Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Web push notifications are a unique, fast and convenient way to stay in touch with your customers. See how to use them in GetResponse.

Unprecedented times. The new normal. We all have our own least favorite catch phrases to describe what it’s like to live through a pandemic, just as we all have our own stories about how COVID-19 has impacted our day-to-day and professional lives. Eleven months into the year, I don’t think it’s necessary to spell out how work life has shifted, in-person engagements have dropped to all-time lows, and how so many people found new work spaces sitting somewhere in front of a Peloton.
What hasn’t changed in the midst of this pandemic and our global shift to working from home is what it takes for sales people to succeed — the ability to adapt. Adapting to fewer (if any) in-person visits, to meeting your customers where they are, to a world of yet-unknowns that will continue to crop up over time. And for those who learn to do this well, there’s a huge opportunity to not just succeed but excel.
Throughout my tech career I’ve worked with dozens of sales representatives. Over the past year, I’ve watched top performers struggle to close a single deal all month. I’ve seen sales people with traditionally challenging territories knock it out of the park. I’ve also had a lot of conversations with my sales reps. Here’s what I’m hearing:
What is the rest of the team doing to succeed? Why is it working for them but not me? Why is it that what used to work for me no longer works?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. That’s why adaptability is key. But it leaves an uncomfortable gray area when it comes to how we should change. What it comes down to is this:
How are you adapting to your customers’ needs? How are you adapting your sales process to our new digital-first world? Are you willing to make the changes necessary to succeed? 
As you ponder these questions, here are three ways that technology and insights can help you reach the right answers for you and your team.
1. Collaboration
The best sales reps are not lone wolves. For some, this isn’t a surprise. For others, it may be difficult to let go of being in control, trust others to get the job done, or admit that they aren’t always (and don’t have to be) the smartest person in the room.
There’s value in having multiple roles supporting the sales process. Realizing that you don’t have to go it alone can help you close bigger deals faster and smarter.

Understand the roles and functions that surround sales at your company. With this basic level of knowledge, you can’t collaborate effectively.

Take stock of where you get the most value. This may not be linear — think about what you need depending on the situation you’re in, or the stage of the sales process.

Provide feedback on what’s working well or what could work better. And be open to receiving and acting on feedback as well.

2. Insights & Intelligence
Once you’ve identified your key internal stakeholders and what they bring to the table, it’s important to put that information to work. One of my favorite synergies is when marketing and sales are truly aligned and build a holistic view of the customer journey together. By understanding where your customer has been and where they are now, you can help them get to where they’re going more effectively.

Familiarize yourself with your prospects’ activities before they land in your lead queue. When you understand the content that prospects are engaging with on your website and  through their inboxes, you can start identifying their interests before you ever talk to them.

Find your account champion. When you’re selling to a company, the purchasing decision typically sits with more than one person. Finding the right contact to facilitate introductions and help sell your product or services internally can make all the difference. If you have visibility into who’s engaging with your content, how much they’re engaging, and how they’re engaging, this knowledge can help you pinpoint how to start the conversation.

Invest in artificial intelligence (AI) to remove human bias from the equation and glean insights you may not have known to look for. AI can help uncover a subsegment of prospects that responds more positively to certain messages or identify leads that are most likely to convert into contacts. Using unbiased insights helps focus your efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

3. Organization
Juggling all of your accounts at different stages and with different business needs is hard enough. But when this information is stored in your mind or simply written down, it’s difficult to find, access, and share. Putting effort into the following can go a long way:

Use the tools at your disposal. Having a CRM doesn’t help you if you’re not actually using it. When you add and update key information, it helps everyone you’re collaborating with to stay on the same page, and empowers you to draw comparisons across accounts. When processes like lead funnel stages and opportunity statuses are standardized, you can easily look across all of your accounts and prospects to see where the needle is moving and where you’ve hit a roadblock.

Make the most of repeatable processes. Each account may need something slightly different, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from what’s worked in the past and make the necessary tweaks to get it to resonate. Once you know which campaigns helped to push opportunities across the finish line, you can use that knowledge to your advantage. For example, you can maintain a library of email templates that get the best responses. Learn, organize, and optimize.

Prioritize your time and effort. There are only so many hours in the day. If you’re ready to start your day with a call blitz, how will you ensure that you’re calling on the hottest prospects first? Using tools like lead scoring and organizing your CRM leads by top lead score first ensures that you’re reaching out in an order that makes sense for your business and is most likely to lead to success.

I’ll ask again: How are you adapting to your customers’ needs? How are you adapting your sales process to our digital-first world? Are you willing to make the changes necessary to succeed? 
Change is inevitable. So think about that last question. I’ve just laid out the key trends I’ve observed in my most resilient sales reps. It’s time for a bit of self-reflection to understand if you’re ready, willing, and able to adapt.
Register for our Dec. 15 Pardot-Like-a-Pro webinar to learn how to sell smarter with Pardot in 2021.

How does IFundWomen empower and support women entrepreneurs? Their strength is in their community. IFundWomen, the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses, aims to empower and support women entrepreneurs as they navigate building their businesses. They’ve identified a powerful marketing channel to help these women bring their visions to life: digital community.
Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at how IFundWomen integrates their marketing and community building to foster inclusive digital spaces. You’ll hear directly from Shakivla Todd, Marketing Associate at IFundWomen, and you’ll learn:

Community tactics to build closer, longer-lasting relationships with your customers
How to learn from your community to inform your marketing strategy
Where Shakivla finds inspiration for creating social media content for a small business audience⠀
How to avoid tone-deaf marketing in uncertain times

This post is part of the #BufferBrandSpotlight, a Buffer social media series that shines a spotlight on the people that are helping build remarkable brands through social media, community building, content creation, and brand storytelling.
This series was born on Instagram stories, which means you can watch the original interview in our Highlights found on our @buffer Instagram profile.

Who are you?
My name is Shakivla Todd and I am the Marketing Associate for IFundWomen. More importantly, I’m a stellar older sister, a dope friend, and a budding plant mom. IFundWomen is the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses and the people who want to support them with capital, coaching, and connections. We offer immediate access to capital through a premium online fundraising experience, access to small business grants from corporate partners, expert business coaching on all the topics entrepreneurs need to know about, and a network of women business owners that sparks confidence, accelerates knowledge, and ignites action.
I manage our digital communities through social media strategy, Slack engagement, and e-mail marketing. I also am a startup coach and I get to coach women entrepreneurs on how to level up their social media game—this is one of my favorite parts of my role!
Where do you find inspiration for IFundWomen’s social media content?
I spend a lot of time scrolling through Instagram to get inspo for social content. I am always stalking Ellevest, R29 Unbothered, Freelancing Females, Girlboss, the list goes on. Additionally, our community is #TeamMemes so pop culture inspires a good amount of my content. I am also looking for the next thing to be memeified! For example, millennials collectively are re-watching the early 2000s sitcom Girlfriends on Netflix. Everyone is talking about it, so I made a meme from a picture of the cast to promote one of our grant programs.
Lastly, I would be lying if I didn’t say that we get inspired by checking out our competitors. It’s a great tactic!
How does managing IFundWomen’s social media account and community look like on a day-to-day basis?
First thing I do in the morning is check all DMs across platforms. I can do this from laying in my bed, so it’s a good slow start to the day and I don’t have to worry about it during the workday. I like to respond to any messages and comments within 24 hours, but if it’s a launch day or something important I check in with Instagram much more frequently.
On an amazing day, I have already scheduled my posts into Buffer. So, I’ll go check on them to make sure everything is still good to go. After that, my day is clear to be creative and strategize for future content. I collaborate with our sales, coaching, and creative teams to ensure that we are consistently marketing our products, services, events, and partnership. I have to make sure everything is reflected in our marketing content calendar.
What advice do you have for brands that are trying to foster a supportive, inclusive online community?
Don’t be tone-deaf. A lot of STUFF is going on in this land of 2020. You can’t ignore it. You have to find some way to address it that aligns with your brand’s mission, values, and voice. That being said, don’t just say something to say something. Be authentic and make it work for you. For example, during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death instead of going silent or posting a black square, our response was amplifying and supporting Black women-owned businesses recognizing that one of the most important actions to combat racial injustice is to redistribute money to Black-owned businesses. ⁠

Don’t be tone-deaf. A lot of STUFF is going on in this land of 2020. You can’t ignore it. You have to find some way to address it that aligns with your brand’s mission, values, and voice.
How do you learn from your community to help guide your marketing strategy?
Our community is loud and clear about what they need, want, and love. I like to try out different tactics and just watch to see where our community takes it. If something goes “viral” I continue to create content similar to that. Our followers are also often in our DMs asking for help to get their businesses funded. Their specific questions fuel my marketing strategy.
Our followers are also often in our DMs asking for help to get their businesses funded. Their specific questions fuel my marketing strategy.
For example, IFundWomen partners with companies to build grant programs for businesses. Over the summer, during the application window for one of our grants people were consistently sliding in our DMs asking very specific questions about their grant application. We decided to host a workshop specifically on grant writing. To promote this free workshop I seriously just took a screenshot of the first slide of the presentation that was going to be used for the workshop. The post blew up with nearly 1000 likes and over 400 people registered for the workshop. I think it succeeded because the Instagram post was very simple, straight to the point, and directly addressed a concern our community was having.
What’s your number one tip for engaging with IFundWomen’s community?
Perform like everyone’s best friend on the gram. What does that mean? That means most comments and DMs get very personalized responses. I interact with our followers not only on our posts but on their posts as well if it comes across our feed. I often engage as if our business account is a personal account. It’s a great tactic to beat the algorithm, but also to build community and brand trust.
Perform like everyone’s best friend on the gram.
How do you stay up to date on social media/marketing trends?
I love reading Buffer’s, Later’s, Hootsuite’s blogs, and Social Media Today. A good scroll through TikTok and Twitter is also good for the brain. I think most trends start in those two apps. Shameless plug, I take what I learn all over the internet and put it into a roundup of “trends to keep up with” in my newsletter, Trending with Shak.
What’s your favorite IFundWomen partnership to date and why?
The Funding Journey is an IGTV series where we interview successful founders on the long, sometimes complicated, journey to getting their businesses funded. It’s my favorite because:

I get to put on my true producer hat and build something out start to finish.
Most of the founders we interview are from HUGE brands. It means amazing reach for us as a brand plus our community LOVES hearing from brands they love like Black Girl Sunscreen, Lively, and The Helm.

Link to Instagram post found here.Link to Instagram post found here.
We hope this interview with Shakivla helps you get started with or double down on your social media efforts. You can follow her journey on Instagram here!
Have any questions for Shakivla? Feel free to reply with your questions to the Twitter post below and Shakivla or someone from the Buffer team will get to them as soon as possible.

Are you seeing a lower return of effort for traditional premium content like whitepapers, webinars, ebooks and more?
Alternatively, do you find the biggest results just aren’t there for the amount of work you put into the creation? If so, you’re not alone. While these offers can provide in-depth insights for prospects, not every prospect sees the value in them.
Still, we continue offering premium content to build trust throughout the buyer’s journey and learn information about prospects along the way.
And yet, the problem remains: Where do you draw the line between offering free, useful content and charging for your expert knowledge and insight?
Some brands are beginning to define this blurry line by developing their own learning management systems (LMS), as a private hub for paid access to their best educational resources.
And yes, you can even build an LMS in HubSpot. Here, we’ll explore what a learning management system is, the benefits of using one, and how you can repurpose content into your own guided learning course. 
Let’s dive in. 

What’s a learning management system (LMS)?
First, let’s first make sure we’re on the same page with a definition.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application to administer, document, track, report on and deliver educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.
It’s a portal that users can log into to exclusively access the premium content you develop specifically for your paid audience. (Paid can mean literal financial payment or the currency of data/membership).

While online courses aren’t new, using a learning management system (LMS) to deliver premium content is still uncharted territory for most brands.

As marketers, we’re always trying to create valuable content. But in a crowded marketplace, it can be difficult to demonstrate value in your content even if you have a strong content marketing strategy.
That’s where a guided learning course can prove beneficial. A guided learning course can offer in-depth solutions to your prospects’ challenges, and ultimately, can provide your company with higher-quality leads.
Which makes LMS’ invaluable to anyone wanting to create a guided learning course, since courses need to be built on a LMS. 
To explore the importance of guided learning courses, let’s consider an example. Let’s say you have two competitors, and both offer a webinar on “Email Marketing Strategy”.
To differentiate your own brand, imagine instead you take an hour-long webinar and split it up into a dozen topics for five-to-seven minutes each. That could easily be offered as a 12-module course.
Your prospect can now go through the content on their own time and only explore the sections that feel relevant to them, versus having to sit and listen to an hour-long webinar. The perception and value is magnified and fits the nature of how your prospect actually wants to consume the content.
Why use an LMS?
Once we know what an LMS is, it’s time to explore why. As you learn what an LMS is and how it works for users, let’s dig into why it could change your business.
1. User Accessibility
Right now most marketers create an ebook, promote that PDF through blog posts and social posts, then use workflows and emails to “guide” prospects and contacts throughout the journey.
We can tell when someone downloads the PDF, but we have no idea how much they consume. Then, with emails, information can get lost on the user side of the equation. So many of us delete emails or forget what the exact phrase in an email is we’re searching for … it can easily become a mess.

An LMS allows the user flexibility to go back into the journey and see what they need to see inside a comprehensive portal.

Users no longer have to rely on emails. Instead, they can reference each step in the learning path, see what’s next, and enjoy a more realistic and user-friendly experience.
2. Buyer’s Journey Trackability
On the marketer’s side, an LMS provides us with more data points to better understand a prospect’s position in the buyer’s journey — especially when using an LMS for lead management and education.

Imagine a world where you can watch your buyer discover your content during their awareness stage, and move through consideration and into the decision stage, all within your ecosystem.

It’s possible to track a prospect’s journey throughout the buying stages with guided learning courses that tailor to users in different stages of the buyer’s journey — this is what truly creating content for the buyer’s journey looks like.
With a webinar or PDF, you’re left wondering how much someone consumed. You don’t have access to the data with PDFs. You know prospects downloaded it, but did they actually consume the information? For the most part, it’s the same with webinars on the user level.
When you use guided learning or an LMS, you can see every module or every single page they viewed, and how far through the course users got. You can measure to make sure it’s effective in general, and you can also measure the intent and automate your systems based on topic performance and even individual chapter performance. 
3. Cross-Device Consumption
Want to know a bonus to creating a guided learning course that users sign into for consumption? Think about a frictionless cross-device experience.
How often do we start a video or article on our laptop while working or researching, only to want to continue it on our phone later? This is especially true when the content is longer than a 2-minute video.
When a user has a membership to your LMS, they can go to their laptop, their phone, their iPad … wherever they want to consume content at that moment, and it’s there waiting for them. That’s winning at UX!
Guided Learning Course Examples
What does a learning management system look like in practice? Let’s take a look at two examples right under our noses.
1. HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy is a great example of using an LMS for lead generation and trust building.
Academy courses teach users all about HubSpot’s philosophy and mindset. Users can learn about HubSpot before purchasing HubSpot’s products or services — but users can also learn about a variety of other marketing, sales, service, and web design topics without ever becoming a HubSpot customer. 
Consider the Marketing Software Certification course. Instead of a PDF with screenshots, users can walk through videos with screen-sharing options, download study guides, and take quizzes and exams along the way to assess progress.

2. SEMrush Academy

SEMrush offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research. To appeal to both prospects and users, the company created SEMrush Academy, a Digital Marketing guided learning course with courses on SEO, content marketing, PPC, and more. SEMrush Academy is free and offers a certification when users complete courses.
Best of all, the guided learning courses have both video and text with some of the industry’s most well-known digital marketing professionals, and while all courses are offered in English, many of them are also offered in Spanish.
Whether you’re a content marketer looking to up your game or you’re already a customer of SEMrush, you’ll undeniably find value in their courses, ranging from beginner to advanced.

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For more inspiration, take a look at 60 Best Free Online Courses For Whatever You Want to Learn.
How to Repurpose Your Content into a Guided Learning Course
If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute … Now I have to create all this new content?” take a breath. Yes, new content is needed. However, you can also repurpose content you already have as you’re creating new content for your LMS strategy.

Most of your existing content can be reimagined into a guided learning course.

You can revisit popular ebooks, webinars, pillar pages, blog posts, slide decks and more to create a multimedia course to serve your customers. You can even turn toolkits and related offers into guided learning opportunities.
For instance, you might consider taking your ebook and using each chapter as a chapter or module in your course. Additionally, you might take some information on the subject from various blog posts and turn it into a checklist or template format for users to try for themselves.
At Impulse Creative, we can turn our Brand Plan ebook into the Brand Plan Course and create a whole new offering. Here’s how that would look:

You get the idea. Each chapter becomes a module, and the subjects in those chapters become the videos that make up the course. This way, you can keep videos shorter for more bite-sized consumption.
Additionally, you’ll want to perform a content audit to uncover what pieces you have and what problems each one solves before placing them into buckets. Then, you can take each of these buckets and create a course.
The content you have will act as a storyboard so you can script your videos. Then you can use the existing content with a slight refresh as the bonus materials in your courses.
Brands find themselves at a critical turning point today … Traditional content can feel stale — and users are demanding more.
There is a major opportunity for the LMS to serve multiple facets of your business, from lead generation to sales or customer success. Ultimately, you’ll want to figure out how a LMS could serve your own business needs, as well as the needs of your prospects and customers.

When it comes to creating reports for your data, sometimes a pre-built dashboard, table, or template will do the trick. But what happens when your current tool doesn’t have a pre-built report that meets your needs or includes the metrics and dimensions you want to use?
Well, that’s when a custom reporting tool comes in handy.
What are custom reporting tools?
Custom reporting tools provide the ability to create personalized and unique (or customized) reports for your data. In addition to selecting the data you’ll display in your report, you can also customize a report’s metrics, dimensions, appearance, and more.

There are a number of custom reporting tools available today including options that come with other perks like no necessary coding, easy installation, different pricing plans, support, and integrations (e.g. for data analysis and one-click sharing).
Many custom reporting tools, like HubSpot, often come with pre-built templates and dashboards as well for instances in which you don’t need or want to customize your report.
Here are 9 custom reporting tools to help get you started.

1. HubSpot Marketing Analytics Software

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HubSpot helps marketers surface a combination of customer insights and data to better understand what’s working and what’s not among target audience members. All of these insights and reports are available at your fingertips — alongside your CRM — without SQL.
The custom report builder offers access to all of your data in a single location without the need for spreadsheets. Use the custom builder to organize all of your business data including contact, company, deal, marketing email, landing page, and blog engagement data.
Other Unique Features:

Use custom objects to capture your unique business data, create new segments, build custom reports, campaigns, and workflows.
Build custom, shareable dashboards to see all of your metrics on one screen with a no-code, drag-and-drop editor.
Report on data that’s unique to your business such as product usage or inventory data.
Use behavioral events to track custom interactions that are unique to your business and indicate when a customer is ready to take the next step in the buyer’s journey (then trigger or schedule the next touchpoint for after that event is completed).
Connect every customer interaction to a contact in your database and the associated revenue generated by using the revenue attribution reporting feature.
Monitor the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts within the account based marketing (ABM) dashboard and then adjust your playbook accordingly to reach your highest-value accounts.

2. Demand Sage

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With Demand Sage, easily move your HubSpot reporting and analytics data into Google Sheets. The tool offers custom and automated — with automatic data sync and pre-built dashboards and templates — reports.
Other Unique Features:

Get very specific with your data by creating reports that are record-level.
View your data any way you’d like using Demand Sage’s no-code analytics and table builder.
Install the free Demand Sage add-on, click “Start” in the add-ons menu, and immediately begin creating custom reports.

Integrate Demand Sage with your HubSpot CRM and Marketing Software.

3. Cyfe

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Cyfe is a tool for making fully-customized business dashboards to monitor, display, and analyze your data. The tool is described as an all-in-one dashboard because you can monitor all of your company’s data including (but not limited to) sales, web analytics, social media, and support.
Other Unique Features:

Create benchmarks to measure your progress against your business objectives. Then, receive alerts from Cyfe when specific benchmarks are met (via email or SMS).
Customize all aspects of your report including the domain name, background, logo, and colors.
View data from multiple sources (e.g. Google, Facebook, Mailchimp) by tapping into Cyfe’s app ecosystem of 1,500+ apps.
Customize dashboards with data from your SQL database.
Integrate Cyfe with your HubSpot CRM, Marketing Software, and Sales Software.

4. Supermetrics

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With SuperMetrics, you can easily move your marketing and sales data into Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, Google Data Studio, BigQuery, API, Snowflake, and Uploader. Once you bring your data into any of these products, fully customize your reports with the Supermetrics templates.
Other Unique Features:

Display and manage all of your marketing data in a central location.
Organize and filter your data in Supermetrics to analyze what’s working and what needs improvement.
Automate marketing reporting and data transfers to save you time.
Integrate Supermetrics with your HubSpot Marketing Software.

5. Domo

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Domo is a business cloud that allows you to easily integrate and visualize your data as well as use (or create) intelligent apps to tailor reports in a way that makes them valuable to your team.
Your interactive and customizable reports are updated in real-time. Based on the type of data you bring into Domo, the tool will recommend certain visualizations it thinks are best-suited to display your information.
Other Unique Features:

Customize your reports by annotating charts, adding governance tools for your team, and refining the data points that are most important to you.
Bring all of your marketing and sales data together to create insights and action plans based on the real-time information in your dashboards.
Determine how the various aspects of your dashboard interact with custom links/ filters.
Integrate Domo with your HubSpot CRM.

6. Dear Lucy

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Dear Lucy is a dashboard for B2B sales. Choose the metrics that matter most to your team and bring them into a single dashboard to display your data. On your dashboard, show pipeline-based or activity-based forecasts so you know what to expect in relation to the goals you set.
Other Unique Features:

Customize your entire dashboard with the drag-and-drop editor to show the metrics and data you care about most.
Use the red and green light feature to be notified when your team is on target or is falling behind so you can make necessary adjustments.
Define unique goals for things like activities, revenue, offer base, and hit rate to compare your performance versus targets.
Customize the way you filter your data for your reports (e.g. by customer type) so it’s tailored to your team and goals.
Integrate Dear Lucy with your HubSpot CRM, Marketing Software, and Sales Software.

7. Analytics Amplifier

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Bring your HubSpot contact data into Google Analytics with ease using Analytics Amplifier. Add HubSpot field properties or custom behaviors (e.g. lifecycle stage, deals won, email unsubscribes) to Google Analytics for viewing. This tool is meant to help you optimize your business paths and drive business intelligence by offering access to data about your contacts in Google Analytics.
Other Unique Features:

View your HubSpot object-level data metrics including lifecycle set, deals won, persona set, lead score, number of associated deals, lead status, email unsubscribes, and NPS rating.
Create and generate rich, custom reports in Google Analytics using contact data from HubSpot to understand how your contacts and customers interact and engage with your business.
Use insights derived from your reports to help you reach people who look like members of your target audience.
Integrate Analytics Amplifier with your HubSpot CRM, Marketing Software, and CMS.

8. Ultimate Data Export

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Ultimate Data Export, by Datawarehouse.io, allows you to export all of your data — such as contacts, deals, web analytics, tickets, and emails — to Excel. You can also back up your data as well as restore, query, sync, integrate, analyze, and share it. This tool is ideal for users who want to move data out of HubSpot and into a platform of choice, all at a low cost.
Other Unique Features:

Export all data from your HubSpot system (e.g. contacts, companies, deals/ deal history, web analytics, owners, campaigns, engagements, emails, products, tickets, forms, pipelines, and more) and view it in a custom report in Excel.
Connect to business intelligence tools like Tabelau and PowerBI for deep insights into your data.

Integrate Ultimate Data Export with your HubSpot CRM, Marketing Software, and Sales Software.

9. Google Analytics

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Google Analytics has a custom report feature that allows you to choose the dimensions (e.g. city) and metrics (e.g. page views) for your report as well as decide how that data will be displayed. If you’re a Google/ Google Analytics user, or use a reporting tool with a Google Analytics integration, custom reports are easily accessible to you.
Other Unique Features:

Export and share custom reports in seconds.
Choose from a list of unique dimensions and metrics for your custom reports.
Create categories to organize your custom reports into groups for easy access.
Use the Custom Tables feature to back up your custom reports if you’re an Analytics 360 user.

There are many custom reporting tools available today that have the power to help you uncover valuable insights and analyze all of your business’s data. So, while trying to determine the best option for your team, think about which types of data you want to dive deeper into, where you want to conduct reporting and analysis, and how you want to share and distribute that information.

A brand is a powerful tool for agencies and clients alike, providing a framework for how an organization presents itself to the world and interacts with customers. But brands are only useful when they’re consistently used and applied. 
Fortunately, email marketers have a few secret weapons to enforce and maintain brand standards for their clients, starting with the ever-important custom email marketing template. With the right tools and a little convincing, you can help your clients become brand powerhouses and provide an irresistible service they can’t live without.

Explaining the importance of brand consistency to clients
It’s easy for many agency marketers to grasp the value of brand consistency, but it’s not always a priority for some clients. 
Even if it is, that care and consideration might not extend to email. While email is often recognized as a powerful tool for communications and sales, its importance as part of the brand experience is sometimes overlooked. 
If you can sell your clients on the importance of brand consistency in their emails, it’s good business for you, too. If you’re their go-to expert that understands their brand better than anyone, you become much ‘stickier’ and make a stronger case when pitching email to your accounts. Make sure your clients are aware of some of the most important benefits of brand standard enforcement:
Cross-channel consistency has a huge impact on overall performance.
Consistency in experience and message between email and other channels, both digital and traditional, improves a brand’s overall reputation and makes customers more likely to buy. It’s an “all ships rise with the tides” situation: consistency between an email and a website makes a social media post that much more engaging, which in turn helps that radio ad stand out more, which makes the next email more likely to be opened, and so on.
Research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau indicates that consumers viewing a constant message across a variety of channels can improve purchase intent by 90% and brand perception by 68%.
Here’s a great example of leveling up cross-channel marketing to really hammer home a big promotion. Taco Bell is running a campaign featuring a giveaway of the new Xbox console, and making sure the message and branding for the campaign can be seen everywhere. It’s in emails, social posts on the restaurant’s web site…even on its cups (thanks to @RoxieThorne for the picture of the cups).

Improving the all-important customer experience.
The customer experience has evolved to become one of the most important competitive differentiators and factors in consumer decision making. A survey from PwC found customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for a superior experience, and 63% say they’re more willing to share information with brands that can offer great experiences. On the other hand, about one in three will abandon a brand they like if they have a negative experience.
Consistent, cohesive branding is a huge part of delivering a good experience. But inconsistency can be confusing and frustrating, disrupting the customer journey and leading to lost business and loyalty. When it comes to meeting expectations for experiences, companies in most industries have some work to do.

Even a little consistency can go a long way in the inbox. 
Emphasize that it’s not a huge effort to incorporate the basics for your brand into an email strategy. Even just the fundamentals—featuring a familiar logo, using on-brand language, and presenting content with the same color scheme, can be enough to make a difference.
We love this simple, powerful example from Insomnia Cookies. The cookie delivery and pickup service makes sure a mobile-friendly version of its logo appears in the email client. And just like Pavlov’s dogs, it gets customers’ mouths watering every time they see it—even before they read the subject line or open the email. Small adjustment, powerful result.

The easy way to adapt your client’s brand standards
Adapting and incorporating another company’s brand guidelines into your own workflow and tools can be tedious, especially if the client doesn’t have a rigorous document detailing colors, logo versions, font styles and so on. 
If you’re in need of a quick, easy way to “port over” a client’s branding into your custom email marketing templates, the Campaign Monitor platform has you covered. The built-in branded templates tool makes it easier than ever for you to build beautiful custom newsletters that look like they were painstakingly crafted just for them. Just input your client’s website, and we’ll take care of pulling out color schemes, logos and more for you to add right into your templates!
This tool also works great if you operate on more of a ‘self-serve’ model where clients do most of their own email sends while you support and advise them. It’s easy to activate and make the functionality accessible to clients through your agency account, minimizing frustration and development problems.
Building foolproof custom email marketing templates for clients
Designing a custom template for a client can make them feel like they’re getting the royal treatment. The Campaign Monitor email builder helps you craft special templates that look great and perform well without requiring a lot of resources on your end.
To get started, navigate to “My Templates” in the platform and choose the desired option for your needs:

Option 1. Choose a design: Our pre-built, mobile-ready designs are ready to be adapted and modified in any way needed. They’ve been artfully crafted and scientifically optimized for performance: the perfect starting point for any custom template. You can select a design you like, and save it as a template to customize and use again later.

Option 2. Select from recent emails: Take an email you’ve worked on recently and update it for a specific client. This is especially effective if you have a template layout you know works for one client that you want to translate over to another account’s brand standards.

Option 3. Start from scratch: Begin with a blank canvas and save time by not removing everything in a template design first. If you have the design and coding talent available, this is a good option to build something particularly spectacular or experimental.

Option 4. Upload from HTML: Already got a great email template coded up? Just upload it and modify it as needed.
Click here to learn more guidance and tips for building your own email templates.
Locking a branded template
 
When appropriate, you may wish to ‘lock’ certain components of your custom templates in place once they’ve been designed. This minimizes the extent to which the email can be edited and adjusted.
 
Though locking a template reduces customization options, those limitations come with several benefits for an agency. 
 
By minimizing the variables that can be altered, you reduce the opportunities to ‘break’ the template by adjusting a piece of content or changing a setting. That’s useful if you’re passing the template off to someone who’s less technically proficient or unfamiliar with the brand. When you hand it off to a client who’s not much of a coding expert, or bring in a freelancer for some extra help, they can jump right in and get to work with minimal fuss.
Template locking is also a great way to set and enforce brand standards. When building a custom email template, you can determine what content modules and branding elements should be part of the brand experience. By locking them in, you ensure that they find their place in every email of that style that’s sent out. 
This prevents someone from accidentally forgetting a critical part of the email (like the client’s logo) or gets a little too adventurous with their creativity (like changing CTA colors to something off-brand).
Locking a template is easy to do with a Campaign Monitor agency account.
To lock sections in an existing email builder template, click the cog icon below the template thumbnail and select Edit.

When editing the template, click to the side of a section to select it, then click Content locking in the left sidebar, then select a lock setting.

When you select a lock setting, it will be applied immediately. To edit your section and its settings again, select Unlock everything.
You can also lock header or footer content by clicking either in your template, then clicking Header content locking or Footer content locking in the left sidebar. When you are done, click Preview, then Finish & save template.
 
Learn more about locking template sections in this comprehensive email builder template guide.
Wrap up
Brand standards are a huge part of effective marketing, including (perhaps especially) when it comes to email. Strong, consistent branding in the inbox and across channels improves the customer experience and grows overall marketing performance, but doesn’t require a ton of effort to achieve significant results back.
Agencies can help clients create and enforce brand standards by generating and using custom email templates tailored to each account. Tools like an intuitive template builder and template locking features make it easy to build branded templates and keep them aligned to brand guidelines.
Bring the power of branded templates to your clients and become essential to their business. Learn how a Campaign Monitor agency account helps your agency grow.
 
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