Category: Marketing Automation

Online sales are reaching all-time highs as buyers become more comfortable with digital transactions — in 2021, for example, consumers spent a collective $14 billion online across Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
For businesses, the shift to online-first purchasing offers substantive potential, but also underpins prospective problems: As the number of digital product offerings ramps up, competition for customer conversions is also on the rise.

The result? A battlefield for brand experience. If companies can create a lasting positive impression among potential customers, they can drive sales and set the stage for long-term loyalty. But what exactly is brand experience? What does effective design require and what does it look like in practice? Most importantly, how do brands create experience strategies that deliver reliable results over time?

While brand experience is similar to user experience, it encompasses a broader perception of your brand at large. Where user experience speaks to the takeaways — positive or negative — of a user when they interact with your website or social media profiles, brand experience refers to the impression of your brand as a whole. Not surprisingly, positive user experiences inform better brand experiences (and vice versa) but the two are distinct concepts.
It’s also important to understand that brand experience is subjective. While it’s possible to create experiences that produce reactions along a generalized spectrum, individual users will have different reactions to your efforts. In practice, this means that no matter how carefully you curate brand experience efforts, there will always be customers who come away with a negative reaction. As a result, the goal isn’t to create a universal experience but rather to create one that resonates positively with the largest number of target customers.
Breaking Down Brand Experience Design
Just 39% of business decision-makers say their brand effectively resonates with prospective buyers. This is a problem: If customers don’t connect your brand with positive thoughts, feelings, and reactions, they’re less likely to remember your products and services when it comes time to make a purchase.
Worth noting? Neutrality isn’t enough. While negative impressions of your brand can drive customers away from your site, neutral impressions are just as problematic — even if consumers see your brand listed in search engine results or advertised online, the absence of a positive brand impression means they won’t seek you out over companies that offer better connective messaging.
So what does effective brand experience design look like? Four components are critical:

Perception
Perception forms a key part of the experience. This includes audio, visual, and tactical interactions that allow customers to connect a specific sense to advertising campaigns. In much the same way that particular smells can bring back memories of childhood experiences, brands that successfully merge senses with marketing can create connections that drive sales.
Participation
It’s also more likely that customers will walk away with a positive brand experience if they’re able to participate in some way rather than simply watch. This might include the ability to submit suggestions online or interact in real-time online question forums, or it could feature the use of physical installations that allow consumers to touch your product or provide direct feedback.
Personalization
Generic marketing campaigns can produce steady returns, but personalization can help encourage connection across different customer segments. By leveraging both user-provided data (with their consent) along with social media interactions and other engagement data, it’s possible to create more personalized efforts that help create connections between consumer needs and current product offerings.
Prioritization
Brand experience can’t be all things to all people. Attempts to capture every consumer in every circumstance actually undermine experience-driven efforts — as a result, it’s worth selecting specific brand metrics such as positive social mentions or repeat purchases to prioritize.
Creating a Brand Experience Strategy
So how do you build an effective brand experience strategy?
First up is identifying areas where your current experience isn’t meeting customer expectations. Social media interactions and customer service calls can help pinpoint potential problems — if consistent concerns around brand interaction or reaction arise, this can help frame the foundation of brand experience strategy.
Next is targeting an area for improvement. While there may be more than one aspect of brand experience that could use a refresh or redesign, attempting to do everything at once can spread strategy efforts too thin and deliver less-than-ideal results. For example, you might choose to increase positive social mentions across specific channels such as Facebook or Instagram. While the eventual goal could be a larger social impact from initial contact to eventual conversion, easily-accessible social platforms provide an ideal starting point.
Effective measurement follows to ensure efforts are bearing fruit. In the case of our social media example above, this means tracking user views, reactions, and responses to social media posts along with the sentiment — positive, negative, or neutral — that goes along with them. This is also the time to explore and innovate by testing multiple strategies to see which one sticks. From video campaigns to personalized storytelling to marketing efforts all designed to elicit specific emotions, it’s worth finding that resonates with your customer base and then fine-tuning your efforts to deliver ideal outcomes.

It’s one thing to talk about brand experience building, but it’s another to see it in action. Here’s a look at five brand experiences efforts that offer effective in-practice examples.
1. Red Bull

In 2012, the company went all-in on its tagline “Red Bull gives you wings by sending skydiver Alex Baumgartner 24 miles above the Earth’s surface to pull off the highest skydive ever recorded and become the first person to break the sound barrier during freefall.
While his record was broken two years later by an executive from Google, it doesn’t change the fact that Red Bull did something no one had ever done before and created a unique brand experience that aligned with its core marketing message.
2. Lean Cuisine

While healthy eating has taken off in recent years, messaging around this effort is often the opposite. With a focus on weight loss instead of overall health, many brands find themselves reinforcing harmful stereotypes that equate weight loss with personal worth.
Lean Cuisine’s #WeighThis campaign looked to change the narrative by placing “scales” around New York’s Grand Central Station that encouraged women to “weigh in”.
The catch? These scales were actually boards that let women write down how they would prefer to be measured — such as by their own persistence, accomplishments or efforts.
Even better? Lean Cuisine marketers were smart enough to stay out of the way. There were no samples on offer, no surveys to fill out; women simply saw the scales and interacted with them, in turn boosting Lean Cuisine’s overall brand experience.
3. Dove

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty took a similar approach to Lean Cuisine but opted for the use of viral video that highlighted beauty of all types — beauty that goes beyond photoshoots and photoshop. The campaign earned praise for both its authenticity and efforts to help boost self-esteem among young girls.
By choosing emotional experience over a simple sales effort, Dove was able to better connect with its target customer base and boost overall customer loyalty.
4. Cadbury India

Cadbury India opted for consumer suggestions in creating their new chocolate bar flavor. Customers were encouraged to visit the company’s dedicated chocolate bar platform that let them select ingredients and create a recipe. Cadbury then tried all suggested recipes and selected the best of those submitted.
By prioritizing interaction over simple reaction, Cadbury facilitated consumer connection and encouraged customers to view chocolate bar making as a collaborative effort rather than a corporate endeavor, in turn creating a community-based brand experience.
5. WestJet

Canadian commercial airline WestJet has been running its “Christmas Miracle” campaign since 2013. It’s 2021 version sees the company asking people what they miss the most during the holidays — not surprisingly, many mention absent family members. WestJet staff then provide plane tickets to help loved ones reconnect, and the end of the video features a tearful reunion in progress.
Overall, it’s a feel-good experience designed to bring out emotions already close to the surface for many customers and in turn, boost the overall brand experience.
Building a Better Brand Experience
The right brand experience makes all the difference when it comes to cultivating long-term customer relationships. By understanding where current efforts don’t deliver, prioritizing areas for improvement and tracking engagement metrics over time, it’s possible to build a brand experience that boosts customer connection and encourages long-term loyalty.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Everyone wants their business to grow. This seems pretty intuitive considering effective and successful growth means your business is experiencing boosts in revenue, brand awareness, brand loyalty, and more — and we know this to be true by looking at the most successful and well-known companies today (e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc.).
The question is: What do these highly-successful companies do to ensure they put themselves in a position for strong and consistent growth?

Of course, there are a number of answers to this question based on who you ask. However, the one we’re going to focus on in this blog post is market penetration. So, what is market penetration?

How to Calculate Market Penetration
If you’re using market penetration as a measurement, use the following formula to discover how much a product or service is used by customers compared to its total estimated market. In other words, take the current sale volume for your product or service and divide it by the total sale volume of all similar products available in the market.
(Number of Customers / Target Market Size) x 100 = Market Penetration Rate
Frequently monitoring your market penetration is important in order to identify any increases or decreases in penetration. If you’re wondering how often to calculate market penetration, a good rule of thumb is to calculate it after every marketing and sales campaign you run. This will highlight any changes in penetration — and, as a result, you’ll also have a better idea of the success of your campaign(s).
Next, let’s dive a little deeper into what market penetration is and why it’s such an effective growth strategy.

Understanding Market Penetration
A company can use market penetration at the industry level to review the potential for specific products or services or on a smaller scale as a way to gauge the market share of a product or service. It offers insight into how the market and your customers view your product or service.
What is high market penetration?
When it comes to market penetration, you want yours to be high. There are many benefits to high market penetration.
For instance, think about Nike. The company is a market leader in athletic shoes. When you go to the sneakers section of a store like Foot Locker or Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nike consistently takes up a large portion of the space.
That’s because retailers like Foot Locker and Dick’s know Nike delivers in sales. They also know their customers expect a wide selection of Nike products in their stores. Nike’s popularity and brand name warrant better shelving space and visibility, too. This is all a result of Nike’s high market penetration.
Similar to Nike, when you have a high market penetration…

You’re an industry leader.
You sell products or services that are already established within the industry.
You have a widely-recognized brand.
You have good visibility in the market.
You have strong brand equity.
You likely make your product for less than you would be able to if you were a less-established business due to the scale of your operation.
You have a high sales volume which means you have leverage among suppliers and sellers.

High market penetration offers a marketing advantage and more potential for continued growth and success as a business. Needless to say, high market penetration is the goal — but, how do you achieve it? Well, market development is a good place to start.

To increase market penetration, focus on market development first. Let’s look at an example.
Example of Market Development Increasing Market Penetration
A successful leggings brand, Booty by Brabants, has made waves in recent years in the athletic-wear industry. The brand has established itself as a seller of high-quality and unique leggings for women of all sizes.
By reviewing their market penetration, BBB was able to identify a small, existing market they could tap into — kids’ leggings. They determined that selling kids’ leggings could help them broaden their target audience and customer base for little added cost and effort.
Although BBB Kids leggings aren’t a major source of revenue for the company, they’re complementary to its existing product line and bring in new customers. BBB was able to identify an existing market they hadn’t taken advantage of yet and determine clear steps to successfully enter that market. As a result, they expanded their product line, customer base, and market penetration.
Now, let’s look at the most effective ways to get started on your market penetration strategy.

As you begin working on your market penetration strategy, you may hear the words: Ansoff Matrix.
The Ansoff Matrix is a tool with four growth strategies listed for businesses to consider.

Image Source
As you move to the upper-right quadrant of this matrix, the growth strategies become riskier for businesses. We’ve included information about the Ansoff Matrix in this article because it further proves and highlights the fact that market penetration is a highly-valuable and achievable way to effectively grow a business, even for the risk-averse.
At this point, you might be wondering about the specific strategies under the umbrella of market penetration that you can deploy at your company — let’s talk about some of those next.

Market Penetration Strategies
Here are some examples of effective market penetration strategies that you may choose to focus on and/or implement at your company.
1. Change your pricing.
Lower or raise the cost of one of your products.
2. Revamp your marketing.
Rework your marketing plan and/or roadmap.
3. Identify the need for a new product and launch it.
Survey and analyze your customers and target audience to identify the need for a new product (or feature). Then, create that product and sell it.
4. Update or change your product (or a specific feature of your product).
Resolve the challenges of your customers and buyer personas more effectively by updating or changing a product or feature.
5. Grow business in new territories and offer franchise opportunities.
Identify new territories in which you can expand and grow your business. Ask yourself: Which new areas can we open our stores or prospect? You might also begin offering franchise opportunities to expand your brick-and-mortar business.
6. Identify a business partner to work with.
Partner or merge with another business in a mutually beneficial way (e.g. run a co-marketing campaign).
7. Purchase a small business or competitor in your industry.
If you have the resources, consider acquiring a small business or competitor in your industry to broaden your base of customers and your offerings/ capabilities. (HubSpot did this a while ago.)
8. Offer a promotional program to boost loyalty.
Give customers an opportunity to sign up for a loyalty program that provides them with perks in return for giving you their contact information (e.g. discounts, birthday gifts, inside information, etc.).
9. Develop a new marketing campaign.
Create and launch a marketing campaign or initiative to promote your product line in a unique and new way that your customers haven’t seen before. Analyze your campaign’s success so you can refer to it in the future.
10. Boost sales rep activity.
Encourage sales reps to increase the number of interactions they have with qualified prospects (e.g. focus on social selling and meeting prospects where they are).
Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
STP marketing stands for segmentation, targeting, and positioning. This is a three-step model that helps you to examine your products or services and how you communicate them to your market. Step one is to divide your market into segments. Step two is to target each segment with tailored marketing campaigns. Step three is to position your business and marketing in a way that will appeal the most to each segment.

What’s an example of a successful market penetration strategy?
There are several examples of companies using market penetration to grow their business. For the sake of this piece, let’s look at Dunkin’.
Dunkin’ (formerly, Dunkin’ Donuts) was started in Quincy, MA back in the 1940s. Since then, Dunkin’ has become a globally-recognized brand. Dunkin’ has since grown substantially and opened stores in 46 countries — yet, the company’s most-loyal customers remain in New England. In fact, there are 12,500 Dunkin’s worldwide (9,000 of which are in the U.S.) In terms of market penetration, Dunkin’ continues to tap into their large and loyal market by opening and maintaining that large portion of their stores in New England.
Check out the following map for example — Boston is a small city, and you can walk between almost all 10 of these Dunkin’ locations in just minutes.

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Dunkin’ knows where their customers are and that those customers want a Dunkin’ store every… well, city block.
Not only has Dunkin’ successfully penetrated their market by opening and maintaining so many stores in New England, but they’ve also increased market penetration by making specific changes to their branding and menu.
Most notably, they changed their name from Dunkin’ Donuts to Dunkin’. The company does 60% of their business in coffee and other drinks, so the “Donuts” aspect of their original name was arguably a bit misleading. The CEO of Dunkin’ said this move was important because the new name, “… speaks to the breadth of our offerings.”
The brand name change also gives a signal to customers that there are a number of other menu items available, aside from donuts. In fact, the name change was paired with many menu additions, including healthier options as well as offerings for non-dairy and vegan customers including their Beyond Sausage and almond milk.
All of these changes broadened Dunkin’s customer base and target audience by accommodating more people within the market they were already penetrating.
Invest in Market Penetration to Grow Better
We just covered several reasons why market penetration is so beneficial to your business’s long-term success. And as you’ve learned throughout this blog post, it’s a highly effective growth strategy that’s typically low-risk.
There are many market penetration strategies to choose from, plan, and implement at your company, so pick the best option for your goals and get started.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Last Updated on February 10, 2022 by Rakesh GuptaBig Idea or Enduring Question: A Price Book is a book in which the prices of products are listed. Currently, business users have to select a price book as soon as an opportunity is created. In this article, let’s check out a
The post Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 90 (Automatically Assign Pricebook Based on Opportunity Record Type) appeared first on Automation Champion.

92% of buyers visiting your eCommerce website for the first time aren’t there to make a purchase. They are there for other reasons: to discover a product, compare prices, and see store details. They usually purchase during subsequent visits.  That’s the harsh reality of the eCommerce arena and it shows why it’s vital to entice…
The post How to Sell Your Product Using Benchmark Email appeared first on Benchmark Email.

My boss tasked me with some research into a email tool, and I’m drawing a blank on how to get the results I want/what to search for. We send marketing emails out to a huge database and I am in charge of monitoring the replies we get to those emails. We get about 200 replies a day and many of them include an out of office reply or letting us know that they are no longer with the company and there is a new contact. My boss wants these contacts added to our system, but that is too much for me to manually do everyday. Is there a platform or way to scrape these emails and put them in an excel doc so they could be automatically added to our system? I’m having trouble trying to find a solution so any help is appreciated!
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​ https://preview.redd.it/yj8c4u0gbug81.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8acbf9f5082a39e334ae27be682bccab187af8ab Sunwell Solutions LTD ERP renders solutions from startups to small and medium-sized enterprises with its robust suite of features and functionalities. A preferred choice of leading business leaders, Sunwell Solutions helps you to streamline accounting and finance tasks, collaborate with finance, marketing and manage various business functions like sales, inventory, purchase etc. This ERP can also scale as your business needs evolve making it a nicer option to have.
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My organization uses Eloqua. Last year we were testing their Send Time Optimization tool and fell in love. However, this year it is part of their new AI package and is like $10,000 per month to get access to the same tool. Looking for any recommendations for tools/integrations compatible with Eloqua that have Send Time Optimization functionality. I’m familiar with Motiva AI but am curious if there are any additional tools out there I could be overlooking.
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SALESmanago, a leading end-to-end martech platform used by over 3000 mid size eCommerce businesses including New Balance, Converse or Vodafone relaunched it’s Customer Data Platform with a dedicated set of features enabling businesses to gather, manage Zero Party Data. These are data voluntarily left by the customers. They are widely known as the most serious response to the challenges of the new Data Privacy regulations, Data Ethics, removal of cookies as well as the challenges around sustainability of eCommerce. 

According to research made by Accenture, 83 % of respondents are willing to voluntarily share the relevant information about themselves in return for contextualized interactions made by brands. 

“It turns out that gathering data directly from your customers is not only the way to revive the idea of one to one Commerce. Actually, it is the only way to approach the current challenges of data privacy constructively and align with the steps taken by the largest players on the market to reduce the usage of Cookies”. – says Greg Blazewicz, SALESmanago CEO and founder.

It is important to point out that Zero Party Data is not only about personalization. The introduction of Zero Party Data strategies by eCommerce, according to recent research Dentsu & Microsoft might lead to a significant reduction of carbon footprint which results from the global growth of eCommerce especially in the area of logistics (shortening the supply chain leading to reducing emissions) and production (ability to reduce waste by super lean production). More on that topic in blog post: 7 ways zero-party data enable your company to reduce its carbon footprint and turn eCommerce into ECOmmerce

“While everybody in eCommerce is struggling with conversion, personalization and basically increase of sales, relatively little is said about how influential the global growth of eCommerce is on Climate. We want to help each eCommerce business contribute to combat Climate Change and we believe the small steps around gathering relevant data from Customers might have a great impact on the environment.” says Greg Blazewicz

The latest research from Dentsu & Microsoft finds out that 87% of customers would be willing to change services and the products they purchase to combat climate change.

Until now, Customer Data Platforms operated almost exclusively on third-party, and, to some extent, first-party data. While the superiority of zero-party data is universally recognized, until now, no one has been able to create an integrated solution, enabling them to effectively collect, manage and utilize such datasets. The key element of the relaunch of SALESmanago Customer Data Platform is the Customer Preference Center. It facilitates the effortless collection and management of zero-party data, as well as its effective utilization by enhancing customer segmentation and recommendations in natively built omnichannel execution environments. 

About SALESmanago

SALESmanago is a leading Customer Data Platform and marketing automation company. Its solution harnesses the full power of first- and zero-party data, combining advanced analytics and AI automation to deliver highly configurable personalized experiences, across a comprehensive range of natively built and integrated marketing execution channels.

Headquartered in Krakow and founded in 2012, SALESmanago employs nearly 400 people and delivers software to a mix of large blue-chip and mid-size organizations located across Europe, the Americas, and Asia and spanning all industry verticals. Customers include Starbucks, Burger King, Pizza Hut, BMW, Toyota, Harley Davidson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Aegon.

Recently, the company completed a nine-digit Euro investment round from Silver Tree and Perwyn, global leaders in Private Equity.

More information www.salesmanago.com 

More Information on SALESmanago CDP and Customer Preference Center for Zero Party Data Management here >> 

Most jobs require specific skills to succeed, like knowing how to use social media scheduling tools if you’re going to work as a content creator.
However, most jobs require skills that aren’t always listed on a job application because you’re expected to have them no matter what, like communicating with your coworkers.
These skills, often called employability skills, are critical even if they’re not listed on a job application. Let’s go over what they are, how they apply to day-to-day activities, and how to improve upon them so you can succeed in every position you have.

As foundational skills, employability skills can be transferable to any position you hold, regardless of job type. For example, you need to communicate well regardless of your position level, whether you’re the C-Suite executive or newly-hired marketing intern.
Employability skills aren’t always listed as required skills on job applications because they are expected as a baseline, but employers and interviewers will still look for them during interviews and expect you to use them on the job.
Developing Employability Skills
You can develop employability skills without specific training through experiences at school, work, hobbies, and extracurricular activities. For example, you can develop public speaking skills from presentations given in class and collaboration skills from playing on a sports team in your free time.
Employability Skills Examples
Let’s go over some examples of employability skills.

Communication: In all positions, you’ll need to communicate with your teammates and customers and be able to explain yourself clearly, both verbally and in writing.

Collaboration: Employers want you to collaborate because teamwork is often a means by which a company can meet its goals. Collaboration also means being able to work well with others.

Critical Thinking: This is your ability to analyze and understand the information in your workplace and act on it. This is a critical employability skill because you’ll always need to think logically about problems and situations that arise at work and come to a solution.

Self-management: Employers want you to self-manage and meet deadlines and goals without significant guidance unless necessary. While there’s nothing wrong with asking for help, employers want to train you and have you be able to take on your everyday tasks.

Adaptability: Adaptability is a critical employability skill because things can change quickly at work, and adjusting as necessary can be the difference between continuing business success or falling behind.

Reliability: Employers want to know that they can trust you in all aspects of work, that you’re punctual and complete assignments, show up on time and that you can be consistent in your overall performance without strict guidance.

Organization/Planning: Being organized and able to plan means you can adequately understand how to complete your assignments in a structured and timely manner. You can create schedules and stick to them to meet targets and deadlines.

Leadership: Employers appreciate leadership skills because they want you to take charge when necessary, whether over your job performance or during team activities, or because you’re at a leadership level and manage other people.

Willingness to learn: Being willing to learn is required for all jobs as you’re always expected to learn on the job, be open to learning on the job, and take on new tasks.

Tech Savvy: A baseline ability to use technology in day-to-day job duties, anything from knowing how to send an email, conduct a query online, or use tools like Google Suite. Technological skills move out of essential employability skills when they are things like using different coding languages.

Improve Employability Skills
As mentioned above, employability skills aren’t taught. They come along with different experiences like working on a job and participating in hobbies. Working on improving your skills can typically be done in activities you may already be involved in. For example:

If you want to improve your organization skills, you can organize events in your community.
If you want to become a stronger leader, you can ask to shadow current leaders at your workplace to learn from their style or step up to the plate to lead new workplace activities.
If you want to improve your technical skills, you can start leveraging different tools in your day-to-day life.
If you want to be better at self-management, you can ask for more responsibility at work to help you learn about time management and organization.

When working to improve your employability skills, it may be helpful to plan out your progress in a checklist.
Employability Skills Checklist
An employability skills checklist will help you create an improvement plan to follow. You can select a specific skill you want to work on and outline the steps you’ll take to improve, a desired timeframe for the process, and resources that will help you get to your end goal.

Download This Template Here
Over To You
Developing employability skills isn’t a significant challenge, as we often develop them over time through life experiences. Use our checklist to take stock of the ones you have, and create plans to further develop those you think are lacking.