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  • 22 Stats that Make a Case for Using Webinars in Your Marketing Strategy

    A webinar is a video presentation, seminar, lecture, or workshop delivered over the internet.
    Although once declared dead and outdated, webinars are very much still relevant. Many businesses are now rethinking the benefits of a virtual event, especially during the time of social distancing. In fact, ON24, a virtual platform, hosted 19,292 webinars in April of 2020 alone, which amounts to roughly 640 webinars per day.
    Given their popularity, you may be interested in getting on board. In this post, we’ll give the most heavy-hitting statistics about webinars that make a case for using them in your marketing strategy.

    Webinar Stats To Know
    General Webinar Stats

    67% of marketers in 2020 were increasing their investment in webinars. (LinkedIn)
    The global webinar market is estimated to reach 800 million by 2023, up 253 million from 2015. (MarketWatch)
    Marketers say that webinars are cost-effective as they help lower the cost-per-lead. (ON24)
    95% of survey respondents said webinars play a key part in their marketing efforts, and 38% consider webinars critical to their digital communications. (ON24)
    53% of marketers say webinars are the top-of-the-funnel format that generates the most high-quality leads. (Demand Gen Report)
    Professionals say that video-based learning is their preferred learning format, and 85% prefer the video to be webinars. 94% of respondents also report viewing webinar content monthly. (BrightTALK)
    Viewers in 2020 watched three times more webinar content than they did in 2019. (ON24)
    91% of webinar marketers in 2020 say they’ve been successful, which is a 10% increase from 2019. (Wyzowl)

    Webinar Conversion Stats

    76% of marketers say that webinars help them reach more leads, 75% say it extends brand reach, 69% say it helps scale marketing efforts, and 49% say that it helps them reach targeted accounts. (ON24)
    A survey from April of 2020 found that webinars had a 61% registration to attendee conversion rate, up from 55% in 2019. (ON24)
    Webinars hosted on a company domain generate 3x more audience participation. 91% of professionals who watch webinars say their next step is to visit a website for more info. If they’re already on your site, you’re increasing the probability of conversion. (BrightTALK)
    Communication webinars have the highest conversion rate (67.05%). (ON24)
    Email is the top promotional channel for webinars. Up to 57% of registrations come from that channel, and the conversion rate is 27% higher. (GoToWebinar, BrightTALK)

    Webinar Content Stats

    81% of marketers use Q&A as an engagement tool during webinars, 69% provide resources for download. (ON24)
    When asked what they’d most like to see in their webinars, consumers reported that they would most like (22%) to see a host or presenter that takes questions from the audience. (HubSpot)
    Survey respondents rate webinar video integrations as a 7.8 in importance on a scale of 10. (ON24)
    60-minute webinars attract more attendees than 30-minute webinars, and the average attendee viewing time is 57 minutes. (WorkCast, GoToWebinar)
    Thursdays are the best days to host a webinar. (MegaMeeting)
    Marketers prefer webinars that are live and on-demand. (Statista)
    Consumers reported being most likely (27%) to sign up for a webinar that teaches them something about a hobby or passion, and 18% would attend a webinar that taught them something about their career or industry. (HubSpot)
    Consumers report that the most engaging webinar format is a presentation that teaches them how to do something specific. (HubSpot)

    Webinars Are Here To Stay
    As these statistics demonstrate, webinars are not dead; they are here to stay. Case in point, 53% of marketers say that they plan to include webinars in their 2021 video strategy, up 11% from the previous year.
    If you’re interested in learning more about using the channel in your marketing, read this guide to understand how to create compelling webinars and learn from experienced marketing HubSpotters on their best practices for taking webinars from good to great.

  • What is Call Overflow Handling? 4 Reasons Your Call Center Needs it Now

    Managing call spikes during peak periods in your call center can seem like an insurmountable challenge. Whether you’re in retail, healthcare, or the financial industry, understaffed contact centers coupled with increased call volumes create stressful moments for you and your agents.
    The ROI of Call-Backs for your Call Center
    If this sounds familiar, never fear: call overflow handling is here. These services provide hands-on relief for call centers by helping them better negotiate call volume spikes during peak periods, whether those periods are related to seasonal shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday), seasonal events (tax season, winterizing services, etc.), or widespread crises (pandemic, PR crises, etc.).
    The big question is, does your call center need a call overflow handling service? Read on to learn all about what call overflow handling is, the benefits of using an overflow service, and the four main reasons why your business should consider this extremely useful and cost-effective option.
    What is call overflow?
    Call overflow refers to any inbound voice calls that your contact center agents are simply unable to answer. These excess calls may arise due to understaffing, peak period, product/service issues, or even an emergency or crisis situation.
    What is call overflow handling?
    Call overflow handling refers to a type of answering service that helps call centers deal with spikes in call volume. These services have trained call center professionals who manage incoming customer calls when primary contact center agents have reached their call handling capacity.
    Your Guide to Call Center Outsourcing in 2021
    Why do call centers use overflow handling services?
    Overflow services ensure no customer call goes unanswered, and no customer is kept waiting. This way, customers will have a more positive experience with your company which can a) encourage repeat business; and b) improve your business’ bottom line.
    An overflow service is easy to set up, and can offer your business:

    The ability to offer 24/7 customer support to customers,
    The capacity to answer every customer call, even during high-volume periods, and

    Happier call center agents who can enjoy workload relief.

    Most call centers employ a call overflow handling service when they know they will be facing spikes in call volume. This is often the most cost-effective approach, and it eases some of the challenges that come with staffing up during peak seasons where your business may see a high-saturation of inbound calls.
    4 important benefits to call overflow handling.
    Setting up a call overflow service is ultimately the more time and cost-efficient choice. When utilized strategically, it can also have a positive impact on your CSat scores and overall customer experience offerings.
    Read on for the top four reasons your call center should be using a call overflow handling service.
    The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
    1. Call overflow handling is cost-effective: it saves and earns profits for your business.
    You may think that outsourcing overflow services is costly, but it has been known to save businesses customer service dollars in the long run. Employing a third party to handle hellish call volumes can save your business serious time and money by:

    Lowering the cost of internal training of short or long-term agents.
    Reducing the cost of hiring and maintaining new agents.
    Saving significant training and HR time (setting up an overflow takes far fewer hours).
    Boosting sales, simply by connecting with more customers on the phone line.

    2. Using a call overflow handling service ensures you’re always prepared for anything.
    While you can predict and prepare for seasonal spikes by hiring more agents, sometimes it makes more sense to use a call overflow service. Why? Many call centers face call spikes due to unforeseen circumstances; they are then unable to meet or exceed their CX quotas during these periods because they simply do not have the right disaster recovery tools in place.
    By outsourcing call overflow handling, then, your call center is better prepared to answer all calls during peak periods and maintain a steady customer service level during unforeseen moments of crisis.
    3. Never lose another customer when you have a call overflow handling system in place.
    One way to gauge the health of a call center is to look at its abandonment rate, or the volume of calls that are dropped before the customer is able to actually engage with an agent.
    An overflow service can help you lower this rate and answer more calls, which turn could mean higher sales volumes and mightier customer service ratings. One thing is certain: an overflow service, coupled with a call-back service, ensures no customer will go unanswered.
    The Contact Center Guide to Managing Spikes in Call Volume
    4. Call overflow handling helps you maintain or improve the customer experience.
    When you engage an overflow handling provider, you can rest assured that your customers are still interacting with trained call center agents who can professionally manage an excess number of inbound calls.
    These trained professionals help to improve the overall quality of calls during crisis periods, and also help with your CX and CS metrics, including CSat and Average Time to Answer scores. It doesn’t hurt that having more hands on deck to handle calls ultimately lowers your customer frustration levels and lightens your agents’ stress levels — providing that piece of mind both to consumers and call center staff? That’s priceless.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

  • “You’re not that good”

    These are the three problems with creative work.

    The first is that when we begin, we’re not that good. This is a fact. The breakthrough for anyone on this journey is adding the word “yet.”

    It doesn’t pay to pretend that we’ve figured it out before we have. It’s counterproductive to adopt a brittle attitude in the face of criticism. In fact, during this stage, “you’re not that good,” is precisely what we need to hear, because it might be followed with insight on how to get better.

    The second is that once we start to build skills and offer something of value, some people are going to persist in believing that we’re not that good. Fine. They’ve told us something about themselves and what they want and need. This is a clue to offer our leadership and contribution to someone else, someone who gets what we’re doing and wants it. The smallest viable audience isn’t a compromise, it’s a path forward. Find the folks who are enrolled and open and eager. Serve them instead.

    The danger is that when you hear rejection during this stage, you might come to believe that you’ve accomplished nothing, as opposed to realizing that you might simply be talking to the wrong people.

    And the third comes full circle. Because it’s possible that in fact, we’re not that good yet, and there aren’t enough people who want what we’ve got. We’re simply not good enough for this part of the market. So we embrace that truth and begin at the beginning. We’re not good enough yet. We haven’t practiced enough, found enough empathy, understood the genre well enough and figured out how to contribute. Yet. At least for this audience.

    And then we get better.

    Sooner or later, these three problems become three milestones on the road to making a difference and doing work we’re proud of.

    PS today’s the best day to sign up for the Freelancer’s Workshop offered by Akimbo. I hope you’ll join in…

  • Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) in action

    An Automatic Call Distributor is a software that routes the incoming call to the right department, best-suited agent, IVR with its mechanism. ACD ensures that the customer interacting with the correct agent or department. Explore more benefits of ACD. https://i.redd.it/hwdjxyqisvs61.gif
    submitted by /u/CX-Expert [link] [comments]

  • Top-Notch Email Examples from 6 Shoe Brands

    As consumers, our inboxes are filled with emails from eCommerce brands we’ve previously purchased from. Emails include various promotions, sales, and new products, all aimed at garnering interest and revenue. If you’re anything like us, some emails quickly get the “unsubscribe” heave-ho, while others bring us joy and anticipation. Why is that? What sets the…
    The post Top-Notch Email Examples from 6 Shoe Brands appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

  • Top Predictive Analytics Providers for Better CX

    The post Top Predictive Analytics Providers for Better CX appeared first on UJET.

  • Starting a new job tomorrow

    What are some ways to get a good look at the Pardot and Salesforce setups and data for a new company? I’m looking for big picture info. Thanks!
    submitted by /u/S86RDU [link] [comments]

  • Why is Salesforce One Of The Best Places to Work?

    It’s unlikely that a few months will go by without Salesforce winning another award for “Best Place to Work”. There are many companies around the world who curate their own list of best places to work, and it’s rare to see Salesforce not featured in… Read More

  • What Are Core Web Vitals? + How to Improve Yours

    Long gone are the days of dial-up internet when web pages loaded line by line.
    Today’s internet users expect an instant response, with 93% of people leaving a website because it didn’t load properly. No one wastes time on a poor experience.
    To elevate the online experience, Google released Core Web Vitals — a set of metrics to help site owners measure the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of their pages.
    The Core Web Vitals report gives you insight into page performance, so you can improve your site experience and let the Google bots know it’s worthy of a high search ranking.

    But why does speed and user experience matter for your business?

    If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%.

    If page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%. (Google)

    A high bounce rate hurts your bottom line. Potential customers will simply jump to a competing site if yours is slow to load.
    But if you learn what metrics to hit and start to improve your pages, Google will reward you with better rankings — and you’ll create a more enjoyable experience for potential customers.
    To do so, you need to understand the metrics that make up the Core Web Vitals:

    Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the loading performance of a page. It considers the amount of time it takes to load the largest piece of content (typically a video, image, or text block) from when a user requests the URL. Google recommends sites keep LCP under 2.5 seconds for 75% of their page loads.

    First Input Delay (FID) measures the interactivity of a page. It’s the time between an action (think, clicking a button or a link) to when a browser responds to that action. The FID measurement comes from whatever element is clicked first, turning the page from a static to interactive. Responsiveness is crucial to making a good first impression with visitors by showing your site is reliable and running smoothly. Google recommends sites keep FID under 100 milliseconds for 75% of page loads.

    Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures all of the layout shifts that occur across a page. It’s scored from zero (no shifting) to a positive number (more shifting). Common causes of shifting are dropdown banner ads, buttons that appear, or images that cause a text block to move. These all contribute to a negative user experience, which is why it’s important to reduce the shifts that happen across your site. Google recommends sites aim for a CLS score of 0.1 or less.

    Image source
    By analyzing millions of pages, Google found that users are 24% less likely to abandon loading pages when a site meets the above requirements. If you’re itching for more details, check out the research behind Defining the Core Web Vitals metric thresholds.
    How to Improve Core Web Vitals
    First thing’s first, you need baseline metrics for your site. Walk through these steps to learn your starting point:

    Plug your URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
    Click ‘Analyze.’
    Check your performance. The labels “Poor,” “Needs improvement,” and “Good” are given to your URL on both mobile and desktop. Toggle between the two in the upper left-hand corner of the page.

    Here’s what it looks like when I ran an analysis on HubSpot.

    Image source
    You can see the desktop version performs better than mobile, which is common. In a study of five million pages, Backlinko found that the average web page takes 87.84% longer to load on mobile versus desktop. A few major factors that affected speed: the type of CMS, CDNs and hosting, and page weight.
    If your URL doesn’t have enough data for a specific Core Web Vitals metric, you won’t see that metric appear on the report. Once your URL has enough data, your page status will reflect the metric that performs the worst.
    Fixing Issues in Core Web Vitals
    It will take work to improve the performance of your pages, but you can begin tackling issues with a step-by-step approach.

    Prioritize issues by label: Tackle everything labeled “Poor” first. Then, choose your work based on the large-scale issues that affect the highest number of URLs or the most important URLs. Next comes issues with the “Needs Improvement” label.

    Make a list: Create a prioritized work list for the team that will be updating the site. Include these common page fixes for reference:

    Reduce page size to less than 500KB.
    Limit each page to 50 resources for optimum mobile performance.
    Consider optimizing your page for fast loading using AMP.

    3. Share common fixes: Each Core Web Vitals metric has a dozen ways to improve the threshold. Below, I’ve outlined the basic reasons for a “Poor” status and how each can be fixed.
    Improving LCP is affected by slow server response times, client-side rendering, render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, and slow resource load times. You can aim to improve LCD by optimizing each of the following site elements:

    Apply instant loading with the PRPL pattern
    Critical Rendering Path
    CSS
    Images
    Web Fonts
    JavaScript

    Improving FID is all about measuring how fast your site responds to user actions. Here, you want to fix any bad first experiences people have on a page. To see how to improve your FID threshold and check how users interact with your site, you can run a performance audit with Chrome’s Lighthouse tool. You can also try the following tweaks to boost your score.

    Reduce the impact of third-party code
    Reduce JavaScript execution time
    Minimize main thread work
    Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small
    Improving CLS and reducing unexpected shifts comes down to following a handful of best practices. Say goodbye to jumpy banners and those accidental ad clicks.

    Include size attributes or CSS aspect ratio boxes for images and videos. These numbers tell the browser how much space to allocate for the page element while it’s loading, which prevents shifts as elements become visible.

    Don’t add content above existing content. The only exception is if it’s in response to a user action where a shift is expected.

    Provide context for transitions. All animations and transitions within a layout need to have context and continuity if you’re moving users from one part of the page to another.

    When you think a specific issue is fixed, you can check if your thresholds have improved on the Search Console Core Web Vitals report. Click “Start Tracking” to launch a 28-day validation session that monitors your site for any signs of the issue. If it doesn’t pop up during that time, consider it fixed.
    Like all ranking factors, the devil is in the details. If you’re a developer or techie hungry for more information on optimizing the Core Web Vitals, take a look at Google’s guides to optimizing LCP, FID, or CSL.
    Timeline for Core Web Vitals Ranking
    Core Web Vitals will be included in Google Search ranking beginning May 2021. They originally announced plans for the update in May 2020 but pushed off the release due to the global impact of COVID-19.
    And, as Dave Brong, CTO of WebMechanix, points out, “Core Web Vitals is the ‘web 3.0’ that our generation of SEO and web development experts are facing.”

    “By shifting focus away from flimsy server-level metrics and more to the user experience (UX), Google is paving the way for a better accessible web in the future.” 

    As you prepare your site for the Core Web Vitals, remember that these are just a part of Google’s existing search signals. Search also considers mobile friendliness, HTTPS security, secure browsing, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
    Part of the Core Web Vitals will include several changes important for site owners:
    “The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results.” (Google)
    Deciding to improve your site’s Core Web Vitals may not seem like a simple task. But by prioritizing the most problematic pages and coordinating with your web team, you can work toward a “Good” label and give everyone visiting your site a great experience.