a product that will help attaincustomers’ goals.
Consistency. This principle involves using the same design throughoutyour site, in email campaigns, across all marketing channels,and in all promotional efforts. Your website shouldmaintain the same font, color scheme, and visual style to improvebrand awareness.
Clear hierarchy. When speaking of hierarchy, we mean the way you organize your content. Remember that your website navigation should answer users’ questions in order. A landing page invites visitors to explore an article on the topic users are initially interested in. If these people are eager to read on, you can encourage them to reviewyour products’features. Make sure to place the most important information in a prominent place. Visitors should instantly notice the benefits of your product, its features, and the problems it can help solve.
Mobile responsiveness. You should ensure that users can access your website from different devices. Mobile responsiveness is now the number one priority for most customers since there are 4.28 billion mobile internet users worldwide.
Usability. The main aim of user experience design is to help clients solve their problems. That’s why you should do your best and comply with the main principle — usability. Your website and product should be simple and easy to use so that customers don’t have to spend time and effort to figure something out. Each icon and button should haveitspurpose. Be clear in your copy, and present the most valuable features. To determine whether your website is easy to use, consider conducting special testingand leveraging usability testing tools. UserTesting, UserZoom, and Validately are just some of the platforms that help check your product’s usability.
Now that you know the key principles, let’s proceed to the tips thatcan be useful if you consider improving your website’s UX design.
Tips to Improve Your Site’sUX Design
Excellent UX design provides your visitors with clarity and intuitivenesswhile also boosting conversion rates. We’ve prepared the most powerful ways to improve your website’s UX design.
Increase website speed. Users expect your site to load in 1-2 seconds, and during this timeframe, people are more inclined to convert. However, if it takes longer to see your website pages, there’s a high possibility of visitors leaving your site frustrated. As a result, your website will have a high bounce rate, which affects the ranking. To prevent it, explore free services that help evaluate your websitespeed,and identify the causes that slow down its work. For example, you can make use of PageSpeed Insights to check both desktop and mobile website speed.
Design a visible and clear call to action.You need the right CTAsto allow users to take your desired actions. They should be clear, visible, and appealing to attract leads and make them convert into customers. One landing page should contain one CTA, and it should communicate action and be clickable. A call to action button should be large enough so that the user can easily click it on a laptop or phone and immediately get to the necessary page. The button should be around 47.9 pixels tall.
Create original and high-quality images. You can’t provide customers with value by posting stock pictures. Since visual content is crucial for users, the best option is to create original images. Ensure that they are high quality and unique. Besides, images should also be informative. Sometimes a user just needs to look through the infographics to find the most important facts within minutes.
Make use of white space. White space is the key to a minimalist and stylish website and your customers’ convenience. It enables users to perceive information easily. White space helps improve user attention and makes your content look readable and easy to understand.
Remember about consistency. To make visitors feel familiar and comfortable when navigating your site, you need to ensure consistency in colors, style, fonts, button sizes, etc. Unify all the elements to simplify the process of navigation on your website and establish brand recognition.
Be short and sweet.Implementlists to enable users to find the information they need fast. They will help visitors get the necessary data immediately, explore the main product features, and find solutionstotheir problems. Remember to write short and to the point and provide customers with answers as soon as possible.
Now that we have set that straight, it’s time to discover several outstanding UX design examples.
3Brilliant UX Design Examples
UX design is a process that has no limitations. Everycompany can implement its unique techniques and approaches to simplify the use ofits services, satisfy customers, and bring them value. Let’s now review several examples of famous brands that succeeded in crafting excellent UX design.
Booking.com
You’ve probably heard about the online giant in the travel industry — Booking.com. The company’s website is easier to navigate than its competitors’ alternatives. Users appreciate the brand for its highly-rated mobile app that enables people to book easily from any device. The search and booking processes are efficiently organized and allow clients to find everything they need for their travels at once.
Disney+
A well-known video streaming service provides subscribers with a wide variety of movies and shows in one place. To improve user experience, the brand decided to use a familiar design so that when customers log in, they see a layout similar to Netflix’s design style. Disney+ gives you a valuable lesson: use established design styles users are already familiar with.
Facebook
Although Facebook has 2.701 billion loyal users, the company still cares about providing the best UX and meeting itsclients’ interests and needs. To encourageusers to explore Facebook and continue using it, the company personalized customer experience based on theirpreferences, interests, locations, and other variables.
In a nutshell, great UX design is a must if you want to improve conversions and increase your customer base. Use our tips to make your website and customer experience better.
vCard (VCF)
vCard is a file format used for electronic business cards. Usually, it is attached to email messages with information like one's name, address, telephone numbers, email addresses, company logos, and photographs.
It may also contain sound clips and geo-positioning information. With vCard, your subscriberscan easily add your sender information to their address book. In this case, the data is displayed in the following way:
The following is an example of a vCard file containing information for one person:
All vCards begin with BEGIN:VCARD and end with END:VCARD. All vCards must contain the VERSION property, which specifies the vCard version. VERSION must come immediately after BEGIN, except in the vCard 2.1 standard, which allows it to be anywhere in the vCard.
You can read more about vCard properties here.
Unsubscribe link
An unsubscribe link is a link that allows subscribers to opt out from receiving marketing emails sent by a particular brand. It is usually placed in the email footer and leads to theunsubscribe page.
Why should I add an unsubscribe link?
It is a legal requirement
It influences your sender reputation
It has an impact on email deliverability
Its’ absence discredits your business
It encourages your mailing list’s self clearance
It is a legal requirement. CAN-SPAM Act and other laws regarding unsolicited email activity require adding unsubscribe link to every email that you send. These legislations were drafted to protect users from getting spam and give them control over their communication with brands via emails.
It influences your sender reputation. If you make it hard to find the unsubscribe link, those users who want to leavewill mark your email as spam. It will damage your sending reputation even worth than unsubscribing.
It has an impact on email deliverability. Email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo analyze your sender reputation: if it seems doubtful, they may block your emails before they even get to the subscribers’ inboxes. The fewer emails reaches people, the less revenue you can get from your email marketing.
Its’ absence discredits your business. If you hide the unsubscribe link, your audience may feel trapped, which will raise questions of trust among your subscribers. If you try to keep your subscribers from opting-out by not allowing them to do so, it will return in a negative attitude towards your brand and a wish to leave your mailing list as soon as possible.
It encourages your mailing list’s self clearance. A normal unsubscribe rate is 0.05% from all delivered emails. Unsubscribing within these numbers is OK because it means you will communicate with the engaged part of your audience, achieving higher click-through and conversion rates.
You need to understand that unsubscribing does not necessarily mean the end of any relationships. Your unsubscribe link can lead to an unsubscribe page whereyoucan make a small optional survey to find out why users unsubscribe. Besides, you can suggest continuing communication in socials or setting preferences on email sending frequency.
How to Add an Unsubscribe Link
Even if you forget to add an unsubscribe link, LIKE.TG will insert it automatically to every email template, caring about your sender reputation and your subscribers’ user experience. You can customize the unsubscribe link by changing the wording, the font, its size and color, and the color of the background. Here’s an instruction on how to customize your unsubscribe link.
In the drag-and-drop editor, you can create a block called “Footer,” which contains that unsubscribe link, privacy terms, your company’s address, etc., and use this block throughout your email campaigns.
Unsubscribe Link Examples
Some of the unsubscribe link examples we’ve gatheredbreach the CAM-SPAM act; the others show how to conduct your email marketing with transparency. Let’s see the difference between them.
Poor examples
Architectural Digest.In this example, the unsubscribe link is hidden in one line next to the “Private Policy.” Chances are that users won’t findit here. Besides, the wording in the result isn’t logical: “View our Unsubscribe.”
Valfre. This brand places an unsubscribe link correctly but makes the font size so small, that it’s almost impossible to find the link without the magnifying glass. ?
Victoria’s Secret.The unsubscribe link is lost in the text at the email’s bottom. The word “Unsubscribe” is not underlined or highlighted in any way, so users will have a hard time finding it. Give it a try!
Good examples
Art.com. In this case, the unsubscribe link is highlightedin blue color — a uniform color for all types of links, which users find easily. It is separated from other elements in the email, has a larger font size, and placed along with “Contact us” and “Privacy.”
Mitsubishi. It’s quite easy to find the essential word “unsubscribe” here because it is underlined and bold. If it wasn't, you wouldn’t find it in the text.
National Geographic. The unsubscribe link has its paragraph, and it is underlined and bold, as well, so there’s no trouble to find it.
Gain more insights into why an unsubscribe link is your marketing friend in this blog article.
User acquisition
User acquisition is winning new users for a specific service, application, or platform. Companies develop promotional campaigns to increase the number of installs by mobile users. User acquisition helps more users discover the app and prevents companies from spending extra money.
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance, channels, and examples of user acquisition. We’ll also review how to increase and measure it.
Why is user acquisition important?
The user acquisition strategy is essential for finding and winning new customers. It helps a company develop a roadmap that depicts the sequence of actions necessary to obtain new users. Companies design advertising campaigns and promotional offers to increase awareness about an app and generate installs. A user acquisition strategy allows entrepreneurs to be aware of all spending and can avoid additional costs.
To develop an effective strategy, a company employs successful marketing methods, hires experts, and segments users. It’s necessary to identify potential users of an app, platform, or service. Once a company’s team finishes these tasks, the business can target the right people with the relevant message. It helps introduce a new app and educate people about it. If marketing efforts are successful, the number of installs will increase. As a result, business owners will receive bigger revenues.
Now that you know the importance, it’s time to review user acquisition channels. The next section will unveil the platforms you can use to promote your mobile app and acquire new users.
User Acquisition Channels
To grow your business, you need to reach a wider audience. You can do it by using multiple acquisition channels. Your main task is to choose the most effective channels for your company. In this section, we’ll review online and offline user acquisition channels so that you can make a decision.
Email marketing. Email campaigns remain on the top of the list for the most effective acquisition channels. Branded emails demonstrate good open rates. With the help of quality and relevant emails, you can reach new subscribers and encourage them to test your app, platform, or service. LIKE.TG’s bulk email service helps you design professional email campaigns without code knowledge. The process is fast and simple with the platform’s free ready-to-go templates.
Paid search. It enables you to pay search engines for placing ads at the top of search engine results pages. So when potential users search for an app similar to yours, they will see your platform at the top of SERPs. It helps drive brand awareness and traffic to your website. This is one of the most effective and fast ways to educate people about your app.
Website. Most companies invest in their websites to bring value to visitors and educate them about their products. If your brand’s site manages to provide people with informative articles and engaging blog posts, you can gain new users. A quality website drives traffic, attracts new customers, and serves as a reliable source of information. To convert visitors into subscribers, your website should include subscription forms. LIKE.TG enables you to design custom subscription forms for free and convert users into subscribers.
Trade show. It’s an exhibition that gathers different companies so that they can showcase their latest products. Trade shows bring together the most influential brands in the industry and create buzz around their products. These businesses can collaborate, learn new things from their competitors, and attract new customers. Journalists promote brands by discussing brands’ products. So if you have a product created for a specific niche market, it’s better to present it at a trade show. This way, you’ll be able to reach your target market.
Blog. It’s a perfect way to drive interest in your product and win new customers. If you manage to share high-quality blog posts regularly, search engines will appreciate it with top positions in search results. Once you bring value to your blog visitors, you can earn their trust and intent to buy your product. To convert blog visitors into customers, you need to choose relevant topics, add unique visuals, bring social proof, and create an appealing email capture form. Your blog should be both interesting and useful.
Influencer marketing. It implies collaboration with influencers aimed at product promotion. Brands choose opinion leaders who have power in a specific industry and the trust of consumers. They recommend a certain product to their audience. As a result, they drive interest in a product, increase sales, and improve brand recognition.
Social media. Social media networks enable companies to reach their target audience faster and communicate the necessary message. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok allow you to publish organic posts or create ads to speak to your audience. Choose the most suitable channels to communicate with potential clients and you’ll see instant results. Social media networks enable you to communicate with customers directly and see their responses to your posts, product, and promos. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are the most suitable places for gathering customer feedback. You can find out what people think about your product from likes, comments, and views. User-generated content helps promote your product and serves as a format of word-of-mouth promotion. More people find out about your brand and its value.
Event. It empowers you to communicate with your prospects and introduce your brand to them. In-person contacts help you reach the right audience at the right moment. Find an event that is related to your product and consider participating in it. You can also host an event to increase brand awareness and present your latest product.
Now that you know user acquisition channels, it’s time to find out how to increase user acquisition. These techniques will enable you to get more clients.
How to increase user acquisition?
You can leverage various marketing approaches to increase the number of customers. In this section, we’ll review several techniques that will help you acquire new clients.
Use targeted ads. If the number of customers isn’t enough for your business, you should consider incorporating targeted ads. Targeted advertising is an advertising format that focuses on audience segments that have specific needs, preferences, desires, and traits. Targeted ads allow you to reach potential clients with a solution based on their personal information. These ads help you generate qualified leads. To make ads work, you need to define the location, age, gender, occupation, family, hobbies, and problems of your potential customers. Divide your potential customers into groups based on demographics, geographics, behavior, and psychographics.
Consider content marketing. Different content formats, including blog posts, social media, email campaigns, videos, podcasts, and ebooks contribute to the promotion of your brand. People search for answers and they find them in articles, blog posts, and videos. If you manage to become a reliable source of information, people can consider using your product as a solution. Strive to create informative and valuable content that unveils the benefits of your product. Make sure to provide a personalized experience, include call-to-actions, and write good articles for each stage of the sales funnel.
Increase social media presence. The number of social media users amounts to 4.70 billion people worldwide. Social media platforms open you access to a wider reach and exposure. You can communicate your message to a huge target audience with many potential customers. Paid ads, organic posts, and influencer marketing help you promote your product to new clients. Social media channels don't require you to have huge spending. Explore the trending to create relevant content formats. Today, people prefer to watch reels, so consider creating some useful short videos for your Instagram account. With LIKE.TG’s chatbots, you can reach your subscribers and update them on new posts, releases, and product features on Instagram, Facebook, or Telegram. Chatbots provide assistance 24/7 and can inform customers about your product.
Share information about your company on forums. Communicate with people on the most popular forums like Quora and tell them about your product. With the help of forums, you can show your expertise and establish your brand as an industry leader. These discussions can also bring your prospects. Make sure you provide open-ended answers to users’ questions to encourage them to use your product in the future.
Implement referral programs. Develop a good referral program so that your current customers could bring you qualified leads. A monetary reward, a gift, or a discount provides consumers with value and encourages them to participate. You’ll win new customers.
Conduct giveaways. You can attract new customers with the help of giveaways. Let potential customers win your product and they will be interested in your brand. Run giveaways to let consumers try your products and come back for a purchase. This technique helps you increase your social reach, generate leads, and engage with existing consumers.
Now that you know the ways to increase user acquisition, it’s time to figure out how to measure it. After evaluating your user acquisition, you’ll be able to find out what steps to take next.
How to measure user acquisition?
To assess the performance of your user acquisition strategy, you should identify the three most important metrics. We’ll review each of them in detail.
Calculate customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is a metric related to the company's costs to acquire new customers. These costs include sales and marketing activities, fees, travel expenses, and other efforts required. To calculate the measure, you need to sum up sales and marketing costs and divide them by the number of customers. To find out whether you get profit from the customers you acquire, consider comparing your customer acquisition cost to the revenue these new clients bring to your business.
Estimate customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is the revenue a brand can expect from a new consumer during a specific timeframe. To calculate this metric, you need to multiply the average sale by the number of repeat sales and the average lifespan of a relationship with a customer. Once you estimate the measure, you need to compare it with CAC to unveil whether your recurring revenue is high.
Identify your churn rate. The churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop interacting with a brand and buying from it. Losing customers in business is a sure thing. However, this number shouldn’t exceed the number of customers you acquire. Once you estimate the churn rate for your business, you can take important measures to retain these customers. Usually, companies estimate a churn rate for specific timeframes to prevent big problems and eliminate issues that cause customer dissatisfaction. To identify the number of customers who churn out, consider dividing the number of consumers lost during a specific month by the number of customers at the start of the month.
Now that you know how to measure user acquisition, it’s time to proceed to the examples. You’ll see how popular brands generate new customers.
User Acquisition Examples
There are many successful examples of user acquisition techniques that help boost the number of customers. In this section, we’ll explore the methods famous brands use to drive attention and get new customers.
Web Summit and Facebook Ads
People can find out about Web Summit, an annual technology conference held in Portugal from Facebook ads. The company targets its potential customers with sponsored ads on Facebook effectively. The ad introduces Web Summit to a broad audience and uncovers speakers and attendees from different countries.
Lyft Referral Program
Lyft, a ride-hailing company, generates new customers with the help of its referral program. The brand manages to collect qualified leads and increase its customer base. The company’s app enables users to refer new riders and obtain rewards. The platform’s users can also refer to drivers eligible for the position. Existing users can send invitations to their friends through the platform to refer new customers.
ASOS and Live Chat
ASOS, a British online fashion, and cosmetic retailer ensure that its new website visitors receive all the necessary information about its products. Its virtual assistant instantly answers all visitors’ inquiries. As a result, people know about the available items, discounts, promo codes, etc. people have a seamless user experience with the website.
Now you know what user acquisition is and why it’s essential. Hope that our examples helped to figure everything out.
User behavior
User behavior is how users interact with your website while visiting it. It helps you realize which pages they visit, how much time they spend on each one, the buttons they click through, the videos they watch, and places where they bounce. With this information, you can better understand the triggers which make users perform different actions. As a result, you'll be able to improve user experience on your website.
In this article, you'll learn why it's essential to analyze user behavior, uncover types of user behavior analytics, and learn how to analyze user behavior.
Why is it important to analyze user behavior?
It provides a clear picture of what's going on under the hood of your website.
Say, your landing page conversion rate is 40% lower than last month. Such a drastic conversion rate drop!
What would you do?
You can play a guessing name listing all the possible suggestions with your team. However, it's not a reliable method. Or, you can go into your website analytics to get some insights. There you will compare how user behavior changed during the last two months. You may find out an increasing bounce rate. To uncover the reasons, look through all the updates made during this period. You might have changed the CTA button's place, color, or text. Alternatively, the registration button doesn't work, or a live chat window doesn't open. Finally, your landing page may be poorly optimized, so it doesn't correspond to users' intent while searching for the answer in the search engine.
So, analyzing user behavior allows you to understand the triggers which make them visit your site, scroll down, click your CTA, or leave the website. With this actionable data, you can run experiments and A/B test different page design variants to determine which one performs better.
Let's take a closer look at the advantages of analyzing user behavior.
Benefits of Analyzing User Behavior
Monitoring your website users' behavior regularly will enable you to reap the following benefits:
get accurate insights on how specific pages perform;
understand which types and formats of content drive more conversions;
realize what your potential clients are interested in and what is not that important for them;
identify the places where leads get stuck and drop off;
invest in effective strategies and tactics only;
improve customer experience and satisfaction;
boost conversions and revenue.
Now that you know why tracking user behavior is essential, read on to discover which type of analytics you should monitor.
Types of User Behavior Analytics
We'll shed light on four fundamental categories of user behavior analytics for you to know which data to consider.
User experience. It helps you determine whether users interact with your website pages the way you supposed them to when designing each page element. Use Google Analytics tools and Hotjar to analyze users' in-page clicks, navigation patterns, scroll depth, mouse movements, etc. With this data, you'll understand what prevents users from using your website as you planned. As a result, you can improve the navigation flow to retain more leads and convert them into clients.
Content performance. Content is the best way to maintain user engagement on your website. Different types of content and their formats help you reach other goals — attract new leads, boost engagement, get users' contacts, increase a conversion rate, etc. You can analyze the top-performing content pieces, the number of clicks and shares, and the bounce rate. All these metrics contribute to building a 360-degree view of your content performance.
Engagement. Many leads require some help and assistance before buying. They write emails and contact support teams via a live chat or chatbot. LIKE.TG allows you to create a chatbot or a live chat for your website for free without any coding skills. They may need you to dispel their doubts or provide more data about the product. Customer care departments can tell you about the typical difficulties of your leads that complicate their buyer journey.
Conversion rate. Conversion is the primary goal of each landing page, and only you decide what a conversion is for your business. It can be sharing an email address, app download, registration for an event, purchase, etc. Your task is to analyze user behavior to make this path less stressful for your client. For this purpose, you can monitor the changes impacted by specific variable testing or look at how users behave during the checkout process. With this data, you'll find out why leads are getting stuck and what helps them make a buying decision.
Now that you know which data to use, learn how to conduct the analysis.
How to analyze user behavior?
Follow the six steps below to analyze users' behavior effectively.
Set the goals. Remember that you should align your business goals with analytics goals. For example, your goal is to increase sales of a specific product. For this purpose, you should get insights into its landing page. You've updated its design, so check which version performed the best. Examine the scroll depth, content users interacted with most often, CTAs, and buttons clicked through. Also, consider where users had some troubles and left the website. So, these are the most important metrics for you to track. Ensure that you have this type of data; otherwise, you won't be able to reach the goals.
Set the event and categories of events to reach the goals. You need to develop an event taxonomy to understand your customer journey better. An event taxonomy is a path a user should follow to buy your product. It can include googling your brand, registering, checking the reviews, considering product features, and using a free trial and purchase. With this data, you'll uncover your users' issues when dealing with your product. Organize the events into categories to ensure quick access to the data.
Identify the users. To recreate a complete user journey, you need to divide them into cohorts based on their actions. So, assign specific cohorts to sessions to identify your users. You can integrate your analytics tool with a database or CRM for more accurate results and productivity.
Set the crucial metrics. To evaluate the success of your analysis, you need to select the metrics that align with your business and analytics goals. They may include the number of sign-ups, feature usage, sessions per user, stickiness ratio, drop in in-app sales, etc. Focus on the most critical metrics and sort out fewer informative ones to pursue your goal.
Make sure the events are tracked correctly. To prevent spending time in vain and wasting the budget, run a test session to check whether everything works perfectly.
Adjust your analysis. With time you can discover other vital issues that require your attention, so be ready to change your course. You may either find that this type of data is no longer valuable or need a higher level of data granularity.
Congrats, now you know the benefits of tracking user behavior and how to analyze it. Start step-by-step, and don't try to analyze deeply on your first try. Use your findings to develop a great product that your users will love!
Upselling
Upselling is a sales technique that allows brands to increase their revenue by inspiring customers to buy more upgraded and expensive models from their product lines.
Why Is Upselling Important?
The idea of upselling is to suggest a product that sweetens the primary deal, making the entire offer more expensive, but also adding value. Some of the obvious benefits of this practice are:
It is simpler to retain current clients than to attract new ones;
Upselling helps establish deeper relationships with your clients;
Upselling results in better customer lifetime value (CLV).
Upselling is also important because it makes it possible to sell more than one item or a single more valuable item. This technique can increase income significantly as the difference between the former product and its upgraded version may be huge.
What Is the Difference Between Upselling and Cross-Selling?
Cross-selling is offering a related good or service to the buyer (for instance, shoes in addition to a dress). Upselling, in its turn, is about offering an upgraded version of the product. What do they have in common? Both methods are used to optimize profitability by motivating clients to spend more money.
You might need some examples to realize how these practices work. Below you can see some examples of upselling and cross-selling.
Bundling Sales
One example of cross-selling is so-called bundling sales. One of the most known companies to use this approach is the famous Amazon. Businesses that sell goods online use this method and benefit from it. The bundled products should be relevant and related, like this example with “Harry Potter” below. If the products aren’t coherently related, it won’t work and will only annoy potential buyers. You may also call it “Frequently bought together.”
Mixing SEO and SEM Services
It is a good idea to mix search engine optimization and search engine marketing services. To do so, determine and create customer personas. Then, do keyword research. After that, separate and arrange the keywords; assign more complicated keywords to SEM while the rest will go with SEO. If you have to hit both long and short-term goals, this option is right for you. Another example could be offering extra services or products related to the main topic of your website. If you offer editing services for writers and students, you may list all the possible assignments that you deal with, as many similar services do (e.g., CustomWritings).
Similar and RelatedProducts
You may also choose a strategy like Laconicum does. It includes several similar or related goods in their initial offer. No matter which good you choose, you’ll be offered a better option with everything you need at the same time.
Paid Subscriptions vs Free Trials
Sky Broadband and Fibre prefer upselling to cross-selling, and they do it perfectly. They always offer a free trial or package, but the thing is that it lacks most of the features that clients need. That is why they initially try to offer paid subscriptions starting from ten pounds, for instance. They specify that the paid option adds plenty of speed, and that is exactly what customers need because everybody hates to wait.
The idea is to show that paid offers are much better than the available free options. An attention-grabbing picture is required but does not always matter if the offer has many exclusive features.
Now, it is time to dig a bit deeper into the process of creating an opportunity to upsell. Read on to find out how you can motivate your customers to buy more than they planned.
How Can I Upsell?
Define the needs of your customers
Come up with buyer personas
Combine relevant goods
Redesign the checkout page
Select the type of upsell
Benefit from knowing buyer persona
Design and set up the campaign
Upselling takes place at the point-of-sale. Both salespeople and customer success managers are responsible for creating an upselling proposition. Here is how to do it.
Define the needs of your customers
You should understand why people are interested in specific goods or services. What motivates them to make a purchase? You can either talk to your clients on the phone or try to find their customer needs via polls and questionnaires.
You might think that your service or product has everything your customers need, but you have a limited perspective. Regular conversations with your customers will detect what demands remain unmet, and you’ll be surprised. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your clients sometimes to realize what they care about most. Otherwise, your business will not please your customers or bring in the desired revenue.
Come up with buyer personas
A buyer persona is a portrait of your ideal customer. Define the exact age, gender, occupation, hobbies, needs, goals, and other critical factors to realize what they expect from you and target the correct segment.
There are many factors to consider but focus on the main things: industry, pain points, and challenges. These are the major things to keep in mind because they will bring you the most value.
The next step is very close to the previous one. To create a buyer persona, you should communicate with both returning and potential clients. Do not think that loyal clients won’t ever leave you – you should implement the best practices of retention management to keep your existing customers satisfied.
Combine relevant goods
Bundling is a type of upselling that does not simply recommend products, but groups them in a specific category. It helps customers get an all-in-one purchase: everything they might need in one package.
Redesign the checkout page
If you don’t have the relevant goods displayed on your checkout page yet, we highly recommend adding them ASAP. You may set up different checkout pages to find which approach works best.
Select the type of upsell to use
The first approach is offering an upgraded version of what a customer is already interested in purchasing. Propose another version of the good or service. Additionally, you can offer product protection – asking the customers to extend their warranty to get cheaper product support and repairs. A screen replacement warranty is one of the common because it is something that suffers most damage out of all of a phone’s components.
One more type of upselling is customization is all about adding special touches to your product. It is about personalizing the product or service so that the customer feels special and is the exclusive owner of a specific design. As for the extended service period, it is somehow similar to product protection: the idea is to suggest a better value for a prolonged contract. SaaS companies benefit from such an approach.
Don’t be pushy withyour offer
It is critical to come up with the right time for your offer. Inc.com has collected data from different sources, showing that Thursday is the best day for closing sales and setting up upsells.
Do not scare off your clients with annoying notifications and pop-ups! It is smarter to display your upsell at the payment stage, at the checkout or after that. Then, you’ll be sure that people who see your offer really need your product or service, and won’t be scared away. In the example below, the company reminds you that it is possible to get 25% off if you keep on shopping on their site. It is a rather attractive deal!
Benefit from Using Buyer Personas
So, you have determined your buyer personas, now, it is time to use this knowledge. When you are aware of a customer’s purchase history, you can provide valuable recommendations based on their previous purchases. Also, address your clients by name to make every client feel special.
When messaging, select suitable terms and phrases. For instance, it is better to avoid tech-savvy terminology if you are selling software so that you are more accessible for beginners. You should not use informal language or slang if you offer something related to serious issues like cancer treatment or home violence. Make sure that you speak the same language as your customers.
Design and set up the campaign
The last stage is to use free or paid tools to create and launch your upselling campaign. Many services make it possible to customize the fields and overall design completely.
Examples of Upselling
Now, it is time to have a look at some examples. It is up to you to choose the right form for your upselling campaign. It may be a website or an email campaign. Email upselling means sending messages after a purchase motivating buyers to take more action and continue their purchases.
Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club seems to understand its target audience perfectly. They place some restock features on their product pages and stress that clients can always count on some extras and full packages for shaving instead of, for example, blade only. Their upsellers are perfect reminders. It’s not another annoying sales pitch – it’s something that clients need and are already accustomed to using.
BMW
BMW does several things excellently. In addition to a successful UX design, they generate an opportunity for upselling. When ordering a car, they made it possible to configure the characteristics, making the car fully customizable and adding lots of upgrade opportunities.
US Pizza
The menu provides the opportunity to select cheese or olives as an extra component for a salad or pizza. US Pizza offers more ingredients or fully customizable order.
Now you understand how a good upsell looks. The practices in the section below will help you create your own perfect upsell campaign.
Upselling Tips and Best Practices
Build trust
Remain relevant
Entice returning clients
Don’t underestimate customer support
Recall the “rule of three”
Manipulate with time and delivery
Come up with the social proof
Are you looking for more tips to make your upselling offer more effective? We are ready to share some with you!
Build trust
If a customer hasn’t been with your brand for very long, they may refuse to listen to your recommendations. Build credibility by referring to specific, trustworthy, up-to-date sources related to your product or service. You may also involve influencers and ask them to share an opinion because 63% of customers rely on influencers to inform their decisions. In the example below, you can see that restaurant experts have chosen these particular places to visit. Most restaurant-goers are likely to trust a professional opinion and are more likely to visit your restaurant.
Remain relevant
Avoid suggesting items that your clients likely don’t need. Coming back to the “Harry Potter” example, do not add “Lord of the Rings” to the recommendations list. You have no evidence that your readers want to see anything other than HP-related items on their list of recommendations. These books might have similar genres, but they target different audiences.
It is not necessary to only offer books from the series of the same name. You can add other products related to the series like memorabilia to the list because it is related to the main item.
Entice returning clients
The best way to attract return customers is to give them exclusive offers. When they think that you have nothing left to surprise them with, surprise them with a compelling offer! Exclusive offers include early-bird or seasonal discounts, referral programs, vouchers, and coupons for friends, etc. In the example below, River Island stresses that there is a limited discount on a certain group of products to make you eager to make a purchase.
Don’t underestimate customer support
Client support representatives capture the most upselling opportunities. They should be able to consult a client on any upgrades or special offers at any time – make sure that they are ready.
Recall the “rule of three”
You should not forget this rule whenever you are doing any kind of marketing. Three is a magic number when it comes to sales. Perhaps, you have noticed that, in most cases, there are three subscription packages to choose from on many websites. The first one is usually free, while others show their price and explain their benefits. Besides, people love having choices, but more than three options can quickly become overwhelming. Thus, it is better to settle on the three alternatives.
Manipulate time and delivery
If you sell goods, stress that your customers can get free shipping if they hurry up to make an order now or complete any other requirements. Stress that your offer is urgent and leave little to no time for postponing their order. This tactic is used effectively in the example below.
Use social proof
Mix your upselling offers with testimonials like in the example below. You can see what other customers think about the company. This makes your customers more confident when purchasing from your company. Social proofs are effective when it comes to upselling and email marketing in general.
Once they place an order and get what they want, do not think that your work is done. Remember customer retention? After a purchase, keep sending personalized emails notifying about new offers and deals from your company. Let them come back for more like the example below illustrates.
In summary, upselling is a vital part of a successful sales strategy. It is one of the best ways to increase revenue in the short-term. If you use email marketing in your strategy, send upselling emails with LIKE.TG! Automation 360 allows marketers to set up automated email sending after the purchase event is triggered by your clients.
Follow this guide to increase revenue with the upselling techniques!
Unsubscribe page
An unsubscribe page is a web page that appears when a userclicks on the unsubscribe linkin the email footer. It aims to confirm the opt-out,and it is the last chance to keep asubscriberfrom leaving your mailing list.
Check out this video on how to create an unsubscribe page with LIKE.TG.
Why is an unsubscribe page important?
Unsubscribing is a serious issue, as it influences the way email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook judge your sender reputation. Acertain number of unsubscribes — over 0.05%from emails delivered —may harm the deliverability of your emails.
Most often, people opt-out because of a high email sending volume, irrelevancy of content, or because they feel overwhelmed with the overall number of emails in the inbox. Sometimes userseven can’t recollect they have once subscribed. Keeping the unsubscribe rate within a norm is a challenge, and the unsubscribe page is the last chance to re-engage users or, at least, find out why they want to get no more emails from you.
An unsubscribe page is also a way to confirm the user’s intention to leave your mailing list. With AMPemails, unsubscribing directly in the email became possible,but not many brands use this technology so far.
How to create a custom unsubscribe page?
It takes just a few minutes to create an unsubscribe page with LIKE.TG. The service provides a default unsubscribe page for confirming the opt-out.
You can create a custom one, change the background color, create a survey with the questions that will help you find out the reasons whyusersunsubscribe. If a person has once opted-in to receive different flows of emails like weekly newsletters and blog digests, suggest unsubscribing from one flow of emails, staying on another.
Here’s an instruction on how to create an unsubscribe page in few steps. Check the example below.
Unsubscribe Page Tips
Suggest updating email preferences
Encourage unsubscribes to follow you on socials
Make a survey optional
Don’t require signing in to unsubscribe
Leave a positive trace
Suggest updating email preferences. Since the most common reason for breaking up with a brand is the wrong email sending frequency, ask your audience to change their email preferences. Even one email a monthcanturn out into some revenue in the future.
Encourage unsubscribes to follow you on socials. Some of your subscribers may want to clear out some private space because they feel overwhelmed with the number of emails in their inbox. Offer to continue communication on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Does it matter where exactlyis your engaged audience, even if it’s not in the email inbox?
Make a survey optional. Don’t make an obligatory poll about what was wrong and how you could improve your job. Such an approach may result in moving your email to a spam folder, too. It’s OK to ask subscribers why they unsubscribe, but let them decide whether they want to answer any questions.
Don’t require signing in to unsubscribe. When the user wants to unsubscribe, that’s for a reason. Allow them to do so in the easiest way possible. Signing in to unsubscribe pushes them to mark your email as spam, which harms your sender reputation even worse than unsubscribing. After all, when uninterested users leave, it makes your mailing list healthier.
Leave a positive trace. Yes, it is not easy to say goodbye after all you’ve been through together, but if there are no other options, make it memorable in the right way! Say that you'll wait for them to become subscribers again. A great example is HubSpot’s unsubscribe video. Some comment on YouTube says: “I want to sign up so that I can unsubscribe!” This is a kind of reaction you should try to achieve.
Unsubscribe Page Examples
Architectural Digest. On this unsubscribe page, AD suggests changing the email sending frequency. This is an excellent strategical move since thisbrand kind of bombards its subscribers with daily emails from the very start.
Death to Stock. There is a small optional survey on this unsubscribe page, that would help improve the brand’s email marketing. The only thing that'snot quite righthere is Death to Stock unsubscribe a user right away after they click on the unsubscribe link. In case the users will change their mind, it would be too late: they would have to go back to the website and subscribe once again, which they would probably not do.
Chubbies. As always, any sort of communication with these guys is humorous and friendly. They use every single chance to keep users from unsubscribing: suggest changing preferences, hilariously plead for sympathy, and offer to continue communication on socials.
Check this helpful blog article for more examples of unsubscribe pages.
User agent
The term user agent stands for agent software, which is acting on behalf of a user. In its most common meaning, it is a client application that uses a particular network protocol.
When a user agent operates inside a network protocol, like HTTP, SIP, and NNTP, it identifies itself (including the operating system and software vendor) by submitting an identification string to the operating peer.
This video produced by OSINT Curious considers the user agent string and explains why you should care about it.
User Agents in Email Marketing
When it comes to email marketing,a user agent serves as an essential source of information about operating systems, browsers, and devices, which subscribersuse to open emails. LIKE.TG provides these statisticsfor all email campaigns.
Knowing these statistics enables you to analyze an email campaign in terms of graphic design and adapting HTML emailsto different kinds of mobile devices.
Usability
Usability is a term that entails the accessibility, clarity, credibility, simplicity, and relevancy of a website for users. Good usability ensures a seamless experience, improves conversionsand rankings, and establishes customer loyalty.
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of usability’s key principles and review some great examples. We’ll also discuss website usability testing and offer several tips to improve your website’s usability.
Why is website usability important?
Webmasters and developers do their best to create user-friendly, easy-to-navigate, and modern sites. Since a website is one of the main mediums for communication with customers for many software companies, it should be almost perfect and comply with clients’ requirements. Businesses build their online presence to reach prospectsand customers and attain their goals. The image of a company is often shaped by its website’s accessibility, relevance, convenience, simplicity, and credibility.
By creating sites with good usability, you enable users to convert faster. If you want users to buy from your company, subscribe to your email newsletter, or contact your support, provide them with a seamless website experience. To obtain higher conversion rates, businesses avoid complicated formsand long checkout processes and ensure that links work properly and their website load time is fast.
Satisfied clients stay loyal to a brand and don’tswitch to competitors. If users feel comfortable using your website, they will stay with your company. Website usability significantly affects SEO, and itentails not only customer satisfaction but the ability of users to easily explore and findwhat they are looking for on a site. Google tracks websites that are useful andanalyzes them while shaping the ranking. Besides, some websites experience high bounce rates because of low usability.
Now that you know why website usability is important, let’s talk aboutits main elements.
Key Principles of Site Usability
If you strive to see your company prosper, you need to have excellent website usability. We’ll review several aspects you need to consider when developing a user-friendly website.
Accessibility. Availability and accessibility are vital since they let leadsand customers explore your product. Ensure that your websitedoes not have any loading errors to avoid dissatisfaction among users. For this, find good hosting. Check your website for broken links, and remove them if you have some. Since the number of mobile internet users now amounts to 4.28 billion, there’s a point in applying responsive website design. It will help make your site navigation more accessible, especially on devices with small screens.
Clarity. Users who come to your website with a specific goal and can’t find the necessary information may never revisit it. That’s why you should help them achieve their goal. If you aim to let customers reach their objectives, provide them with a consistent experience, guide them across your website, focus on the most important information, implement the strategies people are already familiar with, and structure your content.
Simplicity. Design a user-friendly interface that people can handle without instructions to simplify your website usage. Leverage easy-to-manage design concepts people already know. Make use of these popular approaches consistently to meet customers’ needs as soon as possible.
Familiarity. Even if you have quality content, people won’t trust a company without a good reputation. It’s pivotal to provide users with information about your business to establish credibility and brand awareness. Create an outstanding “About Us” page where you can tell about your company’s mission, vision, and goals. Make sure to include your contact information and address. You should create informative and quality content people can trust. Double-check your articles and other content for spelling and grammar.
Relevancy. One more principle of good usability is relevancy. The content your company presents should solve users’ problems. That’s why you should make sure you know yourbuyer personas, their wants, needs, interests, and issues to address them and provide solutions. Once you know their goals, develop scenarios where customers will come to your website for help. Make use of them when creating new content.
It’s time to jump into website usability testing.
Website Usability Testing
Website usability testing is implemented to gauge a website by obtaining feedback from users after they visit a particular site. Companies that leverageit create a list of tasks and scenarios a person needs to perform when visiting a specific site. There’s also a person who monitors the actions and performance of a website in different situations. As a result, business owners can instantly see the strengths and weaknesses of their websites andidentify the areas that require improvement.
Usability testing can be divided into three key methods:
explorative (it’s used at the early product development stage to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of a preliminary design or prototype);
assessment (it’s used to assess your technology and includes real-time trials tomonitor satisfaction, effectiveness, and usability);
comparative (it involves comparing two different solutions, defining their weaknesses and strengths, and asking users which one they prefer).
Now that you are acquainted with the methods, we need to proceed to the next section to explore several ideas that will help you improve usability.
7Tips to Improve Website Usability
Increase website speed
Be consistent with your website design
Come up with a mobile version
Leverage a simple navigation layout
Arrange your content based on generally accepted rules
Ensure that your main features and benefits are visible
Use images wisely
To make your business successful, you need to develop a simple, convenient, and useful website. Explore our seven tips to improve usability and attract more customers.
Increase website speed. Statistics show that a slow loading time leaves users unhappy and discourages them from coming back.Moreover, the majority of customers expect a website to load within two seconds. According to WebsiteBuilderExpert, 46% of internet users don’t revisit websites with poor performance. Hence, if you don’t want to lose prospects and customers, ensure that your website speed is high enough. Remember, unoptimized images, bad hosting, problems with JavaScript, and lots of flash content slow down the speed of your site.
Be consistent with your website design. Once you finish with the website speed, check if you are consistent in your layout, font, and color scheme to make a user feel more comfortable and recognize your brand. Make sure to have the same layout across all pages, similar colors, and fonts not to confuse customers.
Come up with a mobile version. Now when the number of smartphone users worldwide has reached 3.8 billion, a responsive website is a must-have for every business. Since the majority of people browse the internet from smartphones and tablets, you need to ensure a seamless website experience: good speed, clear navigation, and easy-to-find CTAs. Apart from that, don’tforget to use the same font and colors you have in your desktop version.
Leverage a simple navigation layout.Find a good, clear, and familiar navigation layout if you don’t want users to abandon your website without even exploring it. Keep in mind that many customers have already gotten used to certain layouts, so you better use something simple, standard, and familiar to everyone. Your main goal here is to make visitors feel comfortable. Consider leveraging a simple navigation bar at the top of the website that contains links to your main pages.
Arrange your content based on generally accepted rules. It’s critical to have quality content in terms of customer satisfaction and SEO. Therefore, create your content based on standard rules and SEO guidelines. Use clear and short headings and subheadings to break your content into logical parts and make it look better for users, and let them perceive information easily.
Ensure that your main features and benefits are visible. To let customers instantly gather information about your company, product, features, and benefits, create a section with this data, and make it visible. You can implement icons for your features to attract customers’ attention.
Use images wisely. Of course, visuals play a significant role in demonstrating your product and the benefits it provides, but you should not overdo it. Bear in mind that although images will help you break up the text, they influence your website speed. You need to moderate your website to hold the attention and interest of readers.
You already know some great tips to improve website usability, so it’s time to see several examples.
Examples of Good Website Usability
Increasingyour website loading speed to improve usability is not enough. This process needs improvements in layout, navigation, design, content, visuals, and more. Now we’ll unveil how different companies managed to achieve it.
Master Class
Let’s take Master Class, for example. The company that offers classes in different disciplines enables users to easily access and load its website fast. It’s consistent in its font, color scheme, and layout usage across all web pages. Master Class also has a visible and clear CTA button and all important information for newcomers.
Mobile users can also explore the company’s services from their smartphones or tablets.
Apple
You can’t ignore the simplicity of Apple’s website and the way it focuses on the key benefits and features of its products. It contains a lot of white space and makes a site look very stylish and minimalistic. The classical navigation menu allows customers to feel comfortable when they decide to explore the company’s products.
Pantene
The company’s website has a standard navigation menu, consistent content, similar font, color scheme, and layout across all website pages to make people recognize the brand and easily navigate its website. Pantene also provides a convenient mobile version.
Congrats, now you know the importance and key elements of usability. Grab some inspiration from our tips and examples to develop a user-friendly and relevant site.
Unsubscribe rate
An unsubscribe rate is a measure that indicates the percentage of users who have opted-out from the mailing list after an email campaign. The unsubscribe rate impacts email deliverability, soalarge number of unsubscribers leads to negative consequences from email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.
Watch this video, where the expert from Sleeknote gives a framework for reducing the unsubscribe rate and keeping subscribers engaged.
The Role of the Unsubscribe Rate
Marketers monitor the unsubscribe rate to measure email marketing strategy success along with other metrics like open rate and click-through rate. With LIKE.TG, you can track the number of unsubscribes after every email campaignsent.
Unsubscribes are a sort of a self-cleaning of your mailing list, meaning that unengaged people simply stop communication. However, the more users unsubscribe, the more it damages your sender reputation.
Ahigh unsubscribe rate indicates that some elements of your strategy have gaps and you need to take a closer look at your email campaigns. Perhaps the email sending volume is too high, the content is irrelevant to users’ expectations, or your email templates look unprofessional and outdated.
Before you start recollecting all of the weak points of your emails, learn how to get that unsubscribe rate first.
How to Calculate the Unsubscribe Rate
Todetermine the unsubscribe rate, you need to know two metrics: the number of delivered emails and the number of unsubscribes. You can find these metrics in the statistics of each email campaign you create with LIKE.TG.
Here’s the formula:
Unsubscribe rate = (Unsubscribers / Successful email deliveries) x 100
For instance, imagine you’ve sent a campaign with 5000 of emails delivered and 10 users unsubscribed. Divide 10 users by 5000 delivered emails, and you’ll get 0.002. Multiply it by 100 and get the unsubscribe rate — 0,2%
What is a good unsubscribe rate?
According to SmartInsights, you can consideran unsubscribe rate below 0.5% as normal, while 0.2% and below is excellent. Note that the unsubscribe rate for newly generated mailing lists is naturally higher since people need some time to decide whether they want to continue building relationships with your company.It is important tomonitor the unsubscribe rate when the mailing list is settled down — unengaged subscribers have opted out while the rest of them got used to the way you communicate with them.
However, if you’ve noticed a sudden leap in the unsubscribe rate, it is a signal that something in your email marketing needs to be reconsidered.
How to reduce the unsubscribe rate
Segment subscribers
Double opt-in users
Implement personalization
Let users decide upon email sending frequency
Make mobile-friendly emails
Ask for feedback
Reactivate subscribers
Segment subscribers. Segmentation is a method of dividing subscribers into different groups with something in common like age, gender, country, etc., intending to make more relevant content.
Double opt-in users. The CAN-SPAM Act requires companies to opt-in users. Double opt-in ensures that you deal with an engaged audience, having active email addresses on your mailing list. In the first stage, users enter their information in the subscription form on your website or blog and get a confirmation email. In that email, they confirm the subscription by following the link.
Implement personalization. Use information about user’s interactions with your website and emails, subscribers’ place in the sales funnel, data on previous purchases, etc., to send individual emails to provide a positive experience. You can send automated emails to support users during onboarding and purchasing processes with Automation 360.
Let users decide upon email sending frequency. Getting too many emails from one brand is very annoying for the users. Give them a choice on the number of emails at the beginning of your relationships — in a subscription confirmation email. Here are some email sending frequency best practices.
Make mobile-friendly emails. More than half of all emails are read from mobile devices. Make sure to display emails correctly on all devices. All emails in LIKE.TG are responsive by default.
Ask for feedback. It’s okay to ask people what they think about your emails. Send an email campaign with a survey or ask to leave feedback on Google Forms. The information users share with you will open the way for improvements. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback right during the unsubscribing process: if you fail to keep the subscriber on your list, at least you will know the reason why they unsubscribed.
Reactivate subscribers. If the user hasn’t been active for three months, send a reactivation email with an eye-catching subject line like “We miss you!” or “We need to talk...”. In the email, remind recipients about the value you provide and ask if the user wants to continue communication.
Unsubscribing
Unsubscribing from mailings is the ability for a recipientto no longer receive emails from a specific company or individual.
Methods of Unsubscribing
Unsubscribing from the current mailing list;
Unsubscribing from all of the sender’s mailing lists.
The recipient can choose between these two ways of unsubscribing by selecting or leaving unselected the option “Unsubscribe from all mailing lists.”
Mailing list services allow you to choose different levels of unsubscribing. This might be unsubscribing from a particular list, from a specific author, or all authors on the service in general.
Unsubscribe request
An unsubscribe request is a request sent from a subscriber that no longer wants to receive marketing emails from a particular company. Email marketers must provide an immediate unsubscription option in every email to abide by the CAN-SPAM Act.
It’s absolutely normal for some part of your audience to unsubscribe from your messages because you can’t provide content that fits everyone on your mailing list. A reasonable unsubscribe rate is around 0.05%. This means that five out of a thousand people click on an unsubscribe link after receiving every email campaign you send.
If there’s no unsubscribe link in your emails, you leave subscribers no choice but to mark your emails as spam. Spam complaints signal to email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo that you abuse people’s rights and are doing fraudulent email marketing. The worst-case scenario for failing to include an unsubscribe link in your emails is being blacklisted.
Even a few spam complaints can be enough to harm your sender reputation and influence your email deliverability, putting all your email marketing operations at risk. All that being said, make sure that you include an unsubscribe link in your emails to make sure that you don't put your marketing efforts in jeopardy.
Are people who request to unsubscribe automatically removed?
Yes, bulk email services that handle email marketing for companies automatically remove people that want to unsubscribe to ensure they abide by the anti-spam laws. LIKE.TG, for example, adds an unsubscribe link to every email, by default. Aside from that, we provide constructive anti-spam recommendations, including issues with unsubscribe links before you launch an email campaign.
If you don’t use a professional bulk email service for your digital marketing, you might simply forget to include this link in your campaigns or forget to manually remove unsubscribers from your mailing list. That’s why LIKE.TG automatically adds unsubscribed users to a suppression list, preventing any accidental unsolicited communication with them.
How to Handle Unsubscribe Requests
Provide an unsubscribe link
Make the unsubscribe link visible
Immediately remove users who requested to unsubscribe
Don’t ask users if they are sure
Redirect to an unsubscribe page
First of all, you need to satisfy all unsubscribe requests because it’s not a matter of choice but a matter of healthy communication and following opt-out rules. Follow these five best practices when working with unsubscribe requests to be on the safe side.
Provide an unsubscribe link. Make sure it works. If an unsubscribe link is broken, users won’t be able to use it and are likely to mark your email as spam. It’s much faster to report your emails as spam than it is to contact your brand regarding this issue.
Make the unsubscribe link visible. It should be easy to find it in the footer of your email. Some unethical companies add an unsubscribe link that is extremely small, is hidden in the legal address in the footer, or doesn’t look like a link. These tricks won’t work well for your brand because unsubscribers will mark your email as spam without hesitation.
Immediately remove users who requested to unsubscribe. Automate this process to eliminate the risk of sending any emails to unsubscribed email addresses. If a user receives an email after they’ve unsubscribed, it will harm your sender reputation and overall brand reputation. That’s because some users may post on Facebook or other socials to tell people that you violated their rights.
Don’t ask users if they are sure. No one clicks an unsubscribe link if they are not sure. Don’t make the unsubscribers confirm their decision with any checkboxes, or “Yes” and “No” buttons.
Redirect to an unsubscribe page. This page informs the user that they are no longer on your mailing list. However, nothing stops you from using this page to provide a resubscription option or ask people why they chose to leave your mailing list. Use this approach very carefully, offer a survey or resubscription button once when users realize they’ve successfully unsubscribed.
Let’s learn how to create a meaningful unsubscribe page.
How to Create an Unsubscribe Page
Customize the Unsubscribe page look
Add an optional survey
Preview the unsubscribe page
It only takes a few minutes to create an unsubscribe page with LIKE.TG. The service provides a default unsubscribe page to confirm the opt-out. You can customize it by following the steps below.
Step 1: Customize the unsubscribe page look
Go to your LIKE.TG account settings and choose the “Unsubscribe pages” tab. Then click on “Add a new unsubscribe page.” Create a name and title for your unsubscribe page. You can change the title and page’s background color, add a favicon, add an unsubscribe page survey, and choose your customized unsubscribe page as your default one.
Step 2: Add an optional survey
Customize the survey by altering the default questions to meet your needs. This will clarify why the user unsubscribed.
Step 3: Preview the unsubscribe page
Keep customizing it until you’re satisfied and then click the “Create” button. Take a look at an unsubscription page that lets users review their subscription preferences.
Here’s a detailed guide on how to create an unsubscribe page in few steps.
Handling unsubscribe requests in the right way is crucial for your email marketing since it helps you abide by the CAN-SPAM Act, build healthy relationships with your audience, and in some cases, enables you to gain insights about your business. Don’t overlook this factor when you build your email marketing strategy.
Travel marketing
Travel marketing is a combination of activities and strategies aimed at promoting and selling products related to the travel industry. It helps hotels, airlines, travel agencies, and tour operators catch potential customers’ eye, encourage them to buy a specific travel service or product, and convert them into clients.
In this article, we’ll unveil why marketing in travel and tourism is essential and review 10 travel marketing strategies, ideas, and tips. We’ll also explore some excellent examples of travel marketing campaigns.
Why is marketing important in travel and tourism?
Marketing is crucial to the success of any business, and the travel industry isn’t an exception. It helps tourism companies in various ways, and in this section, we’ll uncover the most important advantages.
Stand out in a highly competitive market. The travel sector is filled with numerous hotels, airlines, destinations, and tour operators, so competition is increasingly high. To stand out from the competition, business owners use marketing to communicate their unique value proposition and connect with customers.
Establish customer awareness. In our digital world, clients search for new destinations, travel products, and services related to tourism online. Companies striving to introduce their products and services to a wider audience and establish brand awareness use advertisements and online content. Once travelers visit specific sites, they can instantly see their options.
Build a positive brand image. Strong branding, recognition, and trust are a must in the travel industry. Companies with a positive brand image attract more customers and generate more revenue. By utilizing marketing strategies, business owners succeed in creating awareness about the numerous options available, encouraging potential travelers to consider specific products and services for their future adventures.
Generate higher revenue. Effective marketing strategies can increase the number of tour bookings, hotel reservations, and ticket sales, bringing higher revenues. In turn, this contributes to a business's success and financial health.
Improve customer engagement. Social media, email marketing, chatbots, content marketing, and other channels help communicate with customers regularly. Travel companies engage with prospects and clients and update them on new trips, destinations, tickets, and promos, turning the audience into loyal customers who return and repeat their bookings, reservations, and purchases.
Educate clients on specific travel products and services. Travel agencies, airlines, and hotels use marketing for educational purposes. Various marketing channels like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, chatbots, and email campaigns can become sources of valuable information about new destinations, travel tips, and the best locations for different types of travel.
Adapt to new trends quickly. Like any other, the travel industry changes very quickly due to changes in customer preferences and technological improvements. Marketing enables companies to stay afloat, align with customer needs, and adjust their strategies to stay relevant.
Now that you are aware of the main reasons to consider travel marketing for your tourism business, it’s time to review 10 effective strategies that will help you start implementing it.
10 Travel Marketing Strategies
In this section, we’ll provide 10 strategies you can consider for your tourism business. They’ll help you figure out where to start and how to make your travel marketing efforts work.
Email marketing. Despite numerous marketing strategies and technology innovations, email marketing is still among the most effective approaches. With the help of email campaigns, you can update customers on the new destinations in your tour agency, inform them about the reduction in ticket prices, provide enticing travel offers, or send personalized recommendations based on users’ searches. It is fast and effective, especially when using a bulk email service like LIKE.TG. The platform lets you send up to 15,000 professional emails for free, using a no-code editor and ready-to-go templates.
Content marketing. This strategy is a must for every company involved in the tourism industry. You can significantly improve clients' engagement and desire to buy your travel products or services by writing valuable articles, sharing travel tips, and posting stories about new destinations. To make content marketing work, you need to create high-quality, informative, and engaging content for blog posts, videos, and social media. It will help you demonstrate the unique aspects of your products and services.
Social media marketing. Utilizing social media like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest allows you to establish awareness, generate engagement, and gain recognition. Social media networks can bring a lot of benefits to business owners when they use these channels correctly. Consider sharing visually appealing content through these platforms: creating informative reels with tips, best destinations, and attractive prices. If you do everything right, social media will promote your content for free, making your company well-known among users.
User-generated content. Establishing transparency and credibility can be challenging for companies, yet you’ll achieve it faster with user-generated content. As you know, people trust other customers’ recommendations, so it’s essential to let your clients share their travel experiences and make them visible to your target audience. Collect positive customer reviews and showcase them on various platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, to establish a positive image.
Video marketing. Video content plays an important role in establishing eye contact with clients, building emotional connections, and demonstrating your travel products and services from the best perspective. Visually appealing videos for Instagram and YouTube will help showcase your unique offering and catch customers’ attention. To generate more conversions, consider creating compelling videos covering destination highlights, travel itineraries, hotel overviews, etc.
Chatbot marketing. Adding a chatbot or AI assistant to your travel company’s site or social media is necessary for instant help and assistance. AI will help you analyze customer behavior and actions on your site and personalize communication with your audience. After utilizing a chatbot, you can quickly respond to FAQs and improve customer satisfaction with your brand. If you are searching for a perfect solution, consider leveraging LIKE.TG, where you can build a helpful chatbot for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, your site, WhatsApp, and Telegram without knowledge of the code and programming skills.
Influencer marketing. Opinion leaders greatly influence their audience, especially when recommending products and services they can benefit from. Consider collaborating with influencers related to the travel industry. Today, you can find dozens of couples and solo travelers around the world, and they can become your promoters. Think of the strategy and a powerful message promoting your travel agency, hotel, or spa services. Add videos of your business so that people can instantly see the perks of visiting your place or ordering your services.
Live streaming events. Engaging with the target audience is useful for your business when you can share useful tips, interesting destinations, and travel experiences. This information can entice customers to buy your travel products or services. You’ll get more conversions when you invite travel experts who can organize QA sessions and find the best solutions for those who plan to travel.
Virtual and Augmented Reality. It’s important to use technology when showcasing your travel products and services. Augmented reality is the best way to provide potential clients a virtual tour of destinations and demonstrate hotel rooms and amenities. It will help you show your unique selling proposition, improve engagement, and help future travelers make well-informed buying decisions.
Loyalty programs. Lastly, it's essential to establish contact with potential customers and show care towards existing clients. You can do it by implementing loyalty programs. They will help reward repeat clients and encourage them to stay with your travel agency, hotel, airline, or resort. Consider providing exclusive discounts, perks, or access to special events.
Now that you know the strategies, it’s time to explore some excellent marketing ideas and tips, so let’s dive in.
10 Travel Marketing Ideas and Tips
In this section, we’ll discover 10 travel marketing ideas and tips. Let’s get started one by one.
Send personalized travel recommendations. When the travel industry is enhanced with technology and the competition is high, ensuring a personalized approach to every lead is essential. Consider using your website as a source of information about user activity, behavior, and actions. You can provide personalized recommendations based on the flights, tours, or travel services your site visitors were searching for. To ensure a curated travel experience, you need to look through the interests, social media actions, and previous bookings.
Provide limited-time offers to establish FOMO. Use email campaigns, social media networks, or SMS campaigns to promote your exclusive discounts and offers. Utilize LIKE.TG for a convenient process of creating and sending email and SMS campaigns, messages in chatbots, and displaying web push notifications with limited-time offers. Limited-time deals will help you establish a fear of missing out and create a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to take the desired action quickly.
Collaborate with travel bloggers. A partnership with bloggers involved in the travel industry can become a source of more potential clients, higher conversions, and bigger revenue. Consider collaborating with travel influencers to provide information about your destinations, products, and services to a wide audience of people who might be interested. This approach will help you reach customers worldwide and scale faster.
Develop attractive travel packages. Create exciting travel packages at an attractive price for couples, families, or specific destinations. These packages can cover flights, hotels, and activities to entice customers. Usually, these offers grab travelers’ attention and encourage them to go on a vacation with family or friends.
Use videos to share travel experiences. Create compelling videos to show the advantages of your company by including travel experiences, new destinations, and travel tips. They will serve customers as sources of valuable information and as channels for additional conversions for your business. Visually appealing videos will help you establish connections with potential clients, interest them, and consider traveling with your company. Videos featuring real travelers will help you establish trust and credibility.
Encourage user-generated content. Consider using numerous ways to encourage your customers to share their feedback, testimonials, and reviews of your travel products and services. It can be a comment, video recording, or post on social media. Encourage them to use your branded hashtag and share their stories with your company across social media channels. You can provide rewards, gifts, and discounts for further travel with your company in exchange for reviews.
Offer loyalty programs. Consider leveraging loyalty programs for repeat purchases and better engagement. Reward your loyal clients with perks and discounts to make them stay with your travel agency, airline, or resort. Loyalty incentives can encourage your customers to refer their friends and repeat reservations.
Provide virtual tours and experiences. Consider utilizing technology for better customer experiences and engagement by using virtual tours of destinations, hotels, or attractions. These tours can serve as a source of inspiration for travelers who will come to your company when they are ready to explore new locations. Your business will help them map out their routes and embody their plans.
Utilize geo-targeted ads. Localized ads will help you reach your target audience based on their location. You can offer your services to people from different countries when they are in the area you work in. These ads enable you to find individuals who are interested in your travel agency or nearby hotel.
Host live streaming events. Use live streaming to demonstrate events, festivals, and specific travel activities in real time. You can organize live QA sessions to provide travelers with all the necessary information about your company. Your travel experts can share some useful tips and tricks for people to consider when traveling to new locations.
Now that you know the working best practices, let’s proceed to the examples.
Examples of Travel Marketing Campaigns
Travel marketing campaigns have various purposes, yet they often strive to inspire travelers, uncover new destinations, and encourage reservations. In this section, we’ll review some great examples of companies related to the travel industry that use numerous marketing channels to make their products and services visible to customers and improve sales. Let’s get started with Pegasus and its travel marketing email campaigns.
Pegasus Airlines. Email Campaigns with Discounts
The Turkish low-cost carrier actively uses email campaigns to promote its services and encourage more ticket bookings. Subscribers can find various enticing emails from the company containing attractive discounts, introducing new routes, offering hotel discounts, and providing information about available tours and activities.
Below, you can see one such email campaign providing a 50% discount for flights to Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden during a specific period.
Luna Retreats. Sponsored ads on Instagram
Luna Repreats uses sponsored ads on Instagram to find its target audience and educate them about the company’s products and services. The brand strives to build a community of like-minded people who intend to join the transformative retreat training and empower them with new knowledge and skills for a healthy mental and physical lifestyle.
Bürgenstock Resort. Collaboration with Influencers
The luxury resort welcomes guests from all over the world and offers outstanding services. It uses Instagram as one of its promotional channels. The resort focuses on collaboration with opinion leaders who travel around the globe and share new destinations with followers. The Instagram post below includes a tag that will bring users to the resort’s account and a short overview of the spot and its services. The influencer’s pictures demonstrate all the beauty of the places and the perks people can experience when visiting this extremely beautiful location.
Congrats! Now you know what travel marketing is and why it is crucial for every company involved in tourism. We hope that our tips and examples will inspire you to develop an effective travel marketing strategy for your business. Register in LIKE.TG now to establish your communication with customers through the most popular marketing channels.
Trigger marketing
Trigger marketing is the use of a marketing automation platform to respond to specific actions of leads and customers. Email opens, viewed pages, chatbot interactions, and conversions serve as triggers for the software to automatically send a message (email, SMS, push notification, etc.) to a prospect or customer.
In this article, you’ll find out why trigger marketing is important and explore its benefits. You’ll also unveil the types and examples, and figure out how to create a trigger-based marketing campaign with LIKE.TG.
Why is trigger marketing important?
Trigger marketing helps brands reach customers with relevant messages at the perfect timing. Marketing automation empowers entrepreneurs to respond to users' actions with the right solutions. Email opens, chatbot interaction, and conversions are the triggering events for the software to act. A marketing platform is necessary to automate tasks such as sending email sequences, updating a CRM, adding customers to a list, etc.
With marketing automation software, your brand becomes more human-centric. By sending personalized and relevant messages, you can make your customer feel special. This leads to better communication with the audience and stronger relationships. Unlike mass advertising, trigger marketing focuses on clients’ needs and adapts materials and tasks. Seamless customer service helps you improve customer satisfaction and loyalty to your brand.
By sending trigger campaigns to prospects, you can show them that you care. This way, you’ll establish a positive first impression and encourage word-of-mouth promotion. Brand awareness will increase.
Now that you know why trigger marketing is essential, it’s time to uncover the benefits you can reap after implementing trigger marketing.
Benefits of Using Triggers
Many companies have already leveraged trigger-based marketing to attract customers’ attention to their products. Now we’ll have a closer look at the benefits of this technique for you to decide whether you need it for your company’s success.A brand that uses triggers can obtain the following advantages:
improved customer loyalty;
higher customer satisfaction;
better customer service;
brand awareness;
cost-efficiency;
relevant messages;
competitive advantage;
business process automation;
increased conversions;
access to behavior-based data.
To reap the benefits, you need to choose the right type of marketing trigger for your event. To do it, you should know each type in more detail. In the next section, we’ll review the four most popular triggers.
Types of Marketing Triggers
Many users’ actions serve as triggers for sending relevant email campaigns, push notifications, SMS, chatbots, etc. In this section, we’ll review the classification of triggers and examples for each type.
Event-based triggers
An event is a perfect occasion to send your subscribers an email. The following events can serve you as triggers: brand anniversary, Black Friday, Independence Day, Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day, customer’s birthday, etc. You can provide your clients with attractive offers, discounts, special promos, and more. Often, these offers are limited in time, so consumers have a fear of missing out and rush to buy your product.
For instance, Cyber Monday triggered MAC Cosmetics to send subscribers an email newsletter containing a 40% discount. The offer lasted for a couple of days, so customers needed to hurry to grab this attractive discount.
Engagement-based triggers
You can send emails, push, messages in chatbots, SMS, and notifications on social media networks based on customer engagement and behavior patterns. If users don’t demonstrate a high level of engagement within your website, you can increase it with an email newsletter and messages in multiple communication channels. This way, you show your care to subscribers. Examples include welcome messages, win-back follow-ups, reactivation, and onboarding as a response to subscription, inactivity, and people’s comments.
Once a user decides to create a new account and sign up for an email newsletter, the company sends this user a welcome message. With the help of an email, a company can tell its brand history, convey its benefits, share reviews, cases, and useful materials.
For example, after creating an account with Duolingo, the company sends a welcome message to its new users and gives a pro tip for starters on how to use the app and get a 7-day strike.
Behavior-based triggers
The trigger focuses on customer behavior and activities online. By collecting data about consumers’ actions, you have the chance to meet their needs and address desires. Registration, website activity, and conversions are the causes of behavior-based triggers. The examples include downloads, getting started emails, sign-ups, abandoned carts, opt-ins, viewed products, comments, etc.
Companies use trigger campaigns to win back inactive users. You can leverage different techniques to re-engage your customers. Send email campaigns with attractive offers, new products, service launches, discounts, promos, etc. Entice users to purchase from you before they churn.
ShoeBuy does a great job. The brand sends emails with an appealing subject line “We want you back,” and shows that the company cares about its consumers. The email campaign contains news about a 30% off discount and free shipping.
Emotional triggers
Your company should connect with customers emotionally to make them trust and stay with your brand. Trust, fear of missing out, hunger, self-expression, and recognition are a few examples of emotional triggers that help you appeal to your target audience and encourage them to buy. Consider rewarding your clients for loyalty for their birthdays and anniversary with your company.
You can set triggers to celebrate special occasions with your loyal customers. Your company will send the message on a specific date and time to congratulate your client on his birthday or anniversary with your brand. Send personalized messages to show you care and appreciate customers who have stayed with your company for years.
Dorothy Perkins sends an email on customers’ birthdays and invites them to make use of its discount by inserting the code. The date of the client’s birthday is a trigger for a system to send the message.
Now that you know the types, let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to create a trigger-based marketing campaign with LIKE.TG.
How to create a trigger-based marketing campaign with LIKE.TG?
LIKE.TG empowers you to process customer data and inform consumers about an abandoned cart, registration on your site, or purchase via an email, web push, SMS, and messages on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Now we’ll explain how to do it with our service.
Log in to your account with LIKE.TG or register.
Once you are logged in, proceed to the “Email” tab, click “Automations,” and then press the “Create new automation” button. With our service, you can create automation for various events: a new subscriber, a special date, a webhook, a new deal, the change of a deal stage, an abandoned cart, and more. You can set up any custom event in the “Event Manager.”
1. Configure automation settings
Enter data to set up email series: automation name and email sender. Connect to Google Analytics, select the unsubscribe language, and click “Apply.”
2. Set the event for a flow to start
After, you’ll be directed to the editor to select the trigger that will start your automation flow. Create email series for different events. For instance, a flow to welcome a new subscriber or inform about an abandoned cart.
Select the event on the right panel. Choose the event and click “Apply.” The “Abandoned cart” will be your “Flow start.”
3. Add the necessary element to send a message
Automation 360 empowers you to send messages to subscribers via “Email,” “Messenger,” “SMS,” “Push,” and “Viber.”
Email
When choosing the “Email” element, you need to fill in several fields. Specify the time for sending, enter the email subject and preheader, and select a template. You can create it from scratch, upload your own, or use ready-to-use templates. Click “Apply.”
SMS
If you want to send SMS, make sure that you have users’ phone numbers on the mailing list. Drag the “SMS” element into the editor field, and insert the sending time, sender name, and SMS text to send an SMS to certain customers. Personalize the message and add variables if necessary. If you need an unsubscribe link, you can add it as well. Click “Apply.”
Messenger
If you want to send a message in Facebook Messenger, drag the “Messenger” element to the editor field and specify sending time. Select a bot and type the message you want to send.
Viber
Drag the "Viber" element into the editor field, and choose the message’s sending time. The message will be delivered to the phone number mentioned in the phone variable of the event.
Push
Drag the "Push" element to the editor, and select the recipients of the message. Specify the sending time, title, and text. Add the image for your push notification, if necessary. To send notifications, the website’s subscriber should have the same email address as in the email variable of the event.
Choose a plan based on the size of your list. LIKE.TG offers free and paid plans, which start at $8 per month for email marketing. This plan covers an unlimited number of emails, 10 flows, and 10 events.
Now that you know how to create a trigger campaign with LIKE.TG, it’s time for some examples.
Examples of Trigger Marketing
Companies use different channels to reach customers and prospects after they perform specific actions. The majority of companies leverage email services to respond to visitors’ actions. Let’s find out how they do it.
Wondermind — Welcome Message
Wondermind sends a welcome email to everyone who signs up for its email newsletter. The innovative mental fitness company sends an email that shows appreciation. The message provides subscribers with some short information about Wondermind and things the platform helps people deal with. With this email, the company communicates with its subscribers one-on-one to explain the main tasks of Wondermind and start building trust.
Duolingo — Re-engagement Message
Duolingo, a language learning platform, tries to win back inactive users with regular emails that subscribers receive until they are back on track. The platform uses the engagement-based trigger to win its inactive users back. People get emails with reminders about the language learning lessons they need to complete to improve their knowledge.
Spotify — Confirmation Message
Spotify makes sure that users’ accounts are secure by confirming their emails. The service asks its listeners to click the “Confirm Email” button to ensure that the owner accesses the account.
Now you know a lot more about trigger marketing. Choose the right software to automate the process and get positive impressions from your target audience. Hope our examples inspire you to create great emails for your leads and customers and respond to specific users’ actions. LIKE.TG empowers you to create automation triggered by an event and reach subscribers through channels like WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, SMS, push notifications, email campaigns, etc.
Unique clicks
Unique clicks mean the number of times that a link in your email was clicked by individual users. Repeated clicks on links are not considered unique. Check out the click map report in your LIKE.TG accountto evaluate the performance of your content and offers.
What You Should Know About Unique Clicks
The measure of unique clicks of your first newsletterwill be much higher than unique clicks of the following newsletters, becausesubscribersopen and read the newsletters with pleasure and curiosity after they recently signed up. After three or four mailings, you can expect a stabilization of the measure of average unique clicks.
The unique click rate is usually lower in summer than in other seasons. That’s why it’s necessary to analyze the dynamics of the annual seasonality.
The unique click rate allows you to compare the results of email campaignsdedicated to different products or services and understand subscribers’ responses and attitudes to different lines of products.
The unique click rate shows you the subscribers’ reactions to changes in emails and content. In this case, you can split-testmailings by dividing the mailing list into two parts.
The unique click rate may be reduced if you send emails too often. Sending mailings once a week is a nice middle-ground for different business sectors.
An effective method to raise the unique click rate is to create really useful and relevant newsletters.
We offer a wide rangeof marketing tools for you to send relevant campaigns. Divide your subscribers into segments according to different criteria, personalize the subject line and email body, A/B test any email element, choose a template or create your own. Track campaign statistics to discover the most effective techniques for your business. Enjoy these features with our free plan. If you have fewer than 500 subscribers, send 15,000 emails for free every month. Create valuable content and we'll do our best to make your campaigns deliver!
Create an email campaign
Unique value proposition
A unique value proposition (UVP) is your way of telling potential customers about the benefits your business provides. UVP may refer to an entire organization, a particular product or service, or customer accounts.
Businesses often mix their value proposition with other elements in a marketing strategy. To get things clear, let’s discuss what a value proposition is not.
A value proposition is not:
An incentive. While a value proposition explains the benefits of your product for customers, it doesn’t stimulate them to make a purchase straight away.
A tagline. Soundbites from commercials help consumers identify brands, but they do not express the value a business provides.
Positioning statement. Though these statements emphasize the benefits of a product for a specific persona or audience segment, they are not equal to value propositions. In a nutshell, a position statement is part of a value proposition.
This article will help you understand what a value proposition is, how it helps your brand, and what steps you should take to create it. We’ll also unpack a few tips, templates, and examples.
Why is a value proposition important?
A value proposition is the be-all and end-all of your business. It underlies the products and services your brand offers, defines your marketing strategy and positioning, and so on.
The primary task of a UVP is to explain to your customers why working with you or using your product is the best decision. Without it, your clientele is unlikely to figure out how your product fulfills their needs and why they should choose it.
Another function of a value proposition is to set your brand apart from competitors. Even if you offer off-the-shelf products, you need to make them stand out in a row of similar items, and a clear UVP helps you do it.
So, a unique value proposition makes your brand one-of-a-kind and alluring to customers. However, there are some more substantial benefits this concept provides your business. Read on to explore them.
Benefits of a Value Proposition
A value proposition is a thing that defines your business, promotion strategy, and success in the market. Here are the main advantages a well-designed UVP can bring your business:
Clear communication. A value proposition helps you make a good offer to your customers. Clarity drives more prospects at the top stages of the sales funnel and lets you boost revenue.
Higher quality of leads. Over half of prospective customers mismatch your company. A value proposition helps you achieve almost 100% overlap between your potential buyers' needs and the issues your product tackles. It drives higher conversion rates and saves effort spent on working with unsuitable clientele.
Improved engagement. When your customers’ values match with your company’s, it leads to increased engagement with your brand, products, and services.
Unified messaging. A UVP clarifies your offer and usefulness both for customers and employees. Thus, you can be sure that everyone transmits the same values across different communication channels – your website, landing pages, social media pages, and more.
Intelligible communication, high-quality leads, high engagement rates, and consistent messaging impact your business and financial metrics dramatically. Eventually, you’ll get an increase in customer satisfaction, operation efficiency, ROI, and so on. Still, not every UVP can work like magic for your business.
What makes an effective value proposition?
An elaborate value proposition can change the game for your brand. However, to achieve effectiveness, your UVP should fit the following criteria.
Clarity. A value proposition needs to be clear-cut and easy to understand at first sight.
Brevity. A potential customer should spend only several seconds to get their head around your value proposition.
Advantage. A good value proposition sets your company apart from competitors.
Concreteness. A value proposition should refer to concrete results a customer will get from your product or service.
Credibility. Make sure you can deliver the value you’ve promised. Otherwise, your business comes dead in the water, as customers are quick to recognize deception and warn others.
An additional piece of advice – avoid hype and empty phrases while crafting your value proposition. Phrases like “amazing product” make no sense to consumers and repel them. For the same reason, you should stay away from “best” and other superlatives – unless you can prove that you really have the right to use them — when you are the clear industry leader in a niche.
We’ve explored the definition of a value proposition, the benefits it brings to your business, and the qualities of an effective UVP. Now let’s move on and unpack the different types of value propositions.
Types of Value Propositions
Marketers offer plenty of concepts to classify value propositions. We’ll stick to the system, offered by MECLABS Institute. It divides UVPs into four levels:
The primary value proposition refers to the brand itself. In other words, you can call it a brand's mission or the value a business offers the world. The primary UVP answers the question: “Why should your ideal prospect buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”.
Prospect-level value proposition addresses different segments of your target audience. Thus, you need to tailor it to each potential customer group to achieve the best outcomes. A prospect-level UVP is an answer to the question: “Why should a specific prospect buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”
Product-level value proposition answers the question: “Why should a prospect buy this product rather than any other product?”. So, it focuses on the benefits your specific product provides.
Process-level value proposition allows you to drive results for each conversion step for your product. To craft this one, you need to ask yourself: “Why should a prospect click this marketing message rather than any other message?”.
Various types of value propositions help you work the most effectively in different situations across your business. Thus, it’s helpful to have a well-thought-out UVP for different levels. Now, let’s get into detail and find out how to craft an effective value proposition.
How to create a value proposition
Refer to your brand identity
Identify your product’s advantages
Match your advantages with customer's problems
Explain what makes you the best provider of value
Work out the unique value proposition
Split-test and refine
You can’t just pluck your UVP out of the air – to articulate it, you have to conduct research and brainstorm. Here is an algorithm to help you form a value proposition.
Refer to your brand identity
If your business’ mission is vague or poorly worded, you’re unlikely to create an intelligible value proposition. To find and articulate your brand’s identity, answer the following questions:
Why does your brand exist?
How do you want to shape the future?
How will you create that future?
What principles underlie your behavior?
For instance, if you are developing a sustainable fashion brand, you can answer these questions like this:
“Mass-market brands produce short-lived clothes, depleting natural resources, and cluttering up the Earth. We have an alternative approach. We use lean production to bring out clothing that lasts longer. Our core values are eco-friendliness and high quality.”
Identify your product’s advantages
For this task, brainstorm all the benefits your product offers, including functional and emotional ones. In other words, you can mention specific characteristics your product has, as well as the emotions it brings about in your customers. For a sustainable fashion brand, you may name high quality, classic styles, and the pride a person feels when they wear ethically produced clothes.
Don't worry if the roster is too long – you will assess the benefits and cross out the unnecessary later. Once the list is ready, try to figure out what value each of the advantages brings to a customer. It may be time savings or cost, helping to lead the lifestyle they want to, and so on.
Match your advantages with customer's problems
To make sure your value proposition will reach your goal, compose a list of problems your potential customers face. Take only those that relate to your product. For instance, your prospects may struggle to find durable clothing or can’t afford to buy it from most sustainable fashion brands.
To spot these issues, create a buyer persona – follow our guide to compose a plausible customer profile. To get a clearer picture, conduct research – browse social media and online forums where your potential buyers spend time and identify the problems they discuss. You may also conduct in-depth surveys of your current clients.
Prioritize the importance of consumers’ problems in the list and match them with your benefits. Focus on the most important issues your potential buyers face. This step is essential to communicate your value proposition properly. Bear in mind that customers want to hear how your product solves their problems, not a list of features.
Explain what makes you the best provider of value
Value proposition implies differentiation from competitors. So, after you’ve created a list of your product benefits and matched it with the customer issues, conduct a competitor research. Look at what they offer customers and identify their value propositions. This will help you understand how to formulate your UVP in a manner that beats your rivals.
To get things right, focus on the differences between what your opponents propose and what you can offer. For instance, if a rival fashion brand manufactures expensive clothes, highlight that you provide a cheaper alternative. Accentuate differences that make your business stand out.
Work out your unique value proposition
By now, you have awareness about your brand identity, product benefits, and their value for potential customers, as well as differences between you and your competitors. With this information on hand, frame your value proposition in one short sentence. Try various elements and see how they work together.
In the beginning, you can come up with several statements. Value proposition options for a sustainable fashion brand may sound like “We make ethical fashion affordable” or “We provide high-quality clothing for a clean future.” Make sure all your UVP variations are clear and concise.
Split-test and refine
If you end up with several value propositions, run A/B tests to find out which variant performs best. The best option is to give a trial for offers that are significantly different from each other. Go for modifications that focus on various user problems or emphasize contrasting benefits. To test value propositions, you can launch several versions of landing pages or conduct surveys. Ask your customers these questions:
What do you think about the variations?
Why do you prefer some options over others?
Do you believe in our offer?
How do you understand our proposition?
Testing your value proposition helps you understand what statements resonate with your audience. Also, thanks to trials you can refine these phrases to achieve better results. Articulating your UVP clearly and concisely may be arduous work. To alleviate the pain of putting your values into words, you can use pre-designed formulas.
Value Proposition Templates
Forming a value proposition is painstaking work that requires mastery in operating words and statements. However, people rarely have talents both in business and poetry. That’s why entrepreneurs and marketers have come up with value proposition templates. You can take into service the following ones:
Steve Blank’s Value Proposition Template
This pattern, offered by the entrepreneur and author, Steve Blank, focuses on customer development. The template works perfectly for small businesses.
Formula
Example
We help X do Y doing Z
We help local restaurants launch fast delivery options by offering them special drones.
Guy Kawasaki’s Value Proposition Template
Tech evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, devised this template to help people write compact yet precise value propositions. Statements patterned this way make good incentives as well.
Formula
Example
Action + does what + Differentiator (the thing that makes you stand out)
Deliver faster with our on-demand drones.
Venture Hacks’ Value Proposition Template
Venture Hacks – a company that supports startups – came up with a value proposition formula that helps grab anyone's attention immediately. With it, you can create the perfect catchphrases.
Formula
Example
Industry example for/of a new domain
The SpaceX for local food delivery.
Cooper Vlaskovits’ Proposition Template
Co-authors of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper, crafted the formula to help startups position themselves. You can use this template to form your business mission.
Formula
Example
Customer + Problem + Solution
Local restaurants that want to launch delivery. The owners need to launch cost-effective swift delivery. Our drone delivery service lets them launch delivery at the lowest price.
Following a ready-to-use pattern may help you find the perfect phrasing, especially when you’re stuck. If you want to go further and squeeze every bit of value from your UVP, follow the tips we’ve prepared for you.
Value Proposition Tips
The theory allows you to create a general plan for getting things done, but it’s a practice that makes you come up with the most effective solutions. Thus, we’ve picked pro-tips to help you boost the effectiveness of your value proposition.
Form your UVP as early as possible. The earlier you define your value proposition, the sooner you can benefit from it. Better yet, with a ready-to-use statement, you can start improving it right away by testing. Such UVP trials allow you to address your audience’s pains and hopes more precisely and drive better results.
Test values before statements. Sometimes value propositions don’t perform well in tests. To find the reason, examine assumptions about the audience's pains and values before testing UVP statements. Create a small focus-group and examine their beliefs about your hypotheses.
Rework your value proposition from time to time. As time flies, your target audience may change their preferences and values. A familiar value proposition may not resonate with the new customer beliefs as well as it used to. Thus, testing and refining your value proposition once in a while is a great idea.
The advanced tips listed above can help you take your value proposition to the next level. To improve your UVP even more, learn how to formulate it from professionals. Read on to find amazing value proposition examples from market leaders.
Value Proposition Examples
We've assembled several UVP examples that have helped companies stand out in oversaturated markets, attract loyal customers, and even reinvent the niche they work in. Take a look at real-life value propositions and adopt some of the best practices.
Unbounce – higher conversions
The landing page creator, Unbounce, operates in a busy niche and focuses on a narrow audience of marketers. The service specializes in conversion rate optimization, which is abundantly clear from their homepage.
In the picture below, you can see the main value proposition – convert more leads. To clarify what the page is about, Unbounce uses the phrase “Create custom landing pages with Unbounce — no coding required.” It accentuates that people without technical skills can work with the service. In the next line, the company proves it can keep its promise to boost your conversion rate by listing tools for it.
Uber – easy rides
Remember taxi rides before Uber? Well, it was tough sometimes – you needed to grab some cash, go outside, and catch a car. Not to mention that experience was not always pleasant, as you could end up waiting too long, have to get in a dirty vehicle, and so on.
Uber revolutionized the taxi market by offering a convenient and enjoyable way to order a ride. The brand reflects these values – simplicity and comfort – on its main page with the proposition “Always the ride you want.” The website reinforces that statement with the phrase “Request a ride, hop in, and go.” Yeah, it’s that easy.
Canva
Canva is an online graphics service for editing, creating, and distributing images. The market offers a lot of similar tools, such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. However, they require training, which is not always an option. In this background, Canva sets itself apart by offering the possibility to design any graphic content without learning new skills or hiring a designer.
Canva articulates the value it delivers to customers sharply – the main page offers you to “design anything.” In the next line, the service states that anyone can be a designer and accentuates that using Canva is not only easy but also free.
Casper
Value propositions can help you find an audience even if you sell usual things, like clothing or mattresses. Casper is the best proof of this statement. The company manufactures mattresses and sells them directly to consumers.
Casper offers its customers the sleep they've always dreamed of – this is the brand’s catchphrase. It refers to the main customer's pain – sleep quality. To make the statement more persuasive, the company lists abundant social proof, offers a prolonged warranty, and offers a 100-day free trial.
A landing page is not the only channel to communicate your value proposition to your audience. You can deliver the message via email, SMS, chatbots, and push notifications as well. To explore these marketing opportunities, sign up with LIKE.TG.
Unsolicited bulk email
Unsolicited bulk email is the formal name for spam or junk emails that are sent to users who haven’t opted-in to receive them. Most of these emails are commercial and commonly referred to as unsolicited commercial emails.
The key characteristics of unsolicited bulk email are:
they are sent in mass to a huge number of recipients;
a part of these recipients haven’t opted-in to receive messages from the sender.
Sending these emails,which are mostly for advertising purposes, costs the sender little to nothing. However, unsolicited bulk email can cost a business both its reputation and losses in revenue (from penalties). ISPs try to control the distribution of these emails by blocking persistent senders and the associated IP addresses. Once a sender is blocked or blacklisted, they cannot send emails using the affected IP and email address again.Unsolicited bulk email is often common with spammers and phishers. It is also the main reason the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was established. Enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, this law protects email users by requiring commercial email senders to comply with a particular set of rules. The best way to avoid ending up as spam and breaking this law is to use an email service. LIKE.TG, which enforces a strict anti-spam policy, is one such service enabling sending of bulk email without spamming.
The First Unsolicited Bulk Email
Gary Thuerk sent the first spam email in 1978. Working as a marketing representative at Digital Equipment Corp, he asked his assistant to send a single message about a new computer model to all ARPANET addresses — 393 recipients. It was opposed to the common practice of sending a separate message to each recipient. Though the UBE did generate a couple of sales for the company, the general reaction from those who received it was negative.About 10 years later, the first-ever known chain email was sent with the subject line “Make money fast” to numerous inboxes in 1988. From then, unsolicited mass emails became quite common. In fact, as of 2018, approximately 53.5% of emails were spam. Today, trying to send a single message to over 100 addresses at a go can land the sender in a lot of trouble.Choose an email service instead and send bulk email without worry.
How to Avoid Being Flagged as Unsolicited Email
Never buy mailing lists
Use permission-based marketing
Activate your mailing list
Practice good mailing list hygiene
With all the problems that unsolicited email can bring to a business, anyone looking to use bulk email strategy should be keen on steps to avoid being flagged as spam. Here are a few ways:
Never buy mailing lists
Regardless of what the seller says, never buy a mailing list from any source. Instead, commit to growing an authentic mailing list using subscription forms. Even if it is from a seller who has a good reputation, anyone using a purchased list does not have permission from the recipients to send them messages. Learn how to create a subscription form using LIKE.TG and start growing your own mailing list.
Use permission-based marketing
Use the double opt-in approach when gathering new subscribers. Once a visitor signs up, send a confirmation message with a link to verify their subscription. With permission from the recipient, emails sent to them will be welcomed and will likely end up in their inboxes.
Activate your mailing list
Mailing list activation involves providing information about the source of a particular mailing list. These sources can be opt-in subscribers from a website, addresses from business cards or addresses imported from a different mailing service.
Practice good mailing list hygiene
Regularly checkinga mailing list for invalid addresses and examining bulk email reports are effective ways of avoiding the spam folder. Keep the list clean, up-to-date and accurate.
What counts as permission to send bulk emails?
Having access to a specific mailing list and permission to send marketing emails to those addresses are two different things. More simply, just because a marketer has an email list, it does not mean that they are allowed to send promotional emails to those addresses. To create a successful bulk email list, business owners and other marketing experts ought to seek permission from their subscribers ahead of sending any email marketing campaigns to them. Asking for permission is not only courteous but a requirement when working with LIKE.TG.
Marketers should refrain from assuming permission. Instead, they should confirm the same when they are in doubt. Moreover, they should use best practices when acquiring and managing their lists. For instance, businesses should never use third-party lists. This provision means that renting or purchasing email lists is a no-no. The email list is to be collected by yourself. Now, to manage a list effectively, it is vital for a marketer to use a single list rather than maintaining several lists on their LIKE.TG account. It is also necessary for marketers to keep their permission status “fresh” by engaging their customers regularly.
Furthermore, all inactive subscribers should either be re-engaged or removed from the lists entirely. It is also essential to ensure that subscribers update their profiles by providing a link for doing the same in the marketing emails. All recipients should be able to update their subscription preferences and personal info.
To be sure about “permission to send,” marketers should also implement double opt-in. Here, people have to confirm their registration by email before they are included in a marketer’s list of subscribers.
Learn more about what is considered permission by checking out this page on our site.
How to Send Bulk Emails for Free in LIKE.TG
With the help of LIKE.TG, you can send legal email campaigns. Afterregistering, add your mailing list to the service and activate it. This is a must since the service combats spam deliveries. You only need to describe the source of your list. After it’s activated, start sending bulk emails!
Unsolicited Bulk Email Examples
Here are examples of unsolicited marketing emails. First, a marketing email from Wowcher and corresponding complaints about the inability of customers to unsubscribe:
Here is another example of an unsolicited bulk email. The sender's email address looks suspicious and there are too many spam-like words.
Sign upwith LIKE.TG to send bulk emails straight to your subscribers’ inbox!
