Category: Marketing Automation

 

 

The most important resource that eCommerce companies can have is customer data. Those that own more than one brand have unique insights into customer behavior across brands. Customer Data Platform is perfect for a comprehensive understanding of customer profiles using diverse data. Here’s a quick guide on how to get started.

 

When content marketing strategists build customer profiles and buyer personas, they often dream of having a glimpse of their customer behavior in relations with competitors to complement their information to gain a new perspective. Companies that have more than one store or more than one brand under their umbrella have a unique opportunity to look beyond the constraints of a rigid single relationship. What they don’t always know, however, is that the data they have can be easily pieced together and processed to make use of it.

 

In 2020, startup Mine verified that most people’s data was held by 350 companies, although the top 5% of Mine’s users with the largest digital footprints discovered that an average of 2,834 companies had access to their data (MarTech Series). Unfortunately, nearly 36% of companies are not using all the data they have, and 47% are only planning to implement a data analytics tool in the future (Datamation). This is partly due to a lack of analytical skills, partly due to a lack of the right software that helps fuse this wibbly-wobbly ball of data into a single profile. So with the growing popularity of digital channels, 73% of companies say that intuitive and versatile Customer Data Platforms that help combine diverse data from numerous sources will be critical to their customer experience efforts (Segment).

 

How CDP works

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software that helps collect and unify a variety of first- and zero-party data from different sources. CDPs enable marketers and analysts to handle customer information and comply with privacy policies. And at the same time, they don’t diminish the quality of multichannel data personalization. On the contrary, they significantly increase its quality. It’ s because the platforms use identity recognition technology. It enables marketers and advertisers to unify zero- and first-party data in the areas of user identity and the devices they use both online and offline.

[Free eBook] Read more about CDP and zero- and first-party data >>

So if you’re managing several stores, you can start planning to comprehensively use all your data to improve User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX).

 

What data can be collected with a CDP?

Before you start collecting data, make sure you have implemented monitoring code in all your stores.

Learn how to implement SALESmanago monitoring code >>

Once the code is working properly in all stores, you can get down to collecting information. Here’s what types of data you can collect using the CDP platform.

Behavioral data – its collection stems from the module of identifying and monitoring the behavior of online contacts. This is one of the basic functions of CDP.

Transactional data – this data is available thanks to SALESmanago Marketing Automation integration with CDP and ERP systems.

Timeline – in other words, a chronological history of contacts, interactions and marketing and sales activities with a particular person.

Course of marketing and sales campaigns – precise information about which campaigns a given contact participates in and at what stage they are.

Customer communication flow – this is a list of all e-mails, Web Push notifications, SMS messages, VMS messages and phone calls that a particular contact has received.

Device Fingerprint – this feature allows you to track contacts even if they delete cookies.

Segmentation data – information about which segments a person has been automatically classified into based on behaviors monitored by the brand.

Any information from external sources – if you integrate SALESmanago with external systems and databases, CDP will also collect information from these sources.

Data entered manually by the sales department and Call Center – there is also space on the contact cards for notes made by people working with customers and clients. They can also manually enable certain features from within the contact card.

Contact scoring and its growth dynamics – for each customer-company interaction the system awards a fixed number of scoring points and also provides an analysis of their growth rate over time.

Product preferences – for each contact, the system tracks information about the browsed products and groups them by category, brand, price and color.

AI predictions – predictions are a separate category of data. They allow, according to the contact’s transaction history, to predict when they will buy something again, when there is a risk of churn and what communication channel to use to achieve the highest conversion.

 

Comprehensive profile, or how to understand customer’s profile across brands

Based on the data collected, the CDP platform creates extensive profiles for each contact. If you have data from one service, then the profile will correspond to how the user behaves in contact with one brand. If you feed the database with streams from 2 or more services, you have a chance to create more extensive and more realistic profiling. Comprehensive profiles, i.e., user profiles created on the basis of behaviors on 2 or more services, give insight into behaviors outside of the separate internet bubble limited by the monitoring of behaviors within a single platform.

Comprehensive profiles can be modeled using data such as:

purchase RFM,
price ranges,
activity on services/apps,
categories/subcategories that a person is interested in,
declarative data, including demographic data,
location data,
predictions.

To better visualize the difference, think about how much you can learn about a person by spending time with them in different places and situations. How much more do you know about your partner than the person you play chess with once a week?

 

What activities can be done with the Comprehensive profile?

From the modeling data, we can create automatically managed (via rules/Workflow) funnels. These seemingly simple marketing tools are extremely useful. They allow you to track transitions between campaign stages and effectively work to achieve micro-conversions. This approach will help you select groups of contacts according to their activity in one and all services. By observing trends you can easily identify groups of people who are:

Very active on 2 or more sites,
Very active on one site and not very active on the others,
Not very active on any site.

Depending on your needs, you can use this knowledge to reward active contacts, engage those who are less active but still promising, and run win-back campaigns to those who are inactive or dormant across all services.

Additionally, knowledge of the trends among certain audiences can be translated into creating groups of like-minded contacts so that you can reach a wider demographic with your message.

Pro Tip: Use RFM analytics to see which groups are your best consumers and shoppers. Create custom audiences based on these groups to attract more like-minded people and increase in-store revenue.

 

Examples of rewarding activities

If you want to fortify the relationship with people who are good customers in several stores, think of interesting ways to reward their engagement. A lot depends on your imagination. We just give you some inspirations:

discount for your next purchase,
access to exclusive products from preferred categories in pre-order,
additional points in the loyalty program,
invitation to CSR activities carried out by brands (e.g. cleaning the local forest, planting trees, helping at Christmas Eve parties for the people in need)
an invitation to activities that impact brands (e.g. research, crowdsourcing, etc.).

A lot will depend on the prospect’s buying motivation. Therefore, the better you have an understanding of the habits and behaviors of your best customers and clients, the better you can tailor the bonus to the individual.

 

Examples of incentive activities

People who are very active in one service and less active in the others still might jump to the group of the best customers. It’s worth implementing for them actions based on preferences from the store where they are most active. When it comes to encouraging micro-conversions and conversions you have a very wide field of possibilities. Here are some examples of stimulating actions that can be performed using the CDP system:

on-page campaigns,
PPC Google Ads/Facebook campaigns based on Custom Audiences,
informative omnichannel campaigns about the website where there is no activity,
gradually engaging the user with Lead Nurturing campaigns, which after gaining interest can be changed to the product recommendation process based on the data collected from another service,
rewarding the user for their activity in store X with discount vouchers to store Y.

The CDP platform is irreplaceable for combining data from different sources. Advanced user profiles (comprehensive profiles) help to understand individual users’ behaviour on different sites and, in addition, to target activities aimed at activating them on different platforms.

 

Examples of win-back activities

There are also individuals who are not active in any of the services. There are different factors that can cause this. Sometimes it happens that a person goes to a store, buys once and forgets about it. Sometimes the offer does not meet their expectations. And sometimes they click on an ad by accident and immediately bounce out of the service. The good news is that at least in some cases you can still fight for customers. What can be done? Here are some ideas:

a survey to find out why they don’t buy,
SMS campaign with code for free delivery,
time limited promotion,
dynamic Web Push notification with recommendations based on completed purchases,
email with cross-brand recommendations,
a campaign using AI predictions to choose the optimal communication channel to send a shopping discount.

Not every dormant contact will become active again. That doesn’t change the fact that a win-back campaign greatly increases the chance of reactivating such a person, or getting them interested in your offer from other sites you manage. One of our clients, Domfan, improved conversion rates by as much as 33% through effective sales close and implementation of a win-back program for inactive contacts.

Read the free case study of Domfan about the effects of implementing SALESmanago >>

 

A few words in conclusion

Customers smoothly navigate between stores not only in shopping malls, but also online. Monitoring behaviour on several platforms that you manage can have a very positive impact on the overall performance of your campaigns. If you skillfully combine data from different services, you can gain a unique insight into customer behaviour in relations with other brands. The CDP software helps you unify and organise this data and, from one place, run consistent campaigns that will move individual contacts towards micro-conversions and conversions across different sites.

If you would like to try out SALESmanago’s CDP capabilities in this area, please consult with your account manager.

Piecing together a project timeline template usually involves a Google Doc and mediocre formatting skills. Then comes assigning tasks to teammates and promising to hit the agreed-upon delivery date. But a few weeks go by, and the timeline falls apart. Higher priorities pop up, and deadlines slip past without much progress.
Projects can fail for many reasons: a lack of support from leadership, unforeseen budget cuts, or overpromising outcomes. In fact, poor project management is more common than you think – only 55% of projects are completed on time.
But creating a timeline where everyone involved knows what they’re working on and when it’s due can help ensure your project doesn’t creep past its original deadline. It’s essential for keeping projects (and the people completing them) on track.

To make sure your next project stays on schedule, we’ll cover how to set up a project timeline, the best templates to use, and a handful of examples to inspire your future scheduling.
Why Create a Project Timeline?
Time management is one of the top skills employers look for in candidates. Missed deadlines and rushed projects can set entire teams (and companies) behind schedule.
A structured project timeline offers more than brownie points from your boss. It can also:

Bring leadership and structure to a project
Outline what is being delivered, by when
Share who is responsible for each task and sets expectations for the scope, quality, and delivery of work
Show how the project outcome contributes to company goals
Decrease risk by accounting for any changes to the project scope, budget, deliverables, or deadlines.

Ultimately, a project timeline makes it easier and more efficient to manage a project. But it’s important to match the timeline structure to the project scope. Planning an editorial calendar for the quarter may take more time and effort than creating a marketing video for an upcoming product launch.
That’s where the right template comes in.
Project Timeline Example
Without the right project timeline template, organizing a project can be a lot of manual work — not to mention the formatting mess once multiple people get their hands on it.
The ideal timeline brings direction to a project, yet is easily adaptable when changes arise. Here’s a look at a project timeline for opening a new company office.

You can create a project timeline for any process that relies on a schedule (almost everything these days), like onboarding employees, handling a crisis, or planning social media campaigns. All you need to know is how to outline the steps of a project and the tasks required to complete each phase.
Let’s get into the details.
How to Create a Project Timeline
Crafting the perfect project timeline takes strategy, organizational skills, and a whole lot of collaboration. You need buy-in from supporters and clear directives for everyone involved.
To get started, follow this step-by-step guide to set up a structured timeline — no matter your job, industry, or management level.
1. Write a project brief.
A project brief communicates how you will approach a project. It includes details on the goals, deliverables, timeline, tasks, process, people involved, and resources needed to take a project from start to finish.
Asana outlined the steps to create a simple, yet effective, project brief. You can use this free project plan template to outline the project’s goals, roles and responsibilities, schedule, deliverables, budget, and more. It’s a great starting point for any planning process.

Or if you need a more comprehensive overview that includes key messaging and distribution processes, a creative brief may be the right fit for your project.
2. List all tasks and action items.
Every task involved in achieving a project’s objectives needs to go into the project timeline. After creating the brief, make a list of these tasks. You can start with large tasks and break them down into smaller to-dos.
Let’s say you’re responsible for creating a marketing video to launch your company’s newest product. Your list may include the following:

Establish project leads from each department
Set project budget
Find a video production company
Layout the video storyboard
Choose main features for video
Write video script
Capture video content
Add in sound and background music
Add animations and graphics
Edit video
Write announcement copy
Craft marketing campaign
Create clips for social sharing
Get video and marketing assets approved

Once you have the major milestones down, break down each task into smaller pieces. For example, choosing a video production company involves:

Research video production companies
Curate a list of production companies
Get quotes from each production company
Compare quotes and narrow down options
Meet with the selected companies
Choose a production company
Finalize the contract

3. Connect dependencies.
In a project, certain tasks can’t be started until another is complete. These tasks are called dependencies. For example, a video can’t be filmed until the storyboard is finalized. And the storyboard can’t be finalized until the video theme is chosen.
Mapping out dependencies helps you solidify the order of each task and decide who’s responsible for what. Everyone will know what part of the project they’re working on, which tasks must be completed before their own, and who to contact for the deliverables they need.
Here’s a look at how dependencies can play out in a project timeline.

Image Source
In the example, you can see that hiring a caterer has to happen before finalizing the lunch menu. But other tasks, like finding a DJ and deciding on an event theme, can happen at the same time. So as you map out each task, you’ll have to see which steps can overlap and which need to wait for others.
4. Estimate the time it will take to complete each task.
Once you figure out the sequence of tasks, you need to figure out how much time each will take. Estimate as best you can. That way, it’ll be easier to create the project roadmap and understand the project’s overall time frame.
As you go, make sure to consider the other projects and priorities your team has going on. A designer may be able to come up with a rough draft of video animations in one week, but if they’re wrapping up another project, they may not be able to start on yours for another two weeks.
Being mindful of your team’s time will make it easier to put together a reasonable, reliable timeline.
5. Create the project timeline.
Build your timeline by organizing your tasks from the first to the final step. Make any necessary adjustments to the task times, add milestones, and solidify the deadline. If your team works with project management software, organize the timeline and tasks so it’s ready to share after the project kickoff meeting.
You can save time during this step by using one of the project timeline templates below. It’s simple to customize each and avoid the extra work of creating your own from scratch.
6. Share the timeline with the project team.
Whew, your timeline is complete! Now, you have to share it with stakeholders. This includes everyone who is involved in the project. You’ve already listed these people out in your brief (during step one), so it’s time to share your clear path forward for the project with them.
It’s a good idea to hold a project kickoff meeting with both stakeholders and individual contributors so everyone starts on the same page. You can communicate the project goals, deliverables, roles, and deadlines — without going into an overwhelming amount of detail. From there, you’ll want to schedule time with the project’s immediate contributors to chat specifics and answer any questions before the work begins.
Need help visualizing the entire project? It can help to include a timeline graphic like the one below to give everyone a sense of the overall time frame. You can add or remove steps, depending on the complexity of your project.

Image Source
7. Adapt as you go.
Remember how just over half of projects are finished on time? Roadblocks and setbacks are inevitable in every project. So if your team runs into a delay, you’ll have to understand the impact and adjust the timeline if necessary.
While it’s possible to make up for delays without changing the final deadline, it’s your job as the project owner to update stakeholders on the project’s progress. Reporting a minor issue (like a coworker being out sick for a few days) isn’t always necessary to higher-ups. But if it’s a major roadblock that requires an extreme adjustment to the timeline (like a core contributor leaving the team), you have to communicate a new timeline to stakeholders.
Change is part of every company, so don’t panic if you have to adjust your timeline. It’s better to be transparent about the scope of work and timeline than keep people in the dark until the deadline hits. The earlier you adjust to change, the easier it will be to get back on track.
Project Timeline Examples
Visualizing a project makes it simple to understand what needs to happen from start to finish. Whether you need a template for a product launch or campaign meeting, these well-designed project timeline templates are perfect for your next planning session.
Employee Onboarding Timeline

Product Launch Timeline

Crisis Response Project Timeline

Historical Timeline

Task Project Timeline

Meeting Project Timeline

Need as many templates as you can get? Download all of these project timelines (and more) for free. With the right timelines in hand, it’s easy to keep everyone up to date and informed. Now all you have to do is make sure your projects stay on schedule. Good luck!

How to create a social media marketing plan in 2024?

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

👉   To understand how to solve the same business use case using Process Builder and Salesforce Flow. Check out this article Getting Started with Process Builder – Part 16 (Creating Custom Record Sharing Logic). Big Idea or Enduring Question: Sharing records automatically without sharing rules or role hierarchy Using Apex
The post Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 70 (Creating Custom Record Sharing Logic) appeared first on Automation Champion.

Crafting a customer win-back email is a delicate balancing act. Here are some surefire tips for creating one that works.
When a customer avoids your products and newsletters it doesn’t mean they’ve dropped off the face of the earth. It just means you have to change your approach.
So how do you convert those once-loyal customers into rabid fans again? With smart use of win-back emails.
Today we’re going to talk about what makes a perfect win-back email; from eye-catching headlines and crisp copy to exit surveys and incentives.
What exactly is a customer win-back email?
A customer win-back email is a carefully crafted message sent to inactive customers. Inactive customers are those who haven’t purchased or interacted with you in a set period of time.
Timing is everything for these kinds of emails. Now, most businesses will recommend six months before you start implementing your win-back strategy.
But that’ll vary depending on the vertical you are in. If you’re selling subscription gourmet pet food your window might be shorter than someone who’s selling bespoke garden tools.
What makes a good win-back email?
You put a lot of time and effort into building your email list. 
And all because some of them have gone quiet doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road. Adopting a good win-back email strategy can help get your customer buying again.
There are several components to a solid win-back email strategy:

Reach out and remind them you exist

Craft an email title that’s impossible to skim over

Make sure the copy is on point

Incentivize them to buy with a discount or coupon

Ask for feedback on where you went wrong with survey emails

And finally, goodbye emails

Let’s dive right into some of the types of win-back emails you can send.
The survey email
Sometimes a win-back email is as simple as just asking, “Hey, what’s going on?”. You can send a form asking them questions relevant to your business, and hopefully, get them to re-engage. This kind of email can also be sent when customers are unsubscribing.
Even if it’s an exit survey, it’s always important to have accurate data explaining why customers are unsubscribing so you can make business decisions about how to handle it. 

Source: Really Good Emails
Take a look at this email by SeeSo.

They kept the tone right, balancing on-brand humor well

They kept it simple and on message with concise copy, and a clear CTA

Plus they blended visuals seamlessly to support the message of the text

For more tips on the importance of survey emails, check out our guide here.
The reminder email
The world is a busy place these days.
Things come up and customers forget about your product. Don’t take it personally—with some smart marketing you can get them back on board. Set up an automation to target these customers after 3-6 months of inactivity.

Source: Really Good Emails
Sometimes as little as reminding them you exist is enough. And other times you might want to offer them a discount. Let’s take a closer look at this email by language app Busuu.

Busuu offers discounts to incentivize a customer’s return to the service

They also target FOMO by making it a timed 24-hour offer

The image chosen reinforces that message well.

The end of the line
What happens when that’s not enough? You tried everything and they’re still not engaging? Well, you just have to accept it and move on.
But with your final email, you have a chance to gain some benefit.

Source: Really Good Emails
This email by Atlas Obscura ticks a number of boxes—they sincerely wish the customer well, and then offer them another option. Why not subscribe to a list with less frequent emails, which might well have been the reason they unsubscribed in the first place!
It’s important to note that if you still are getting ghosted or left on unread at this stage in your customer win-back automation, it’s best to cull them from your list—which is easy to do with the latest Campaign Monitor updates. There are disadvantages to having ghost subscribers, like:

Emails getting filtered to spam
Emails may simply get blocked by the service provider
Your sender reputation ranking might be damaged

For more on factors that affect your deliverability and how to navigate them, consider enrolling in our free course on deliverability best practices!
Wrap Up
Now you know what makes up a smart win-back strategy. You’ve learned how the various types of emails to send, and when. And you know how to tempt them into interacting with your brand again.
But there’s still a lot more to learn about emails. And for more tips on how to get the most out of your email list, check out our modern guide to email marketing.
The post The Art of the Customer Win-Back Email appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

After spending hours creating an email marketing campaign, the last thing you want to do is get blocked by your recipients’ spam filters. Luckily, by avoiding common email spam trigger words, you can successfully prevent your emails from getting routed to spam folders.

Let’s take a look at what spam trigger words are, what gets emails sent to spam, and which spam words you should avoid when creating your email campaigns.
Spam filters can be triggered for a variety of reasons, causing your email to skip recipients’ inboxes and land straight in their spam inbox. One of the easiest ways to avoid spam filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email’s subject line.
Trigger words are known to cause problems and increase the chances of your email getting caught in a spam trap. By avoiding these words in your email subject lines, you can dramatically increase your chances of getting beyond the filters.
Spam trigger words alone aren’t enough to send your email to spam. For instance, if you are offering a 3-for-1 discount sale, you can still advertise that in your emails and not get sent to spam. It’s important to understand all the factors that come into play when emails get identified as spam.
What causes emails to go to spam?
Email providers look for a number of factors when deciding whether to automatically send your emails to spam. If you’ve made it on an email blacklist, that means you’ve repeatedly sent emails to recipients who haven’t signed up for your email list.
Your emails can get sent to spam if you:

Don’t include an unsubscribe button in your email
Send poorly-designed emails with broken or glitchy code
Address your recipient by “my friend” or “dear” (or not by their name)

Buy email lists online and mass-send messages to email addresses that don’t exist (resulting in a high bounce rate)
Use all-caps text and extreme punctuation (!!!!! or ?????)
Include strangely formatted fonts (𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘)
Provide links to fraudulent websites

Email providers only want to deliver emails from high-reputation senders. To be a high-reputation sender, do the following:

Include an unsubscribe button

Design your emails with clean code using a tool such as Marketing Hub

Personalize your emails with the recipient’s first name
Only email those who’ve subscribed to your email list (if you don’t have any, you should learn to naturally increase your email list subscribers)
Keep your email deliverability high
Keep the text free of odd formatting and extraneous punctuation
Only link out to reputable websites

If you meet these criteria, you can get away with using “classic” email spam words in your subject line and your email. The text surrounding the spam phrase also matters, as does your history as an email sender. If email providers don’t have a reason to mistrust you, they simply won’t.
Email Spam Words to Avoid
When writing your email subject lines, you want to avoid:

Over-sensationalizing
Over-promising
Using strange formatting to “stand out” in the recipient’s inbox

Next time you sit down to write an email subject line, consult the exhaustive list below. In fact, you might want to bookmark this list so you can refer back to it every time you craft an email subject line.
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Use Spam Trigger Words Sparingly and Within Context
So long as you use email marketing best practices and use spam trigger words within context, you can bypass spam filters. Spam filters have become much more sophisticated in recent years. Using one or two phrases won’t hurt you, but make sure to only email customers who want to hear from you and to always personalize your emails. Doing so will optimize the results of your campaign and keep you out of spam folders.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Have you ever presented results from a marketing campaign and been asked, “But are these results statistically significant?” As data-driven marketers, we’re not only asked to measure the results of our marketing campaigns but also to demonstrate the validity of the data — exactly what statistical significance is.
While there are several free tools out there to calculate statistical significance for you (HubSpot even has one here), it’s helpful to understand what they’re calculating and what it all means. Below, we’ll geek out on the numbers using a specific example of statistical significance to help you understand why it’s crucial for marketing success.

In marketing, you want your results to be statistically significant because it means that you’re not wasting money on campaigns that won’t bring desired results. Marketers often run statistical significance tests before launching campaigns to test if specific variables are more successful at bringing results than others.
Statistical Significance Example
Say you’re going to be running an ad campaign on Facebook, but you want to ensure you use an ad that’s most likely to bring desired results. So, you run an A/B test for 48 hours with ad A as the control variable, and B as the variation. These are the results I get:

Ad
Impressions
Conversions

Ad A
6,000
430

Ad B
5869
560

Even though we can see based on the numbers that ad B received more conversions, you want to be confident that the difference in conversions is significant, and not due to random chance. If I plug these numbers into a chi-squared test calculator (more on that later), my p-value is 0.0, meaning that my results are significant, and there is a difference in performance between ad A and ad B that is not due to chance.
When I run my actual campaign, I would want to use ad B.
If you’re anything like me, you need more explanation as to what p-value and 0.0 mean, so we’ll go through an in-depth example below.

1. Determine what you’d like to test.
First, decide what you’d like to test. This could be comparing conversion rates on two landing pages with different images, click-through rates on emails with different subject lines, or conversion rates on different call-to-action buttons at the end of a blog post. The choices are endless.
My advice would be to keep it simple; pick a piece of content that you want to create two different variations of and decide your goal — a better conversion rate or more views are good places to start.
You can certainly test additional variations or even create a multivariate test, but, for this example, we’ll stick to two variations of a landing page with the goal being increasing conversion rates. If you’d like to learn more about A/B testing and multivariate tests, check out “The Critical Difference Between A/B and Multivariate Tests.”
2. Determine your hypothesis.
Before I start collecting data, I find it helpful to state my hypothesis at the beginning of the test and determine the degree of confidence I want to test. Since I’m testing out a landing page and want to see if one performs better, I hypothesize that there is a relationship between the landing page the visitors receive and their conversion rate.
3. Start collecting your data.
Now that you’ve determined what you’d like to test, it’s time to start collecting your data. Since you’re likely running this test to determine what piece of content is best to use in the future, you’ll want to pull a sample size. For a landing page, that might mean picking a set amount of time to run your test (e.g., make your page live for three days).

For something like an email, you might pick a random sample of your list to randomly send variations of your emails to. Determining the right sample size can be tricky, and the right sample size will vary between each test. As a general rule of thumb, you want the expected value for each variation to be greater than 5. (We’ll cover expected values further down.)
4. Calculate Chi-Squared results.
There are several different statistical tests that you can run to measure the significance of your data, and picking one depends on what you’re trying to test and the type of data you’ll collect. In most cases, you’ll use a Chi-Squared test since the data is discrete.
Discrete is a fancy way of saying that your experiment can produce a finite number of results. For example, a visitor will either convert or not convert; there aren’t varying degrees of conversion for a single visitor.
You can test based on varying degrees of confidence (sometimes referred to as the alpha of the test). If you want the requirement for reaching statistical significance to be high, your alpha will be lower. You may have seen statistical significance reported in terms of confidence.
For example, “The results are statistically significant with 95% confidence.” In this scenario, the alpha was .05 (confidence is calculated as one minus the alpha), meaning there’s a one in 20 chance of making an error in the stated relationship.
After I’ve collected the data, I put it in a chart to make it easy to organize. Since I’m testing out two different variations (A and B) and there are two possible outcomes (converted, did not convert), I’ll have a 2×2 chart. I’ll total each column and row so I can easily see the results in aggregate.

Once I’ve created my chart, the next step is to run the equation using the chi-squared formula.
Statistical Significance Formula
The image below is the chi-squared formula for statistical significance:

In the equation,

Σ means sum,
O = observed, actual values,
E = expected values.

When running the equation, you calculate everything after the Σ for each pair of values and then sum (add) them all up.
5. Calculate your expected values.
Now, I’ll calculate what the expected values are. If there were no relationship between what landing page visitors saw and their conversion rate in the example above, we would expect to see the same conversion rates with versions A and B. From the totals, we can see that 1,945 people converted out of the 4,935 total visitors, or roughly 39% of visitors.
To calculate the expected frequencies (E in the chi-squared formula) for each version of the landing page, we can multiply the row total for that cell by the column total and divide it by the total number of visitors. In this example, to find the expected value of conversion on version A, I would use the following equation:
(1945*2401)/4935 = 946

6. See how your results differ from what you expected.
To calculate Chi-Square, I compare the observed frequencies (O in the chi-squared equation) to the expected frequencies (E in the chi-squared equation). This comparison is done by subtracting the observed from the expected value, squaring the result, and dividing it by the expected frequency value.
Essentially, I’m trying to see how different my actual results are from what we might expect. Squaring the difference amplifies the effects of the difference, and dividing by what’s expected normalizes the results. As a refresher, The equation looks like this: (observed – expected)*2)/expected

7. Find your sum.
I then sum the four results to get my Chi-Square number. In this case, it’s .95. To see whether or not the conversion rates for my landing pages are different with statistical significance, I compare this with the value from a Chi-Squared distribution table based on my alpha (in this case, .05) and the degrees of freedom.
Degrees of freedom are based on how many variables you have. With a 2×2 table like in this example, the degree of freedom is 1.
In this case, the Chi-Square value would need to be equal to or exceed 3.84 for the results to be statistically significant. Since .95 is less than 3.84, my results are not statistically different. This means that there is no relationship between what version of landing page a visitor receives and the conversion rate with statistical significance.
8. Report on statistical significance to your teams.
After running your experiment, the next step is to report your results to your teams to ensure everyone is on the same page about next steps. So, continuing with the previous example, I would need to let my teams know that the type of landing page we use in our upcoming campaign will not impact our conversion rate because our test results were not significant.
If results were significant, I would inform my teams that landing page version A performed better than the others, and we should opt to use that one in our upcoming campaign.
Why Statistical Significance Is Significant
You may be asking yourself why this is important if you can just use a free tool to run the calculation. Understanding how statistical significance is calculated can help you determine how to best test results from your own experiments.
Many tools use a 95% confidence rate, but for your experiments, it might make sense to use a lower confidence rate if you don’t need the test to be as stringent.
Understanding the underlying calculations also helps you explain why your results might be significant to people who aren’t already familiar with statistics.
If you’d like to download the spreadsheet I used in this example so you can see the calculations on your own, click here.
Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in April 2013, but was updated in September 2021 for freshness and comprehensiveness.

At one of my first jobs out of college, my manager admitted that my professional growth “wasn’t a priority.” I knew I wasn’t in a leadership role that required succession planning, but the admission still stunned me. Without support for career development, I wound up leaving the company.
This situation may seem dramatic, but it points to the importance of having a succession plan in place. Of course, senior leadership roles take precedence because these can create a larger vacuum if the position is left unfilled. But succession planning can (and should) extend to all leaders across a company.

Developing a succession plan can set your company up for smooth transitions when leaders resign or accept a promotion. It can have a major impact on employee morale and can position your team to skillfully handle future business challenges.
But you don’t want to wait until you absolutely need a successor. At that point, you’re scrambling and may choose the wrong person. Let’s look at the ins and outs of succession planning so your team is prepared for any transition.
What is succession planning?
Succession planning is a strategic process for identifying high-potential employees and taking steps to prepare them for future leadership positions. It helps your business develop and retain the talent pipeline so you can quickly fill vacant leadership roles.
Some succession plans look ahead 12 to 36 months for when a leader retires, steps down, advances, or leaves. Others, including CEO succession plans, look years into the future to secure the next several generations of leaders. We’ll cover the specifics of C-suite transitions later on. But all succession planning has similar benefits for thinking ahead and identifying what you want in a successor.
Why is succession planning important?
In the Global Leadership Forecast 2021 report, 11% of surveyed organizations said they have a “strong” or “very strong” leadership bench — the lowest reported in the past decade.
The benefits of strong leadership are apparent. It improves employee turnover, ensures the execution of goals, and contributes to the company’s survival. So if a crucial leader leaves, a succession plan can help ensure the role is filled and your company continues to thrive. But that’s not the only upside.
Benefits Of Succession Planning

Finding and developing people for future leadership roles allows you to promote from within. These employees have organizational knowledge and internal relationships that outside hires lack.
Letting employees know that you’re investing in them is a huge morale boost. It can also increase motivation and loyalty to the company.
Training employees for leadership roles forces you to identify the skills, knowledge, practices, and relationships needed for each role in your succession plan. This can attract new talent, retain current employees, and keep you competitive.
Hiring for highly specialized roles isn’t easy. Succession planning helps you find people with unique competencies when it comes time to replace the current employees.

Currently, leaders looking to develop skills outside of their daily work want more coaching and development assignments, in addition to assessment and formal training. Succession planning is the perfect way to formalize training for both present and future leaders.
Succession Planning Best Practices
Succession planning isn’t simple. But if you consider these best practices as you choose successors, your company will be well-equipped to manage transitions and unexpected changes.
Formalize a Plan
The earlier you set a succession plan, the better. You don’t want to risk a leadership vacuum that leaves teams feeling unsupported. That can quickly waterfall into an entire team or department leaving, especially if the leader is particularly strong and has a close relationship with their direct reports. Once you have a succession plan, write it down. Then, make it clear there’s a plan in place for when the inevitable transitions happen.
Stay Dynamic
Volatility is common at every company. People move cities, find new jobs, and retire. Your succession plan should be able to adapt to change. Instead of creating a plan and only revisiting it when the time comes to fill a role, see the plan as an evolving process that needs to be constantly updated.
Evaluate Talent
Part of a fluid succession plan is taking the time to assess employees’ interests, skills, performance, and opportunities. This can be done through 360-degree feedback, weekly check-ins with managers, informal training, or tools like the nine-box grid. The goal is to get an idea of people’s strengths and weaknesses, career goals, and growth opportunities so you know who may be the right fit for leadership roles.
Communicate Openly
Communication builds trust, which makes it easier to set expectations and ensure everyone is on the same page. As you build a succession plan, have honest conversations with employees. Find out where people want to be, and tell them where they’re currently at. The whole point is to make your plan a reality, and successors will appreciate your openness when the time comes to offer them a role.
Make Diversity and Inclusion a Priority
Companies with women in leadership roles experience almost 50% higher profit and share performance. And since women, especially women of color, have been most affected by the pandemic, it’s wise to consider gender ratios in any succession plan — including the 2SLGBTQI+ communities.
Succession Planning Example
When asked, a whopping 61% of organizations said they didn’t have a direct report who could step into their CMO role tomorrow. That’s a bad sign for C-suite succession plans. Without a strategy to replace leaders, a company can quickly go downhill.
To avoid chaos, here are a few examples of how succession planning can play out:
McDonald’s Smooth CEO Succession
How does a multi-billion dollar company thrive after losing two CEOs in one year? They had a concentrated effort to develop high-potential employees and created a backup plan for their succession plan.
Coca-Cola’s Failed CEO Succession
The repercussions of a poor succession plan can affect a company for decades. See the implications of Doug Ivester’s term as CEO and the stakeholder concerns that caused his resignation after two years.
Succession Planning Steps
 

Image Source
1. Make a plan for your plan.
This step is all about defining the goals of your succession plan and aligning with everyone involved. For some companies, this will mean meeting with your board to outline strategic priorities. For others, it will require meeting with senior leaders to define what you’re looking for in a successor.
You’ll be ready to move on to the next step once you:

Define the roles, skills, core competencies, and experience required for a successor.
Gather information and feedback on the above from your team or experts within your network.
Forecast your company’s needs. Consider turnover trends, retirement dates, compensation strategies, and management training.
Update your job descriptions and any leadership models to reflect the information you’ve gathered. You want to be clear about your expectations before looking for candidates.

2. Identify potential candidates.
Using the succession profiles and job descriptions you’ve created, you’re ready to seek out candidates. Make sure your approach is easy to repeat and introduces as little bias as possible. It can be helpful to get support from the HR team, who can share the tools needed to engage candidates and help facilitate the process.
To identify candidates, you can:

Look for leaders who develop others, follow through on projects, take action to support the company vision, and have strong leadership skills.
Get insight into each candidate’s goals, disposition, and potential by holding interviews, creating surveys, and setting up focus groups.
Ask people for ideas on how to improve succession and leadership to get buy-in and discover who’s engaged with the process.

3. Inform candidates.
There’s a great debate on whether or not companies should let employees know they’re succession candidates. But informing people of their potential will not only motivate them—it will prevent them from wondering about their future with the company. A great candidate may jump ship if they’re in the dark and think they can find a better opportunity elsewhere.
Instead, communicate your intentions about the positions, people, and planning. Just keep your expectations incredibly clear on the included roles and people involved.
4. Set up professional development efforts.
Your company likely has programs in place for onboarding and training employees. But development is about creating opportunities for people to get experience beyond their current role and skillset. This is especially important for team members who can get caught in a specialist silo.
Once you identify candidates who you want to develop, you’ll want to figure out the specific skills and knowledge they’ll need to move to the next level. This often involves an individual development plan, continuous feedback, mentoring or coaching, formal training, and open conversations between the employee and their manager.
5. Do a trial run.
As potential successors accelerate their growth, they’ll become true contenders for leadership roles. This is the ideal time to start trial runs to test their knowledge and expose them to various aspects of a position. Exposing candidates to real-world situations can highlight what effective leadership looks like and give them insight into overall company goals.
There are a variety of ways to get candidates involved, just choose the method that makes the most sense for the role.

Job shadow a senior leader to learn about their day-to-day tasks
Take on responsibilities when their manager is away
Invite them to sit in on higher-level meetings
Bring them into discussions on strategy, execution, or company forecasting
Involve them in the hiring process for junior candidates
Give them more responsibility on projects or involve them in cross-functional work

6. Adjust your hiring strategy.
Eventually, the time will come when you extend an offer to a potential candidate. And you’ll need someone else to fill their role. Luckily, the successor can use their new leadership skills to help interview or train the person filling their position. This can be an employee a few levels down or a new hire.
That’s why it’s important to adjust your hiring strategy to account for successor’s roles. Without them, your plan won’t go as smoothly and their team will likely be scrambling to fill the gap.
7. Implement the plan.
Succession planning is a complex process with multiple short- and long-term layers. But eventually, it will be time to make the transition. Make an announcement and celebrate the succession. This will show employees that your company prides itself on strong leadership and has a plan for everyone’s career development.
Sometimes, a more gradual transition is needed. Family businesses often struggle with smooth succession planning because of familial relationships, emotions, and intertwined histories. In this case, a clear succession plan based on business needs is exceptionally crucial to ensure the company’s continued success
CEO Succession Planning
Only one in three CEOs rank their company’s leadership quality as “very good” or “excellent.” That’s a low score for such a high-stakes business priority — especially considering the majority of CEO successors are internal hires.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) ranks CEO succession as “arguably the most important decision a board can make.” Replacing a CEO needs to involve a long-term, well-devised plan that’s linked to both short and long-term company priorities.
CEO succession planning can follow similar steps to employee succession planning, but there are specific considerations for this top-level role. HBR outlines the following tips for developing a CEO successor:

A candidate’s competencies, personal attributes, and experiences need to be connected to business priorities. A charismatic senior leader may seem like the top pick, but a company may need a successor with expert-level technical skills in addition to social skills.
Think several generations ahead instead of focusing on the immediate successor. Succession is a long game, so you want to position it as a continuous process to develop top talent.
Identify seven potential CEOs in your company across all generations. This can take the stress off of each CEO transition and help keep your talent pipeline top-notch.
Train CEO candidates through a combination of on-the-job experience, executive coaching, education, mentoring, and cross-functional training.

Developing talent to take on the CEO role will require time and effort from high-level stakeholders. But it’s absolutely worthwhile to prevent the vacuum this leadership role can leave if succession is poorly managed.
If a board is involved in the process, HBR recommends using board meetings to combine strategy sessions with talent development. That way, stakeholders can make sure strategy changes reflect the skills needed for potential successors.
Employee Succession Planning
Succession planning extends to employees in all roles across a company. Viewing it this way, rather than saving succession plans for senior leaders, helps you identify high-potential employees at all levels. You can then take steps to develop them into leaders who are able to take on additional responsibilities when a role opens up.
When looking for successors, keep an eye out for employees who are interested in learning new skills, are comfortable with change, can adapt to uncertainty and new leadership, and can manage various work environments. All potential successors should be motivated and engaged in the process because they have a chance to grow their knowledge and take on more challenging, rewarding roles.
When you see a path for an employee’s growth, they’ll see it too. So the next time a key leader steps down or a new director position is created, you’ll know just the right people to recruit for the role.

There’s no underestimating the benefits of a good first impression. When it comes to email marketing, welcome emails are a fantastic way to say “hello” to new subscribers and pave the way for a great ongoing relationship. Aside from the long-term benefits, they also generate five times more clicks and four times more opens than…
The post How to Create Welcome Emails That Leave an Impression appeared first on Benchmark Email.

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