Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Everyone can acknowledge the importance of a mobile-friendly website, especially after Google’s Mobilegeddon algorithm update.
Mobile optimization is here to stay, and it’s demanding more and more of businesses and their websites. But mobile optimization is about more than just a responsive website design.
In this article, we tell you why and how to adopt a mobile-first mindset for your website.

Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm change in 2015 (and a few more since then) was evidence that the search engine recognizes its responsibility to surface websites that painlessly get users what they need at the time that they need it.
Google doesn’t want to send mobile users to websites that provide a frustrating browsing experience — that would damage its promise to its users to always deliver helpful, relevant content.
Moreover, this algorithm change was and is a signal of a much larger shift that’s afoot — consumer behavior is changing, and it’s your job to adapt.

Building a mobile-friendly website is step one, but tweaking your website will not keep you ahead of consumers’ changing behavior and expectations.
In short, you have to infuse your marketing strategy with a mobile-first mindset. Here’s how.
1. Map your customer journey.
Imagine the experience of Sally, a young marketer who has just moved to Chicago. While out for a walk, Sally passes by a hair salon and realizes she needs a haircut. She pulls out her phone a search for hairstylists in Chicago who specialize in curls and color. Her Google search pops up Joann’s Stylez.
She flips through the website quickly and wants to research more, but it’s too hard while on the move — so she texts herself a link. When she gets home, she opens her texts on her tablet and quickly checks Yelp reviews, examines her calendar, and then books an appointment using the simple form on the Joann’s website.
When Sally loads up her laptop later that night to check her email, she discovers an email from Joann’s that confirms her appointment and gives her the option to add it to her calendar. The next day, 30 minutes before her appointment, she receives a push notification on her work computer reminding her of the appointment.
The next day, Sally receives a mobile email asking for feedback on the cut and offering to set up a recurring appointment at a discounted rate. She’s sold.
Sally’s experience is illustrative of the cross-device, omnichannel journey that many customers now make as they move through the marketing funnel. Every day, consumers switch a handful of different devices when completing common tasks such as online shopping, readying blog posts, booking appointments, or communicating with each other.
HubSpot’s Blogging Software equips you to publish relevant, conversion-optimized content you can preview on any device — allowing you to engage with customers wherever they are.
Consumers now expect this type of experience from all of their digital interactions. They want to be able to accomplish whatever fits their fancy on whatever device is at hand. This means that simply adapting your site to look nice on different devices is not enough. As a marketer, you must dig deeper into your customers’ and prospects’ lives.
For example, at HubSpot, we know that a visitor on a mobile device is very unlikely to fill out a long form on one of our landing pages. So we started using Smart Content to automatically shorten the form when a mobile viewer is looking at it. By doing this, our mobile prospects increased by 5x.
2. Seize intent-rich micro-moments.
You’ve likely already developed a strong set of buyer personas. You’ve conducted user research and testing to understand which content and CTAs to present to each persona as they move down the funnel. You must now go a step further. You must understand both the rhythm and rhyme to when, why, with what, and from where people are interacting with your website and content.
Google encourages marketers to identify the “micro-moments” in a customer’s journey:

Micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device — increasingly a smartphone — to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped.

A number of brands have figured out how to anticipate and capitalize on these micro-moments. Apple Passbook loads up your Starbucks card when you’re near a coffee shop. Hertz sends you an email when your plane lands to let your know that your car is ready. Starwood allows you to check in and open your hotel room with your smartphone.
Consumers are increasingly becoming acclimated to companies offering such intimately responsive experiences. 59% of shoppers say that being able to shop on mobile is important when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from, and 39% of smartphone users are more likely to browse or shop a company or brand’s mobile app because it’s easier or faster to make a purchase.
How can you figure out these micro-moments and design your content to meet prospects’ intent? Tap into your data. Here are three analyses you should start with:

Search: Which queries, ads and keywords are bringing users on different devices to your website and landing pages? Once they land on your site, what types of searches are users on different devices performing?

Content: Examine the content that users access by stage in the funnel and by device. Is there a trend around what prospects on their phones are downloading? Sharing?

Flow: Dig into a flow analysis segmented by device. What is the path mobile-using prospects follow? What is the path tablet-using customers follow? From what sites and sources are these visitors arriving?

After building your trove of micro-moments, it would be easy to think: “Okay, we just need to strip our website down to the specific things our visitors will mostly likely want to access on the go.”
But mobile users are not limited to completing short, simple tasks. The device does not directly imply location or intent.
A busy professional may use her commute time to conduct in-depth industry research on her phone, process her email inbox on her tablet while watching a movie with her family, and browse the websites of potential contractors while flying across the country.
Confirming this intuition, the Pew Research Center’s study of U.S. smartphone found that 99% of smartphone owners use their phone at home, 82% use their phones while in transit, and 69% use their phone at work each week. (This study was conducted in 2015, but we believe it’s still relevant, if not more so, today.)
People don’t want a stripped down set of content. Instead, they want quick and easy access to the materials they need on whatever device they happen to be using.Thus, while you want to optimize your site, landing pages, emails, etc. for micro-moments, you do not want to force visitors into a box from which they cannot escape.
3. Consider (and reconsider) your metrics.
The metrics you established in the desktop-centric days may not seamlessly translate to our new multi-device, micro-moment world. For example, you might have fought tirelessly to find ways to increase visitors’ time on your site, recognizing that more time means higher engagement, which translates to higher conversion.
The micro-moments you identify for mobile visitors, however, might suggest that you want a lower time-on-site. A prospect visiting the website of a consulting firm may be looking for:

An infographic they want to show a coworker
The bio of a partner with whom they are about to meet
A case study to read while traveling

In order to meet this prospect’s expectations for their mobile experience, you must design your website to quickly and intuitively help them find the specific piece of information for which they are looking. If their mobile visit is distracting, frustrating, or too time consuming, you’ve damaged their perception of your brand.
4. Embrace the intimacy of mobile.
For better or worse, I go to bed with my phone (reviewing tomorrow’s schedule and reading a nighttime meditation) and I wake up with my phone (silencing the alarm and checking the weather). I communicate with my partner and my best friends everyday — all through my phone. When my MBA classmate sends a GIF of Tyra Banks being sassy, I turn my phone to the person next to me, and we have a good laugh together.
Day-in and day-out, these interactions create an intimate connection between my phone and me. And I’m not alone: Most consumers imbue their mobile experiences with more intimacy than desktop experiences. The Pew Research Center found that Americans view their smartphones as freeing, connecting, and helpful, and associate their phones with feelings of happiness and productivity. These associations can inspire greater engagement with and interest in content.
As marketers, we should take advantage of these trends and consider how to make our prospects’ mobile experience more personal and social. Perhaps change your website to increase the proportion of social CTAs you display when someone arrives on mobile.
5. Remember the basics and think ahead.
Overall, embracing the mobile mindset means ensuring that the entire customer journey is responsive, relevant, actionable, and frictionless. As a marketer, you want to help consumers quickly and easily find what they want to find and do what they want to do. Again, this means thinking ahead, understanding when, with what device, and from where your prospects will interact with your content.
This can seem daunting, but mostly it means diligently applying the basics across channels. For example, since nearly half of all emails are opened on mobile, ensure your emails are mobile optimized. We recommend doing the following:

Use large, easy-to-read text.
Use large, clear images and reduce file sizes.
Keep layouts simple and invest in responsive templates.
Use large, mobile-friendly calls-to-action and links.

Recognizing the personal associations people have with their phones, you’ll want to ensure that the “From” name is familiar and that the preview text is inviting. And think ahead: Don’t email a link to a form or an event registration landing page that is not mobile-friendly.
Use HubSpot’s Free Landing Page Builder to launch landing pages that look perfect across devices and automatically change content based on who’s viewing your page.
Over to You: Time to Optimize
Follow these tips and you will be well on your way to living the mobile mindset and weathering the change in consumers’ digital behavior. Move quickly and your organization could be at the head of the pack.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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There are a ton of benefits to building co-branded partnerships, including cost-effective marketing strategies, bigger audiences, and the opportunity to quickly create relationships with new leads. Which is why building your partnerships and being a great partner is essential. Brand partnerships, often referred to simply as co-branding efforts, leverage your audience and marketing prowess with…
The post How To Be a Great Partner appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

As much as 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. One of the reasons for that can be a bad lead qualification process, which means that 79 times out of 100 you can be wasting your time and money, trying to pursue leads that from the beginning are not ready to buy. According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of marketers pass leads to sales immediately after collecting their data, without any verification. We present the tools that will help you increase their quality.

Identify your contacts – know your potential customer from the get-go

With SALESmanago every lead you collected on your website is supplemented with information on its behavior, helping you understand what products or services in your offer brought their attention. Website behavior can be tracked thanks to the cookies technology, which means you have to identify the lead only once, and from now on all their visits to your website will be connected with their 360 customer profile. If the lead was browsing your website earlier, before it was identified, this information will be also included, because SALESmanago keeps historical visits of anonymous visitors to present you with a full view of the leads’ interest.

Know their needs – use behavioral segmentation

Once you know who is browsing the website, you need to know what they want, what were they looking for. That can be managed by creating an appropriate Segmentation Matrice, in which you define the list of URL addresses on your website connected with different products in the offer. As a result, a visitor who browses different subpages, reading articles describing your offer is getting tagged with the name of that product, giving you a quick view on what potentially they might buy.

Let’s say, you work for a car dealer company and you want to segment the leads that could be interested in different financing options. If they visit a subpage with the description of the leasing service, a right tag will be assigned to them (e.g. FINANCING_LEASING). That’s how you know, this lead could potentially convert into sale and you can proceed accordingly.

Measure the level of their interest –  use tag and contact scoring

You need to remember that even though behavioral segmentation gives you some information that can help you initiate direct contact, this might be not enough – every lead can check different products in your offer. You will know then how deeply they know your offer but it won’t indicate the most interesting offer. A solution to that is a tag scoring feature, that shows how many times the contact was tagged as interested in a specific product.

Going back to the car financing example. You can set the scoring value, which will mean to you that the customer was not just browsing what options are available, but really wanted to learn more about the leasing option.  In such case, if a given person visits three subpages with information about leasing it will not only be tagged FINANCING_LEASING, but by the name of the tag the system will show you how many times it was applied so in the end, you will see FINANCING_LEASING (3) position on the leads’ segments list. You can qualify for sales leads that exceed a certain value in the tag scoring, to make sure you’re talking to leads with specified interest in your offer.

Another way to distinguish good quality leads is by using contact scoring. It increases anytime the lead is active – opening your emails, or browsing your website. Let’s say, in a day you get a 100 new leads. There could be many selling opportunities, but as we’ve already established, around 79 out of that 100 won’t convert. A solution is to pick the ones that are the most active and therefore have the highest contacts scoring. A lead that has visited your website a large number of times and with a scoring of 100, will be far more probable to convert than a new one with a scoring of 5, so you want to start contacting these new leads by choosing those with the highest contact scoring first.

Make sure they understand your product – use lead nurturing

Even leads with high contact or tag scoring might not be ready to buy yet, because they could be missing some important information on the product, which makes the majority of them resign after the first conversation with your sales representatives. Try delivering them this information with an automatic educational message cycle. Thanks to lead nurturing, you can get 50% more leads ready to buy. Studies show that lead nurturing emails are 10 times higher response rate compared to regular emails.

In SALESmanago’s Lead Nurturing Wizard or in Workflows feature, you can create message campaigns that will start after a chosen lead fulfills some requirements, for example, the contact has been assigned a specific tag or was added to a specific sales funnel, which makes them qualified for a lead nurturing campaign. After you select an event that’ll start the messaging campaign, you can pick the message that will be sent as well as the time of sending (how much time after the campaign was activated).

Turn good leads into sales – use the Sales Alert and help your salesmen

Finally, when you have a good quality lead (segmented, high scoring, nurtured), you have to have a way of informing your sales team on this fact. Sales alert is a simple automation that sends a notification to your sales representative, that they should contact a specific lead.

You can choose behavior that should trigger sending this notification. In most cases, for leads who qualify for sales the most common trigger is any website visit. They already proved they’re interested. If they are looking for the information again, it’s the best time to reach out to them. 

All of that gives you a bigger chance of succeeding while reaching out to new leads, as you made sure to pick the high value ones.

marketing automation

marketing automation

Browser vendors are planning changes that will affect the way Pardot users produce online content and emails. The Pardot product team is working with the browser vendors and web standards communities to stay current with planned changes and to communicate to our customers what you need to know to continue to deliver effective content. In this post, we’ll explain what mixed content is and how near-term changes being rolled out by browser vendors will affect you.
But first, some background that will help us understand why things are changing.
The history of online encryption
Before about 1970, commercial computers were mostly isolated systems, each installed by a business for some specific task, such as running an accounting system. As business processes became increasingly reliant on information technology, the potential of networked computers became apparent. This raised a serious question: How would networked systems protect themselves against malicious actors who would snoop on and tamper with critical data moving between systems?
Outside of secretive governmental agencies, encryption was mostly a dark art in 1970. But due to the rise of the internet, this has changed in the decades since. In the 1970s, we saw the standardization and deployment of the Data Encryption Standard (DES). In the 1980s, we saw the rise of encryption systems with fancy capabilities such as performing secure digital signatures. During the 1990s, Netscape developed the early versions of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), now rebranded Transport Layer Security (TLS).
TLS is the protocol that secures the internet. It’s based on the encryption research that happened in earlier decades, and the protocol continues to mature today – the most recent version is TLS 1.3. During the 2010s, technologies such as Let’s Encrypt made TLS more accessible, and the visible rise of major cybersecurity incidents has motivated technology leaders like Salesforce to push for the universal adoption of encryption via TLS. The 2020s will be the decade where we witness ubiquitous web security and privacy via encryption.
This is a trend that we need to pay attention to.
What is mixed content?
Browsers interact with sites using a technology called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The “http” in http://example.com/ indicates the link is using HTTP to transfer your content to your visitor. But HTTP alone doesn’t provide any encryption. This means that content transferred to the browser can be snooped on or tampered with while in transit.
HTTPS is HTTP combined with TLS. The “https” in https://example.com/ means the link is using HTTP along with TLS to provide a secure browsing experience. Technology leaders and standards bodies are moving away from vanilla HTTP to secure HTTPS.
Now we come to the heart of this post: mixed content.
Mixed content is when a site mixes HTTPS and HTTP. A common example of mixed content is a secure site (served over HTTPS) that includes images served over vanilla HTTP. The problem is that the site owner or site visitor created a website that was clearly intended to be secure, but some parts of the website — images in this example — still remain vulnerable to snooping and tampering.
Why it matters to marketers
You may be thinking: None of my trade secrets are exposed on my site or in my marketing materials. While this is probably true (I’d hope so!), there are good reasons to move all of your content to HTTPS and make sure you don’t have mixed content. The biggest reason?
Browser vendors are changing the browser experience to encourage site owners to avoid mixed content, with an ultimate aim to create a secure browsing experience across the internet.
Chromium, the technology at the heart of the Google Chrome, has announced mixed-content deprecation, an initiative to disallow sites to serve mixed content. This process is already in motion. There are a couple of key callouts for Pardot users:

The latest version of Chrome – Chrome 86 – automatically attempts to upgrade mixed-content images to HTTPS. While this should be innocuous, there may be unintended side effects of this Chrome change that affect the browsing experience.
Chrome will eventually stop showing mixed-content images altogether. This is planned to happen in Chrome 88, scheduled for deployment in January 2021.

There are other motivations for moving to encryption everywhere. Not only do search engines prioritize secure sites, this practice also promotes trust with your audience and helps to future-proof your sites against related browser and web changes.
How marketers can prepare for the changes ahead
According to my research, over 90% of Pardot users have websites served via HTTPS. This is good! My calls to action for you are:

Make sure that the marketing content you link to in your sites and emails is also served via HTTPS. Not sure how to do this? Learn how to turn on HTTPS for your marketing content.

Check out the Pardot product team’s Salesforce Knowledge Base Article about mixed content. We’ll update it as new information emerges.
Check your site for any resources, even those not served by Pardot, that need to be secured.

At Salesforce Pardot, we believe that a secure, trusted experience in everyone’s best interest. For this reason, we’re actively exploring other ways to promote security for our users and for their customers. Stay tuned for more communication as events unfold!
This blog post is part of our security, privacy, and technology series.