Author: Franz Malten Buemann

A strong understanding of your clients’ different customer journeys is crucial to maintaining a strong relationship with your clients’ customers. The more targeted and personalized each touchpoint or email feels to a customer, the more engaged they’ll be with your clients.
That’s good news for your clients, of course. But it’s great news for you and your agency, too. Better performance means a stronger relationship with your accounts, higher renewal rates, and a strong resume you can use to attract new business to your agency’s email marketing services.
Building highly targeted emails for every customer journey is time-consuming if sent as one-off campaigns. It’s simply not scalable to manually send messages to every target right at the most opportune moment. Fortunately, advanced marketing automation tools streamline the customer journey touchpoint process and empower your clients to connect with customers when it matters most.
In this guide, we will first discuss what customer journeys are, and will then explain how marketing automation plays a role in connecting customers to your clients.
What is a customer journey, and why is it important?
The customer journey is the sum of experiences, decisions, and interactions someone has leading up to and through making a purchase. It describes how someone first becomes aware of a brand, engages with it, and eventually buys (or doesn’t buy). And hopefully, the journey doesn’t end there.
Everyone’s customer journey is unique, and every brand will have different ideal paths to purchase. Even so, there are recognizable patterns in buying behavior and consumer preferences that can be identified, mapped, and acted on.
The goal for your clients is to acquire new customers and retain the customers they already have—one of the best ways to do this is by managing different customer journeys. For example, one customer journey can exist for someone who signed up for your client’s newsletter for the first time, and a different customer journey can exist for a customer who decides to extend their existing monthly subscription. As the experts, you should be offering advice, strategy, and support in recognizing and improving their journeys so potential customers are more likely to convert and keep coming back for more.
A common starting point for agencies that plan customer journeys for their clients is identifying which personas make up their client’s customer base. From there, you can determine which stages exist within a customer journey.
According to Daniel Newman, CEO of Broadsuite Media Group, you need to know customers’ different personas, goals, and what actions a customer needs to take in order to reach their goal. This will determine the different touchpoints your clients should prioritize for a personalized and targeted customer journey.
Some agencies decide to create customer journey maps and then use their analysis to discover where there are gaps in communication and where their clients succeed in customer satisfaction. According to Goran Paunovic, Creative Director at ArtVersion Interactive, 
“Journey mapping…encourages stakeholders to consider the customer’s needs, wants, emotions and questions, and [creates] the path to fulfill those needs.”
The main things to consider when developing and analyzing a customer journey is to look at what customers feel, expect, and need at each stage of the journey. A customer might want to feel appreciated after first signing up for a newsletter, and they will want to feel understood and heard later on in the journey when they are seeking an effective solution to their problem.
It’s important to be in touch with the customer from start to end of their journey and throughout the different stages to make sure that they feel valued, heard, and engaged. McKinsey & Company believes that doing so can “enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.” Not only will customer journeys keep your client’s customers engaged—but they will also drive increased ROI.
Using automation to trailblaze email journeys
Marketing automation emails that are sent in customer journeys are based on triggers defined by an email marketing tool. This is known as an email journey. When each customer takes a specific action, the marketing automation tool of choice will send that customer a relevant email that you designed with or for your client.
These tools also allow you to define what each ‘trigger’ is, which will vary from client to client and journey to journey. You can plot different customer journeys as needed and create the content for each email in every stage of the journey. This is far more efficient than sending one-off email campaigns to a list of customers (though there’s still a time and place for that).
When designing behavior-triggered emails, the emails are automatically sent out based on the segmented lists you build with your clients and the stage in which each individual falls within their journey. This saves time and increases relevance and personalization. In fact, studies show that automated emails get 86% higher open rates, produce a 196% increase in click-through rates, and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails.
Plotting the course to conversion: Customer journey mapping
Combining the ideas of customer journeys and email journeys may sound a little complicated at first, but visualizing them together can help explain them to your clients. 
The process of email journey mapping combines the customer journey with an automated email process to create an outline of the content the subscriber will receive during their journey. A basic customer email journey might look something like this:
You can begin with a simple outline of a journey for a given persona with your client, then build it out over time with more touches or adjustments based on testing results.

The different stages and touchpoints in an automated customer journey
One of the first steps in refining a great email journey map is determining how many touchpoints you should provide for, and what message you want to highlight at each point. The most compelling journeys are usually those with regular, consistent messaging – but if you send too often, or aren’t providing the right message for the moment, you risk an unsubscribe. It’s also important to factor in how your clients’ other channels might come into play, aligning email touches with a well-timed SMS or direct mail campaign can make for a powerful combination.
There are three basic stages most customers go through when exploring a brand. In the first stage, casual prospects have become aware of your client’s brand and offerings. The second stage involves active subscribers who have had their first experiences with your client’s business, whether it’s visiting a website, signing up for email, or even shopping in their store. Finally, in the third stage, these prospects indicate some willingness to become customers and should be guided toward making a purchase.
Potential customers at each stage have distinct needs and should receive different kinds of email content and messages that will guide them to the next. For instance, early messages in stage one should be more introductory in tone, explaining the ins and outs of your client and what they should expect. Later in stage three, it’s time to push more direct, action-oriented messaging. In between, helpful content and resources will help prospects feel more comfortable with the client and more confident about making a purchase decision.
To learn more about what the content of these journeys should be, you can read more here.
The power of email automation
When combined with email list segmentation, automation can turn your email marketing strategy from so-so to unstoppable.

Find the complete infographic of high-impact email marketing statistics here.
4 Automated customer journeys you can implement for your clients
Now it’s time to start thinking about how to transform customer journey strategy and implementation into marketable services and billable hours for your agency.
Creating automated customer journeys can be an intimidating task for brands to think through about all the varying types of subscribers they’ve accumulated. This is the perfect opportunity for you to swoop in and save the day with indispensable ideas and proven tactics to build out and optimize their customer experiences into high-converting purchase funnels. 
To assist in your creative process, we’ve compiled a list of automated customer journeys that could (and should) be included in every email marketing agency’s arsenal.
1. Welcome email
We all know how important first impressions are. When subscribers first sign up for your client’s newsletter or purchase a service, this behavior should trigger an automated welcome email or series of emails that makes a big, memorable impact.
These campaigns are also known as lead nurture campaigns since a new lead will often sign up for a brand’s newsletter or another email list prior to making a first purchase.
Through the use of a welcome email campaign, you can nurture your clients’ leads and slowly encourage products or services that may suit their needs instead of overwhelming them with purchase decisions right away.
Many agencies decide to send special offers in welcome emails, which encourages users to explore your client’s products. You can also include fun content with tips and tricks they can use when learning about your client’s brand. This is a good opportunity to incentivize further connection to your client, such as signing up for a rewards program or following their social accounts.
You can decide to include 5-10 emails in this initial stage spread out across the month in order to promote engagement through offers and storytelling content.

Source: Really Good Emails
2. Reminder emails
Reminder emails are most relevant to existing leads and customers who need to follow up with your client’s brand. This could include scheduling follow-up appointments, renewing a subscription, or taking advantage of certain perks and benefits. This is a great way to re-engage with current customers that have gone dormant by sending them a quick call to action.
You may want to have just a couple of reminder emails set up in this journey in order to prompt them to take action, while also providing them with useful content that relates to their next step.
For example, if they’re being reminded to renew a subscription, you might want to include what’s different about the new subscription model versus the old one.

Source: Really Good Emails
3. Milestone offers
Milestone emails can include anniversary offers or new VIP offers, as well as personal milestones like birthday messages. These emails are based on triggers and can depend on where someone is in their journey or what data you have on them in your client’s CRM. Sending relevant and personalized offers helps to build a relationship with your client’s customers, and also encourages them to make purchases.
These messages are especially useful because they nurture loyalty. Only your client’s most dedicated customers will receive these emails. These journeys send the message that the more loyal a customer is to your client’s brand, the more benefits and special treatment they will receive.

Source: Really Good Emails
4. Re-engagement emails
These “We miss you” emails target customers who seem to be at the end of their customer journey. As discussed earlier, the goal is to make sure a customer journey continues after the purchasing process and that customers remain engaged with your clients. One of the best ways to re-engage with customers is by understanding what their expectations are, why they became unengaged, and how you can appeal to their needs.
Customer journey mapping can really come into play here when designing these automated customer journey emails. Sending dynamic content, solutions to their problems, engaging stories, and offers can help to re-engage distant customers and bring them back into the fold.

Source: Really Good Emails
Wrap up
When creating customer journeys for clients, you need to take into account the different stages that exist in each journey and how these stages vary by segmented lists or personas. Pay attention to customers’ feelings and needs in each stage of the process. Take time to truly understand the customer experience of every client and how their various personas might begin a journey.
Marketing automation not only saves time, but it also increases relevance, efficiency, and revenue. The more you can focus on building strong relationships for your clients; the more effective their automated customer journey campaigns will be.
Email automation isn’t just good for sending relevant information to your email subscribers, it can also be used to gather valuable customer data. Check it out.
 
The post Advanced Email Automation and Customer Journeys to Implement for Your Agency Clients appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Hey there! I want to create a unified dashboard to get real-time updates from twitter, linkedin, facebook, youtube, instagram. For youtube I am able to get the reports on Data Studio. What would you recommend for the rest? What are some tools or methods you have tried out.
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Whether you’re part of an internal marketing team or an agency developing an advertising pitch, it’s imperative to nail your advertising proposal to gain stakeholder clarity and secure their buy-in.
After all, advertising is expensive, and a poorly managed campaign results in wasted funds and resources that fail to deliver a return on investment – which could hinder a company’s ability to hit its awareness and sales goals.
Executives need to know that an advertising project has been well thought-out from all angles before they front the money to develop creative and buy advertising space. And the best way to inform and persuade these decision-makers is with a crystal clear and actionable advertising proposal.
In this article, we’ll outline the actions to take, templates to use, and questions to answer when developing your advertising proposal, so you can get moving on your advertising project faster and maximize revenue from it.

Follow along with HubSpot’s free Advertising Proposal Template for PowerPoint. The template is completely customizable to your business’s needs and makes developing an advertising proposal presentation simple, covering sections thorough proposals need to have such as:

Project timeline.
Project team.
Project budget and fees.
… And more.

While the template is best-suited for marketing agencies, it can easily be adjusted for in-house marketing teams for internal project management. Download the template now to get started.
How to Make Your Advertising Proposal
1. Plan your advertising project.
Preparing an advertising plan is an essential first step in an advertising pitch project. As a rule of thumb, it’s best practice to work off of an advertising plan template to ensure you check all the necessary boxes when it comes to the project.

In the next few sections, we’ll highlight what you should include in your advertising plan and proposal, but the reason to start with this step is to ensure organization. By proactively setting up your framework, you’ll be better suited to prioritize your tasks down the road and understand which roadblocks you might face – and in the process, get ahead of them.
2. Specify your tasks and/or services.
So, you’re moving forward with your advertising proposal – but what exactly are you planning on doing?
The next step is to outline the scope of work for the project, including:

Conducting market research.
Choosing an advertising platform.
Developing creative and copy.
Working with media buying/selling vendors.
Analyzing and presenting results.

Depending on the makeup of your team or agency, you might be responsible for some or all of these tasks – or perhaps some not even listed here.

The important thing to remember in this step is to make the expectations of what your team will be doing abundantly clear.

There should be no question from those to whom you’re presenting regarding what will or won’t be done by your team.
3. Pick your team members.
An advertising campaign requires contributions from marketing, sales, sales enablement, finance, and/or the product teams.
In your proposal, put faces to names by explaining who will be responsible for what. Naturally, this process might take more time if you’re combining the efforts of those within and outside of your company, or if there are different team members in the same department who need to decide which person will be responsible.
4. Establish a timeline.
When boiled down, executives need to know what is happening and when it is happening. Thus, the next step in the process is to build a timeline for your activities.
Now that you have a list of those who will be involved in your campaign, work with their schedules and areas of expertise to determine who will be doing what, and at what point.
Your timeline should be clear, efficient, and attainable. When presenting your proposal, you don’t want anyone feeling unsure about your team hitting its targets, but you also don’t want to give off the impression that you’re not moving as diligently as possible.
As such, be sure you can speak to why each step of the process will take as long as you’re suggesting and what contingency plans – if any – you have in-place.
5. Solidify your budget. 
The key distinction between marketing and advertising is budget. Advertising requires an additional investment to buy space on a desired platform, and when asking for money, you’ll need to be transparent about how much you’re asking for, and why.
Your budget outline should speak to all funds required to execute the campaign, such as:

Agency fees (if applicable).
Creative development fees for video, imagery, and/or graphic design elements.
Advertising placement costs on your intended platform(s).
Additional headcount (internally or freelancers).

Alongside your budget, you should also speak to the projected monetary impact of your advertising campaign, including both revenue and profit, and, if available, the projected increase in customers and unit sales. Adding these elements can help make the budget more justifiable.
6. Share your presentation.
Once you have all of these elements laid out in your advertising proposal, it’s time to share your presentation.
If it’s via email, make sure to include relevant articles or resources in your messaging or in an appendix, and encourage the email’s recipients to promptly send any questions so you can address them and move forward with the project quickly.
If the presentation is in-person or over a video call, always be sure to rehearse your presentation – particularly if more than one person is explaining the proposal. As a best practice, you should leave ample time at the end of your presentation to answer any outstanding questions somebody may have before signing off on the proposal.
3 Tips for an Outstanding Advertising Proposal Presentation
1. Be creative.
You’re being tasked to work on this advertising project because you’re creative, so why would you allow your advertising proposal to be any less creative?
Make sure your proposal and presentation are filled with imagery and is well-designed. If appropriate, you might also want to consider throwing in some references, GIFs, or jokes to appeal to your audience’s more lighthearted side.
2. Be clear.
We’ve said this already, but advertising campaigns can require enormous investments of time, resources, and capital. Leave absolutely no stone unturned in your presentation, or you might risk setting false expectations about your team’s capabilities.
A lack of clarity might also convince your audience you haven’t fully answered all questions, which could result in the decision to not move forward with the campaign. When it comes to numbers, timelines, and processes, clarity is key.
3. Be concise.
Finally, always remember that we’re all pressed for time. While clarity is essential, there’s no point in redundancy or wasting your audience’s time. Some information is best suited to be clarified in the Q+A session after the presentation or in follow-up collateral if requested.
In your presentation, prioritize delivering the need-to-know information – but be prepared to follow-up on anything that needs clarification.
Delivering a Winning Advertising Proposal
With these steps and this template, you’ve got the foundation to bring your advertising campaign idea to life. Find the balance between clarity and creativity, know your numbers, explain your process, and you’ll be on your way to getting your advertising proposal approved.

 

 

While 29% of start-ups simply run out of money, 19% turn up worse than the competition, and 14% have awful marketing, the need for mysterious-sounding growth hacking arises.

 

The Definition

 

If you have ever had any interest in expanding the group of your audience, there’s no way you hadn’t heard this weirdly annoying buzzword: Growth Hacking. For those living under a rock, it may seem a little suspicious, dangerous and for most – illegal. 

 

Hacking is the term very close to hackers, and hackers are those guys in American movies, wearing masks and doing black magic on their computers with supernatural typing speed, right? Well, no, not really. Growth hacking refers to nothing more than just an umbrella of strategies, whose main purpose is to help your company grow. Rings any bell? Neil Patel explains growth hacker as someone who uses “analytics, inexpensive, creative and innovative ways to exponentially grow their company’s customer base.” Some call growth hacking the best way to grow a business or even the future of marketing. But as the reader sinks into many articles written about this phenomenon, it turns out that a single definition is unable to cover the whole topic.

 

What is all this about?

 

Growth hacking is relatively new on the marketing’s horizon. Coming down to the simplest explanation possible it’s a process consisting of data-driven and experiment-based processes. This definition may still seem enigmatic, so let me rephrase it to a more real-life example. 

 

A growth hacker is someone who constantly uses data – in the sense of technology and automation – to which they can then apply marketing and psychological strategies to conduct a series of experiments ultimately leading to the discovery of a hidden treasure – the Growth Hack.

 

How is it different from regular marketing?

 

The answer is: not that much. Growth hacking is considered in frames of marketing, as a subset. If we think of it, marketing is about increasing sales through generating leads, digital marketing it’s the variation of the very same but performed online, and growth hacking benefits from both, with the difference of using a more intuitive, and maybe even eccentric way with the heavy reliance on data. As Sean Ellis was the coiner of the very term we are discussing he defined a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth.” And yet, there are a few significant discrepancies between marketing and growth hacking.

 

The Differences

 

For starters, growth hackers operate in the future. Okay, it sounded a bit like they in fact were magicians, so maybe let’s change it to operate FOR the future. Their focus is mainly on next growth opportunities, rather than current day-to-day ones like marketers do. This allows to actually predict (basing on relevant data) the trends, which then can be used to the business’s advantage. 

 

Funnel-wise – mentioned “hackers” use the whole spectrum of it, including Retention and Referral, while most marketers stay in the area of Awareness and Acquisition. 

 

The bigger is not always the better – while marketers often focus on long-term projects, growth hackers are making it small. Trying everything little by little is for sure a more convenient way than eating the whole cake at once, hence the idea to run small experiments and see how accurate the results are – if not good enough, it’s easy to start over by running another test. 

 

There are also already mentioned differences like the use of technical skills and data-driven work specificity.

 

Alright, knowing all this, where we can expect to use growth hackers?

 

Either grow fast or die fast

 

I admit that may sound a little harsh, but isn’t that what marketing is? The thing is we are talking not only about enterprises who want to occasionally boost their revenue because they can. We are talking about start-ups whose first months of putting themselves in there might be decisive on their survival or extinction. That’s what growth hacking was created for. 

 

Let’s be honest, starting a business from scratch ain’t easy. It is estimated that 90% of new businesses fail severely due to poor growth in their early stages. After digging through businesses postmortems CB Insights reports that 29% of them simply ran out of money, 19% turned up worse than the competition, and 14% had awful marketing. I can bet that none of them had a growth hacker. 

 

It is the rapid growth that keeps start-ups from burning out faster than a can of hairspray thrown into a fire. That growth we are talking about provides financial strength, allows you to do successful marketing, and brings in enough money to give you the opportunity to grow and glow. 

 

To ensure this rapid growth to your baby-company you need to know how to expand your customer base and your revenue in a really short time. For that, you should be introduced to a certain skill set, which is a must-have for a growth hacker.

 

The Skillset

 

No Hogwarts certificate is needed for that, but for sure some wizard skills are welcome. A proper growth hacker in order to boost your start-up at the beginning of the journey is able to make customers feel emotionally linked to the company so that they keep coming back for more. The solid profile of a growth hacker should include:

 

Experience in product marketing and user retention
Ideally, clairvoyant abilities but knowledge of psychological principles and behavior patterns should also be sufficient
Experience with full-Funnel
Great analytical skills when it comes to data
Hands-on experience with marketing technologies

 

So, when should you consider growth hacking?

 

Analyzing who growth hackers are and why they can be of use when you are trying to build the empire (or just a prosperable company, whichever one you prefer) you should really set up your priorities. 

 

If you are prior to product-market fit, it’s better to wait until you are really sure that the mentioned product is fit to the market you are aiming for. Hiring Growth Hacker with no strategy whatsoever might end up pumping money into multiple channels before the need is validated. 

 

If you don’t have enough data to work on growth hacking won’t be as effective as it would be with a high volume of quantitative data. Make sure you have the numbers that are workable, such as web traffic, user behaviors, and other types of in-product data to power the optimization of growth channels.

 

If you are broke and your marketing budget is nonexistent, you have to remember that acquisition channels are pretty expensive and do not generate a lot of ROIs at the beginning.

 

Summing up

 

Growth hacking sounds cool, that’s a fact, and in most cases, when used properly it can also do cool stuff in terms of your start-up. Going back to the beginning of this article, it’s not just an annoying buzzword or a bunch of illegal actions – it’s a set of skills and knowledge from the combination of superficially unconnected fields, that have more and more sense when we sink deeper into the topic. The growth hacking strategies you decide to use greatly depend on what type of business you have, your current situation, and what you hope to accomplish. Then when your goals are clear, and fresh air of victory fills your lungs, your start-up will have the opportunity to thrive with the help of growth hacking.

marketing automation

marketing automation

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