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Author: Franz Malten Buemann
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Sent an email with two links not working. Can my company fire me? Is it considered a big mistake?
Today I made a horrible mistake, I prepared an email and thought all was good in the tokens. Asked my teammate if all looked good on his end as well and he also said it was good to go. One day later we find out 1 links wasn’t working and the other one was wrong. Could this get me fired? I feel so ashamed…
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Author and CX Speaker Dan Gingiss’s Linkedin LIVE Webinar
Dan Gingiss, CX Speaker and author of “The Experience Maker” will be be going live to share about his learnings and experience he got from McDonalds, Discover and Humana. Also Alan Berkson, Head of Global Analyst Relations at Freshworks will also be joining Dan to discuss how businesses can create remarkable expereince that customers can instantly share on social media. Get your free spot: bit.ly/3cC64ul
submitted by /u/grand_disappointment [link] [comments] -
Promote lead automation for customer base
How do I get a customer list in 3 days that will be interested in signing up for a free beta test that will get them a customer base with lead automation? Hi I’m just starting without much money and want to do a prelaunch to get people on an email wait-list or they join social media pages so they will sign up for the free beta test in 3 days and maybe stay on as customers. The beta will get them access to the lead automation software and it can get them a customer base. Any suggestions?
submitted by /u/Razzibot [link] [comments] -
When the marketing manager is wrong
submitted by /u/ClearWayLaw [link] [comments]
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Emails We Love: Pride Edition
June is finally here and while the weather is hot, these emails are even hotter. We’re looking at some of our favorite emails celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community.
1. Show & Tell
Subject line: Thanks for joining our mailing list.By Show & Tell
The first impressions, as they say, are the most important, and to start off our list we begin with Show & Tell’s welcome email. The wonderful hero image draws you in with its brightness and warmth, making me want to be part of this friend group and a part of their community.
My enthusiasm for our connection is matched by their personalized message (they know my name!) and premium content, such as the convenient discount code. Sadwe blocked out the discount code? Well, head over to their website for some email inspiration and your very own discount.
2. Dapper Boi
Subject line: NEW DROP: Dark navy chinosBy Dapper Boi
As an email marketer, it’s important to find inspiration both within and outside of your industry. For me, there’s no better place to look than retail brands like Dapper Boi.
Retail consistently perfects the use of imagery. Dapper Boi stands above the rest with how they showcase their clothes, their mix of still and action shots, and their choice of models. So, if you’re looking for inspiration, or a new pair of pants because your office is not sweatpants friendly, look no further than Dapper Boi.
3. The Trevor Project
Subject line: Support our life-saving missionBy The Trevor Project
In the last email, we saw the power of images. Now, let’s turn to copy. There’s no group that excels at crafting amazing stories like non-profits. The Trevor Project is a great example as each email they send ties back to their mission while still addressing current events, celebrations, or holidays.
In this email, they give subscribers a first look at their Pride partners and share ways to celebrate and help the community.
4. Lesbians Who Tech
Subject line: Find Your Match at Pride Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Joins LineupBy Lesbians Who Tech
No matter how you pronounce it – gif or gif (personally I’m team gif), when they are added to any email, they make a big impact. Event emails allow us to break the traditional image to text ratio as seen here with the list of speakers.
This list grows with each promotional email, creating excitement for the event and driving the reader down the list to the additional calls-to-action at the bottom.
5. Wildfang
Subject line: JUST WHEELIE GOODBy Wildfang
Even without that amazing subject line, this email has everything you want. From the bold typography to the striking images, this email makes me want to don some coveralls and head out on my wheelie.
6. Bonus: Erdos + KoBy Erdos + Co
While not technically an email, I wanted to highlight this great email pop-up. Erdos + Ko show us how to craft a pop-up that’s not intrusive by having a clear message about how they’ll use my email and their commitment to my privacy. Plus, who wouldn’t want to sign up when the owners have invited you into this homey scene with their adorable dog?
Thanks for joining us for another edition of Emails We Love. What LGBTQIA+ emails are you celebrating this month?
The post Emails We Love: Pride Edition appeared first on Campaign Monitor. -
Top 10 mind-blowing statistics about hyper-segmentation you have to know in 2021
Segmentation has been around for quite some time already, but it resembled more of an uncut diamond – rough and not really visible. With the ongoing changes in technology used for gathering data, new generations of consumers who require highly personalized content and recent changes in buying behaviors caused by COVID-19, updating the ways of data segmentation has become crucial. Segmented campaigns can bring up to 760% revenue growth for companies, so if you want to keep up, you must do it properly.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘If I see one more line about how shopping has changed over the past year, I’m out’ – then you’re right. This statement seems to be obsessively repeated in every article related to eCommerce. But well, I’ll be damned, it’s true! Shopping has changed, and ignoring it can cause serious damage to your business!
How it all started
A segment is a group of users who share something in common.
To give a little background on this topic, let me first explain how it used to be. At the dawn of personalized offers, market segmentation was based on just a handful of qualities.
Let me ask you a question, who would buy a wedding dress? Firstly – a bride-to-be, that’s obvious. But how about a man, who wants to buy it for his fiancé, a kid wanting to dress as Corpse Bride for Halloween, a middle-aged woman who just decided to marry or a stylist to use it for photoshoots?
A few years ago, in the not-so-distant past, a wedding dress manufacturer would only target women in their twenties and early thirties. And that would be about it. At the time, this unfair generalization was just enough for brands, after all, there’s always some woman who wants to buy a wedding dress, right? Well, let’s face it, that kind of thinking won’t get you far as a successful company.
That’s why you need completely different ways of segmentation.
Types of segmentation
As I said, segmentation has been around as long as e-commerce. But back then, in the 1990s, there was a lot of customer data and no smart ways to analyze it. Today, with the advent of codeless approaches and software, the full potential of data can be used for your own needs of better personalization. With the vast amount of data available on today’s consumers combined with proper software to analyze it and provide actionable insight, brands can amplify conventional market segmentation markers and supplement them with all kinds of data. These can include:
Demographic segmentation – age, gender identification, education level, income, family situation or ethnicity or even job situation and industry,
Psychographic segmentation – interests, beliefs, values, personality traits, priorities, influences or lifestyle,
Behavioral Segmentation – buying patterns, brand loyalty, spending habits, brand interactions,
Geographic segmentation – postal code, urban or rural, climate, area around a certain location, city, and country.
But even if segmentation has evolved and now includes many more elements, is this its final form?
Enter of hyper-segmentation
So here we go again… Shopping has changed over the last few years. This is thanks to upgraded AI-powered software that works much better than 5 years ago due to Machine Learning features. Also, the changing profile of the customers themselves! We have entered an era where a huge customer base consists of Millennials and Gen Z, who have very different needs than previous generations. 70% of millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant offers! And of course the changes that the pandemic brought. The coronavirus made us rethink what we really needed for fear of losing our jobs or not having enough money. Maximizing offers to customers had to be almost perfect.
We’ve gone from the shock phase after COVID-19 through the acceptance phase, and now it’s time for action. While for now, marketers are heavily focused on go-to-market actions, in the longer term, they need to realize that eventually things will normalize and will return to normal aka. before pandemics. So how do you combine the ‘right now’ with the long-term, creating a solution that works for both?
Balancing these needs (flexible short-term, and solid long-term) is one hell of a ride for many executives. Here is where hyper-segmentation enters the picture.
What is hyper-segmentation
Hyper-segmentation involves identifying segments and accounts with high potential and high propensity for targeting. If you wonder, how is it different from the traditional segmentation, I’m rushing with an answer.
Hyper-segmentation, as the name suggests, is ‘hyper’, which means it goes beyond traditional segmentation. It is often referred to as 1:1 personalization. To give you a ready definition, according to Cap Gemini hyper-segmentation is “advanced and real-time customization of offerings, content, and customer experiences on an individual level.” Simply put, segmentation is the customization of a product, service or experience to a unique customer.
If you’re wondering how it differs from regular segmentation, it’s not just finding a group of people connected by the same characteristic. It’s more about creating a segment ‘at the moment’, even for a single customer. Companies are re-segmenting their customer base to target customers and potential customers who show an increased willingness to buy ‘now’.
Top 10 statistics swirling around hyper-segmentation
To give you an idea of how important hyper-segmentation is, there is no better way than to use statistics to do it.
77% of marketing ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns
The reason for this is simply to segment your customers into small groups and, with the 1:1 approach, even into a single user with unique characteristics. This, of course, leads to highly personalized offers that translate into higher chances of purchase.
Non-targeted campaigns show a 50% lower CTR than segmented campaigns
Email marketing is alive and well, but non targeted campaigns are a dud compared to targeted ones! It is common knowledge that under no circumstances should you create one email copy and send it to everyone. The real art worth mastering is to unleash the power of hyper-segmentation and use it to send multiple email campaigns, even to the smallest possible groups, but with a guarantee that they will be opened. This will make customers feel valuable, resulting in a better Customer Experience that will directly translate into their loyalty to your brand.
Segmentation leads to 3 to 5% increase in returns on promoted sales
Using the potential of behavioral segmentation, you can easily act on AI-driven predictions of transactional activity to predict the next purchase, the risk of churn, CLV and the communication channel most efficient for each buyer. Just inform them (but do it smartly!) about new offers and change your pricing strategies based on well-analyzed consumer behavior.
Segmentation causes companies to be 60% more likely to understand customers
Segmentation makes companies 130% more likely to know their customers’ motivations and 60% more likely to understand their concerns and challenges, which directly translates to increased lead generation and revenue goals. No big conclusions here – knowing your customers is like having a golden goose.
Only 4% of companies segment with multiple data types
42% of marketers don’t segment and only 4% segment with multiple data types (and that’s where the hyper segmentation starts). As we established earlier, in today’s marketing world, there is simply no place to operate without segmentation because people want it! 91% of consumers want to shop with brands that only provide them with relevant things. As the famous David Ogilvy quote goes: “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife”.
Using personas makes 90% of companies more knowledgeable about their customers
Use of segmentation in its easiest form can bring you even 140k of new customers with the high propensity of buying your products, which was confirmed by The Royal Canadian Mint case study. However, leveraging the potential of properly conducted buyer persona, leads to target your audience on a completely new level. 90% of companies using personas is able to understand their buyers better, according to research. AI-powered segmentation helps you address personas’ needs in a dynamic way, and hyper-personalization allows you to respond to their needs in real-time
Conclusions
So how do you feel about it? Are you more likely to leave your money on the table, acting by the outdated rules of an old and unattractive to today’s market segmentation rules? Or maybe you will take the challenge of hyper-segmentation, taking advantage of the 1:1 approach, and providing relevant offers for a completely new profile of young customers adapted to pick through more and more attractive offers? The ball is in your court.
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39 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List
I have some bad news — your email marketing contact database degrades over time.
Your contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another, opt-out of your email communication, or abandon an address they only used to fill out forms on websites.
As a marketer, it’s your job to make sure you’re constantly adding fresh contacts to your email lists so you can continue generating growth. While purchasing emails is an option, it’s not always the best way to go about this.
In this post, discover high-quality strategies to help you grow your email list to ensure that you have a large audience of subscribers eager to hear what you have to say and likely to make purchases and contribute to your business growth.Sometimes called subscriber lists, email lists can get smaller if members unsubscribe and grow as you continue to collect more and more addresses through lead generation.
If you’re not working on building your email list already, or you’ve run out of ideas on how to do so, here are 39 simple ways to grow your email list. Please note that, with these methods, it’s essential to allow people to opt-in to receiving additional emails from your company, as some may not be interested.
39 Creative List Building Techniques
How To Grow Your Email List Using Email
1. Create unique email content.
Want to retain your current subscribers and have them help you grow your list? Create unique email content. If your emails are entertaining, informative, and valuable, recipients will always look forward to receiving them and will be more likely to forward them to their networks. This helps you gain exposure and obtain additional subscribers.
2. Encourage subscribers to share and forward your emails.
Include social sharing buttons and an “Email to a Friend” button on your marketing emails. By doing this, you’ll gain access to recipients’ friends, colleagues, and networks to expand your contact list. At the bottom of your emails, include a “Subscribe” CTA as a simple text-based link so that the people receiving the forwarded emails can easily opt-in too.
3. Segment your email lists by buyer persona.
Email recipients are more likely to click through emails that cater to their specific interests, so using varying types of email subscriptions to send targeted content to different segments of your audience is worth considering.
If you create multiple targeted subscriber types, you’ll increase the chance that visitors will subscribe to one of them. In fact, marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
4. Reinvigorate a stale email list with an opt-in campaign.
Do you have an older list that you suspect is mostly decayed? Create an engaging opt-in message and send it to your old list and encourage contacts to re-opt in if they’d like to, but also promising to remove all contacts who don’t respond.
Though it may seem counterintuitive to remove folks from your email list to grow them, emailing contacts that you know are engaged can improve your deliverability and increase the odds of your email being shared with those outside your current database.
5. Add an opt-in link to your employees’ signatures.
Hyperlinked email signatures can lead people to a landing page where they can sign up for your mailing list. Plus, if you’re already in a natural email conversation with them, subscribing to more emails can be a natural next step.
How To Grow Your Email List With New Content
6. Create a new lead-generation offer.
Create a new gated lead-generation offer, like a free ebook, and host it on a landing page that asks visitors to provide their email to download it.
7. Create a free online tool or resource that requires sign-up.
Free online tools make your users’ lives easier, especially if all they have to do is sign up with their email address. For example, we’ve created quite a few free tools, like Website Grader, to gather email addresses.
8. Create additional bonus content.
Not all gated content is worth it to a website visitor. Sometimes, to gain their interest, you need to give them free content first. You can begin with a blog post that offers beginner advice on a subject, then offer additional bonus content with more advanced tips that they can access by submitting their email address via a landing page.
How To Grow Your Email List Using Social Media
9. Promote an online contest.
Use your social media accounts to host a free giveaway that requires contact information to enter. You can encourage your followers to click through to your website and sign up using their email addresses.
10. Promote a lead gen offer on Twitter.
Create a Twitter campaign to promote an ebook or free resource to your followers that requires using an email address to redeem.
11. Use Pinterest to promote gated visual content.
Pinterest plays host to visual content that encourages visitors to sign up to see more content. Use this to your advantage, and promote your gated visual content on the platform, so users are eager to learn more from you and submit their email to get more high-quality information.
Featured Resource: 12 Pinterest Templates for BusinessDownload These Templates for Free
How To Grow Your Email List Using Facebook
12. Make your email newsletter the theme of your profile cover photo.
Your Facebook profile cover photos are a great place to call attention to something specific, especially your email newsletter. If you create a high-quality graphic that highlights and calls attention to its value, you can entice users to submit their email to gain further benefit from the content you offer.
Featured Resource: Five Free Facebook Cover Photo Templates
Get These Customizable Templates
If you do this, you should also consider leveraging our next tip, making it easy for users to seamlessly submit their emails once you’ve attracted their attention.
13. Add a call-to-action button to the top of your Business’s Facebook page.
The value of this list-building technique is in the destination: add a CTA button to your Facebook page that links users to your sign-up landing page or a gated featured resource that requires email access. We added CTAs to our HubSpot Academy Facebook page, as displayed in the image below.
Image Source
In addition, placing a sign-up CTA button within your profile makes it easier for users, as they won’t need to leave Facebook and go to your site — they simply click the link, and you take them there.
Here’s a guide from Facebook on how to add one to your profile.
14. Share newsletter previews on your profile.
Creating a Facebook post that showcases a snippet of your email newsletter is a great way to attract your audiences and entice them to join your email list. They’ll get a preview of what you have to offer, become eager to learn more, and sign up to continue generating value from your business. Within this post, you can include a link to your sign-up page for easy and quick sign-up.
15. Promote content through Facebook that requires an email address to access.
Promote content in your Facebook posts that encourage email submission to access. This content can be something like a gated ebook, joining a giveaway or contest, or even saying that email subscribers get early access to new products.
Be sure to add social sharing buttons to your landing and thank-you pages to encourage your leads to share within their networks.
How To Grow Your Email List Using YouTube
16. Add engagement features to your YouTube videos.
End screens, also called video outros, are a tool that YouTube offers creators to direct viewers to take additional action after finishing a video, like clicking on a link to your website or watching another video on your channel. As they are used to generate further engagement from your viewers, it’s worth considering adding hyperlinks to your sign-up landing page in your end cards to grow your email list.
This tip is beneficial if you have created an informative video with mostly surface-level content. A more advanced view is provided in a gated offer or your email newsletter.
17. Use your header and images to promote your email newsletter.
Capture leads by placing a link to your sign-up landing page in your channel header. This image is front and center on your profile, and if your banner is eye-catching, well designed, and calls attention to your content offer, users will be drawn to it, which places the CTA link in their direct line of sight.
The red arrow in the image below points to a CTA on the HubSpot Academy YouTube page that leads users to a course enrollment offer that requires an email to sign up.18. Promote your emails in your video descriptions.
Your YouTube video descriptions talk about the content within your videos, so viewers know what they’re about to watch. Each of your descriptions will likely contain unique elements, but it’s worth plugging your email sign-up landing page link within each of them.
This tip can be especially useful if you create how-to style videos, and you can entice users to sign up for more informative content and instruction by clicking the link in your description.
Featured Resource: 7 YouTube Description Templates [Free Prompts]
Download These Customizable Prompts
How To Grow Your Email List Using Instagram
19. Add a call to action to your Instagram bio.
Your Instagram bio is a great place to share information with your audience, like a CTA that calls attention to your email list and a link to your sign-up form.
Your CTA text should entice users by explaining the benefit they get from signing up, like obtaining bonus info, access to exclusive offers, or a general business newsletter. Placing the link directly in your bio also reduces customer effort, as they can simply click and sign up in a pop-up window within the app.
20. Share posts that lead users to click the call-to-action email link in your bio.
While you may not share posts that outright say “Give us your email,” you can certainly see success from sharing posts that entice users to share their contact info.
For example, you can advertise a giveaway and let users know that they can enter by clicking the link in your bio and submitting their email addresses. In another case, if you post an informative video about how to use your products, you can entice users to sign up because your emails will offer more informational content about how to use your products.
21. Use the swipe-up feature to share your landing page.
If you have an Instagram Business profile and more than 10k followers, you can add a clickable link to your Stories that users can access by swiping up on the story.
This feature is an excellent opportunity to share a link to your sign-up page or another offer on your site that collects email addresses in exchange for value, like a free trial. You can also use this feature to link to something like an informative blog post with a lead generation offer that your audience will be excited to sign up for.
Featured Resource: 8 Instagram Story TemplatesDownload These Free Templates
22. Add an email button to your business profile.
A more direct way to get user emails is to add an email button to your business page. This tool is primarily used for service needs so that customers can reach out to you for support inquiries. Still, it gives you the opportunity for further lead nurturing by asking if customers want to opt-in to receiving more emails.
Here’s a guide on how to add one to your profile.
How To Grow Your Email List Using LinkedIn
23. Send readers to a landing page for email sign-up.
After having conversations on LinkedIn, you can share links to your sign-up pages. You’re allowing users to continue the interaction you’ve just had, as your email will provide them with further high-quality information and content related to your business.
You can send these links in InMail messages, comment threads, and personal 1:1 direct messages.
24. Post about your email newsletter.
If you have an email newsletter, you can post snippets of its content on LinkedIn and let users know that, if they sign up, they’ll get access to the entire piece and every newsletter from there on out.
25. Publish links to gated offers.
When you share a post on LinkedIn that contains high-quality information your audience can benefit from, round it out by encouraging users to sign up for your email list. If what you’ve said has resonated with them, they’ll recognize that receiving emails from you will give them additional access to the high-quality content you offer.
You can also do this in appropriate and relevant LinkedIn group discussions — just be mindful of the topic being discussed to ensure your offer is a welcome addition to the conversation.
How To Grow Your Email List On Your Website
26. Ask website visitors for feedback
People enjoy offering feedback on information that pertains to them. On your site pages, include a form that asks visitors what questions they might have about your business, and collect email addresses to follow up with them.
27. Shorten the length of your lead-capturing forms
It’s tempting to collect as much information on a user as possible right away, but adding too many fields to your landing pages and lead-capturing forms can drive people away. Reduce the length of your forms to just two to three fields — you can collect more information from them once you start a conversation.
28. Link to offers across your website that capture email signups
Create CTAs that link to your offers across your website that captures email sign-ups. Some key places to consider include your website’s homepage, your ‘About Us’ page, and your ‘Contact Us’ page.
29. A/B test different campaign copy
You might be doing all the right things to generate leads — landing pages, gated content, contests, and more, but not seeing the success you’re looking for. The problem may be that the design or copy itself isn’t driving the engagement you need.
A/B test different aspects of your list-building campaigns with different versions of the same content. This includes the call-to-action text, the color of the gated offer, and even where these sign-up forms are placed on your website. Sometimes a small change can drive hundreds more conversions.
Featured Resource: The Complete A/B Testing KitDownload the Free Kit
30. Create a blog that readers can subscribe to.
If you don’t already blog, you should. Blog posts help you increase your ranking on search engines and generate blog subscribers to upgrade to more actionable email campaigns over time.
31. Guest blog for other websites and share a call-to-action.
There are many websites and publishers out there that cater to your audience — and larger portions of it. Guest blogging for these websites helps you expand your contact list through exposure to a new audience.
When you create guest blogging content, include a CTA for readers to subscribe to your sites’ blog or email newsletter.
32. Include customer reviews on your sign-up landing pages.
It’s one thing for you to tell people to sign up for a campaign, but it’s another thing for your happiest customers to say it too. Customer reviews are the social proof that encourages people to join in on something, and you should publish these reviews on your website, especially landing pages with sign-up forms. Including reviews will add genuine value to your content when people are on the fence about submitting contact information.
How To Grow Your Email List With a Partner
33. Run a promotion on a partner website or email newsletter.
Similar to guest blogging, partner websites can help you target a new audience. Use this partner source to direct visitors to your website, where you’re already sharing sign-up forms.
34. Host a co-marketing offer with a partner.
Creating an ebook or webinar with a partner can split up the work of content creation and allow you to share the audience of a similar business. After you release your content, split the leads you generate with your partner.
Creating an ebook or webinar with a partner can split up the work of content creation and allow you to share the audience of a similar business. If the content is gated, you’ll collect email addresses from a new audience for nurturing.
How To Grow Your Email List With Traditional Marketing
35. Collect email addresses at a trade show.
Offline events like trade shows are highly anticipated growth opportunities for professionals in your industry. Demo your latest product at an appropriate conference and collect signups in person.
Once you’re back at the office, import these signups into your contact database, and be sure to send a welcome email that confirms their opt-in to your list.
36. Host your own offline, in-person events.
Meetups, seminars, hackathons, educational panels, and your conferences place you front and center of a networking event. Those who attend are often more qualified to be contacted because they came to your event. Take the opportunity to collect email addresses from attendees, and send a welcome email and encourage opt-in.
37. Host an online webinar.
Webinars are the perfect opportunity to talk about your industry and access the audience of thought leaders that you may want to present with. The best part? Webinars are normally registered for via email, so you have audience emails to add to your list for further nurturing upon registration.
38. Add QR codes to your display ad.
Incorporate a QR code into your print marketing collateral that people can scan for more information on the printer content. You can set it so that your codes require email addresses to access additional content so that you can grow your list.
39. Collect emails in-store.
If you have a brick-and-mortar store where you interact with customers face-to-face, launch a store membership that they can sign up for via email at the register. You can create an email campaign designated to walk-in customers, which can help you keep in touch and reward loyalty to your product.
The examples above are all things you can do to increase your business’s email list. The best way to do so is to leverage multiple strategies on this list, helping you reach your audiences from a wide variety of angles and increase the chances of growing your list.
As you grow your email list with fresh, opt-in contacts, you’ll be able to nurture them with middle-of-the-funnel offers that allow you to convert early-stage leads into sales-ready leads. -
8 of the Top Marketing Challenges Faced Globally [New Data + Expert Tips]
Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs.
Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area you can improve to turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.
But marketing is often fast-paced, so it can be difficult to identify which areas you’ll want to develop to facilitate stronger growth in 2021 and beyond. For that reason, it’s important to pause for a moment and reflect on the biggest challenges marketers feel they’re going to face this year.
Why? Because problems are much easier to tackle once you’ve correctly identified them.
So … what’s happening in 2021?
Below, let’s review the current global marketing issues impacting the industry, according to marketing experts.
Biggest Marketing Challenges [New Data]
To start, I surveyed over 120 marketers to gauge the biggest challenges affecting the industry as a whole.
By far, “Generating traffic and leads” was marked by nearly half as the biggest challenge marketers are facing this year.
This challenge was followed by 21% who said “providing ROI for your marketing activities” was their biggest challenge.
“Delivering an account-based marketing strategy” (8%), “securing enough budget” (6%), and “managing your website” (5%) were the other three notable challenges marketers feel they’re facing in 2021.
It’s important to note, a few other marketers marked “targeting content for an international audience”, “training your team”, and “hiring top talent” as their top challenge … but these three challenges were marked by less than 3% of the respondent pool, so they’re less statistically significant.
Let’s dive into these in more detail, along with expert tips to combat these challenges, next.1. Generating Traffic and Leads
Generating enough traffic and leads is the top global marketing challenge in 2021, according to the data mentioned above.
HubSpot’s new State of Marketing report supports this — in fact, “Generating more leads” is the top priority of marketers in 2021.
Why It’s a Challenge
John Lee, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft Advertising, believes that generating leads will be a particularly big challenge for marketers in 2021. He told me, “Getting quality traffic isn’t a challenge today, and likely won’t be tomorrow. There has been growth in search and content marketing in 2021. New channels continue to surface and show promise, too (TikTok or audio chat rooms anyone?).”“Through the 2nd half of 2021 and beyond, the challenges will lie elsewhere – maintain and growing leads or sales, tracking and scaling, etc.”
Lee adds, “‘Sea change’ is the phrase that comes to mind for the state of digital marketing today. Change in the realm of privacy, identity, and changes to cookies. Change in the form of lost data clarity (will cookie-based conversion tracking continue to work, GA4, access to search queries, etc.). And all of this sits within the context of change to how and where we work and economies in flux as the world continues to move through the pandemic.”
Fortunately, privacy changes doesn’t mean the end of generating leads — it simply means learning how to re-think strategy. As Lee told me, “To weather this storm of change, marketers need to be vigilant in monitoring and understanding industry-wide acceptance of privacy protocols and updates to search, social, and display/native platforms (consumer-side and marketing/advertising-side). And last, but not least — lean into the power of peer support and networking for sharing best practices and learning.”
Additionally, marketers are struggling with producing enough demand for their content. And as the years progress and competition stiffens, this will only become truer. With so many options of platforms for marketers to publish their content and even more ways to promote it, it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts.
What Can You Do?
When it comes to creating content that produces enough traffic and leads, marketers should ask themselves two questions: Are you truly creating high-quality content — the type of content people would pay for? And, do you know the type of content your audience actually wants?
For instance, when asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service in 2021, 69% said they’d prefer to watch a short video over a text-based article, infographic, or ebook. This means, if most of your product-related content is in ebook format, you could be missing out on the majority of consumers who prefer video.
Additionally, the length of videos produced by businesses is increasing. In fact, the number of videos in the 30-60 minute category grew 140% in 2021, compared to 2019 — suggesting that long-form video content is becoming a more popular option for companies.
To ensure you’re creating content that resonates best with your audience, you’ll want to refer to analytics often. Use effective tools to properly track the types of content that performs best with your audience to generate more leads in 2021.
Additionally, once you know you’re creating the type of content your audience wants, the focus shifts to promoting it in a way that makes your audience take notice.
More than ever before, people are being flooded with content. Consumers don’t have to use a search engine to find answers. Instead, articles fill their news feed or buzz in their pocket via mobile notifications. To keep up, consider exploring alternate distribution methods — like social media or podcasting — to increase brand awareness.
2. Providing the ROI of Your Marketing Activities
Measuring the ROI (return on investment) of your marketing activities has remained a top marketing challenge globally year-over-year.
In fact, when asked how confident marketers are when making budgeting decisions to invest in programs that influence revenue, roughly half (48%) said they were only somewhat confident.
It continues to be a vital way for marketers to understand the effectiveness of each particular marketing campaign or piece of content.
Plus, proving ROI often goes hand-in-hand with making an argument to increase budget: No ROI tracking, no demonstrable ROI. No ROI, no budget.
Why It’s a Challenge
Although return on investment is a crucial stat that shows your campaigns success or progress, tracking the ROI of every single marketing activity isn’t always easy, especially if you don’t have two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales reports.
What Can You Do?
Providing ROI often comes down to using effective analytics measurement tools. For instance, Beautiful.ai Director of Marketing Kim Giroux told me, “Marketers are constantly challenged to illustrate the ROI of their efforts and 2021 is no exception. Proving ROI doesn’t always have to mean extra work or effort though. In fact, certain technologies bake ROI into existing work processes.”
Giroux adds, “Take presentation software, for instance. Savvy marketers today can create and use pitch decks with built-in presentation analytics that offer real-time data — such as how much time was spent viewing individual slides. Armed with these insights, marketers can better gauge stakeholder interest, inform their strategies, and adjust their campaigns.”
Christina Mautz, CMO of Moz, believes measuring ROI comes down to redefining the marketing process as a whole. She told me, “My biggest challenge, and one all marketers face in providing ROI, is the prospect of meeting traditional KPIs in the modern workspace.”
Mautz says, “Instead of leads and trade show success, marketing wins are now largely digital: engaging prospects and generating more clicks, downloads, and page visits.”CMO of Moz Christina Mautz says, “To better measure marketing progress, we have to redefine the marketing process, encouraging collaboration with sales and reaching KPIs together.”
“For example, statistics such as page visits per sale or rising higher in the search engine results page (SERP) give marketers and SEOs tangible evidence as to how their work is meeting their ROI. New buying patterns and a customer-centric world require a divergence from the old, but measuring ROI will look far different than it did before and some leaders may not understand how or why.”
When it comes to providing ROI, there’s a strong case to be made for dedicating time and resources to establishing links between marketing activities and sales results. This means using both marketing software (like HubSpot) and a CRM solution (like HubSpot’s free CRM), and then tying them together to close the loop between your marketing and sales efforts with a service-level agreement (SLA). That way, you can directly see how many leads and customers are generated through your marketing activities.
3. Securing Enough Budget
How can you create a winning marketing campaign without a budget? The truth is, it’s pretty hard. But, even when you have a great, revenue-generating idea, you still usually need to get your budget approved by a higher-up.
Particularly in the aftermath of the global pandemic, some companies don’t have the means to increase marketing budgets in 2021. As a result, marketers are faced with the challenge of achieving high levels of growth with minimal financial support.
Why It’s a Challenge
Securing more budget is a pressing challenge for marketing globally. And often, getting more budget is easier said than done — especially for smaller organizations that aren’t working with sizable or flexible marketing spend.
But the key to securing more money for your team might not be that complex. Here’s what you can do.
What Can You Do?
The key to unlocking budget lies in being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts. According to our report, organizations that can calculate ROI are more likely to receive higher budgets.
Again, success with inbound marketing also plays a large role in driving higher budgets. Effective strategies obviously produce results and make a strong case for increasing budget. But remember, inbound marketing is a long game. If you get off to a slow start, you shouldn’t back off — in fact, you might consider doubling down.
To learn more about how to understand and leverage marketing ROI, check out this simple guide.
4. Managing Your Website
In 2021, 64% of companies are investing in website upgrades.
Although managing a website is consistently a challenge to marketers, it seems to be growing less threatening. In the data mentioned above, only 5% of marketers listed “managing your website” as a top challenge.
Why It’s Still a Challenge
Chances are, your website’s performance is high on your list of priorities — particularly since website speed and performance plays a major role in your website’s SEO ranking. It’s an asset that works around the clock to draw in visitors, convert them, and help you hit your goals.
Issues with website management include a variety of different factors, from writing and optimizing the content to designing beautiful webpages. Here are a few things marketers can do to deal with this challenge.
What Can You Do?
First, try HubSpot’s free website grader to determine how your website stacks up on key metrics including SEO, mobile, and security performance — and how you can improve it.
If your primary challenge with managing a website has to do with the skills and resources you have available, you aren’t alone. This is especially true for small companies who don’t have all the talent in-house required to cover content, optimization, design, and back-end website management.
One solution? Hire freelancers and agency partners. To find freelancers, we recommend:Tapping into your personal and professional network by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks with a description of what you’re looking for.
Browsing freelance writers and designers based on their portfolios and areas of interest. For writers, check out Zerys and Contently. For designers, check out Behance & Elance.Browsing HubSpot’s Services Marketplace, which lists a wide variety of designers from partner companies and agencies we’ve deemed credible.
Overall, you can make website management easier on your team by hosting your website on a platform that integrates all your marketing channels like HubSpot’s COS.
Finally, for the projects you want to keep in-house, here is a list of ebooks and guides that might be helpful to your team:Run a Website Grader report
Ebook: Website Redesign GuideEbook: 77 Brilliant Homepage Design Examples
Ebook: How to Design and Optimize Landing Pages
Blog: 27 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Ebook: The Ultimate Workbook for Redesigning Your Website
Ebook: The Marketer’s Guide to Mobile
5. Targeting Content for an International Audience
Targeting is a key component of all aspects of marketing.
With 65% of marketers currently marketing internationally, and at least one-third of marketers planning to initiate an international strategy in 2021, it’s important to have an international strategy.
To be more effective at targeting, one of the first things any marketer needs do is identify their buyer personas to determine to whom they should be marketing.
Why It’s a Challenge
If you’re expanding internationally, it can be a big challenge not only to figure out the best ways to market to an international audience, but also how to to organize and optimize your site for different countries.
Here are a few other top challenges when marketing internationally:
Image Source
What Can You Do?
Download our free ebook, The Global Marketing Playbook. There are some really helpful tips in there that’ll help give you some direction on global marketing, including how to identify your top three growth markets, how to explore local trends, and tips on choosing the best localization providers.
Additionally, when marketing to a new region, the most common tactic marketers use is to shift their product offering.
Remember, your website visitors might speak a plethora of different languages and live in totally different time zones.
To make your content appealing to a wide audience, you’ll need to keep your global visitors top-of-mind when creating all your content. This means being aware of seasonal references, translating units of measure and monetary references, and giving translators the tools and permissions to customize and adapt content for a specific audience when they need to.
When in doubt, solve for local or cultural challenges by hiring locally. With a newly hybrid workforce, physical location is no longer a limit to who you can hire.
Finally, be sure you’re optimizing your website for international visitors, too. For more SEO-related tips and resources on global marketing expansion, take a look at How SEO is Different Around the World, According to HubSpot Content Strategists.
6. Training Your Team
As companies scale and technologies continue to evolve, training your team will become a greater challenge for marketers.
Why It’s a Challenge
Whether it’s training them on the concepts and tools they’ll be using every day or making sure they’re achieving their full potential, the struggle is real across the board.
To combat this, I’ll share some tips I’ve used during my trainings to make sure the concepts and tool tips stick and have a lasting effect on your team and your marketing.
What Can You Do?
To get an overall idea of where your team stands, take a few minutes to assess each of your team members’ marketing strengths and weaknesses, levels of expertise, and passion/commitment to your company.
Then, objectively rate the priority (or level of importance) of their expertise and their contribution to bottom line objectives (ROI) to date. Here’s a simple assessment tool from Lean Labs to help you evaluate your team so you can figure out who needs recognition and who needs coaching.
You also might consider requiring your team members to rack up some online marketing certification. HubSpot Academy, for example, offers certifications, documentation, and training programs to help people master the basics of inbound marketing. Google also offers training and certifications on analytics with their online Analytics Academy.
What about new hire training, specifically? We recommend creating a training plan for new team members. Here at HubSpot, each new marketer is given a document to lay out specific goals and help new hires demonstrate their effectiveness. To create your own 30, 60, or 90 day plan for new hires, take a look at The 30-60-90 Day Plan: Your Guide for Mastering a New Job [Template + Example].
7. Hiring Top Talent
Hiring top talent is another challenge marketers commonly report experiencing.
Why It’s a Challenge
Many companies are shifting more resources to inbound marketing, which means higher and higher demand for top marketing talent. But supply simply isn’t keeping up. From sourcing the right candidates to evaluating for the right skills, finding the perfect person could take months … or more.
What’s more, the type of marketing talent companies are looking for is changing, too. According to a 2020 report from LinkedIn, employers are seeking marketers with soft creative skill sets as well as hard technical skills. And the quick rate at which the demand for these jobs are rising has caused a marketing skills gap, “making it difficult to find candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing.”
What Can You Do?
Stefanie Grieser, co-founder of Shine Bootcamp, a professional speaker accelerator for women, understands the challenge of hiring top talent.
She told me, “When I talk to high-growth companies or marketing agencies (and the marketers running those teams), I’ve found that hiring not only top talent, but diverse top talent is extremely challenging. In fact, I was just having a conversation with an agency owner who hires SEO and paid marketers, and he told me, ‘Hiring is still the biggest challenge we face.’”
In 2021, hiring talent can be incredibly difficult — particularly as more companies become competitive with 4-day work weeks, transparent salaries on job descriptions, and the adoption of remote work, which enables companies to hire anywhere. Fortunately, Grieser provided me with a few tips for employers to stand out from the crowd. She told me, “My suggestion here is for marketers to invest heavily in their employer brand for the long-term. Just like you need to market your product, you also need to dedicate resources, time and energy into marketing your company as an employer.”
Grieser adds, “I would suggest Diversity Tech Co, Tech Ladies, and Girlboss as go-to resources to post jobs. These organizations are run by incredible individuals who really care about diversity, equity, inclusion and intersectionality. I’m also seeing niche communities and job boards pop up. For marketers specifically, I would post your open roles here: Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group, Hey Marketers, and Superpath (which is focused on content marketers specifically).”While it might seem random to discuss employer branding in a post about marketing challenges, it isn’t — since it’s often the marketing team that cultivates a strong employer brand. As Grieser points out, “Airbnb has an Engineering and Data Science blog, Intercom has an Instagram dedicated to their design team, and Dooly posts short, LinkedIn posts (see an example here) interviewing their fun team with a few fun hashtags #doolydreamteam and #meetadooligan.”
“Guess who leads this initiative? The marketing team. Think about how you and your team can showcase your work and your team’s work. I won’t try to assume that employer brand falls solely in your court, but as a marketer, you have natural skills that will lend themselves to marketing the company as whole.”
LinkedIn data from 2020 shows that 87% of active and passive job candidates will consider new job opportunities. Additionally, the number one reason candidates will consider or accept a job is career growth. This means that job listings and a company culture that offers employees a plan for growth will see the most interest from talent.
8. Delivering an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a new trend, which is a growth strategy in which marketing and sales collaborate to create a personalized buying experience for an identified set of accounts.
However, interestingly, the most common challenge with ABM is delivering a personalized experience.
Why It’s a Challenge
Currently, there isn’t a lot of software that’s focused on account-based marketing. Many companies that are implementing ABM strategies are using manual methods, which means some accounts are getting lost in the cracks.
However, marketers strongly agree that personalized content (56%) and advanced data management (43%) are keys to ABM’s success.What Can You Do?
To deliver a more personalized experience, you should use a software that helps you combine your sales and marketing information.
For example, HubSpot’s ABM software help unite your marketing and sales teams with collaborative, intuitive ABM tools that create seamless buying experiences for your highest-value accounts.
This software can enable collaboration among teams and personalize content.
Additionally, HubSpot’s software has account-level targeting added to the LinkedIn Ads integration, giving you the ability to target companies by target account status or tier, and contacts or subsets of contacts at target accounts.
The account overview sidebar, the ABM playbook for sales reps, and a native integration to link your HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts, help further deepen your relationships with people over time, helping build more authentic connections with stakeholders within each account.
Does your company face any of these marketing issues?
A thorough analysis of your marketing strategy and its current performance will help you discover where your biggest marketing opportunity lies. This will allow you to focus on improving the areas that need the most attention, so you can start making your marketing far more effective.
If you’re faced with a challenge and want ideas on how to best tackle it, you can always consider getting some help by any of the various types of marketing training that are available.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2012 and has been updated for freshness and comprehensiveness. -
20 of the Best Free Google Sheets Templates for 2021
Whether your marketing position requires you to send invoices to clients, track website analytics, or create budget and expense reports, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself working with spreadsheets in some form.
And if you’re anything like me, those spreadsheets can feel frustratingly tedious when you’re under a time crunch.Fortunately, Google Sheets offers 26 pre-built templates, allowing you to create reports and analyze data in spreadsheets faster and more effectively.
Best of all, Google Sheets templates cater to specific categories. For instance, if you click the Paid Traffic Report template, your spreadsheet is already organized into Overview, 12-month Trends, and Medium Breakdown categories. It knows what you need and offers it without any manual input.Here, we’ll dive into 20 of the best free Google Sheets templates for any marketing role in 2021, so you can create better spreadsheets while saving valuable time to focus on more important things — like making sense of the data itself.
Before we properly delve into the templates, let’s see why Google Sheets is an excellent choice for free templates and how you can find these templates.
Why use Google Sheets?
Google Sheets is part of Google’s G Suite of software that has over 6 million users. Here are some reasons why you should consider using it too:
1. It’s free.
Even if you don’t pay for Google’s G Suite, you can still use Google Sheets and its templates for free.
2. It’s easy to use.
You don’t need to pick up a manual or guide before you can start using and enjoying the features of Google Sheets and its free templates.
Since Google Sheets is cloud-based, you can work on them wherever you are or on whatever device you own as long as you have an internet connection and can access the Google account where the Google Sheet is.
3. It encourages collaboration.
Unlike with Microsoft tools, it’s easier to collaborate with Google tools like Docs and Sheets.
With a few button clicks, you can share a template or Google Sheet with other members of your team wherever they might be in the world. You can also leave comments as you and your teammates work on the same sheet in real-time.
You can also download your sheets or templates if you like.
How to Find Templates In Google Sheets
There are two common ways you can find and use free Google Sheets templates.
1. Google’s In-Built Template Gallery
On your browser, go to Google Sheets. Click “Template Gallery” at the top right. Explore the templates to find the right one for you.You’ll find different templates for your personal, work, and project management needs. Here’s an example of what the Personal template library looks like:
2. Add-Ons
Another way to find free templates in Google Sheets is to download and install the Vertex42 add-on. Here’s how: Open an existing Google sheet, or type “
sheets.new” to create a new one. Then, find and click the “Add-ons” button on the top left menu.
Type “Vertex42” into the search bar, and click enter. Install the add-on.
To access the templates, click on “Add-ons,” then “Template Gallery for Sheets,” then “Browse Templates.”
Here you would find templates that can help with almost everything you need — whether you need to create an invoice, income/expense tracker, or a dashboard to manage your projects.Let’s now look at some of the free Google Sheets templates you would find useful as you run your business.
20 Google Sheets Templates
Google Sheets Templates for Finances
1. Invoices
If you’re a freelancer or work for a small business, you probably use invoices to bill clients for services. This invoice template makes the process simple — it provides space for all the necessary information and looks more professional than a plain spreadsheet. Plus, the template is customizable, so you can create a theme that aligns well with your brand image.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.2. Annual Business Budget
This template is more in-depth than it initially appears. There are tabs at the bottom — setup, income, expenses, summary — and each one includes several subcategories. “Expenses,” for instance, covers everything from taxes and insurance to travel and customer acquisition.
The final tab, “summary,” takes your income, subtracts your expenses, and automatically updates to display your ending balance each month. This template is a good option if your budget requires a lot of customization and many moving parts.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.3. Financial Statements
The financial statements template truly is an all-in-one resource to keep track of business transactions, profits, and losses. The “profit & loss” tab automatically summarizes revenue, costs, and expenses for the year and can display your growth rate percentage.
If you work for a small business and need to manage much of your finances, this template offers resources and guidance to make the process easier and less prone to human error.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.4. Expense Report
Knowing how much you spend is an essential part of running a successful business. But it’s often easy to forget to record these expenses with the amount of work you have to do every day. This simple expense report template makes it super easy to record all of your expenses and those of your employees.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.5. Purchase Order
You’d find this template to be a life-saver if tracking the orders or supplies your office/department makes is part of your job. With this sheet, you can save time and avoid the headaches that come with monitoring orders or shipments.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.Google Sheet Templates for Reporting and Analytics
6. Website Traffic Dashboard
Suppose your role requires you to analyze website traffic using Google Analytics. In that case, this template is a fantastic supplemental tool to pull that data into an organized report, saving you tons of time. Better still, you can use the dashboard template with Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to monitor and analyze data from PPC, SEO, social media, and website analytics.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.7. Website Paid Traffic Report
This template makes the process of analyzing and reporting on paid traffic relatively seamless. It automatically collects data on your paid sources from Google Analytics and provides a clean chart with important information, including PPC’s percentage of goal conversions, total traffic, and bounce rate.
You can also adjust it to compare different periods or different channels or segments. If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate paid’s influence on your business, this is the tool to do it.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.Google Sheet Templates for Customers
8. CRM
To organize your contacts and automate an effective sales and marketing process, you must have a CRM — but if you’re a small company just starting, you might not feel ready to implement a fully established CRM with all the features.
This CRM template is a great place to get your feet wet. It saves automatically, so you never lose data. The share feature allows you to work with coworkers within the CRM, which helps encourage collaboration between your sales and marketing departments.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.9. Sales Dashboard
This template helps salespeople manage their leads, sales, and revenue all in one place. At the bottom of the template are different tabs where you can easily input your data that eventually shows up on the main dashboard. There’s also an “instructions” tab to get you up to speed with using the sheet.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.Google Sheet Templates for Project Management
10. Project Timeline
Whether this is your first significant project or you’ve been managing projects for years, the project timeline template is a valuable tool for organizing and implementing each project step. The template helps you visually break up a daunting project into smaller pieces, ideally making it easier and less stressful to manage and delegate tasks.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.11. Project Tracking
If you’re juggling many projects simultaneously, this project tracking template could become your new best friend. This template takes project management to the next level by enabling you to organize your tasks into categories by date, deliverables, status, cost, and hours — best of all, it lets you prioritize your projects. Hopefully, simply visualizing what needs to get done first will alleviate time-management stress.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.12. Event Marketing Timeline
The event marketing template offers organization and structure if you’re implementing an upcoming business event or campaign. It provides categories you might’ve forgotten to consider, including local and national marketing, PR, and web, with subcategories ranging from an email newsletter to impact studies.
The template is already organized with all necessary categories for planning an event, reducing the time you spend on tedious manual input.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.13. Gantt Chart Template
The Gantt chart template helps you alleviate any concern you might have over timing — and, when you’ve got a complex project with overlapping components, I’m willing to bet timing is one of your primary concerns.
Using the Gantt chart template helps you visualize all steps and delegate essential tasks more efficiently — labeling the task with an owner on one chart is undoubtedly easier than individually following up via email. And by sharing the template with coworkers, everyone is on the same page.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.14. Product Roadmap
Without a product roadmap, it’s easy for your team to misunderstand the direction you want a project to take. With this template, you can solve that problem. The template provides a calendar summary of a project and the milestones and deliverables as you go through the product development process.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.15. Product Launch Plan
This template has everything you need to organize the best product launch you’ve ever had. It has fields to help you outline your market and competitive analysis, project strategy, key messaging, and who your target audience is.
If you’re in charge of managing a product launch and want to organize the best launch ever, then this is the project management template for you.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.16. Action List With Ranking
Managing a project requires that you track daily actions to ensure you don’t lose focus. But sometimes, you’ll have some tasks on your list that are more important than others. You can easily arrange these tasks based on their importance with this action list template. You can also share this sheet with others if you’re working as a team.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.17. Project Budget
Away from the general business budget, most managers create budgets for each of their projects. This project budget template is for you if you’re looking for a simple yet effective template that lets you quickly estimate how much revenue a project would generate r how much it would cost.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.Google Sheet Templates for Leading a Team
18. Employee Shift Schedule
Keeping track of who works what hours, and how much each employee gets paid, can feel confusing, especially if you lead a team of part-time contractors or seasonal interns. This template includes slots for employee’s names, hours worked, and monthly wages, making your paycheck process straightforward and organized.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.19. Weekly Timesheet
Like the employee shift schedule, the weekly timesheet helps you track time and know how much to pay employees or subcontractors. However, the weekly timesheet template works better if you want to quickly find out how much time each employee spends on a project.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.20. Contact List
This template comes in handy if you want to create a contact list database. You can easily use the template to store your contact information (say, phone number and email address), your employees’ contact, and those of emergency services like the ambulance or fire department.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.Start Using These Free Google Sheets Templates
No matter what your job is, using a suitable spreadsheet would make it easier and more enjoyable.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with using these 20 free Google Sheets templates to save time, effort and improve your productivity.Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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3 Tips to Boost Call Center Agent Engagement
Despite advancements in customer service technology and automation, one thing hasn’t changed: people remain fundamental to the success of a contact center. Human customer service agents and their knowledge, capacity to troubleshoot, and empathetic nature ensure they will always be a necessity when it comes to assisting customers.
With this in mind, it’s important that your best agents are happy and engaged enough with their work to stay put and make your contact center successful. But how? Getting started is easy: you can read all about it in our latest practical guide, How to Foster Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center, a rich report offering concrete insights and best practices for supporting your employees whether they’re in-office or remote.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
This guide also breaks down how strong agent engagement can significantly boost revenue and overall call center metrics – two good reasons for call center managers to take their employee engagement seriously.
For a sneak-peak, and to get a head start on improving engagement, read some of the top tips from our guide below (and then download the complete guide here. It’s free – we promise!).
Employee Engagement Tip #1: Invest in communication
Communication can make or break any team, regardless of industry or function. This is especially important if you work in a hybrid contact center, where staff are both near and remote. Ensuring continuity in your communication when you have staff dispersed across the globe can feel impossible to manage and do well, which is why you should deliberately funnel more time and energy into resources to improve communication with your agents, and thus, their engagement.
Some ways to incorporate clearer communication protocol in your call center include:
Daily team stand-ups (or “huddles”)
Consistent contact with your agents via a daily meeting or ‘huddle’ is the first step towards improving communication in your call center. Using these moments to go over team successes, challenges, and upcoming daily tasks can reassure agents that they have frequent opportunity to access support from their team.
Weekly full-company meetings
Company-wide town halls can go a long way in improving top-down and bottom-up communication. Having a clear line of sight into what the company is doing, and giving agents a forum to address their concerns and offer their ideas to leadership, are both strong motivators.
Strong instant messaging channels
Encourage your staff to instant message one another internally. Set up Slack, MatterMost, RocketChat, WhatsApp, or another internal network to encourage open, honest, and constant communication within and across teams.
How to Make a Call Center Agent Engagement Survey
Employee Engagement Tip #2: Give them real benefits
Call center agents are at risk of being treated like temporary workers, which can naturally reduce their engagement and commitment to your team. This is why it’s integral to find ways to entice and re-engage them via incentives and benefits.
Benefits are ultimately a secondary form of compensation, and nearly as attractive to your staff, who see these perks as a thermometer of the way they are valued by the company. So, if you’re looking to engage or re-engage your contact center agents, rethinking your perks is a great place to start.
And you don’t have to bankrupt yourself to offer better benefits. Some low-cost ways of rewarding your top-performing call center agents include:Generous parental leaves or sabbatical opportunities
Gamification and performance-based incentives
Access to free helpful services (financial planning, meal subscription boxes, etc.)
Free or subsidized professional development
And more (view the full list here)!5 Important Strategies for Agent Engagement in 2021
Employee Engagement Tip #3: Invest in agent-first technology
In a hybrid call center environment, it is crucial to equip your agents with the tools they need to do their job well, including technology that makes life easier for them on the front lines.
A more engaged employee usually has the software, services, and equipment they need to be effective in their role, and makes it easier for them to handle enough enquiries to drive sales, solve customer disputes, and otherwise contribute positively towards your business goals.
If you invest in technologies that improve their lives, agents will feel valued, and will return the favor with higher engagement and top-notch performance. Consider the following ways to equip your agents during their toughest moments on the job:
Put a scalable call center software in place.
Invest in a premium integrated call center technology that also houses knowledge bases and supports agent feedback. Shop only for the highest-quality call center software that includes call-routing, cloud-based calling, and sophisticated reporting.
Help your agents tackle call volume spikes.
Show your agents love by offering them tools that take the edge off of stressful peak call center periods, including outsourcing overflow handling services. Another cost-effective option? Call-backs. These ensure your agents don’t get overloaded, and your customers aren’t waiting endlessly on hold.
Top Contact Center Technology Trends in 2021
Invest in AI to support your agents.
Leverage advances in AI that can ultimately benefit and support your agents, including the ability to forecast call volume spikes. Not only is this an affordable option, it also ensures you can easily staff-up or otherwise support your call center agents proactively.
COVID-19 accelerated many call center technologies that were already underway, providing many more opportunities to leverage tools that make your call center operations more efficient, which will help to increase agent engagement and satisfaction.
Like with any good tool, the time is now to use them, or lose them.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.