Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Note: This is the quarterly update sent to Buffer shareholders, with a bit of added information for context. We share these updates transparently as a part of our default to transparency value. See all of our revenue on our public revenue dashboard and see all of our reports and updates here.

We’ve emerged from a challenging year, one that proved our resilience and gave us a renewed sense of optimism heading into 2021. We spent much of the final quarter of 2020 leaning into the inspiration we gained from the adaptability and strength of our customer’s stories. We observed countless companies shift quickly to remote work, an evolution of work that we always thought would someday come. We reflected deeply on our purpose, questioning how we’d show up for our customers to help them expand their positive impact and grow their brands and businesses over the next decade. We invited the company’s first Chief Product Officer to join Buffer’s Executive team and we committed to refining the company’s purpose, vision, and mission. We established strong company-level OKRs, and set ambitious goals for 2021 and beyond. For another reflection on 2020, check out this review of Buffer’s 2020 in Numbers.With January just behind us, we’re already realizing the exponential impact of optimism, resilience, and a cohesive leadership team in service of the entire team’s execution of shared, ambitious goals. We’re moving quicker and raising our bar in support of small businesses. We’ve re-committed to being bold, increasing the value of the essential tools we offer, while maintaining our strong foundation of Buffer values and integrity.This year already feels so different.  We’ve just launched Buffer’s new engagement tool as the newest feature in our full stack of brand building tools and in response, saw the highest number of daily trial starts we’ve seen in awhile. Along with Buffer’s engagement tool, we’re focused on adding value for customers, improving accessibility, and providing more opportunities for active engagement by leaps and bounds. We’re also hiring several roles this year.We’re looking forward to what’s ahead in 2021.  Let’s take a look at our financial results for Q3 and end of year outlook.  
Financial results from Q4 2020

Q4 2020:

Total operating income: $400,471
EBITDA margin: 7.69%
MRR: $1,760,653

2020 end of year:

Net Revenue: $21,080,452
2.30% YoY revenue growth
Operating Income: $3,318,234
EBITDA Margin: 15.74%
MRR: $1,760,653 (down slightly from end of Q3 MRR $1,761,962)
ARR: $21,127,836
ARR Growth Rate: -4.8%

Metrics
What else would you like to see?
This is the update that goes to Buffer shareholders, but I’d also love to hear from you. Are there other metrics or financials that you’d like to see from us? We’re working on building and delivering a new level of transparency this year and I’d love to hear what you’re most interested in, send me a tweet with your thoughts.

 

72% of websites completely fail to meet expectations for search results (BigCommerce). Basic eCommerce search engines are not able to understand and deliver relevant results, especially when 34% of users search for non-product related content (Baymard). The new SALESmanago solution answers these problems. Search Engine Turbocharger is a mechanism which supports the operation of a traditional search engine but is tailored to the individual needs of the customer. This allows you to create perfectly customized campaigns.

 

Frustration with a general product search decreases sales and sours the Customer Experience

 

The statistics speak for themselves, users who are dissatisfied with the returned results do not decide to buy again, and new customers immediately go to competitors’ websites.

 

39% of purchasers are influenced by a relevant search (ThinkWithGoogle),

Level of churn and burn reaches 68% (Forrester),

15% of search engines have a ‘broken’ search query type performance (Baymard),

 

Better search engines are definitely needed for eCommerce. Search Engine Turbocharger sets new standards in targeted searches. What differentiates it from standard products on the market is advanced AI and NLP. But that’s just the start! SALESmanago Turbocharger also provides 3 additional options for creating non-standard search campaigns – product, filter, or transferring the customer to a selected page in response to search items.  Sounds complicated? Nothing could be further from the truth. It is easy to use and allows you to measure the effects of your activities.

 

Create a thematic product campaign in 5 minutes

 

Customers who use eCommerce search engines don’t expect them to merely understand basic phrases. They want them to be tailored exactly to their requirements and product interests. 

 

Search Engine Turbocharger allows you to create a search campaign by choosing any keywords that will return the selected products as a result of entering them on the website.

 

 

Let’s suppose the user entered the value ‘Perfect gift for my boyfriend’ in the search box.

Thanks to the latest technologies, the mechanism checks which typed phrases match the keywords:

 

Perfect gift for my boyfriend

 

And as a result, it returns exactly the products that you selected in the Advanced Settings panel.

 

Filter campaigns can increase the efficiency of searches and increase the number of perfect responses to queries

 

What if the search engine could return products that include selected filters in response to entered queries? No more tedious and often cumbersome selecting filters on product pages (especially on mobiles). The mechanism itself intelligently interprets the entered phrases and provides only products that fall within the set price ranges or filters. In addition, knowing that clients search for products that we do not have in our database, we can decide specifically which results will be returned by the search engine, and thus generate more sales.

 

 

If a user who is looking for an EXPENSIVE sofa on your website has to scroll through dozens of products that do not match the typed query, they will most likely leave your store. To prevent this, just set appropriate filters e.g. the price range of the products searched for, availability or categories.

 

Link a page with a ready-made campaign and increase sales of selected products

 

Online Stores often have a separate listing page for seasonal sales. Now you can redirect users to it immediately after entering the appropriate phrases in the search engine, and thus increase campaign results, improve sales results, and get seasonal products flying off the shelves in a simple and super fast way.

 

 

How is it done? Simple, in the Actions tile, just enter the address of the page you want to redirect the user to. That’s it – the campaign runs itself.

marketing automation

marketing automation

 

 

According to Accenture statistics, AI will boost profitability by 38% and generate $14 trillion of additional revenue by 2035. Using product recommendations gives approx. 500% higher conversions compared to the generic offer. There are not many credible sources describing how the various recommendation engines work and which algorithms are more effective, hence we chose to compare them, including non-AI and AI-based offers to find out which one is the most efficient.

 

Types and examples of product recommendations

 

Product recommendation engines are systems that enable displaying personalized, compliant with each client’s product information to increase conversion rate and sales. Recommendations can be displayed in a variety of ways such as landing pages, e-mail notifications, or web push. We can distinguish 3 types of product recommendations:

 

Product-based – Recommendations depend on the product attributes
1-to-1 – Recommendations depend on the individual user actions.
AI – Recommendations depend on the similarity between the user and other users.

 

Our goal was to find out how each type of AI and non-AI recommendations work in generating revenue and how their efficiency is compared with the one of mass communication. The conducted research has given us an updated picture of the AI and non-AI recommendations, allowing us to show the most effective recommendation types.

 

We took into account the whole spectrum of data of several dozens of e-commerce vendors utilizing dynamic and AI recommendations in their strategy and conducted a set of statistical analyzes aimed at determining the effectiveness of each of the tested types of recommendations.

 

Product recommendations delivery channels analysis

 

One of the areas which we wanted to recognize after the research, was the impact of the recommendation delivery method on the results. To make the comparison accurate, we concentrated on the communication channels that allow the determination of both, display and click in the recommended products.

 

We included: 

 

mass email campaigns
mass web push campaigns
automated email campaigns
automated web push campaigns

 

Recommendations in automated web pushes generate the highest revenue

 

We start our study with the analysis of click rate in recommendations from different sources – automated and mass emails and web pushes. According to our research:

 

Automatic messages generate more revenue than mass messages 
Bulk web pushes generate more revenue per click than mass mailing and workflow
Automatic web pushes generate more revenue than automatic emails

 

Web push notifications with product recommendations surpass the emails in effectiveness and generated revenue.

 

The results can be seen on the graph below:

 

 

Effectiveness of different recommendation types

 

After conducting the above research, we wanted to check if there is a difference in the effectiveness of different recommendation types. Is AI guaranteeing better conversion compared to other recommendation types?

 

We checked how the efficiency varies for the most popular recommendation algorithms both AI and non-AI-based capabilities to deliver personalized offers and found out that AI-based algorithms, in general, prove to accomplish higher conversion and precision than non-AI recommendation types. However, the highest precision can be reached by using a mix of the two mentioned above.

 

What is the best recommendation engine?

 

As AI recommendations are becoming a standard in the modern eCommerce world, many companies offer their solutions leaving marketers with a troublesome task to choose the most effective one. 

According to research (Comparative Evaluation of Top-N Recommenders in e-commerce: an Industrial Perspective) that evaluates well-known recommendation algorithms, the effectiveness of SALESmanago’s recommendations is positioned on the top.  

 

Comparison of precision for different recommendations engines:

 

Precision is a metric used in the evaluation of prediction models. It responds to the question: What proportion of positive identifications was actually correct. In the case of recommendation algorithms, it shows how many customers’ purchases, we are able to find at least one of the recommended products.

 

SALESmanago’s AI recommendations engine outperforms other solutions available on the market in the precision of the product recommendations by reaching a 5.2 times higher average.

 

If you want to know more about product recommendation benchmarks take a look at the full research.

marketing automation

marketing automation

“This could have been an email.”
Those six words can take the wind out of an office. They mean that time has been wasted, employees are frustrated, and leadership has been ever-so-slightly undermined.
Unjustified meetings are inefficient and grating. Haphazardly putting time on colleagues’ calendars — only to fumble with its purpose, conduct it without direction, or spend all your time talking at attendees as opposed to collaborating with them — takes a toll on everyone involved.
Here, we’ll review some criteria you should look for when deciding whether a meeting is worth everyone’s time, see a few definitive signs that an issue doesn’t warrant a meeting, and go over some of the more prominent, effective meeting alternatives.

When You Should Hold a Meeting
The issue at hand is urgent and time-sensitive.
If the information you need to convey is must-hear and timebound, don’t think twice — book a meeting. You don’t want to run the risk of sending a mass email about a pressing issue, only to have some employees gloss it over or ignore it entirely.
Some things are need-to-know and can’t wait, and your response to those instances needs to reflect that kind of urgency. Don’t be overly passive. Don’t count on your team members to get to the information on their own time. Book a meeting, and get those points across.
You need a space for thorough discussion and multiple perspectives.
Some issues call for some degree of collaboration and thinking out loud. Those kinds of brainstorm sessions and general discussions warrant actual meetings. The spur of the moment thinking and flexibility for your team to bounce ideas off one another is hard to replicate via mediums like instant message or email.
Collaborative meetings foster creativity and critical thinking. If you feel you need your team to immediately run thoughts by one another on the fly and tease ideas out of each other in person, booking a meeting is probably your best bet.
Decision-making is at play.
When the content of a potential meeting is high-stakes — as in “involving decisions that have significant implications on the company’s future” — you have to get everyone together.
You can’t take these situations lightly. In these cases, stakeholders need to know what’s going on and have a forum to air concerns and provide input. An email chain, message board, or pre-recorded video presentation won’t provide that.
When You Don’t Need a Meeting
You don’t have a definitive agenda.
One of the biggest meeting blunders you can make is going in without a plan. Never wing a meeting. Just going in and trying to figure things out as you go is frustrating and obnoxious for your team members — it’s an unproductive waste of time.
If you don’t put an agenda together, you’re also undermining your ability to determine whether the issue at hand actually warrants a meeting in the first place. When you take the time to organize your thoughts, concerns, and materials, you’re giving yourself a chance to see the situation in a more objective light.
With that kind of clarity and perspective, you can more thoughtfully determine whether the information you need to convey is better suited for a mass email, instant message chain, or any other less time-and-energy-consuming format.
You don’t have all your information together.
This point ties into the one above. If you’re not thoroughly prepared or the information you’ve gathered so far presents an incomplete picture of the situation at hand, you’re best off holding off on booking a meeting.
The most effective meetings are thorough, thoughtful, and provide actionable guidance. If you only have a piece of the bigger picture, you probably won’t be able to definitively set your team on the right track — and there’s no getting that time you with everyone booked back.
If you have some information on hand that you feel your team should know. You might be better off touching base with them over a less personal, time-consuming medium and letting them know you’ll have more insight to offer sometime soon.
The meeting is going to involve too many people.
If you’re finding your list of potential meeting attendees seems excessive, you might want to explore other options for getting the information in question out. Massive meetings are often unproductive and typically involve a fair amount of people who don’t actually need to be there.
If the meeting is going to be packed to the rafters, you probably won’t see much thoughtful, organized discussion. Plus, if that many people need to know what you need to say, it’s probably more of a one-sided announcement than an issue that lends itself to focused collaboration. In most cases, that kind of content is generally better suited for email.
1. Email
Email might be the most prominent alternative to meetings. It’s an excellent resource for announcements and less pressing, more general internal communication — information that doesn’t necessarily require an immediate response. It allows you to easily get your message out while providing an opportunity for individual questions and thoughtful collaboration.
2. Video Presentations
Pre-recorded video presentations can be an excellent way to thoroughly and thoughtfully convey information without getting the team together. Resources like Loom allow you to conduct demonstrations, record messages, and offer updates that your team members can watch on their own — making for less friction and saving some time that a full-scale meeting might waste.
3. Instant Messaging
Instant messaging is one of the better ways to replicate some of the more immediate, spur-of-the-moment aspects of a collaborative meeting. With these kinds of programs, you can receive quick responses from team members in real-time. The format is best suited for quick questions and conversations that aren’t necessarily significant enough to warrant full-scale meetings.
4. Wikis and FAQ Pages
Wikis and FAQ pages offer materials that address common questions and concerns that your team members might run into. These mediums are also effective in the long term. By committing information to a web page, you can offer your team an evergreen reference point for concerns and stave off unnecessary meetings, down the line.
Quiz: Do you really need that meeting?

 

Meetings need to be booked carefully and with intention. Your colleagues can’t get that time back, so you need to know that you’ll be productive every time you circle up with them.
If you’re thinking of booking time with your team, be sure to consider the points on this list. You don’t want to deal with the groans and eye rolls that come with a meeting that “could have been an email.”

Did you know that the virtual and augmented reality global revenue is expected to grow from over $13 billion this year to more than $67 billion by 2024?
In fact, virtual reality startups are valued at more than $36 billion on paper.
For marketers, virtual reality’s surging popularity and ability to deeply engage people in immersive experiences and transport them to places they could only imagine going to makes it one of the most exciting emerging technologies in the industry.
But branded VR experiences are still in its infancy. Most marketing teams don’t know how to use the technology to its full potential.
To help you learn how to effectively leverage VR, we decided to make a list of the top VR startups and showcase how they’ve been able to use the technology to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and build successful businesses.
If you want stay ahead of the VR curve in 2021 and beyond, check out these startups.

8 VR Startups to Keep an Eye On In 2021
1. Magic Leap

Magic Leap, a company valued at over $6 billion, is an augmented reality platform focused on providing VR solutions to businesses.
With its wearable spatial solutions, you can easily incorporate VR/AR into your day-to-day. For example, you can use the headset to meet with coworkers and colleagues remotely, collaborate, share content, and even visualize complex 3D models.
Innovative businesses can use VR/AR to make remote collaboration easier.
2. Niantic

Niantic, the company that launched Pokemon Go in 2016, has become a top leader in augmented reality in that short 5 year time span. The business is even valued at over $4 billion.
This company focuses on building VR/AR games that get people moving. In fact, Niantic’s mission is to use emerging technology to enrich our experiences as human beings in the physical world.
This is a great company to keep an eye on to see how they market emerging VR/AR tech. Plus, you might even be able to use the games in your business as a part of a team building exercise.
3. Lightricks

Lightricks, a company founded in 2013 and valued at $1 billion, is an excellent leader in the VR/AR industry.
This business develops apps for social media marketers, creative content creators, or even small businesses. With these apps, you can use AR technology to edit social media posts, create videos with animated graphics, and more.
4. Surgical Theater

The third highest cause of death isn’t a ravenous disease or motor vehicle accidents — it’s medical errors. These errors are usually due to the extreme difficulty of treating each unique patient with absolute precision, especially during surgery.
It’s even harder to mitigate this prevalent problem because the only way surgeons can prepare for an operation is usually by planning and practicing surgery on a generic two-dimensional model of the human body.
Fortunately, with Surgical Theater, a VR system that can combine a patient’s MRIs, CT scans, and angiograms to reconstruct a 3D model of their brain’s unique anatomy, neurosurgeons can explore each of their patient’s arteries, bones, and tissue, accurately plan the surgery, and even practice the upcoming brain surgery on the 3D model.
Brain surgeons also use Surgical Theater to walk patients through their brain’s anatomy and the entire process of their surgery, making patients feel more informed about the details of their procedure.
Neurosurgeons can train with Surgical Theater similar to the way fighter pilots train with flight simulators, and some of the country’s top academic hospitals, like UCLA, NYU, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Mayo Clinic, Mount Sinai, and Stanford University, have implemented the technology to advance their neurosurgery efforts.
5. VirtualSpaces

Selling a property that hasn’t been constructed yet is one of the biggest challenges real estate professionals face today. Blueprints don’t do the potential property justice — it’s almost impossible for people to sense its scale, size, height and depth. The human imagination can only visualize so much.
On top of that, most people are too busy during the week to tour property, so a lot of real estate professionals heavily depend on the weekends to showcase their realty. Getting people to walk through properties that are far away is also another challenge for real estate professionals.
But with VirtualSpaces, a mobile VR technology that can build immersive, three-dimensional visualizations of properties with only a blueprint, real estate professionals can overcome these common challenges.
With VirtualSpaces, real estate professionals can send digital properties to their potential clients at any time, transport them to the property from the comfort of their own couch, and walk them through its entire concept. And this allows them to provide unprecedented convenience, get potential clients excited about the property’s potential, and expedite their sales cycle.
6. Virtual Speech

Practicing a speech without an audience can be helpful, but the experience doesn’t truly emulate the pressure of an evaluating crowd. You can nail a dry run ten times in a row on your own, but when you actually step on stage and see an ocean of people staring at you, the nerves can debilitate your public speaking abilities.
Fortunately, VirtualSpeech can help you hone your public speaking skills — the app places you on a virtual stage with a virtual crowd, where you can practice your speech or presentation in front of an audience that imitates the mannerisms and sounds of real people. Their movements and noises are fully customizable, so you can ramp up the distractions and virtual judgement as much as possible.
At the end of your virtual speeches, the app will analyze and score your verbal and nonverbal communication. You can also add your own slides into your virtual presentation, practice for job interviews, learn how to network, and sell in a wide range of sales situations too.
Virtual Speech offers soft skills training courses and packages for individuals, teams, and companies too.
7. Neurable

Mind control of everyday objects might seem like science fiction today, but with virtual reality, it’s already a proven concept.
Using Neurable’s wireless brain-computer interface platform, people can interact with virtual and augmented reality applications with only their brain activity, avoiding lag-prone technologies like eye-tracking and voice commands.
Neurable leverages machine learning and a non-invasive method of monitoring brain activity called electroencephalography or EEG to accurately and instantly detect what your brain wants to do. And since using your brain is faster and easier than using controllers, brain-computer interface platforms like Neurable could be the future of VR.
8. Vivid Vision

Most healthcare VR startups provide solutions for doctors and surgeons, but Vivid Vision focuses on the people who truly need help: patients. By designing VR games that treat lazy eye, Vivid Vision provides a non-invasive cure to a common eye issue people can suffer from for their entire lives.
Vivid Vision also partners with over 180 eye clinics around the world to provide their most advanced and personalized treatment for lazy eye. But if you just want to do their vision therapy at home, you can get a prescription from your doctor to buy their less complex treatment program.
VR/AR has been around for a long time now, and the industry is only growing. As new startups continue to innovate, we’ll begin seeing VR/AR in several areas of our life, including work, healthcare, and entertainment.