All posts by Mukesh Kumar

SaaS Marketer, B2B Growth Consultant, Fractional CMO, Enterprise SEO Expert.
Digital Marketing

The Manifest Recognizes MarAutomation As The Most Recommended Digital Marketing Company

The business of making things easier

MarAutomation is in the business of making things easier. We believe in preserving the hourly economy of our clients for the things that actually matter to their business. This is why we’ve invested a lot of time and effort in understanding our client’s markets and how they operate most effectively.

The Manifest - Most reviewed digital marketing agencies

We are happy to announce that this focus is paying dividends, as we have recently been given some great news. Thanks to the feedback from our past clients and partners, we’ve been named as one of the most reviewed digital marketing agencies in Washington, DC, for 2022 by The Manifest.

The Manifest is a business news resource that highlights top-performing SMEs from various industries through awards efforts and ranked listings. These awards, in particular, spotlight companies that have earned the goodwill of their clients.

In order for a business to get named as one of the top companies on The Manifest, they first need to earn as much support from its audience as possible. This is often measured in the form of reviews and feedback – hence the name.

Proud to be recognized as one of the featured leaders

“This is a great honor! We’re proud to be recognized as one of the featured leaders. Being in this elite group makes us feel like our hard work has been rewarded with success and validation for all those hours spent putting customers first every step along the way.” – Mukesh K. Singhmar, Founder of MarAutomation.

The Manifest - Most Recommended digital marketing companies

We greatly appreciate how the support and patronage our clients have shown us over the years have led to such an important milestone for our team. We are also one of the top digital marketing companies in Virginia. Discover why so many people are praising our work by going to our website and learning more about our services. Contact us today and get a free consultation from our expert team.

Marketing

7 Strategies for Creating a High-Converting Landing Page

A high-converting landing page is one of the key parts of any marketing strategy. If your landing pages are not bringing in valuable leads, it’s time you revisit the approach you took for creating them.

The sole purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors and if it’s not doing that, it’s clear that elements on the page are having the effect they are supposed to. It’s true that there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that you can implement, and considering the different types of landing pages that are there, you can’t pick one plan of action.

However, there are certain things that remain constant and act as the foundation of a good landing page. In this blog, I’ll talk about all the details that marketers have to pay attention to for creating a high-converting landing page. But before I move to the main part let’s talk briefly about what a landing page is.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is any standalone page that can act as a way to capture leads. It can be a homepage, a page specifically created for a campaign or a referral page. Each of these pages will have different purposes and need to be created accordingly.

Consider for example a blog page- the purpose of this page is to attract visitors who want to be educated about your industry or the service that you provide.

While there are different types of landing pages, they are mostly created for specific campaigns. This way marketers can effectively track the performance of their campaign and see how many leads are generated through that particular campaign.

The main thing that you have to keep in mind is that a landing page should encourage a visitor to share their personal information. Now, to ensure that that happens, you’ll have to create a good enough landing page. Let’s see how you can do that.

create high converting landing pages

How to Create a High-Converting Landing Page

1. Create a compelling headline and copy

Content is the center point of every marketing strategy. This means that if your content lacks substance, your campaign will likely not bring in the desired results. The same goes for landing page content.

As soon as a visitor lands on the page, they should know its objective. How can you do that? By writing a clear and concise headline. The headline should ideally be short, and to the point, and pique the interest of the visitor. Since the headline has to be short, you cannot possibly convey the purpose of the page through it alone, you will also need a good subheading.

Create a headline and copy

Now, the subheading will elaborate a little on the headline and should ideally make the objective of the landing page clear. Next comes the copy! Just like the headline, your landing page copy should be to the point and creative enough to encourage the visitor to fill out the form. Try to ensure that there’s no fluff content or long paragraphs and that you are speaking directly to the visitor.

2. Include high-quality images

These days people are more likely to respond to images than just plain text. Visual content is more engaging and helps visitors understand your offering in a much better way. However, you can’t just stick any image on the page and expect people to respond to it in a positive way.

Make sure that the image is of high quality and is related to whatever service or product you are offering. Additionally, if you are able to put an image that explains the aim of the particular landing page then nothing like it. Visual content is a great way to enhance user experience and your campaign can witness better results if you leverage it properly.

3. Keep forms short and visible

The form is one of the most important parts of your landing page. But, if you are not careful about the sort of information you ask for, you may risk driving a potential lead away. Of course, you’d like to get as much information about visitors as possible, however, asking for way too many data points may backfire.

Ideally, ask for as little information as possible. If you think that just the name and email id can fulfill your purpose then there’s no need to ask for a phone number or company name as well.

Also, you can put the form above the fold so that the visitor can get to the main task immediately. There’s also the option of designing the form in a way that it scrolls along with the rest of the page. That way the visitor will never lose sight of the form and might feel more compelled to fill the form.

4. A call to action that stands out

When we talk about landing pages, it’s pretty obvious that it has to have a CTA. But remember, the CTA on your landing page has to be compelling and clear. It has to convey what the visitor is signing up for in just a couple of words.

call to action

The CTA button should stand out, be clear, and be able to catch the eye of the visitor. You can use vibrant colors that are in contrast with the rest of the colors on the page. The button shouldn’t be too small so that the visitor doesn’t notice it. And lastly, to emphasize again, make sure you get to the point straight away.

5. Optimize your landing pages for different devices

As you might already know, people these days use different devices for browsing. Therefore, if you create the landing page just for the desktop and fail to optimize it for mobile devices, you may see higher bounce rates.

Make sure that you are creating responsive pages to provide an enhanced user experience regardless of the device visitors are using.

6. Include testimonials and social proof to convince visitors

Testimonials are a great way to convince visitors to go for your product or service. You can put in video testimonials, quotes from your existing customers, or use case studies to make your point.

Another thing that may help you convert more visitors is social proof. Are you working with some well-known brands? Great! Put their names and logos on the landing page. Has your company recently won some accolades? Good for you! Throw in the names of brands that featured your company.

This way you are essentially letting visitors know that you are not a rookie, other brands are already benefiting from your product/service.

7. End with a ‘Thank You!’ page

Once you are done with all the key elements of your landing page make sure to include a ‘Thank you’ page. The visitor should be directed to a thank you page after they fill out the form and click on the CTA. It’s an easy way to be polite and thank the user for their interest in your offering.

how to create a high converting landing page

Best Practices

    1. Before ending this blog, I wanted to highlight some points that you have to take care of or you should avoid for creating a kickass landing page:
    2. Don’t put ads on landing pages. It’s a really bad idea to put ads on such pages because firstly, they will probably serve no purpose, and secondly, you will probably end up violating Google’s policies.
    3. Ensure that the content above the fold is crisp. Whether you are putting the form in the first fold, an image, or social proof, you have to make sure that the content is good enough to instantly grab the attention of the visitor.
    4. Design the landing page by keeping in mind your target audience. If your landing page successfully represents your audience, then the chances of converting visitors into leads are higher.
    5. Make sure to demonstrate clearly what problems your service or product can solve and how it will benefit the visitor.

Final Thoughts

There you have it, all the important things you need to consider to make an excellent landing page! Once you understand your target audience, all the other elements will fall into place. You just have to make sure to pay attention to all the constants that I have mentioned above and build a strategy accordingly.

The average conversion rate for landing pages is 2.35%. However, if you put in the needed efforts, you will end up getting the desired results.

Sales

10 Effective Email Marketing Strategies to Drive More Sales

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The fact that email marketing still remains one of the most effective ways to build quality relationships with leads and customers alone indicates that it’s indispensable for businesses. It is through email marketing that most of the marketing events get started.

For instance, if you are conducting a webinar, you’ll send a series of emails to invite people. Emails will also act as a way of politely thanking everyone who made it to the event.

Clearly, email marketing is the foremost means of healthy communication between businesses and customers. What this means is that your email marketing strategy should be creative and well-thought-out. Putting in half-hearted efforts can result in the loss of valuable deals, which can further translate to slow business growth.

effective email marketing strategies

But, the good thing is creating an effective marketing strategy isn’t all that hard if you know all the elements that need to be implemented. This blog aims to tell you exactly that- how to create a kickass email marketing strategy to help you drive more sales.

Start with a broad plan

The very first thing you have to focus on is creating an outline for how things should proceed. Before you start writing emails, it’s imperative to define your audience. This will allow you to target the right people, thereby increasing engagement and conversion rates. You should be aware of the signup sources, as it will help you know at which stage a particular prospect or lead is.

Now that you are clear about your target audience and where they are coming from, think about what kind of content will engage them. For example, if you are selling quirky coffee mugs, the content should be peppy enough to appeal to young people (think about including pop culture references).

But this would be a bad content strategy for a B2B company pitching software. The content in that case should be more professional and to the point.

After this, timing and frequency will come into play. How many emails are you sending to prospects? Are you reaching out to prospects way too often even if they are not responding? Are you reaching out to prospects at the right time? These are all important questions and you need to make sure that you are not misusing your audience’s information.

Email Marketing Strategies

Now, that you have an outline, it’s time to move on to specifics:

1. Personalize your emails

This one is pretty out there, but it’s worth mentioning that without personalized content, email marketing is no good. Understand your prospects and build the content around them. This will ensure two things- firstly, since you have a clear idea of your target audience, you will only reach out to relevant people, and secondly, you will pitch something that interests the prospect.

You are more likely to get positive results by personalizing content and understanding the needs of your audience. But, there’s always a limit to everything, so make sure to not go overboard.

Personalize your emails

2. Segment your audience

Before you even think about sending emails, you should segment your audience. Why? The answer is quite straightforward- you’ll see higher engagement rates, meaning increased open rates and click rates, and more prospects are likely to respond to your email (which is the ultimate goal of email marketing).

While it may not be possible to segment the audience on all of the touchpoints, go for as many as you can. Geography, timezone, browsing behavior, age, purchasing behavior, and previous engagement rate are some key areas for audience segmentation.

Segment your audience

3. Create catchy subject lines

Most of the time, the open rate of an email depends on its subject line. It should be interesting enough to grab the attention of the reader but not misleading. It’s not as easy as it seems, because you have to keep the subject line short. Also, a good idea is to end the subject line with a relevant emoji. In the end, this part will and should test your creativity.

4. Keep your emails mobile-friendly

These days a lot of people use multiple devices for different purposes, and the same is true for checking emails. Therefore, it is highly significant to ensure that emails are mobile-friendly. This especially goes for campaigns where you are including images, videos, product browsing options, gifs, or any other interactive element. If such emails do not have a responsive design, then your campaign may backfire.

outbound marketing

5. Conduct A/B tests

A/b testing is an essential step, more so if you are just starting out and haven’t figured out yet what works and what doesn’t. Running an a/b test on your current campaign will give you necessary and detailed insights about the sort of content strategy you should be using, which type of subject line works best, what time is better for sending out emails so that the engagement rate is high, and basically how people respond to different elements in emails.

Trials and errors are part of the game, but you can minimize them if you implement a/b testing right at the beginning.

 

6. Leverage marketing automation

This is an important one. Marketing automation is essentially a way to streamline your entire campaign. A marketing automation tool will give you insights to improve the content strategy, schedule emails, and follow-ups, and pull out reports that will help you come up with better strategies in the future.

Chances are your campaign consists of drips, and the way to effectively implement those is through marketing automation. You can schedule the entire drip and the tool will take care of whether or not the second or third email should be sent based on the reaction of the prospect.

7. Have a re-engagement strategy in mind

Even if you come up with a cool and effective email campaign, a lot of prospects may not even open your email or the entire sequence. That does not mean your idea was bad. Email marketing works on probability, which means you can’t be sure how recipients are going to react.

Hence, it is a good idea to have a re-engagement plan in place. Ask the prospects if they are interested in your product. You can also conduct a survey, a poll, or ask for feedback. This way you’ll know if the prospects on your list are relevant. If not, you can clean up the list and include people who will convert in the future.

8. Make sure to a send test email

It’s just common sense to send a test email before you launch the campaign. Doing so will let you know about any kinks that you need to take care of. For example, extra spaces, any grammatical errors, font color, and size, whether or not the images or any other elements in the emails are responsive, and so forth.

9. Include an “Unsubscribe” option

If you are not respecting prospects’ privacy and not giving them the option to opt-out, you’re setting yourself up to fail. There are a lot of privacy laws in place these days and rightly so- they protect consumers from any sort of digital fraud. Therefore, you should make sure to not force your service or product on anyone without their consent or approval.

A lot of times it also happens that a person is no longer interested in a product that they might have liked before. They should be able to opt out of your email list easily. This is why you need to ensure that there’s an unsubscribe button and that the email recipients can find it easily.

10. Pay attention to reporting and analytics

After every email campaign, you should ideally review metrics like open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate. These reports will help you plan your next email marketing strategy in a better way by showing you how many people you are able to engage. For example, if the unsubscribe rate is high, you’ll know that you have to work harder on the email copy and provide something of value to the recipients.

Moreover, experimenting is the way to find out the new technique that works best. But if you are running a lot of experiments, you also need to stay ahead and keep a tab on what is yielding better results. This is where reporting and analytics come in.

In Closing

Email marketing is the best and most effective way to reach your audience. You are not directly intruding in their lives while making sure that they know you exist and will be at their service when and if the need arises.

Just ensure that you are following all the best practices and reviewing your strategy constantly to get the best results. Also keep in mind that focusing on basics, including content quality and privacy, is important to master email marketing.

Email Marketing, Marketing Automation

B2B Email Marketing Automation: 10 Campaign Ideas

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Email marketing is a yielding channel for almost all companies, and this holds especially true for B2B companies. This is because, in the B2B space, you need to communicate directly and put your point in a straightforward manner. And this has to be done in a way that holds the client’s or prospect’s attention.

But this is also where it gets tricky. How do you capture someone’s attention while still being direct? In order to run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to have a good idea that puts your point forward in a not-too-boring way, to say the least. It’s all about maintaining a delicate balance of creativity and sincerity.

Today, I have a number of campaign ideas that you can put to use for engaging your prospects and converting them into clients. Let’s get to it then.

Email Marketing Campaign Ideas

1. Welcome emails

The phrase ‘first impressions stick’ is popular for a reason. For a business to be successful, you need to make a good first impression on your clients. This can be done easily by sending a good welcome email to all your new subscribers.

Let the clients know that you are grateful and open to providing all the support they may require. You can include links to guides to make it easier for new customers to get started with your product or service. Or, if you are building a subscriber list, you can put links to important resources or blogs that may help the new joiners understand the industry better.

Basically, tell the new people on your subscriber list that you are there to help.

2. Activation emails

People have a lot on their minds these days and it’s easy to forget stuff. For example, someone may have subscribed to your service, but they are not using it. Days go by and you see no activity from their end.

It may have just slipped out of their minds. A quick and polite reminder though can be helpful in this situation. Let the clients know what’s waiting for them on the other end to pique their interest. It’s kind of like when credit card companies check on you when you haven’t used your card in a while. The point is, checking on your clients may prove to be helpful.

b2b email marketing ideas

3. New products/features emails

A budding business means product/service growth, which can entail the addition of new solutions to the palette or the addition of new features to an existing product/service. Whatever the case, always make sure to let your customers know about any new developments that are happening.

Firstly, this is a great way to keep a conversation going. Secondly, new products or features may be of more use to your existing client base. And lastly, you get to expand your business right through trusted customers.

features emails

4. Event updates

Events like webinars, fireside chats, or virtual lunches are pretty common in the B2B spaces. The reason for this is that such events act as a great way to attract high-value customers. Since this is an important activity, your email marketing strategy needs to be strong.

From inviting people to the upcoming event, following up with them a couple of times, and then thanking the ones who showed up, a lot of work has to be put into such a campaign. Briefly let the recipients know how a particular event could add value for them, and if possible, end the email with a sense of mystery so that prospects are left wanting more.

Also, ensure to clearly state the time and place of the event. Make it as easy as possible for the recipients to sign up, which means putting the signup link in the emails.

Event updates

5. Offers

Offers and gifting activities are a great way to lure in clients, after all, everyone likes to shop during end-of-season sales. You can set up criteria and prospects who pass it can leverage whatever discount you are offering. This way you also get to close high-value clients.

Free trials are also a good way to establish trust with potential clients. You can offer to get on a demo call with people who opt for free trials and show them how your service or product can be useful. You get to start the relationship based on actual proof and the customer won’t feel like they are just taking a leap of faith.

6. Use FEAR

When I say ‘fear’, I don’t mean you need to literally scare your prospects, but use it in a constructive way. You need to tell the prospect that the way they are conducting business or some aspect of it, might actually be harmful in the long run. You get to be the person who will take care of the situation and come up with a contingency plan using your service or product.

For example, if the prospect is running a website, you can let them know they might be violating Google’s policies with a certain practice. You can then offer to run an audit for them and tell them what the problem is and how it can be fixed.

7. FOMO

This works in a similar manner as the last point, only here, you are playing on prospects’ fear of missing out. You might often have seen emails with subject lines like “Don’t miss out on a 50% discount” or “You are missing out on the deal of your life”. Well, these are some mainstream examples, but if you get creative, FOMO is a great way to capture the attention of your audience.

One thing that you need to take care of here is to not use just a subject line that plays on the emotions of the prospects while the content doesn’t exactly offer the same. This is a bad trick and could lead to a falling out between you and your audience.

B2B e-mail marketing automation

8. Curated content

Suppose you have built a great list of subscribers and you are constantly showing them good content. Even though it may seem like the work is done or you are on track, the work does not finish there.

What you can do next to move prospects down the funnel is segment them on the basis of their interest in your solutions and then start sending them curated content on that particular niche or industry. This allows you to target your prospects more precisely. You can also introduce a section of gated content that is specifically meant for prospects who are ready to convert.

9. Re-engagement emails

Oftentimes, prospects become cold and stop reacting in any way to your emails. You may also find that a particular lead that was deemed unfit for your business is now a good fit.

In such cases, re-engagement campaigns can help you get out of the throes. Using a more direct approach helps convince inactive prospects.

Basically, you need to nudge them a bit and see if they are still interested in your services. Offering them a free trial or some other such activity can be of use here.

10. Thank-you emails

The world may keep telling you to be strong and ruthless to get your way, but this isn’t really the case in the digital marketing world. If you are hoping to be on good terms with your client’s prospects or leads, you have to be polite to them.

The good news is that it’s the easiest thing to do. You just have to thank them for standing by your side choosing you or agreeing to give you a chance to prove your worth. Be humble and let your clients know that you appreciate them.

Leverage your thank you emails in different situations- for example, when someone signs up for your service when someone attends an event when you cross significant milestones.

Final Thoughts

The good thing about email marketing is that it is highly versatile in nature and you can practically think of a thousand different ways to use it for growing your business. You can use emails to maintain relationships with existing customers and definitely use them for building new relationships. It’s an easy and effective way to get in touch with the right people.

All you have to take care of is the basics and have a tinge of creativity. This way you will have yourself an email campaign for growing your business.

Marketing

Why Should you Hire a Marketing Automation Consultant in 2022

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As of 2019, over 75% of marketers have been using at least one type of marketing automation tool. This number certainly seems to indicate that marketing automation has become popular among businesses.

But it does make you wonder about the rest of the marketers who aren’t using any marketing automation tools at all. Another question that comes to mind here is whether are businesses currently using marketing automation using it to its full potential. At the very least, it can be argued that there’s always a scope for improvement.

Well, the point I want to make here is that a marketing automation consultant can be an asset to companies. A lot of businesses that shy away from leveraging marketing automation software complain that they don’t have the required workforce and knowledge about the technology. Such issues can be solved easily by a consultant.

If you’re interested in knowing how exactly a marketing automation consultant can help your business, read ahead.

What is a Marketing Automation Consultant?

A marketing automation consultant is responsible for making the most out of marketing automation tools. They take care of all repetitive tasks, keep in touch with leads and customers to target them with the right content at the right time, and keep a close eye on all the workflows and integrations required to increase the efficiency of marketing automation tools.

In addition to being knowledgeable about automation tools, a marketing automation consultant also has a deep understanding of different marketing channels, such as content, advertising, sales, email marketing, types of traffic, analytics, and market research.

Marketing Automation Consultant

In short, a consultant streamlines different processes involved in marketing and helps increase ROI for marketing automation tools. Now, let’s take a look at what exactly a marketing automation consultant can do for you.

What does a Marketing Automation Consultant do?

The marketing team needs to stay ahead of some tasks and quite frankly, a consultant can reduce the load by a lot. They will essentially function as the backbone of the entire marketing setup.

what is a marketing automation consultant

Develop a marketing automation strategy

You are set up with all the automation tools you need and have a workflow in mind, but is everyone on your team aligned with the same idea or strategy? Are the goals of every marketing person set to achieve a single strategy? If not then you are not making the best use of marketing automation.

A marketing automation consultant will help you see the bigger picture and come up with a strategy that gets everyone on the same page. They will set workflows according to a single strategy that is bound to lead to the growth of your business.

Integrate different marketing tools

As a marketer, you know that a single automation tool won’t cut it. You need different tools to automate the multitude of processes that make up the workflow. But it is easy to get lost in arrays of reports and check up with every single tool in such a scenario. What you need here is an integration of all the tools in a single place.

This is what a marketing automation consultant will do for you. They will integrate all the marketing automation tools you are using with your CRM and even come up with an alternate solution if any tool cannot be integrated. Furthermore, a consultant can develop a synergy between the different marketing channels.

Educate the marketing team

Not everyone who joins the marketing can be expected to have a working knowledge of all the automation tools you have in place. Think of the newbies who are just getting started or even a person with experience who hasn’t used the tool that you are using. They have to go through a training process to get aligned with the entire marketing operation.

While you may not have enough time on your hands to thoroughly get about this task, it will be a primary task for a marketing automation consultant. Moreover, they will be able to give a 360-degree overview of all the processes and tools and inculcate a proper understanding of marketing automation among employees.

Should you Hire a Marketing Consultant?

The answer to this question depends on many conditions. There are various reasons for hiring a marketing consultant and even if you think you are well enough without one, you should know that such an asset will only complement your current growth strategy.

1. A consultant will constantly monitor all the marketing automation tools and reports to see if there’s any scope for improvement (which is almost always true).

2. Your very first priority as a marketer is to generate high-quality leads. If you think that the lead generation process is slow for your organization, you should consider hiring a marketing automation consultant. A key part of their job is to study the digital footprint of prospects to come up with a highly personalized campaign.

3. At times, it may become hard to determine if a particular process should be automated or not. It is exactly for such queries that a marketing automation consultant will come in handy.

4. It can be tricky to implement certain automation tools and even if you have implemented them, you may not be satisfied with the results. A common example is that of chatbots. Almost all SaaS companies have implemented chatbots but find it hard to reply on time or cannot designate a particular person to take care of the entire tool.

However a consultant will be able to tell you what needs to be done to generate leads from such channels. They will facilitate the proper implementation of tools and ensure that they are functioning properly.

5. Marketing processes or campaigns do not always yield the desired results. It’s not uncommon since there’s no formula here that can be put to produce a specific number. This means that trials and errors happen occasionally. While this cannot be eliminated, a consultant will make sure that such instances are limited. They have enough experience and knowledge to deal with situations that can potentially go south.

6. A marketing automation consultant will optimize your entire marketing automation system to yield better and more positive results.

7. Lastly, when you have a designated person to handle all marketing automation processes, other team members will have more time to focus on tasks that they need to pay the most attention to. All in all, your company will have enough manpower to take care of all the necessary touchpoints.

what does marketing automation consultant do

What to Look for in a Marketing Automation Consultant?

It is safe to say that this job is for someone who has quite a bit of experience in the marketing field. They should understand all the different marketing channels and should know how to effectively leverage every one of them.

Knowledge about marketing automation in general, different types of marketing automation tools, and which tools make a good fit for which types of process is a given of course. Other than this, it’s probably a good idea to go for a person who has a good understanding of your business and industry.

An experienced person in an industry similar to yours will do much better than someone who has to start from scratch. They should also be data-driven, have a creative flair, and be result-oriented.

Marketing Automation Consultant

The job of a marketing automation consultant is multi-faceted and cannot be reduced to something singular. This means that the ideal person for the job should have all the necessary skills to cater to the different needs of a business.

In Closing

I hope this blog helped you understand the position of a marketing automation consultant. They can bring all the aspects that need improvement to the front and ensure that new ways are being implemented for the continuous growth of your marketing strategy, which will eventually lead to the faster growth of your entire business.

Marketing

How to use Marketing Automation for Lead Generation

Building up a client base for B2B businesses is a combined effort of marketing and sales teams. However, friction between the two is not unheard of and is pretty common in most companies. The cause behind this is oftentimes misalignment.

Leveraging marketing automation for lead generation, however, is a way to tackle this misalignment. Conventionally speaking, marketing teams are required to bring in leads and pass them on to the sales teams, who then track the lifecycle stages of these leads and take action to convert them into clients eventually.

But problems may arise due to the quality of the lead or untimely action, which could lead to the loss of significant business opportunities. While it’s easy to shift blame to either side, it’s more important to seek a solution. Enter marketing automation.

Marketing automation, also known as lead generation software, can play a significant role in getting marketing and sales teams on the same page. This solution helps marketing teams move a lead down the funnel and pass it on to the sales team once it’s ready.

The data captured by the marketing automation software can then be leveraged by the sales team to get insights regarding a contact. In this blog, I am going to talk in detail about how you can effectively use marketing automation for lead generation.

Managing Evolving Marketing Channels

The way digital content is perceived these days is completely different from say 5 years ago. It can further be argued that the elements involved change radically at times due to some phenomenon or the other. Consider the pandemic for example- it led to a sudden surge in digital content consumption.

People started relying on online channels for entertainment, seeking information, shopping, and several other purposes. This rise in content browsing gave marketers a chance to target an increased number of people.

Similar trends can be witnessed during occurrences of different events such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The point I am trying to get at is that the digital industry, and marketing channels by extension, are in a state of constant evolution, which marketers should thoroughly consider when they think of building lead generation strategies.

Today, the need is to make effective use of social media, email marketing, content marketing, campaigns for lead generation, SEO best practices, and landing pages to target and nurture audiences for eventually converting them into clients.

Now, the problem with multiple channels is that their management requires different software, thereby leading to a scattered approach altogether. Hence, to generate quality leads, this is the foremost issue that marketers need to deal with.

The lead generation process can be simplified extensively by combining the efforts of all marketing channels and having multiple data points in a centralized software. This is where marketing automation comes in.

Lead Generation Agency vs. Marketing Agency

How Marketing Automation Binds Lead Generation Processes

Marketing automation is essentially a one-stop-shop solution that unifies your lead-generation processes. If you look at any marketing automation software, you’ll notice that it is an amalgamation of different tools that allow you to take care of all the processes involved in lead generation.

For example, you take into account the people who visit your website to build the right audience base. Some of them will exhibit the accurate intent for you to take the conversation forward. You’ll know this when you start nurturing these leads through different email campaigns and by the way they engage with said campaigns.

Those who show further interest in your offerings will turn into sales-qualified leads and can be handed over to the sales team. Hence, you see, the process is multi-staged and it’s only natural that you’ll require different tools for every stage. What marketing automation does is provide you with all those tools in a single platform for a hassle-free experience.

Automation for Enhancing Efficiency

‘Automation’ is undoubtedly the major aspect when we talk about marketing automation. While fundamentals of lead generation remain the same, which mostly includes email campaigns, it is improved scalability that marketers are after these days.

We are looking at trends such as personalization and hyper-personalization in the digital industry. On top of this, user intent cannot be taken for granted. If you are not approaching a prospect in the right manner and with the right service/product/offerings, someone else is bound to.

Therefore, to remain ahead in the game, it is imperative to leverage automated workflows. Such an arrangement will help you personalize the content to effectively target prospects, let you know which prospects to prioritize, and allow you to have detailed insights about the journey of every one of your leads.

Nurturing leads is where marketing automation plays the most vital role during the entire lead generation process. Automated processes come into effect at this stage when your visitors have turned into leads.

What you need to do next is to keep them engaged through your content, educate them about your niche, and eventually loop them in conversations about your products. All this is achieved through sending informational content to leads after determining their lifecycle stage.

Now that we are done with the basics of lead generation marketing automation, let’s take a look at the elements that are involved in lead generation automation.

Marketing Automation Lead Generation Elements

Landing pages

The lead generation process starts with landing pages and the conversion forms that you insert on those pages. A visitor with the right intent will convert into a lead when they fill out a form on your website (a subtle hint about how important landing pages and conversion forms are for your business).

Landing pages

If you have done a good job with the form, the visitor will likely share their information which then will go into the repository of your CRM. Now, you have certain details about your new lead depending on the information you asked for in the form. This information about leads is crucial, as it is what allows you to run further campaigns and personalize the content.

Therefore, you need to ask for all the important information on the forms while making sure that they don’t get overwhelmed with the number of fields.

Autoresponders and triggered email sequences

If a visitor fills up a form to download a guide from your website, you ideally need to keep them engaged through further conversations. One way to do this is through autoresponders or triggered email nurture sequences.

For example, once they submit a form, they would receive a ‘thank you’ mail and you could also provide a pdf version of the guide or ebook in the mail itself. This can be set up with the help of marketing automation tools.

Triggered email sequences are also essential in the sense that they ensure the delivery of content that is personalized for each contact and based on their engagement. The automatic lead generation process is heavily dependent on such tools.

Funnel stages

Automated lead management relies on sales funnel stages. With the help of marketing automation tools, you can strategically move the leads down the funnel until they are ready to get on a demo call.

Sales funnel stages are:

  1. Subscriber
  2. Lead
  3. Marketing qualified lead (MQL)
  4. Sales qualified lead (SQL)
  5. Customer

Funnel stages are also important because they tell you the kind of content a particular lead will potentially engage with. For instance, consider an MQL- the content you target these leads with should range between industry-related information and information about services/tools that could be useful for them.

On the contrary, an SQL would have moved down from the above stages and would already be knowledgeable about the industry. Now, you would need to educate them about your services/products and tell them why they should choose you instead of any other competitor.

However, you can only be this precise with all your leads if you are aware of their funnel stages, which is exactly the knowledge marketing automation provides you with.

Marketing Automation For Lead Generation

Automating the Lead Generation Process

We have discussed in detail why marketing automation is crucial for lead generation today and where exactly marketing automation comes from in the entire lead generation process. The next step here is to see how you can exactly automate processes for generating high-quality leads.

Automating personalization

Marketers have probably realized by now that without considering user intent they cannot get too far and certainly cannot build lasting relationships. User intent and personalization are connected in the sense that without accounting for the former you won’t be able to deliver a personalized experience, which is necessary for businesses today.

  • Marketing automation allows you to deliver exactly such an experience through a variety of tools. We have already touched upon automating email campaigns, but it’s worth mentioning again about personalization. By automating email campaigns, you wouldn’t have to worry about a lack of personalization. Different companies use marketing automation tools that allow you to personalize the entire campaign for multiple contacts.
  • Other than emails, you can also leverage chatbots to enhance the customer experience when they land on your website, which will further increase the chances of generating better leads. Chatbots can be hard to manage manually unless you have a dedicated team or at the very least a person to handle things. With marketing automation, however, you don’t have to worry about replying to every single message yourself or at least keeping a tab on conversations 24*7. You can set up a time and let the visitors know when you’ll be available.

These smaller aspects go a long way when you want to improve customer experience. If the visitor feels valued and gets answers to their queries right away, the chances of them converting are much higher.

  • If you want to go a step further, you can also personalize the website experience for recurring visitors. This can be done by mapping the behavior of all visitors and then categorizing them. Customer personas will further help you target visitors in a much better way, thereby allowing you to generate better-quality leads. And while taking care of all this data could be hard, marketing automation tools can help you achieve it easily.

Automated lead management

We talked about funnel stages in the last section and saw why segmentation is important for delivering the right content to the right contact.

Everything starting from segmenting leads to lead scoring can be efficiently done with the help of marketing automation software. Automated lead management can make things for you incredibly easy because, let’s be honest, it’s impossible to manually deal with large-scale data, especially when you have more important tasks to take care of.

With the help of marketing automation, lead scoring becomes a piece of cake. Furthermore, you’ll know exactly how engaged you need to keep a lead for them to keep moving down the funnel. A lot of time, marketers miss out on important deals because their process is slow.

They may have forgotten about a follow-up or didn’t find the time to deal with the lead at the right moment. Marketing automation tools are built to take care of such tasks and ensure timely engagement with leads.

However, you should take care to choose the right marketing automation software since poor integration could get you in a ditch. A robust integration system is the backbone of automated lead management.

Lead magnets for automated lead generation

Building a marketing automation list is probably among the very first steps when we talk about lead generation. However, it can be a pain to get details of quality prospects. A lead magnet can help you solve this issue though.

A lead magnet is offering free content or services to prospects which may ultimately incline them to sign up for your product/service. You can offer eBooks, reports, free audits, or guides to engage prospects.

automated lead generation

This will also serve the purpose of educating them about your industry. What you have to ensure is that any content or service you offer for free should provide value to the prospects; otherwise, what’s the point, right? Offering a solution to key industry problems could be a way around this.

Lead magnets primarily allow you to showcase your expertise in industry matters, which will further entice prospects to consider you when they are ready to leverage your product/service. They are further an easy way to kickstart the automated lead generation process.

To sum up

Lead generation marketing automation- a process that lets you build a content client base- needs to be tackled strategically for the most benefit. As a marketer, you should focus on getting behind on every aspect entailed in the entire process.

Without educating yourself, you could be doing more harm to your business than good. But, if you leverage it wisely, marketing automation has the potential to help you generate leads that are just the right fit for your business.

Automating the lead generation process allows you to focus on the necessary tasks while taking repetitive, time-consuming, but necessary tasks off your hands. Here’s the summarized version of ways in which marketing automation lead generation benefits you:

  1. Automated email campaigns free you from sending follow-ups and personalized messages for an enhanced customer experience.
  2. Lead scoring and automated lead management allow you to track the journey of every contact in your list.
  3. Marketing automation tools help you send relevant content to prospects, which speeds up their journey down the funnel.
  4. Triggered email campaigns increase the chances of engagement.
  5. Salespeople can focus on building relationships with warm leads rather than spending excessive time on cold campaigns.
  6. Marketing automation deals efficiently with information about your leads and lets you know when and how to act upon a certain contact to maximize the chances of conversion.
  7. Lead generation marketing automation gets marketing and sales teams on the page, thereby reducing friction between the two.
  8. Automating processes allows you to combine the efforts of different marketing channels.
Ecommerce, Web Development

Top 10 Reasons Why Shopify Is The Best eCommerce Platform in 2023

Did you know that the number of online shoppers is expected to reach 300 million in 2023 in the U.S. alone?

This means that today, it is vital to have an online store for your eCommerce business, even if your physical store is doing well. But, in order to have a successful online eCommerce store, you’ll need plenty of support because it’s no piece of the cake.

The critical element in this equation is an eCommerce platform that will help you generate a significant audience base. Running an online store is no easy feat since a myriad of processes is involved, ranging from setting up the website to accepting payments.

However, an eCommerce platform will provide you with all the necessary solutions that you need to set up and run your online business. Shopify is one such platform. Before I move on to tell you why you need to consider Shopify, let’s quickly take a look at what Shopify is.

Shopify Overview

With Shopify, an eCommerce software, you can build your online store from scratch. The platform allows you to create the entire store before you start selling the products. You can leverage any or all selling channels that it equips you with and build a strong customer base.

Furthermore, Shopify has tools that can be used to market your store, including Facebook ads, email marketing, and business chat. When you have set up everything, you can manage your entire store from Shopify’s dashboard itself.

And, when I say manage everything, I mean everything related to order placement, payments, and insights for improving the store.

Currently, over 500,000 businesses in 175 countries are using this platform to run their stores. These numbers speak for themselves, but I’ll share some excellent reasons that clearly demonstrate the competence of this eCommerce platform.

10 Reasons why Shopify is the Best eCommerce Platform

In-built marketing tools

After you have built your online store, the next step is to bring the right customers to your eCommerce website, and that cannot be achieved without marketing tools. Shopify’s in-built marketing tools eliminate the need for going to different platforms and provide you with a variety of options to reach your ideal audience.

You can promote your products via Facebook ads and Google smart shopping. Additionally, the fact that Shopify provides a blog as a channel for generating leads has made it popular among a lot of businesses.

why shopify

Supports multiple languages

One way to expand an online business is to sell products globally. This is easy to achieve with online stores as they overcome the limitations of physical stores. But even with online stores, the key to reaching out to a global customer base is localizing experience.

This means that customers should be able to browse your store in their local languages and should be able to choose the local currency for making payments. Shopify provides such an experience, thereby allowing you to reach a wider audience and make more sales.

The only thing you’ll need to check is if your shipping providers ship the products to the locations you want.

Optimum page load speed and SEO focused

One thing you don’t need with an eCommerce website is high bounce rates and abandoned carts due to poor page load speed. Because Shopify uses CDN for images and JS and CSS files, the content on your website loads faster, which in turn ensures an enhanced customer experience.

Much like page load speed, SEO is also a major factor that could be a deciding factor for the success of your store. Shopify provides built-in meta tags and manages robots.txt for optimizing the websites. Furthermore, the platform’s sitemap feature takes care of indexing and crawling of all pages.

The free business name generator

Another popular feature that Shopify is known for is its business name generator. It lets you name your brand in a matter of seconds and further helps you secure a domain name. The name of your brand is a crucial aspect, and it should be as creative as possible. You also need to make sure that you are not infringing on any other copyrighted names.

While sometimes, it may come to you quickly, mostly, it could be a hard task to come up with a suitable word/phrase that instantly describes your brand. Shopify’s business name generator could take this task off your hands easily.

Option of hiring an expert

Shopify experts are freelancers and third-party agencies that will help you take care of different aspects of the eCommerce website. You can get help regarding content writing, setting up the store, visual content and branding, marketing and sales, development and troubleshooting, and any other general stuff.

If you think you are out of your depth in this area, seeking help from an expert could be the best idea. It can be overwhelming to get acquainted with something new; however, with the help of an expert, you can acquire all the necessary learnings for running an online store.

top ecommerce solution shopify

Lets you provide multiple payment methods to customers

The payment process of your store should be as smooth as possible, or else you risk abandoned carts and unsatisfied customers. Offering multiple payment methods to customers is probably the easiest thing you can do to streamline payment gateways.

You need to check which payment methods are available in the countries that you are targeting and incorporate those on your website. Shopify provides various payment methods, some of which are fairly common, like Amazon Pay, PayPal, Apple Pay, credit card, and Google Pay. Other than these, Shopify also lets you customize the payment methods according to the targeted location.

Fully hosted

Web hosting could be a challenging issue if you are not technically inclined. You will ideally need to build expertise in this area, which requires time. But Shopify is a hosted solution, meaning there’s no need for you to worry about databases or servers.

Therefore, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to start an eCommerce business. You easily manage and access your store with an internet connection and admin login details.

14-day free trial

Jumping blindfolded into something new is always risky. However, you don’t need to worry about this with Shopify since the platform offers a 14-day trial. You can do your research and explore the platform before deciding if it will be a good fit for your business or not.

14-day free trial

After the trial period, you could choose from any of the three plans that Shopify offers:

  1. Basic – $29/month
  2. Shopify – $79/month
  3. Advanced Shopify – $299/month

Allows you to manage the store via smartphone

Let’s be honest; there are bound to be times when you cannot access your laptop. However, that shouldn’t come in the way of your business. The Shopify app ensures exactly that and allows you to track anything important right from your smartphone. You check how your store is functioning and also track its performance (number of visitors and total sales etc.).

Additionally, the app also lets you manage products, orders, and customers. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what situation you are in, and you always have a way of checking up on your store to maximize its potential.

Provides great support

Lastly, Shopify is often hailed for its 24*7 support system. The platform offers support via phone, live chat, and email for greater convenience. Other than this, you always have the option of searching for queries on the Shopify community. Their forum has over 87,000 members and is currently live with more than 1,100,000 posts.

Shopify’s own help center also equips you with all the necessary information- starting from how to set up your online store to managing everything, including customers, payments, orders, and shipping and delivery.

Shopify – the best choice for your eCommerce store

Now you know why you should at least give Shopify a try. Its long list of features is sure to provide you with everything you need to succeed in your online business. This cloud-based eCommerce tool is affordable and will help you save a lot of time and money that you may otherwise spend to build an online store.

Sales

Optimize Your Marketing And Sales with 9 CRM Best Practices

Sales and marketing teams have long relied on CRM software to manage customer interactions and track sales pipeline. But to get the most out of your CRM, it’s important to practice some best practices. Here are a few tips to help you optimize your CRM for marketing and sales purposes. First, make sure all of your data is entered into the system accurately.

This includes customer information, contact details, and past interactions. Next, use the CRM to keep track of your marketing campaigns. Keep track of which campaigns generate the most leads and measure their success over time. Finally, use the CRM to track the sales pipeline and forecast future sales. Implementing these best practices will help you get the most out of your CRM software.

CRM software

Keep your customer data organized and up-to-date

The first step to getting the most out of your CRM is to make sure all of your customer and contact data is entered accurately and kept up to date. This includes customer information, contact details, and past interactions.

Customer and contact data accuracy is essential for marketing and sales success. If the data is inaccurate, it can lead to wasted time and resources trying to reach the wrong people or targeting campaigns at the wrong customers.

Inaccurate CRM data can hurt your business in several ways. It can lead to duplicate contacts and leads and may even result in lost sales opportunities. Second, inaccurate data can lead to ineffective marketing campaigns. Inaccurate data can hamper your ability to forecast future sales accurately. This can lead to missed opportunities and financial losses.

Inaccurate data can also cause confusion and frustration among team members, as they will be working with incorrect information.

Therefore, it is essential to take the time to enter all customer and contact data accurately into your CRM system.

optimizing your crm

Create targeted marketing campaigns based on customer interests and demographics

Your CRM can be your best friend if you use it right. With all of your data in one place, the insights are limitless. Use your CRM to create targeted marketing campaigns based on who you’re selling to–their age, location, hobbies, and what they buy from you. Truly find out what makes them tick so that you know how to take care of them later.

When it comes to marketing campaigns, it’s important to target specific demographics. For example, if you’re selling a product geared towards mothers, you’ll want to target mothers in your advertising. You can use your CRM to track demographic data and use it to create targeted campaigns. You can also use your CRM to track customer interactions. This will help you to understand your customers and their needs better.

Use lead scoring to identify potential customers

Lead scoring is the process of calculating a score for each lead in your database based on their likelihood to convert into a customer. This score can be used to prioritize leads and determine which ones to focus on. Several factors can be used to calculate a lead score, including demographic information, contact history, and engagement with your marketing content.

Using lead scoring can help you identify potential customers more efficiently. You can assign points to different criteria, such as how warm a lead is or how likely they are to purchase. Leads that score higher on your scale are considered more valuable, and you can focus your attention on them accordingly.

There are many software options available for lead scoring. Some CRM systems have built-in lead scoring features, while others offer standalone lead scoring software. The key is to find a system that fits your needs and helps you prioritize your leads.

It’s important to prioritize your leads when it comes to sales and conversion. Some leads will be more likely to convert than others, so focusing your energy on the most promising leads is important. There are a few ways to prioritize your leads, including:

  1. Based on purchase history: Leads that have a history of buying from you are more likely to buy from you again.
  2. Based on engagement: Leads who have shown an interest in your product or service are more likely to convert than those who have not.
  3. Based on demographics: Certain demographics are more likely to buy your product or service than others. For example, young people are more likely to buy technology products than seniors.
  4. Based on the level of urgency: This is a subjective measure that considers how badly the potential customer wants your product or service. For example, a business traveler who needs to get from point A to point B might be more willing to buy a plane ticket immediately than someone who isn’t traveling.

Automate sales processes as much as possible

Sales processes can be time-consuming and tedious, but they don’t have to be. Automating some of these processes can save you a lot of time and hassle.

Sales processes can be automated to a large extent by using CRM software. This can save time and improve accuracy. Automating sales processes also allows you to track the progress of each sale from start to finish. This saves the time and expense of going back and forth with a deal that has stalled.

Here are a few tips for automating your sales process:

  1. Use a CRM to track leads and sales pipeline. This will automate the process of tracking sales progress and forecasting future sales.
  2. Use email automation tools to automate the process of sending out marketing emails and follow-up emails.
  3. Use online tools like Calendly to automate the process of scheduling meetings.
  4. Use payment processing tools like PayPal to automate accepting payments.
  5. Look into third-party referral management tools to automate the process of finding and managing referrals.

Reduce human errors using data validation

Data validation is the process of verifying and ensuring the accuracy of data before it is used. This is important to reduce the risk of human error, leading to inaccurate results. There are a few ways to validate data. One method is to check the data against a set of rules. This can be done manually or automatically.

Another approach is to compare the data to other data sources. This can help to identify inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Finally, you can use mathematical algorithms to verify the data. This is usually the best choice if the data is numerical and contains a lot of values. All of these methods can be used to verify data before it’s entered into a CRM.

Reduce human errors

Most CRMs provide their own set of tools for contact management, so using them properly will help you manage your contacts more effectively. It’s essential to be clear about the company you are working for because this will establish some ground rules. You can segment your data based on company attributes like industry, size, and location.

A good CRM system will allow you to quickly filter contact groups based on these rules.

contact management best practices

Train your staff on how to use the CRM software effectively

Sales team CRM training is essential for getting the most out of your CRM. One of the most important things you can do to get the most out of your CRM software is to train your staff to use it effectively. Please make sure everyone who needs access to the system is familiar with its features and how to use them.

Ensure all of your sales reps are familiar with the system and use it to track leads and sales pipeline, entering data accurately and using the CRM to track marketing and sales activities. By training your staff on how to use the CRM, you’ll ensure that everyone uses it to its full potential and gets the most out of it.

Additionally, set up regular training sessions to ensure that everyone is up-to-date on the latest features and changes. This will help keep your CRM use efficient and effective, maximizing its value for your marketing and sales efforts.

If you are responsible for managing the marketing team, make sure to use your CRM data to measure the success of your campaigns. This will allow you to see which campaigns are generating the most leads and customer conversions, allowing you to focus future campaigns on the best returning sources of revenue. Suppose you don’t have this information readily available. In that case, you will only be able to guess which traffic sources are most effective, not knowing if your marketing efforts are worthwhile.

Finally, make sure that your sales reps use the CRM to track their pipeline. This will allow them to effectively forecast future sales and see where they stand with each customer. Customers who need additional information or have questions and unresolved issues should be prioritized because these customers are most likely to buy your product.

These best practices will help ensure that your CRM gives you the biggest bang for your buck, helping maximize its value as a useful marketing and sales tool.

Regularly analyze your data to track progress and optimize your strategies

CRM software can be a powerful tool for marketing and sales, but it’s only effective if you use it effectively. One best practice for getting the most out of your CRM is regularly reviewing your data. Periodically analyzing your data will help you track your progress and optimize your strategies. This means regularly checking your data to see which campaigns are generating the most leads and measuring the success of these campaigns over time. It also means tracking your sales pipeline and forecasting future sales. Using your CRM to its full potential can achieve excellent results in your marketing and sales efforts.

Another best practice for maximizing your marketing and sales efforts is keeping track of which campaigns generate the most leads. Then, measure their success over time. If a campaign stops being successful, either put more effort behind it or stop running it altogether.

You should also use your CRM to track the sales pipeline and forecast future sales. This will allow you to measure your sales team’s performance and offer support for critical business decisions. This can help you determine who is generating the most leads, which customers are ready to purchase, and what type of sales conversions you can expect.

CRM best practices should also include using your CRM software to track each lead through the whole sales funnel. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by seeing which ones are generating the most leads. Make sure to track which campaigns generate targeted traffic, lead conversions, and sales conversions.

Conclusion: Is your CRM optimized?

There are many CRM best practices to optimize your marketing and sales. To get the most out of these tools, you must accurately enter all data, track your marketing campaigns for success over time, and use the CRM to forecast future sales pipelines. It may seem daunting at first if you’re not familiar with how a CRM works or what information is pertinent, but we can help!

My goal is to create successful digital marketing strategies that ensure top-of-the-line customer service by leveraging cognitive neuroscience principles like behavioral psychology to tap into how customers think during different stages of the purchasing process or lead funnel. Which principle have you used before? Let me know!

Sales Development

What Is A Sales Development Representative (SDR)? Role, Skills, Qualifications, Challenges

Sales development representatives are salespeople who specialize in prospecting and lead generation. They’re usually responsible for making the first contact with prospective customers, which often takes the form of phone calls or emails.

Sales Development Representatives typically work for larger companies that offer multiple products or services, meaning they can target prospects by industry, location, company size, and other criteria. Some common titles include “sales engineer,” “business development representative,” and “account executive.” Unlike some other types of salespeople who sell directly to consumers (e.g., door-to-door sales), SDRs generally don’t interact with end users–instead they focus on finding potential clients within an organization to bring into the fold.

SDRs can be employed by several different types of businesses, from smaller companies with only a handful of employees to larger ones with hundreds or even thousands.

Who is this article for? If your company is hiring sales development reps, you may find this knowledge useful in helping them understand what SDRs do and how they fit into the business. If you’re an SDR, this can help you understand what’s expected of you and how your job fits into the organization as a whole.

What is a Sales Development Rep (SDR)?

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) are the first point of contact for many sales teams. They are responsible for identifying and qualifying potential customers, as well as building relationships with potential buyers.

SDRs are responsible for cold-calling and emailing potential clients to see if they would be interested in learning more about a company’s products and services.

The typical day in the life of an SDR includes a lot of outreach, whether through phone calls, emails, or social media. They spend a lot of time reaching out to potential customers and identifying those who might be interested in what their company has to offer.

Because of their active role in the discovery, SDRs are often involved in success closes. They work with customers to discover how they can best solve problems and identify the best solution for them. SDRs then work with sales staff to finalize any necessary paperwork before closing.

Sales representatives who are looking to further their careers typically begin as SDRs. They can then move into other jobs within the field, including territory sales representatives and account managers.

Sellers looking to become an SDR should keep in mind that this position requires a lot of outreach, often making phone calls or sending emails for long periods every day. This job is ideal for someone who enjoys listening and speaking to people and is motivated by the idea of helping others.

What are the skills and qualifications for an SDR role?

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) are responsible for developing new business opportunities through prospecting and qualifying leads. They play an essential role in a company’s sales process by identifying potential customers and creating interest in a product or service. SDRs should have excellent communication skills, be able to solve problems, and articulate ideas.

They should also be comfortable working with people and be able to build relationships. Qualifications for an SDR role vary depending on the company, but some standard requirements include a college degree, previous sales experience, and knowledge of the company’s products or services. It also includes strong communication skills, problem-solving skills, and the ability to articulate ideas. They should also be comfortable working with people and be able to establish trust.

marketing automation

What skills do successful SDRs have?

Successful SDRs are incredibly effective communicators, especially on the phone. They’re able to move a conversation quickly from small talk to business and back again in a matter of minutes. Sales reps must be good listeners and be adept at picking up on the subtle nuances in tone and body language that can help determine who’s a good fit for their product.

Sellers should also be able to pick up quickly on the prospect’s tone, whether they are excited about the prospect, skeptical, or completely disinterested. This means listening carefully to what prospects say and paying attention to their body language.

If you’re thinking of applying for an SDR role, you should be able to demonstrate your ability to handle rejection. Even the most experienced sales reps occasionally get turned down on cold calls. Successful SDRs are resilient and not discouraged easily by what others think of them or their ideas.

Successful SDRs

Sellers interested in becoming successful SDRs should consider joining a company that provides in-depth training. This is an excellent way to learn the ins and outs of sales, including qualifying leads, customer relations, upselling/cross-selling techniques, and much more.

What are some challenges faced by SDRs?

Selling over the phone can be extremely challenging because it requires sellers to strike a balance between demonstrating their expertise on the product or service they are selling while remaining flexible enough to adapt to any objections. This requires excellent communication skills and the ability to think quickly on one’s feet.

Sales development representatives (SDRs) are vital for many sales teams. They bridge the gap between potential customers and the sales team by qualifying leads and building relationships. SDRs are typically responsible for the following tasks:

    1. Generating leads through research and networking
    2. Qualifying leads through phone calls, emails, or other forms of communication
    3. Building relationships with potential customers
    4. Collaborating with the sales team to follow up on qualified leads

One of the main challenges faced by SDRs is qualifying leads. This involves determining whether or not a lead is worth pursuing and whether or not they have the budget and need for the product or service being offered, and ensuring the lead is a legitimate opportunity. They need to identify the buying signals of potential buyers and determine whether or not they are a good fit for the company’s products or services. They also need to qualify the leads based on their budget, timeline, and authority.

SDRs also face the challenge of building relationships with potential customers. This requires empathy for the buyer and understanding their needs, which can be challenging to do over email or phone.

SDRs are also typically responsible for researching industry trends and events to find leads and maintaining an updated database of contacts they have spoken with recently. SDRs collaborate with the sales team to ensure all qualified leads flow through for a smooth and effective sales process.

How can you become a successful SDR salesperson?

The road to becoming a successful SDR salesperson is not an easy one. It takes a lot of hard work, determination, and resilience. However, if you are willing to put in the effort, here are some tips to help you on your journey.

First and foremost, it is important to understand what a sales development representative does. This will help you to better understand the role and the skills that are required for success. Secondly, make sure that you have the necessary qualifications and experience.

Finally, hone your skillset by practicing and learning from others. Be open to feedback and willing to learn from your mistakes.

Sales Development reps learn from their mistakes. They are constantly working to improve their skills and become more successful in their role. One of the best ways to learn is to reflect on your experiences and see what you can learn from them.

SDR salesperson

For example, they can learn how to qualify potential customers better, build better relationships with clients, and generate more leads. They can also learn what works and what doesn’t work for them, so they can continue to improve their sales process.

Mistakes are a valuable part of the learning process, and sales development reps should embrace them. By learning from their mistakes, SDRs can become more successful in their role and boost their sales performance.

What are the benefits of working as an SDR?

The benefits of working as an SDR are vast. Sales development reps are responsible for developing new leads and opportunities for their company by working with potential customers. They identify potential customers, qualify them, and create a plan to move them through the sales funnel. By doing this, they help increase sales and revenue for their company.

Another benefit of working as an SDR is that they have the opportunity to learn about the sales process. They learn how to identify customer needs, understand what solutions they need, and articulate those solutions to potential customers. This knowledge helps them when they transition into a role in sales.

SDRs also have the opportunity to work with a wide range of people. They develop relationships with current customers, potential customers, and sales reps. They must learn to work with many different types of people to help them move through the sales process.

marketing automation

What is the future of the Sales Development Rep role?

The future of the SDR role is bright. Sales development reps are an essential part of any sales team and play a vital role in the company’s success. They are responsible for developing new leads and opportunities for their company by working with potential customers.

SDRs are a great fit for many sales teams because they can work with people, solve problems, and articulate ideas. They are also responsible for researching industry trends and events to find leads and maintaining an updated database of contacts they have spoken with recently. This makes them an invaluable part of any sales organization.

Sales development reps are critical to the success of any company, and their role will only continue to grow in importance in the coming years. As a result, more and more companies are hiring SDRs to help with their sales process and increase revenue.

The perfect candidate for this job has excellent phone skills and is able to speak with poise and confidence when communicating with potential customers. They must be able to communicate accurately, understand customer needs, and add value to the sales process.

The role of an SDR is demanding and requires constant improvement for success. However, with the proper training, skillset, and work ethic, they can become one of the most important parts of any successful sales organization.

Conclusion

Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are the lifeblood of any sales organization. They play an important role in qualifying leads and getting them ready for the next stage of the sales process. SDRs should have excellent communication skills, be able to solve problems, and articulate ideas well.

The typical day for a sales development representative is always busy. They are constantly on the phone or emailing trying to qualify leads and get them ready for the next stage of the sales process. A lot of outreach via email and phone and working with other members of the sales team to help move deals through the pipeline. If you’re looking for a career in sales, consider becoming an SDR – it’s a great way to start your journey up the ladder to success.

Email Marketing

Google Postmaster Tools: How To Improve Email Deliverability

Google Postmaster Tools are a set of tools that can help you manage your email deliverability. This means that you can use these tools to get insights about your email traffic and how well it performs and tips on improving delivery.

To use the Postmaster Tools, you must first verify your domain and create some records with Google. After that, you can begin using the various tools in the interface to troubleshoot and optimize your email program.

What are some of the most common issues people encounter with their email marketing campaigns, and how can Google Postmaster Tools help you troubleshoot them?

Some of the most common issues that people encounter with their email marketing campaigns are:

  1. Incorrect sender address
  2. Invalid recipient addresses
  3. Spam complaints
  4. Bounces (undeliverable messages)

Google Postmaster Tools can help you troubleshoot all of these issues. For example, the toolset can provide insights into how many spam complaints your messages receive and how to reduce them. It can also help you identify and fix invalid recipient addresses. And, if you see a large number of bounces, the Postmaster Tools can help you identify the root cause and fix it.

To use Google Postmaster Tools, you first need to verify your domain with Google. This is a simple process that only takes a few minutes. Once your domain is verified, you can begin using the various tools in the Postmaster Tools interface.

The Postmaster Tools interface is divided into four main sections:

  1. Overview
  2. Traffic insights
  3. Compliance
  4. Setup

The Overview section provides an overview of your email program, including message volume, spam complaints, and delivery statistics. The Traffic insights section provides more detailed information about your messages’ performance, including data on opens, clicks, and bounces.

The Compliance section helps you ensure that your messages comply with Google’s anti-spam policies. And the Setup section provides instructions on setting up SPF and DKIM records for your domain.

b2b email marketing automation

What are Google Postmaster Tools and what do they do for you as a business owner or marketer?

The Postmaster Tools consist of the following tools:

Inbox Preview

This tool lets you see how your email will look in different email clients.

Spam Analysis

This tool provides information on how likely your email is to be marked as spam and suggestions on improving your deliverability.

Email Delivery Report

This report shows you how your email is performing, including data on opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints.

Sender Reputation

This tool helps you understand your sender’s reputation and how it affects email deliverability.

Authentication

This tool provides information on how well your email is being authenticated and offers tips on improving authentication.

Compliance

This tool helps you ensure that your email meets industry standards for spam and privacy.

The Postmaster Tools are a valuable resource for improving your email deliverability. Using these tools, you can troubleshoot any problems with your email program and optimize your email content and delivery to ensure that your emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

If you are interested in using the Google Postmaster Tools, visit the official website for more information. There, you can find guides on how to set up and use the tools and tips on improving your email deliverability.

The Diagnostics Tool

This tool provides information about your email traffic, such as how much of it is being blocked or delivered to the spam folder. It also shows how many messages were sent, received, and bounced, as well as how long it took to deliver them.

The Sender Score Checker

This tool measures your email program’s reputation and provides tips on how to improve it. It checks your sending IP address against a list of known spammers. The higher your score, the better your reputation and the more likely your messages are to be delivered.

The Delivery Monitoring Tool

This tool allows you to see how your messages are performing over time. You can use it to troubleshoot delivery issues and improve your email program’s performance.

Google Postmaster Tools provides a wealth of information about your email traffic and its performance. Using the Postmaster Tools interface tools, you can troubleshoot and optimize your email program for better deliverability.

How does Google Postmaster Tools help protect your domain reputation and keep your email lists healthy and spam-free?

google post master

Google Postmaster Tools helps protect your domain reputation and keep your email lists healthy and spam-free in several ways:

  1. It gives you insights into how your emails perform, including information on how many bounces and complaints you receive. It also tells you how many people are opening your emails and provides tips on improving delivery.
  2. The Postmaster Tools interface includes a tool that checks your email headers for common problems that can lead to spam complaints or other delivery issues.
  3. The toolset provides a blacklist monitoring service to help you stay informed about any changes to the blacklists that could impact your email deliverability.

Google Postmaster Tools

If you have problems with your email deliverability, using Google Postmaster Tools can help you troubleshoot the issue. The insights and tips this toolset provides can help you improve your email program and protect your domain reputation. Simply verify your domain and create some records with Google to get started.

Then, use the various tools in the Postmaster Tools interface to get started. Enjoy improved email deliverability with Google Postmaster Tools!

How does Google Postmaster Tools differ from other email marketing platforms, and why should you consider using it in your business strategy?

Google Postmaster Tools is a comprehensive set of tools that can help you troubleshoot and optimize your email program. It differs from other email marketing platforms in that it provides detailed insights about your email traffic and how well it is performing. In addition, it offers tips on how to improve delivery.

If you are looking for an all-in-one platform that can help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts, Google Postmaster Tools is an excellent option to consider.

Google Postmaster Tools

Some of the benefits of using Google Postmaster Tools include:

  1. Detailed insights into your email traffic and performance
  2. Tips on how to improve delivery
  3. Tools to help troubleshoot any issues with your email program

Conclusion

Google Postmaster Tools is a great way to help you manage your email deliverability. The verification process is simple, and the tools in the interface are easy to use. After verifying your domain and creating some records with Google, you can use the tools to troubleshoot and optimize your email program. This will help you improve delivery rates and keep your subscribers happy.

Have you tried Google Postmaster Tools? What has been your experience?

If you need help getting started, our team at MarAutomation can assist you. We provide a variety of services to help you improve your email program, including consultation, design and deployment services, and ongoing support. Contact us today to learn more!

Email Marketing

Email Marketing Services: How It Works And Successful Email Campaigns

Email marketing services are a great way to keep in touch with customers and promote your business. Email marketing uses email to send advertisements, messages, or other types of content to a group of people who have consented to receive that type of message from you. Email marketing can be an effective way to reach out to customers and promote your business, but only if it is done correctly.

Email marketing services can help you create and send email campaigns that are effective and compliant with the law. Email marketing services can also provide you with templates, lists of subscribers, and other tools to make email marketing easier.

Email marketing services vary in their offerings, so it is important to find one that fits your needs. Some email marketing services offer a free trial, while others charge a monthly fee. Email marketing services may also offer features such as automation, which can save you time by sending emails automatically at pre-determined intervals.

tips for successful email marketing campaigns

When choosing an email marketing service, it is important to consider your needs and budget. It is also important to make sure that the email marketing service you choose is compliant with the law. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives customers the right to opt out of receiving emails from you, and sets penalties for violations.

Email marketing services can help you create and send effective and compliant email campaigns. Choosing the right email marketing service will help you reach your customers and promote your business.

How does it work

Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your customers and followers. It can also be a great way to promote your products or services. But how does it work?

When you create an email marketing campaign, you first need to create a list of people who will receive your messages. This can be done by collecting email addresses from your website or blog or doing web research to build out a list.

Once you have a list of email addresses, you need to create a message that you will send to those people. This message can be anything from a simple promotional message to a more complex message that includes information about your products or services.

Email Marketing

Once you have created your message, you need to send it out to your list of people. This can be done using an email marketing service or sending the emails yourself.

Email marketing services will usually provide you with a way to track how many people open and click on your messages to see how effective your campaign is.

How to create an effective email campaign

An email campaign can be an effective way to reach out to customers and promote your business. But, before you start blasting out emails to everyone on your list, you should keep a few things in mind.

First, make sure your email campaigns are well-targeted. Sending messages to people who aren’t interested in what you have to say is a certain way to get your messages ignored.

Second, keep your messages short and to the point. No one wants to read a long, rambling email. Get your point across quickly and move on.

tips to create an email marketing campaigns

Finally, make use of tools like A/B testing to make sure your emails are as effective as possible. A/B testing allows you to send out different versions of your email to other groups of people and see which version gets the best reaction.

Email marketing can be a great way to reach out to customers and promote your business. Just keep these tips in mind, and you’ll be sure to make the most of your campaign.

Tips for improving your open and click-through rates

Email marketing can be an extremely effective way to reach out to your audience and promote your products or services, but only if your emails are opened and clicked on. Here are a few tips for improving your email open and click-through rates:

  1. Make sure your subject lines are catchy and interesting.
  2. Personalize your emails as much as possible.
  3. Keep your email content short and to the point.
  4. Use images sparingly, as too many can make your email seem cluttered.
  5. Include a call to action in every email.
  6. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly.
  7. Test, test, test! Try sending your emails at different times of day and to different list segments to see what gets the best results.

improving your open and click-through rates

Examples of successful email campaigns

Email marketing can be a highly successful way to reach out to your customers and promote your products or services. However, it’s essential to make sure that your email campaigns are well-designed and well-executed to achieve the best results. Here are a few examples of successful email campaigns:

  • The Obama campaign used email marketing to significant effect during the 2008 election, raising over $750 million through its various email appeals.
  • In 2012, the British Heart Foundation used email marketing to promote its “Change4Life” campaign, which encouraged people to adopt healthier lifestyles. The campaign was a success, with over 1.5 million people signing up for the program.
  • In 2013, The Guardian newspaper used email marketing to launch its “GuardianWitness” project, allowing readers to submit videos and photos of newsworthy events happening in their area.

Email marketing can also be used to promote special sales or discounts on products and services. For example, many online retailers will send out “flash sale” emails to their subscribers, offering steep discounts on items for a limited time only.

Email marketing can also be used to build relationships with potential and current customers. Many companies will send out regular newsletters or “ezines” containing helpful tips, articles, or other information that would be of interest to their target audience.

How email marketing works

If you’re thinking of using email marketing for your business, there are a few things to keep in mind to make sure your campaign is successful:

Make sure you have a large enough email list

You’ll need to have a significant number of people on your email list to reach a wide enough audience.

Make sure your emails are well-designed and well-written

Your emails should be visually appealing and easy to read, with clear calls to action.

Make sure you have a good email marketing service

Several different email marketing services are available, so it’s important to choose one that will suit your needs.

Make sure you track your results

Keep track of how many people opened your email, clicked on the links, and unsubscribed from your list. This will help you to fine-tune your email marketing campaigns and make them more effective over time.

Email marketing can be a great way to reach out to your customers and promote your products or services. However, it’s important to make sure that your email campaigns are well-designed and well-executed to achieve the best results. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll be on your way to success!

Conclusion

Email marketing is a powerful way to reach your target audience. This article outlines the different types of email messages you can use and how they work for driving sales in your business. If you want help implementing these strategies into your original marketing plan, let us know! We offer an affordable monthly retainer that will allow you direct access to our team of email marketing experts.

Marketing Automation

Top 8 Reasons to Use Marketing Automation

Marketing is a complex thing with multiple facets and room to always do something new and extraordinary. But while you think of ideas that will instantly grab the attention of prospects, automated processes can take care of all the mundane tasks for you.

Building relationships is probably the most crucial aspect of marketing. However, you need to go through several tasks to get to the part where you can show your competence to a lead. And a lot of these tasks are far from being interesting at all.

But I am here to tell you that it is precisely for these reasons that you should use marketing automation.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the use of software to automate different marketing processes. For example, suppose you want to use a drip campaign to capture leads and you have prepared a set of emails for the same. Now, conventionally, you would send different emails at different times based on how a particular lead is reacting to the contact.

Marketing automation software will allow you to schedule the drips and will automatically send follow-up emails according to the reaction of the prospect.

You will often hear that ‘when used correctly, marketing automation has the potential to nurture your leads in a highly specific and targeted way, one which has a high chance of converting them into clients. But for this to happen, you have to make sure NOT to automate the wrong processes.

A common example is buying a list of prospects rather than building one on your own. Well, now that’s out of the way, let’s see what makes marketing automation so important.

Top Reasons to Use Marketing Automation

Enhances efficiency by saving time

Marketers can significantly increase the efficiency of their entire workflow if they automate certain processes. Your social media campaign can run smoothly if you schedule posts rather than posting content manually every single day (much like drip campaigns which we talked about in the previous section).

Enhances efficiency

If such tasks don’t call your attention, you will spend more time coming up with unique strategies to capture leads. In a nutshell, marketers can use their time for valuable aspects of the workflow rather than worrying about administrative tasks.

Aligns sales and marketing

If you have ever worked in either the sales or the marketing team, you know that strife between the two can easily occur. The marketing team will argue that they are bringing in leads but sales folks are not taking timely actions. Sometimes, salespeople find out that a prospect has been receiving way too many messages as both teams are targeting them.

It’s a common enough problem in organizations and can be solved to a large extent by structuring processes properly, and that’s where marketing automation comes in. The problem mainly occurs due to misalignment; however, if processes become transparent for everyone, both teams can easily get on the same page.

Marketing automation will help ensure that better quality leads (more about this later) are coming in and that time-consuming and repetitive processes are streamlined.

marketing automation

Effectively tracks the lead lifecycle

As you read ahead, you’ll notice that it is very important to track the funnel stage of leads in your pipeline. Why? Because everything you do after identifying a lead depends on their position in the funnel.

Suppose a lead is at the top of the funnel and without considering it, you are sending them product portfolios. This will especially not work for SaaS companies. If a lead doesn’t even know what kind of service you are offering, there’s no way they are going to buy the product.

Similarly, if you keep showing awareness-building content to leads who are at the bottom of the funnel, they’ll eventually tire and drop out of your network.

Hence, marketers need to know the lifecycle stage of a lead. Marketing automation software does this effectively by tracking the lead on the browser and studying their online behavior.

Improves content quality by focusing on personalization

You’ll rarely hear the term ‘marketing’ without ‘personalization’ these days. This is because marketers are aware that they can’t go far without personalizing content, let alone close high-value deals.

The leads in your funnel are at different stages and should be targeted through curated content that is relevant to them. Marketing automation software will tell you at what stage a particular lead is and allow you to create content for them accordingly.

There are a lot of marketing automation software these days that give you actionable recommendations to improve your content quality. And let’s not ignore out-of-the-box content that can help you more than anything. Are you targeting leads through video content, personalized decks, or stuff they may find funny? No? It’s all worth a try, believe us.

Build a relationship with your audience by using all the information you have about them and your business will grow in ways you might not have thought. Marketing automation will be an asset when you go for such campaigns.

Better customer profiling

Leveraging a CRM tool alongside marketing automation is probably the most helpful thing you can do for your business. Data is everything for organizations and if you don’t have enough data to act on, you can’t hope to stay afloat in business.

Customer Profiling

A CRM tool can fetch behavioral and even personal information about quality leads. Think about how much you can do with such data points. Personalization becomes ten times easier and your chances of closing a client will surely plummet.

Improves the lead quality and nurture process

With all the important data you have at your disposal, you can be sure of one thing- you won’t have to deal with as many unqualified leads. Lead scoring systems of CRMs are further important, as they let you know when a lead has become a marketing qualified lead and when it crosses the score to become a sales qualified lead.

After each of these events, it is also important to nurture leads properly. Now, even with the help of a marketing automation tool, there are bound to be leads that won’t convert. But, you surely can’t skip the nurturing process in any case, which unfortunately is time-taking.

Marketing automation can take this task off your hands and ensure that all the leads in the pipeline are being nurtured properly. While a lead may not be ready to buy your product at the moment, they may be ready to convert after some time.

Reasons to Use Marketing Automation

Increases engagement rate

This is somewhat related to personalization but is an effect of the latter. When you personalize the content by considering user intent, you show the prospect that you have been thorough. This lets them know that you have discovered that your product can possibly be of use to them.

If you’re employing such strategies, you’ll notice that leads are engaging more with your content and emails. And well, if the engagement rate is increasing, the chances of closing deals increase as well. Behind such a strategy lies marketing automation, because to get to this stage, you’ll need to automate certain processes (as discussed above) that increase the value of your content.

Organizes reporting and analytics

As important as reporting and analytics are marketers aren’t usually fond of keeping track of a multitude of data, especially if one has to do it manually. But, with the help of a marketing automation tool, reports can be generated easily. There, doesn’t that sound like a lot of your problems were just solved?

You can streamline all your processes, see which process needs improvement, what campaigns are working efficiently and can be used again, and basically know any points that need to be changed if you have proper reports at your disposal.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of touchpoints that can be automated using marketing automation software, and well, as we’ve tried to show, your work can become more result-oriented. Pick out areas where you think your workflow is lagging and check if marketing automation can help in that area.

Otherwise, processes like lead lifecycle tracking, data gathering and feeding in the CRM, and scheduling emails, and social posts are certainly the areas that can be automated.