Author: Franz Malten Buemann

I’m a realtor and it’s common knowledge that a lot of realtors don’t like to make phone calls or outbound prospect, which is totally crazy to me. But this is the truth. So and me and two realtor friends built an automated lead follow up platform for agents and mortgage lenders. It has prebuilt campaigns with ringless voicemail recorded by the user, text and emails for instant lead engagement and long-term nurture. You can use the prebuilt templates or create a campaign of your own and then simply upload a CSV file and broadcast a campaign or seamlessly and instantly integrate through Zappier or email parsing with any new leads come in to your website or web forms. It works particularly well with Facebook leads. We’re thinking this could also help other sales people besides real estate agents. Thoughts?
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Ever see those cool 360-degree cameras on red carpets at award shows?
Someone famous will stand in the middle and several cameras positioned all around will simultaneously capture pictures of the star, creating a spectacular image that gives you a 360 view of the person.

Now, imagine if you could do that with your target audience? Capture them from all angles as they interact with your brand. With a single customer view, you can.
The issue is, many businesses struggle to know where to start.
At the end of this article, you’ll understand what a single customer view is and how to create one for your brand.
A single customer view combines data from a consumer’s behavior on web and email, social media activity, demographics, interactions with customer service, and purchase history.
Let’s go through an example of an interaction between a consumer and a brand.
A consumer, let’s call her Jazmyn, discovers a brand on Instagram. Jazmyn visits the brand’s website through Instagram and downloads a free offer. Said brand adds Jazmyn to an email list and she starts receiving nurturing emails.
After months of no interactions, Jazmyn rediscovers the brand and makes a purchase. A month after that, she calls customer service regarding an issue with her product.
In just a few months, Jazmyn has interacted with at least three departments within the company: marketing, sales, and customer service. In many businesses, every department tracks data using its own system.
For instance, sales teams often use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track their interactions with clients and prospects while marketing teams use marketing platforms and automation tools to generate leads.
This creates huge data gaps, making it difficult to understand how a user is behaving over an extended period of time beyond a single vertical. It can also lead to duplicate information, leading to dirty data.
For instance, Jazmyn might receive ads for products she’s already purchased. Or she may get a call from customer service asking about a product she’s already reviewed via email.
Having a single customer view allows organizations to build personalized interactions with consumers, based on their current stage in the customer lifecycle. This creates a better customer experience, stronger brand loyalty, and better retention rates.
When you know where your target audience is, you can make enticing offers based on their current needs. It’s personalization at its best.
Benefits of a Single Customer View
When you invest in a platform with a single customer view, you:

Have cleaner data – With an integrated system, you remove information silos, which often cause data duplication.

Gather better insights – When you have an accurate map of the customer journey, you can better understand how your campaigns are performing and identify areas of improvement.

Assign proper credit to the right channels – Proper attribution is a major issue when it comes to audience tracking. With an SCV, you can identify the best and worst-performing channels for future campaigns.

1. Align your data owners and your KPIs.
The first step in creating an SCV is aligning all your data owners across your organization.
It’s important to align your teams early on key targets and key progress indicators. This keeps everyone on the same page and striving toward the same goal.
So, although everyone will be working on different sections, they’ll all be contributing to the same objective. This is key in keeping everyone in the same mindset and easing the transition to a data-driven approach.
Your data owners will serve as liaisons between IT and your team, enforcing governance standards and supplying IT with the access they need.
During this process, your IT team will be instrumental, as they will need to consolidate data from multiple systems and sources.
2. Find the right tech.
The next step is finding a platform with the capabilities to support your company’s needs.
Key features to consider when searching for a platform include:

Usability and accessibility of software
CRM Integration
Data quality tools
Automation

You’ll also want to consider the size of your company and the scalability of the software. all-in-one CRM platform like HubSpot, which combines sales, marketing, customer service data to support a holistic customer experience.
3. Hire data managers.
Depending on your company size, you may want to onboard roles dedicated to data, such as data miners, data analysts, and data migration specialists.
The process of migrating data is a costly and time-consuming one that you may not be equipped for. Instead, hire experts with the knowledge and experience to do it right.
They will be essential not only during the initial building phase but also as you grow your customer base.
4. Sort and integrate all data from your legacy systems.
If you’re an established brand with a ton of scattered data, you’ll need to sort through your systems.
Start by conducting an audit of your data quality. From there, clean your data so you can start integrating it with your other systems, including:

Your data warehouse
Your point-of-sale systems
Your marketing automation systems
Your call center systems

5. Set your data governance strategy.
As you’re in the process of cleaning out old data, you’ll need a new system for new, incoming data.
This is where your data governance standards come into play. They serve as operating guidelines for retrieving, storing, and processing data.
You may wonder, what’s the difference between a data management strategy and a data governance strategy? The former refers to the actions you take to fulfill the guidelines outlined in your governance strategy.
To learn about how to develop a governance strategy, click here.
6. Test your processes.
The last step in this process is testing your new centralized system.
To ensure that your new environment works (i.e., that the data linkage is complete), some test data will need to be used to ensure the data is gathered, stored, and reported correctly on your platform.
This will likely be an ongoing process as your business scales and you implement new touchpoints.
The earlier your team can implement a single customer view framework, the better equipped you will be to serve your target audience. While the process can be expensive and time-consuming, it’s a worthwhile investment that will be instrumental in making strategic business decisions.

The goal of a landing page is to get visitors to take an action, whether that’s to buy a product, sign up for an email list, start a free trial, or something else. 
But like any goal, you shouldn’t just “hope” that it’ll be achieved. You need a strategy that guides visitors toward completing the desired action. 
One way to get visitors to take action is to use mental triggers — subtle cues that nudge readers in the right direction. In this post, we’re sharing effective mental triggers you can use to optimize every element of your landing page. 
Optimizing your offer
Your offer is the most important part of your landing page. Because no matter how many optimization techniques you employ, if your target market doesn’t want your offer, your landing page will not convert. 
A quick way to test whether your offer will convert is to see if it fulfills one of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who theorized that there were distinct levels of basic human needs. Certain levels (like the need for food and water) had to be met first before a person would care about more sophisticated needs (like creativity). 
Maslow envisioned this hierarchy like a pyramid: 

Image source.
If you can match your offer to one of these basic human needs, you can be relatively sure it will be desired. 
For example, computer security software would fall into the “safety needs” category, like this offer from McAfee Total Protection:

Image source.
On the other hand, a university landing page inviting visitors to enroll would fall into the “esteem” or “self-actualization” category, like this offer from Capella University:

Image source.
Optimizing your copy
Your copy – the words on your landing page – is what will ultimately persuade someone to take the desired action. So, it’s very important. 
Don’t rely on sales techniques, such as using hyperbolic words like “best” or “only.” Today, most people are too familiar with marketing tactics to fall for these techniques — and may even resist them. For example, a 2013 study found that people react negatively when they sense someone is trying to persuade them in marketing. 
Instead, emphasize the free will of the reader, so they feel empowered to make their own decision and will be more likely to trust your offer. Use phrases such as “you are free to choose” to ensure readers don’t feel they are being “sold to.”
Another non-salesy (but very effective) strategy is to use storytelling in your copy. Studies have found that traditional urgency techniques (e.g. “limited time offer”) are not as effective, especially in the long-term, as showing the value of your offer through storytelling. 
To make storytelling easier, try following the simple framework created by the founder of Storybrand, Donald Miller. It consists of elements found in the hero’s journey: 
 

Character

Has a Problem

Meets a Guide

Who Gives Them a Plan

And Helps Them Avoid Failure

To End in Success

For example, this accounting firm’s landing page uses the story of the Problem their market is facing to make their message persuasive, but not salesy:

Image source.
Optimizing your headlines
To capture visitors’ attention immediately and keep them engaged on your page long enough to evaluate your offer, you need a compelling headline. Speak directly to the benefits of your product or service and how it fulfills an essential need for your prospect.
One technique to use is the focusing effect.
The focusing effect is the tendency of people to place too much emphasis on one thing at the expense of others. When it comes to your landing page headline, though, you can use this to your advantage.
Your product or service likely has many benefits, but highlighting your unique value proposition (UVP) in your headline helps prospects focus strongly on that one feature. 
JumpCrew lists several of its benefits in the copy, but highlights its UVP (more customers for less money) in the headline to grab visitors’ attention and make them hungry for more information:

Image source.
Optimizing your images
Your images are also very important when it comes to how visitors will feel when they view your landing page. 
One proven strategy is to choose images of people (instead of inanimate objects). 
The theory goes that it’s easier for people to relate to other people than to objects. But you can also take this a step further and take advantage of research that found that when the people in the images are looking at the CTA button, viewers also instinctively look at the button and become click it more often. 
For other best principles, you might find it helpful to follow an image checklist created by the 60-Second Marketer. The images must…

Look trustworthy
Demonstrate the advantages of the offer
Contrast with page design (stand out)
Express desired emotions
Make it easy to see the CTA button

For example, on the following landing page, there’s a photo of a person, who’s looking at the CTA button, and who conveys the desired emotions of the target audience: 

Image source.
Optimizing your CTA buttons
Finally, apply strategy to create CTA buttons that drive more conversions. One of the most effective strategies is to make your buttons stand out from the rest of the page as much as possible. 
According to marketing and psychology researcher, Nick Kolenda, this strategy works because of something called processing fluency. Processing fluency refers to the phenomenon that the ease with which readers understand what to do is closely related to whether they perceive the action as easy and pleasant. 
In other words, if a button is easy to spot and click, it feels easier and more pleasant to actually click. In turn, this will increase conversions.
Take a look at the following example landing page. The CTA button is orange when nothing else on the page is orange. This makes the CTA stand out more. 

Image source.
Wrap Up
Simply creating a landing page and generating traffic to it is not sufficient to increase your conversions. You must design the page with the right elements while implementing some mental triggers. Only then will your visitors be persuaded to take action and your marketing funnel start to collect more and more leads.
The post Design An Optimized Landing Page Using Mental Triggers appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Big Idea or Enduring Question: How do you allow Sales reps an easy to transfer their opportunities to another user? In today’s world, Sales reps switch their job frequently. Transferring their existing or closed deals or leads to another user is … Continue reading →
The post Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 63 (Allow Users to Mass Transfer Records They Own) appeared first on Automation Champion.