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You probably already know the value of building a community behind your brand: more powerful word of mouth, stronger customer retention, better organic growth. And yet, I find many small business owners aren’t quite sure how to foster real communities or don’t believe they can if they don’t have the money to really do it successfully.
I’ve built two thriving communities on startup budgets, first as employee #1 and Director of Marketing and Community at theSkimm and now as the founder and CEO of puzzle company JIGGY. Here’s my advice for doing it right.
1. Find Ways to Support & Celebrate Your Organic Ambassadors
You probably already have a community of champions—people who love what you’re doing and want to tell the world about it—even if it’s just a small one. If the cheapest customer is always your existing one, the easiest community to build is the one you already have. So, look for ways to help your current advocates help you, and thank them when they do.
At JIGGY, we make it clear on our product packaging and website how puzzlers can share their progress on social, tagging us and the artist who designed the puzzle artwork. We also always react or share their posts on our stories to show how much we appreciate them (and encourage them to continue sharing!).

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JIGGY’s customers love sharing their puzzling journey—and we’ve made it easy for them to help spread the word about our brand in the process.
At theSkimm, a simple prompt in our daily newsletter to share it with a friend evolved into an entire ambassador program (called Skimm’bassadors), with detailed guidance on how to best spread the word and tiered perks based on the number of referrals. For a long time, we even chose incentives that cost us almost nothing and further drove community engagement: access to a private Facebook group, invites to Skimm events, and the chance to meet the team.
Whatever you do, taking a little time now to support and appreciate your biggest fans will save you a lot of money in the long run when it comes to your community growth.
2. Bring Your Followers Into the Business-Building Process
Traditional marketing is a one-way conversation, but to build a strong community, you should create opportunities for your customers to feel like they have a voice, too.
Again, this doesn’t have to be complex. Our JIGGY team makes sure to respond to every customer email we get so our users know they are being heard. We keep an ear to the ground and make product decisions based on what our customers want, letting them know when we’ve addressed their feedback. We ask our followers for their thoughts on ideas we’re considering, rather than just trying to read their minds. Even a simple Instagram poll can be engaging and insightful.

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A post shared by JIGGY (@jiggypuzzles)
When we released our first kids puzzle, we emphasized that this decision came from customer requests.
By treating your customer community as a very large board of advisors, you may also start to feel confident trying half-baked ideas to see what kind of reaction you get. For instance, when we were figuring out how to monetize our newsletter at theSkimm, we simply told our readers, “We’re going to start putting some ads in, let us know what you think!” By staying transparent and opening up this line of communication, our users felt more invested in what we were doing—and more forgiving as we figured it out.
3. Encourage Connections Within Your Community
The real magic of a brand community starts happening when you help users build connections with each other.
About a year after we started doing events for our Skimm’bassadors, we did a user survey, and found that a huge indicator of satisfaction was the people our users were meeting through the group: new friendships, professional connections, even some romantic relationships.
Early on with JIGGY, we saw a ton of organic engagement on social between our customers and the artists who create the work for our puzzles, and we found that it made both communities feel more dedicated to what our brand is doing. More recently, we noticed users having puzzle parties over Zoom—so decided to launch the Puzzle Club to help further encourage this kind of engagement.
Puzzle Club members get the same exclusive puzzle every month so they can all share their progress, as well as opportunities to interact with JIGGY artists—both great drivers of deeper community.
Think of ways to bring your community together, and then step back and watch the real connections start to happen.
4. Stay Guided by Your Why
Ultimately, none of this works if you don’t have a deeper why behind your brand. At theSkimm, that was about being informed and connected with current events in the world around you. At JIGGY, it’s about reconnecting with downtime and practicing mindful self care while also supporting independent artists. People want to be part of these communities because they want to be around like-minded people.
It’s not just about stating your values—it’s about living them out in your branding, your copy, and even your business decisions. In the early months of Covid-19, we ran out of product and couldn’t restock because of supply chain issues. All we had access to was blank puzzles so, after hearing about the financial struggles our artists were having, we had them draw one-of-a-kind puzzles on these blanks and auctioned them off for charity and artist relief. This didn’t benefit our bottom line, but helped puzzlers stay engaged with our company even when we couldn’t sell them anything, supported our artist community, and reinforced what we’re all about as a company.

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A post shared by JIGGY (@jiggypuzzles)
During the early months of Covid, our Jiggy Originals campaign supported our artist community and drove a deeper connection with our puzzlers.
Communities don’t rally behind a product—they rally behind values that matter to them or a lifestyle they identify with. Figure yours out, live it out in the brand, and make sure you really care about your customers along the way, and you’ll be amazing at the dedicated following you can build.

Will 2022 be the year that you level up your social media strategy? Marketing trends come and go, but social media serving as a major determining factor of success definitely isn’t going anywhere any time soon. There are 4.55 billion active social media users around the globe, representing 57.6% of all people on the planet.…
The post 6 Best Social Media Tools for Your 2022 Strategy appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Last week I mentioned that the key now is to simplify the mobile setup of my site and reduce eye noise for users.
Some of these users have given feedback that the search bar on the home page has no use. Previously, the search bar included a general search, a tools search, a community search, and a search within the site. Now, I simply delete the search bar function on my phone. On the computer, only the tool search function is retained. Do you guys think the tool search function also needs to be deleted?
https://postimg.cc/tsD0gqWn https://postimg.cc/B8tzQxJR
“Your website looks confusing, with too many things laid out on the home page.” There were many comments like this, so I decided to change the theme of my website on cell phone. Before I directly placed various e-commerce tools on the homepage, allowing people to directly click and read the tool introduction. Now, I put these e-commerce tools into several different folders according to categories first, and clicked on the folders before I could start to understand the tools.
https://postimg.cc/p9cKyFP1 Although there are more steps for the user to take than before, after this change, I found that the home page is much shorter and looks more simple and easy to understand. Do you think this theme is more suitable for my website?(After all, my website is a tool directory for e-commerce sellers.
And the most important point, the mobile version of the site originally had a navigation bar setting, but after the change, it seems to be incompatible with the current theme. Have you guys encountered any problems like this? How was it solved?
https://postimg.cc/PpT2vYHt https://postimg.cc/TpV1Cbv8 Or do you guys have any better suggestions about the whole website layout? Anyway, Happy New Year to all you guys sincerely~
submitted by /u/Sixeven2021 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/beautyaal [link] [comments]

What’s the largest unread count you’ve seen in someone’s inbox? Whether you’re a proponent of inbox zero or an “I’ll get to it when I get to it” email accumulator, know high unread counts aren’t uncommon. A recent consumer survey found 20% of respondents had 1,000 or more unread emails in their inboxes.
Given the vast amount of emails sent out daily (over 300 billion each day in 2020), it’s hardly a surprise so many go unread. Consumers, overwhelmed by their inboxes, rarely have time to read everything. If your brand doesn’t make the cut, they may unsubscribe from your list. However, they might also get in the habit of deleting your emails before reading them or leaving them to get buried in an ever-growing stack of unread messages. These inactive customers aren’t just a lost opportunity. They can also affect email deliverability.
Email list churn is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be the end of a consumer relationship. Knowing why someone stopped reading in the first place can help you figure out how to win them back. Your email reactivation campaign should start with a survey to learn why readers are churning. Armed with this data, you’ll be able to create reactivation emails that address customer worries or annoyances and give them a reason to return.
Ask subscribers why they stopped reading
All the data analysis in the world won’t give you the kind of insight you can get from a simple survey. If someone has stopped reading your emails, the easiest way to find out why is by asking them.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. Getting a churned reader to respond to an exit survey is difficult. Ironically, you may have the easiest time with those who take the time to click unsubscribe: Your confirmation page can ask why they no longer want to read your emails. For those inactive subscribers who skim past your emails after seeing the sender, the subject line is your only chance to get their attention.
This is not the time for subtlety or cleverness. If a consumer has churned, it means your marketing tactics aren’t capturing them at the moment. Your survey email (and its subject line) should feel not only personalized but also personal. Without deviating from your brand’s style guide, you may want to:

Use an individual’s name, rather than a brand name, in the from field
Write an email that reads like it’s meant for one individual rather than an entire email list
Include a sign-off or signature with a real person’s name and contact information
Use a respectful, empathetic tone and voice throughout the message

An inactive user is unlikely to give feedback if they don’t think anyone will listen. A successful win-back email must center your consumer rather than your brand.
Write an effective email list churn survey
Whether you’re writing up questions to go on the Unsubscribe page or a survey to be shared via email, it’s important to keep your request simple and short. Unengaged readers typically aren’t in love with your brand, which means they may not have much time to give. Each question you ask comes with the risk of a reader deciding they don’t have the time or energy to fill out your survey and closing the window before they complete it. Your job is to minimize customer frustration and make sure the survey is as easy to complete as possible.
Try to keep your survey to three or fewer questions. Make sure each request gathers an important data point and asks for unique information. For example, asking “Why did you stop reading our emails?” and “How do you feel about the frequency of our emails?” might give the same answer. If you used the second question to instead ask, “How often do would you like to receive emails?” the answers would provide important data you couldn’t have gathered with the first question.
Identify key reasons for email list churn
Once you’ve gathered the data, it’s time to examine it for trends. The process will vary depending on the type of answer you asked for. Checkboxes and radio buttons give clear-cut data because readers are choosing from pre-existing answers. It’s simply a matter of finding the most common response(s). If you gave respondents room to write out their thoughts, you will likely gather more nuanced answers but also have to reconcile the different ways people express the same sentiment. Many surveys have more than one question type, which means using different methods to make sense of the data from different questions.
Once you’ve collated all the answers, you may find a simple, easy explanation for email list churn — or you may find more than one reason for readers leaving. In the latter situation, ask yourself whether you can address multiple issues in the same re-engagement email campaign. If not, consider segmenting your lists and creating a different series of emails for each concern you identified. Failing to respond to consumer feedback is a fatal error with a reader who is only lukewarm on your brand.
Craft a campaign that addresses consumer needs
If you’ve gotten responses to your survey, congratulations: Your customers have told you how to win them back. The next step is to craft reactivation emails that provide what they are asking for. Though your strategy will vary depending on what you learned, each message in a reactivation campaign should be focused on re-earning a customer’s trust. Here are some tips on how to address common causes of email list churn.
Refocus on your target audience to increase relevancy
Personalizing emails by sticking someone’s name in the subject line won’t help if they’re not interested in what you have to offer. The content you are sending out must address the needs of the consumers you want to reach. Using one email newsletter to speak to multiple demographics with different needs just leaves everyone disappointed.
Many email lists run into this problem as they grow. It’s hard to keep up with the high content demands that come with personalization efforts. Unless you have the capacity to create multiple articles to speak to each group, your email blasts for different audiences may look 90% the same. In this situation, it’s probably more effective to focus on one group, even if it means a smaller list.
Part of refocusing on your target audience might mean letting some email subscribers go because they aren’t the right fit. This doesn’t feel good if you’re trying to decrease subscriber churn, but it provides important data about what doesn’t work.
Segment lists for less frequent readers
One of the top reasons for email list attrition is too many emails. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the best way to compete with the deluge of other emails is by sending so many you always end up near the top of someone’s inbox. This approach can backfire, cementing you in a consumer’s mind as one of the big drivers of an email overwhelm problem.
You don’t need to drown others out to get people in the habit of reading your emails. You do need to give your audience a reason to keep coming back. Instead of sending out every bit of content immediately, create a list for those who only want to hear from you one or two times a week. Still send your best content — just in fewer emails. Depending on what you learn, you may even find you can scale back email frequency for everyone without losing subscribers or engagement.
Double down on quality content to make customers feel understood
If your emails read as too sales-y or dishonest, they’re more than likely going to go straight into the trash. A surprising number of marketers still send out clickbait or other meaningless content. Getting high open rates or link clicks doesn’t matter if your reader closes the page two seconds later; in fact, it’s more likely to sour them on your brand in the long run.
Providing quality content means understanding your readers and what they want, then following through with answers they can’t find elsewhere. Use the customer pain points and questions identified in your survey as prompts for future email topics.
Use the data to improve your email marketing strategy
Email churn is inevitable, which means re-engagement campaigns need to be part of your repertoire. However, there’s no reason to wait until someone is leaving to make changes. Use the data you gather from churning readers to refine existing email marketing campaigns so you can hook new customers and increase retention. You may even want to go a step further and survey happy readers to see what they want more (and less) of.
Consumers will likely continue to struggle with email management. By 2024, the world will send (and receive) over 360 billion emails a day. That means email opens will be harder to win. If you haven’t yet mastered re-engagement emails, it’s time to get started.
The post How to Craft Reactivation Emails That Win Back Subscribers appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

SMS marketing campaigns can bring 6x-8x times higher engagement than email marketing alone. But how can you make sure your campaign is a successful one? Read now to find out!

What’s better — 1,000 Instagram followers who engage with your brand, or 1 million followers who don’t?
Ultimately, the goal of social media is to generate revenue. If your followers don’t engage with your posts, they won’t engage with your business.

Communities are critical because they promote engagement. They’re incubators for brand awareness, loyalty, and trust. But they’re also a dime a dozen, so marketers need to refine their approach to building and leveraging them correctly.
Let’s explore more about social media communities, their benefits and challenges, and where brands will invest their resources in 2022.
Are Brands Investing in Social Media Communities?
The Hubspot Blog surveyed 1,067 global marketing professionals working in B2B and B2C companies to determine which trends they leverage, the channels they use, and their plans for 2022. Here’s what we found:
Social Media Community Trends

64% of marketers plan to invest in social media communities in 2022.
More than half of respondents (51%) plan to build more social media communities in 2022.
The biggest challenge marketers face with social media communities is actively managing members.

Facebook

89% of marketers who leverage Facebook plan to increase their investment in 2022.
83% of marketers plan to increase their investment in Facebook Live Audio in 2022.
44% of marketers plan to leverage Facebook Stories for the first time in 2022.

Instagram

More than half of marketers (58%) plan to increase their investment in Instagram Reels in 2022, closely followed by Instagram Live (57%).
Almost half of respondents (49%) plan to leverage Instagram Reels for the first time in 2022.
73% of respondents rank Instagram as the best platform for influencer marketing.

Twitter

79% of respondents plan to increase their investment in Twitter Spaces in 2022.
65% of respondents report live audio chat rooms, like Twitter Space, as one of the most effective formats on social media.

YouTube

44% of marketers plan to leverage YouTube for the first time in 2022.
83% plan to increase their investment in YouTube Shorts in 2022.

TikTok

66% of marketers report TikTok as the most effective social media platform for video.
More than half of respondents (52%) plan to increase their investment in TikTok in 2022.
85% of marketers rank short-form videos, like those on TikTok, as the most effective type of social media content.

Social Media Community Benefits
As I mentioned, it’s not enough to have a large social media following — you also need an engaged community. Here are a few reasons why:
1. They are vehicles for personal recommendations.
In a sense, every member of a social media community is a micro-influencer, sharing real experiences and opinions that can influence other members. This is worth mentioning since nearly nine out of ten consumers read reviews before buying a product.
Customers who love your brand want to talk about it. They want to share reviews and pass on advice, and communities give them a place to do that.
But what about bad reviews? As an active participant in your community, you have a great opportunity to resolve any issues or complaints. And since members are already invested in your brand, they’re more apt to find solutions with you.
2. They can cut costs.
Active, self-sustaining communities can become hubs for customers to ask and answer questions, which alleviates pressure on customer support teams. They can also reduce support costs — one study found it was 72% cheaper to answer a question via a community than to submit a ticket to a support team.
Communities can also reduce your ad spending. Here’s a crazy stat — in 2022, ad spending in the US will likely cross the $200 billion mark. Brands with active communities can spend less on social media advertising because they can reach customers in an owned space for free.
3. They create active participation with your brand.
We’ve all heard the statistic — it’s cheaper (and arguably easier) to retain customers than to convert new ones. This is why brand advocacy and retention are critical to any marketing strategy.
Brands can strengthen relationships with members in their communities by encouraging active participation — with polls, surveys, contests, and user-generated content, to name a few. In essence, what was once a transactional relationship is now an active conversation. And every active engagement brings customers closer to your brand.
4. They offer insight into your consumers.
The most productive communities are strategically designed to spark conversations. You can take full advantage of these conversations by tracking common complaints, ideas for improvement, and unique ways they’re using your products to solve problems.
When you make a change based on member feedback, remember to let your community know. People love to know you’re listening and taking their suggestions seriously.
Building a Social Media Community
You’re probably familiar with the adage, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The same is true of social media communities. 
Here are a few tips for building a thriving community:
1. Remember that communication = community.
If you want to build a thriving community, you can’t expect your customers to always start the conversation. You have to do the heavy legwork to post content, ask questions, respond to comments, and keep communication lines open.
While you don’t need to be the center of the conversation, your members should know you’re there.
2. Focus on the audience first, brand second.
Social media communities are valuable tools for self-promotion — but if that’s all you’re using them for, you’ll eventually drive customers away.
Effective communities provide value. They educate, entertain, and solve problems for the audience. In other words, if you want to build a real sense of community, you need to provide value with the content you create or share.
Check out how Glow Recipe, a skincare brand, provides value by offering tips for healthy skin while subtly promoting their products:

(Image source)
4. Feature user-generated content.
A great way to boost engagement within a community is to encourage user-generated content. This is any content — like text, videos, or reviews — that your members create, which you can then share across your social communities.
Peloton does an excellent job featuring user-generated content by highlighting customer stories and fitness milestones. Not only does this give the audience a voice, but it also encourages members to share their stories and testimonials — effectively fueling word-of-mouth marketing.

4. Make your community findable.
It’s hard — almost impossible — to build a community if people aren’t aware it exists. Here are a few ways to spread the word:

Embed social icons on your website
Invite family, friends, and colleagues to follow and share your community
Use hashtags to expose your content to new audiences
Cross-promote your community on different channels
Run exclusive giveaways or discounts for community members

5. Don’t let your community collect dust.
Consistency is an important ingredient in successful social media communities. If you let your accounts collect dust, members will abandon ship. When planning ahead, it’s a good idea to create a content calendar and publishing schedule. And if your brand is juggling a variety of different platforms, check out HubSpot’s social media management tools.
Challenges of Building a Social Media Community
Running a social media community is similar to hosting a party — you’re in charge of the entertainment, creating a pleasant atmosphere, and keeping conversations friendly. That’s a lot of responsibility. Luckily, you’re also in control of the guest list.
When it comes to managing your members, start by establishing clear rules and guidelines for your community. This deters any troublemakers from joining and helps prevent future conflict.
For example, Facebook offers a variety of customizable rules that users have to accept before joining a Facebook Group. This is one way to pre-moderate a group without doing any work. Check out the rules below:

The next step is to follow through. When you see members veering from community guidelines, take appropriate action — whether that’s sending a private message to a user or removing them altogether. This alerts other members that you care about the culture in your group.
To help with this process, you may want to designate someone on your team to moderator your community. Or, hire a community manager or online moderation partner such as Hive Moderation or SupportNinja.
Another challenge is measuring the ROI from your community. In other words, are your community-building efforts paying off? For instance, you may have high engagement levels in your community, but your conversion rate is stuck at 0%.
Before doing anything else, ask yourself — how do I want my community to contribute to my businesses? Is it customer engagement? Retention? Product adoption?
Next, you’ll want to identify a few metrics that you can measure your goals against. They should be community-specific and directly related to community activities — such as click-through rates, sign-up rates, or engagement rates.
You can take this one step further by tracking the same KPIs for both community members and non-members, and then comparing the performance between the two. For instance, you may discover a 30% higher product adoption among community members than non-members.
Final Thoughts
By building a social media community, you can turn transactional relationships into meaningful ones, and offer a place for customers to share, collaborate, learn, and provide feedback. But building one is no easy feat, so determine your goals, develop a strategy, and get ready to start the conversation.