TotalWeb Partners Blog

November 14, 2022

Anatomy of an email marketing strategy: from discovery to conversion

E-Marketing, Marketing, News Email Marketing

Content continues to prove itself as an invaluable part of a marketing strategy, for B2Cs and B2Bs alike. Brands that make it their business to create and serve engaging, useful content can keep their audience interested, gain their trust, and establish themselves as an authority in their field.

Content strategy can be a major part of reaching business objectives – according to Semrush’s 2022 State of Content Marketing Global Report, more than three-quarters (78%) of brands that achieved their business goals have a documented content marketing strategy, while 81% of companies that did not reach their goals do not have one.

There’s a role for content throughout the entire customer lifecycle, though it has the most impact when it is delivered at the right moment, which is where email comes in.

Mapping the right content with the right point in the customer journey and delivering it through email can be extremely effective. With consistent delivery of quality, relevant and valuable content, you get better quality leads and customers who are more likely to stay with you, as well as the opportunity to learn more about your audience and what they want, continuing the virtuous cycle.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can effectively build content into your email strategy in three steps: mapping the customer journey, collating the right content, and bringing the two together in an email programme.

Step 1: Understanding the customer and mapping their journey
As is the case with every marketing campaign, the best place to start is with an understanding of your audience. As a first step, draw upon any insights you have about your existing customers to develop different personas, before plotting the journey they take with you from awareness to conversion and beyond.

Reflect on the prospect’s needs, challenges and concerns on each step of that journey. Then identify the points at which they will be most receptive to content from you and determine what that content should look like.

An important point to keep in mind is that your email and content strategy must be aligned with the company’s broader marketing goals. According a 2019 survey from the Content Marketing Institute, the two biggest benefits of a documented content marketing strategy are aligning teams around common missions or goals, and making it easier to determine which types of content to develop.

If your business objectives are well defined, then goals for the content strategy will more naturally follow. It also means you’re less likely to waste money and effort on campaigns that don’t deliver material results for the company.

Step 2: Bringing together the right content
By this point you should have a good idea of the content you need, and fortunately, there may be no need to create it from scratch. It may be far more efficient to update or repurpose content that already exists in the company, which you can track down with a content audit. This is where you take stock of all the content you have on your site, such as blog posts, videos, guides, whitepapers and survey results, noting what content is performing well or tends to spur action.

If it is necessary for you to make new content, ensure you’re thinking about who your audience are as individuals – where they work, their life stage, their challenges, what they value, where they get their information – as well as where they are on the customer journey, to guide what you create.

Step 3: Aligning content with the customer journey
After you have an understanding of the likely journey the prospect will take with you and the content to which they’ll be most receptive, it’s time to bring the two together with your email strategy.

With a bulk communication and marketing automation platform, like Everlytic, it’s possible to set up automated workflows that send emails in response to certain behaviours, ensuring the prospect receives the right content at the right time. Also, if you have segmentation in place, you can adapt the email and personalise the content within it to suit their profile, rendering it even more valuable.

For example, when the Independent Institute of Education (IIE), South Africa’s largest private higher education institution, wanted to convert prospective leads into applicants and ultimately registered students, they used Everlytic to build a series of emails to nurture those interested in further study.

A series of emails and texts were sent to contacts over time, which were triggered by their behaviour. The content of the messages, of which there were five variations, would reflect where the recipient was in the onboarding lifecycle. IIE attributed the campaign as a factor in the 20% growth in student numbers the following academic year. This paced approach also took some of the strain off their sales and marketing teams.

November 9, 2022

by TWP Publisher

How And Why To Adapt Your B2B Sales Strategy For Future Success

B2B Marketing, News B2B, B2B Campaign, B2B marketing

We’re in the midst of a significant B2B sales and marketing revolution. The pandemic forced companies to move from traditional sales to a more hybrid experience. Gone are the days of pitch decks in a conference room and “inside” sales—the future of B2B includes more channels, more convenience, and a more personalized experience for customers. Enterprise companies need to invest in this shift if they want to see success in the future.

Companies that refuse to evolve with the changing landscape will see a decrease in revenue as they compete against competitors adopting new strategies. In McKinsey’s latest B2B Pulse survey, “more than 90 percent of enterprises plan to sustain the changes made to their sales force structure over the past year.”

Here are seven ways to update and adapt your sales strategy to be more effective and capture future sales.

Solve your customers’ problems anytime, anywhere.

Your customers want a complete solution. Companies need to enable touchpoints in multiple channels to ensure you’re serving customers when and where they want to buy. An omnichannel presence is critical. And a true omnichannel experience, which looks very different from five years ago, is now at least a 10-channel strategy. McKinsey data shows that “customers want—and expect—to engage seamlessly across ten or more. And the businesses that have been quick to meet that demand have profited: 72 percent of B2B companies that sell via seven or more channels grew their market share.”

More and more B2B customers are happy learning and buying through online and digital channels, making the traditional, in-person sales pitch less necessary.

Work higher in the funnel.

At any given time, about 95% of B2B buyers aren’t in the market for your product. This simple yet monumental fact changes the B2B advertising and marketing game quite a bit. It means you need to spend advertising dollars on people who aren’t going to buy right now, but need to be familiar with your brand or product when they are in the market.

The most effective way to do this is focusing messaging and advertising dollars on creating brand-positive memories for your customers so when the time comes to purchase, your company is top of mind. As LinkedIn’s B2B Business Institute accurately captures, “Advertising impressions, accumulated over time, affect our memories. So, your advertising has to be designed to create distinct impressions about your brand in people’s minds — to be activated later.”

Constantly invest in your brand awareness.

Invest at least 50% of your advertising dollars in awareness. With research showing that only 16% of B2B marketers rank building brand awareness as a major marketing objective, it appears most companies, particularly large ones, are taking their awareness for granted.

Small companies see the immediate value in spending money to increase brand visibility, but bigger, more established brands sometimes skip it. What keeps the brands with the most awareness top of mind is their ongoing and deliberate dedication to weaving their brand into their customer’s thoughts and lifestyles. Never skip or skimp on your brand awareness budget.

Base every conversation on value.

Regularly remind your customers—both current and future—about the value you bring to the relationship. Provide end-to-end insights about your business and industry. Suggesting ways to help your customers navigate regulatory change or demonstrating how potential customers measure up in their industry are just a couple of ways you can help increase your value to customers.

November 7, 2022

by TWP Publisher

The role of B2B marketing in sales enablement

Diverse Team of Professional Businesspeople Meeting in the Office Conference Room. Creative Team Around Table, Black Businesswoman, African-American Digital Entrepreneur and Hispanic CEO Talking.

B2B Marketing, News B2B marketing

The digital world and the proliferation of channels have created an opportunity for PR to perform more cohesively across the organisation. From internal communications, reputation management, stakeholder engagement and sales enablement, the demand for collaboration and creativity across all business outputs is only increasing.

As a result, we’re seeing a real coming of age for B2B PR. More than ever, clients want to know how this can benefit the sales function.

B2B sales don’t come overnight
It’s important to acknowledge the B2B buying process when putting together a communications strategy. According to research by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now. That means 95% of buyers are out of market and won’t buy for months or maybe even years. The chances are they’ve already got what you are selling, so you can’t make them go in-market at will.

It therefore makes no sense to direct all your marketing budget to generating leads for the 5% of customers that are ready to buy today. Instead, make it your purpose to more effectively influence the 95% of potential future customers who will generate future cash flow.

This is where B2B communications strategy comes in. Because success in the form of sales rarely happens overnight, there is more of a requirement to think long-term. How can you do this?

1 Go where your target audience is
The digital landscape provides more platforms and channels for brands to be visible across than ever before. That responsibility can feel overwhelming at times and as the saying goes, companies are now ‘needing to do more with less’. Successful B2B PR strategies rely on a focused approach that starts with understanding where your target audience most commonly resides. This will allow you to direct more of the marketing budget to the channels that are going to be most valuable to the organisation.

2 Stand out for the right reasons
To effectively target people that aren’t actively in the market now, brand awareness is super important if they are to remember you when they are in the market. This is less about timely press releases to announce your latest product updates and more about delivering a compelling message that resonates with your audience – and doing so on a consistent basis.

Therefore, it’s not just a case of being known, your ‘why’ needs to be heard louder than ever before, especially if you operate in a crowded marketplace. Your ‘why’ is what sets you apart from the competition.

Become a thought leader on the topics that reflect your ‘why’, provide your perspective and be an authoritative voice on the issues that matter to your target audience with a consistent and targeted content marketing strategy.

3 Earn third-party validation
This is a key component for building brand awareness and trust. It can take the form of a product reviews campaign or a case study approach. Letting a third party do all the talking for you provides credibility.

This strategy is so effective for building trust that Google is also getting in on the act. It now puts the focus on useful and relevant content from third parties rather than from brands themselves. As a result, brands are finding that news articles appear top in search results rather than their own website content. This further emphasises the importance of a content marketing strategy.

4 Reflect your audience’s vision
To be relevant today, an organisation needs to demonstrate that it understands – and acts upon – the same issues and concerns as its audience.

The greatest example of this is the rise of environmental, social and governance (ESG) communications in the B2B sector, a broadening of the focus on the environment against the backdrop of the social justice movement. It centres on the belief that organisations can no longer ignore their own accountability and requires total transparency in delivering on their ESG values and vision.

As a result, ESG is increasingly becoming the centre of an organisation’s communications. Failure to be transparent and communicate creates an assumption that the organisation is failing to act at all; this can result in lost leads.

September 21, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Experts Share Tips on Strategic Web Design for Successful Digital Marketing

Marketing, Website Design Practices Digital Marketing, Web Design

Website is the second most popular channel used for marketing purposes in 2022, according to HubSpot. While it’s important to note that 59% of users, as per Adobe, prefer “beautifully designed’” sites compared to “something simple and plain,” 88% of users won’t return to a website due to poor UX, as reported by Amazon Web Services. Hence, businesses need a website design strategy that combines visual appeal and usability to engage and convert users.

DesignRush, a B2B marketplace connecting businesses with agencies, leveraged its 13,000-agencies-strong network for quick insights – or “QuickSights” – on the strategic web design tips for digital marketing.

1) CAPTURE ABANDONED CARTS VIA EMAIL SIGNUP

Forge Digital Marketing CEO Erin Schnittker Siemek states that installing email integrations and leveraging exit and shopping intent popups to collect emails on websites is a winning combination to capture abandoned carts.

“If you have an eCommerce business, we stress the importance of creating integrations with Klaviyo on your website,” said Siemek. “Design a user experience that converts first and foremost, but the second best thing to [help increase] sales conversion[s] is email signup. [Therefore] structure your website and email integration to capture abandoned carts and use strategic exit intent and shopping intent popups to grow that email list […] A website that uses these techniques can expect to add 30% to their bottom line of revenue by correctly deploying email capture within your web design and development plan.”

2) DECLUTTER YOUR SITE FOR FASTER LOAD TIMES

In the opinion of Rahul Jain, founder of SlashMonk, decluttering is a key tactic to incorporate on websites because it helps improve usability and search engine rankings.

“Speed is key when it comes to website usability,” said Jain. “That’s why one of the best ways to improve [it] is by decluttering your site. By eliminating unnecessary elements and formatting, you can significantly reduce the time it takes your website to load. Not only will this make your website more user-friendly, but it will also boost search engine rankings. So go ahead – clean up your site and see the dramatic improvements it makes in both usability and search engine rankings!”

Tabitha Jean Naylor, owner of TabithaNaylor.com, adds that optimizing websites for fast speed is essential since delays can cost businesses a significant number of leads.

“An extra 5 seconds on your page load time can mean losing 20% of your leads,” said Naylor. “Optimizing website speed will ensure your potential customer stays long enough to engage and realize that they need your product. Compress images, get rid of unnecessary plugins and minify website code for faster speeds.”

September 19, 2022

by TWP Publisher

What Challenges Do Entrepreneurs Face In Digital Marketing?

Marketing Digital Marketing

If you are stepping into the field of digital marketing as an entrepreneur to grow your business then know that it is a great field that can increase your brand awareness but there are some enormous challenges and obstacles for people who are new to this field. Digital marketing is becoming popular with every passing day as its results are better than traditional advertising and it is cost-effective. Plus, the increased penetration of the internet has further helped in the growing popularity of digital marketing.

But there are a lot of challenges for beginners in the field of digital marketing that we are going to discuss shortly. Those entrepreneurs who are new to the field of digital marketing aren’t able to get promising results and their startups fail to do much in digital marketing but worry not. You just need to be careful in this field, keep your ground in front of the challenges that await your way and you will be able to succeed in digital marketing campaigns. So, here are the common challenges that entrepreneurs faced in digital marketing as a beginner:

Insignificant Knowledge About Digital Marketing
Most entrepreneurs and startups don’t have enough knowledge about the field of digital marketing due to which they struggle and mess everything up. It is a common problem, not in the field of digital marketing but in any other field. If you don’t have significant knowledge about a field and you jump right into it then you are going to make things even worse.

To be able to come up with promising results in the field of digital marketing, you should learn more about this vast field, gather some knowledge, and stay updated with the latest digital marketing tools and trends that are being used in this field before you actually jump into this field.

Low Budget
Budget and Capital, are the two things that play a significant role in any business category. Without a budget, no campaign or business can run. In the field of digital marketing, you must have a budget for your marketing campaigns that will help you reach your estimated target. Sometimes, it may be required to boost your content which also requires a budget. So, you have a budget pre-planned for digital marketing or else you will struggle.

Fail To Draw The Attention Of The Targeted Audience
People who don’t have knowledge about the field of digital marketing aren’t able to draw the attention of their targeted audience. To succeed in generating leads, it is important to draw the attention of the targeted audience to your products/services. It is beneficial for your business as it increases its popularity and you also get the attention of the audience that you were targeting.

Based on the products and services that your startup provides, you should have a rough understanding of the interest of your potential audience. Therefore, you should understand the interests of your audience and provide them with content that will catch their attention and will help generate leads. For instance, if you have a startup program similar to Omegle then targeting those people who wish to meet new people would be the ideal choice with content that they wish to see.

Ignore ROI
Another challenge or mistake you can say that startup owners make is that they ignore the ROI or Return On Investment. They start a marketing campaign and don’t even measure the progress of their campaign and whether it is generating results or not. Determining the ROI is helpful to measure how good your investment is turning out to be or not. If the ROI is good then it shows that you are going with a good strategy but if ROI is bad then you need to change your marketing strategies.

Unfortunately, people who are new to this field ignore the ROI due to which they are unable to predict the appropriate return on their investment and don’t make any changes to their marketing strategies. You wouldn’t see startups like Chatroulette making such a mistake.

September 14, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

E-Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing Email Marketing

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Marketers use various strategies for firms to market and raise brand awareness. Social media marketing and email marketing are two of the most popular and successful ways to accomplish marketing objectives. Both are magnificent in their own ways. As of 2021, there were around 3.78 billion users of social media and 4.1 billion users of email globally, according to Statista. This amount represents about 48% of the world’s population.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular every day. Nevertheless, we are unable to control how emails affect their users’ ability to transact. The issue at hand is which is superior. Which of the two can influence the target audience more effectively?

What is Email Marketing?
A type of digital marketing called email marketing uses emails to spread brand recognition. It informs customers about the newest items, discounts, and services to help them remember the brand. The following are some advantages of email marketing:

Strengthen Relationships, Loyalty & Trust
Building individualised interactions with present and potential clients through email marketing is a terrific strategy. The readers of your newsletters and emails will come to know, like, and trust you and your business if you write them well. Consumers also do business with trusted companies.
Increase Brand Awareness & Stay Top of Mind
Consumers are reminded of your business, products, and services every time an email is delivered to them. This helps customers remember your business when it’s time to make a purchase.
Segmentation
Email marketing allows you to establish lists of each market segment based on demographics, interests, previous behaviour, etc. This allows you to develop marketing messages that are specifically tailored to each target audience. With the help of this incredibly successful marketing strategy, each segment will closely relate to your marketing message.
Low Cost & Good ROI
Comparatively speaking to other marketing strategies, email marketing is relatively affordable. For every dollar invested, email marketing typically returns $44.25 in profit.
Easy to Use
An email campaign may be set up quite quickly. You may upload subscriber information, segment your lists, use email templates, fill in your content, and send out emails to subscribers regularly using the many resources and software providers for email marketing available online. Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are two of our preferred email marketing services providers. Instead of using a pre-made template, having a customised email template that aligns with your company’s brand can be much more successful.

September 12, 2022

by TWP Publisher

What Digital Marketers Should Know About Direct Mail

E-Marketing, Marketing Digital Marketers

Since I founded Gunderson Direct roughly 20 years ago, I’ve had a number of conversations where I’ve defended direct mail to digital marketers. It seems that our channel is just not as well understood as most others, so I’ve done my share of explaining.

Here is just some of what I say to help them understand how direct mail can help them.

• It has unique targeting capabilities: Cookie concerns? IP identification issues? A physical address is the most reliable contact information for prospecting. Direct mail datasets are appended with thousands of attributes—both demographic and behavioral—that are available for targeting. And you can apply AI and machine learning to model builds across numerous databases to constantly improve direct mail’s look-alike targeting capabilities.

• You can go bigger and cheaper (per impression): Scaling in digital typically means upping your bids to compete for a relatively fixed ad inventory. There is no bidding war to get into your prospect’s physical mailbox. In fact, the direct mail industry is set up to reward companies that scale, offering ever-improving manufacturing and data efficiencies as quantities increase. Scale a DM program, and your cost per impression typically drops.

• Omnichannel DM strategies can boost your response: The same data used to target a prospect’s mailbox can be used to target them digitally. Automated display (no cookies needed) and email touches, combined with the USPS’ free Informed Delivery program, can strategically surround the physical delivery of printed mailing withs additional impressions. We’ve found that these “digital surrounds” can improve overall campaign response by as much as 40%.

• Direct mail stands out: It’s often said that the average consumer encounters as many as 10,000 ads a day. Compare that to how many pieces of mail are delivered to your home each day. Importantly, ads in digital and traditional channels often interrupt your entertainment or information consumption, so they are often missed and easily dismissed. But direct mail consumption takes place away from a screen and can be reviewed at a prospect’s leisure.

• It makes an impression: People depend on physical mail to receive information from government and business institutions, making it a trusted source of communications. Furthermore, research shows that physical ads are remembered more quickly and elicit a stronger emotional response than digital ads.

August 3, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Which Is Better For Ecommerce: On-Page SEO Or Link Building?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO

Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Taha in Chicago, who asks:

My question is on ecommerce SEO. Currently, I am working as an SEO Executive for an ecommerce brand. They have zero content on the site and their total backlink profile is around 1,000 links (which is nothing compared to competitors).

Which area should I focus on first in order to rank category pages? Should I go for the content and on-page optimizations or create backlinks to compete with my competitors’ profiles?

Taha, great question.

The short answer is: you should start with content and on-page optimization.

Now, let me give you the long answer, which applies to more than just the category pages you mentioned.

Start With On-Page SEO
Backlinks are important and we know they are part of the ranking algorithm.

However, you must have optimized content on the website so the search engines know what to rank your website for.

Below is a brief checklist on what to focus on in terms of on-page optimization before you start investing time in link building.

Determine Your Keywords & Themes
If you haven’t already, spend some time identifying your keywords.

Go from broad to narrow as you create your list, but keep in mind that relevancy is the most important consideration.

Even as you identify broad terms, though, they should still be targeted and relevant to your categories and products.

August 1, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Why Having A User-First Approach To SEO Is Important

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Optimization

In the search engine optimization business, we spend so much time thinking about Google algorithms, sitemaps, and backlinks that we sometimes lose sight of the primary goal: providing useful information to human visitors.

In the past, it was easy to understand why. You could cram your page with keywords, slap on a few meta tags, and voila! Your page was on the first page of search engine results.

Google rightfully recognized this wasn’t the best way to provide top-quality answers to search queries, so it adapted its algorithms. Evidence of Google’s interest in improving user experience (UX) is found with updates like Panda in February 2011, Core Web Vitals, and other core updates that happen regularly.

That’s not to say you can completely forgo aspects of traditional SEO and that keywords no longer matter. Search engines still take foundational SEO attributes into account.

But organic search now also depends on implementing a user-first approach.

So how do you do that? Here is a list of five steps you can take to make your site more user-friendly, and hopefully climb further up the search engine results page rankings.

July 27, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Web hosting for SEO: Why it’s important

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Website Content, Website Design Practices Web hosting

Want to know an easy way to speed up and improve the overall performance of your website?

Invest in good hosting.

Ignorance is no longer an excuse for any company to use a cheap web host.

Website performance is a critical element that can help improve your rankings, traffic and conversions.

This guide will cover everything you need to understand about why web hosting is important for SEO.

What is website hosting
A website hosting service provider, or web host, is a service that offers the technology required for a website to be viewed online.

Think of a web host as the home base of your website. Websites or webpages are stored on special computers called servers, and through the server your webpages get connected and delivered to internet browsers.

So, when users want to view your website, all they have to do is type your website address or domain into their browser.

When building a website, companies typically invest a lot of time and resources on design, development, digital marketing and SEO.

But web hosting is one area that tends to be an afterthought.

If you are willing to invest in making sure the website looks good and driving traffic to it, why not also ensure that the actual website is fast, functional and flexible?

Using a high-quality web host can maximize your conversion rates, along with other helpful benefits.

How web hosting benefits businesses
If you want a website for your business, then you will need a web host. Although web hosting is usually left at the back of a business’ mindset, it is crucial for your online presence.

A reliable web host can give your company a variety of benefits, such as:

Improved site performance.
Effective data management.
Enhanced security.
High uptime.

In short, investing in a reliable web host is wise – and should help grow your business.

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