Category: Marketing Automation

Hello Dear Community, I am happy to be here with you to share ideas. if you are looking to increase your sales, better brand positioning. We are looking for a new tool that covers all aspects of marketing. A tool that will allow you for better understanding your customers and prospects on Social media using Sentiment Analysis. So, we are conducting a survey to gather feedback from brand owners or business owners, but also marketers regarding your opinion and your suggestions about this innovative technique in order to increase your sales and remain competitive. If you have a moment, can you help us answer some questions? It’s easy and quick sentiment analysis survey
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Accomplishing your goals is an incredibly gratifying feeling.
However, it can sometimes be challenging to get that feeling, as achieving your goals takes time, effort, and a structured process. This is why it’s important to create plans of action for meeting the goals that will help you stay motivated and ensure you’re on the right path.
In this post, we’ll go over a goal-setting worksheet created by HubSpot to help you outline your goals with the SMART framework and create a plan for achieving them. The template is broken down into relevant sections to help you through the process, and if you download it, you can follow along throughout the post.

Goal Setting Steps
1. Identify your initial goal.
The first step of the process is to simply identify what your goal is. It doesn’t have to be convoluted, just merely the objective you’re hoping to achieve. For example, if you’re hoping to grow your website, your baseline goal could be “I want to generate more site traffic.”
2.Define your SMART goals.
The second step in the process is to use the SMART framework to elaborate your goals to ensure that they’re clear, measurable and that the process will help you get there. Here are is what each of the element in the acronym stands for:

Specific: A specific goal clearly outlines what you’re hoping to improve. If you share your specific goals with your team, it should be clear what your intention is.

Measurable: Making your goal measurable means attaching numbers to your objective that will help you understand what you have to meet, track your progress, and see how long it will take you to reach your end goal.

Attainable: Making sure that your goals are attainable means that they are realistic and that you have a chance of achieving them. Your goal is not too out of left field or so unrelated to your current practices that you wouldn’t be able to succeed.

Relevant: Ensuring that your goal is relevant involves answering the question of “Why are you setting the goal that you’re setting?” Your goal should directly relate to your business’ needs and help your business grow.

Time-Bound: The final aspect of your goal-setting process is to set a timeline. It helps you understand what your schedule should be and stay on track in terms of achieving your ultimate goal.

Goal Setting Template
It’s always helpful to have a worksheet guide you through your process, and the image below is an example.
Download Template Here
Once you’ve finished defining your goals, the next step is to calculate your targets so you know what your final numbers should be and so you can plan your process accordingly, so you’re able to meet those final numbers.
2. Calculate your goal outcomes.
The most challenging part of your plan might be coming up with numerical targets that coincide with achieving your goals. You can just say, “We want to increase blog leads by 25%,” but what would the 25% increase be in numerical form?
When you have these numbers, you can set milestones for yourself and monitor your progress and make changes along the way if necessary.
The image below is an example of a SMART goal calculation.
Image Source
3. Evaluate your SMART goals.
The template’s final step is to evaluate your goals, which helps you anticipate possible roadblocks and develop action plans for dealing with them. If you have multiple goals, aim to ask these questions for each one that you have:

What is your SMART marketing goal?
Do you feel that this goal is realistically attainable in the time frame you’ve set?
How many hours per week can you dedicate to achieving your goal/your goal process?
What is the biggest challenge preventing you from achieving this goal? What are possible challenges you may face in achieving this goal? What is the biggest roadblock(s) to achieving this goal?
What three steps can you take to reduce or remove that challenge and succeed in reaching this goal?

All in all, following this framework makes your goals explicitly clear for yourself and helps you communicate their importance to all necessary stakeholders, so everyone is on the same page. To get started, download our template for free and start achieving your goals.

It’s been a busy season for our engineering, product, and design teams at Buffer — what we collectively refer to as EPD. In the past eight months alone, we hired a Chief Product Officer for the first time, promoted a team member to be our first VP of Design, completely overhauled and restructured how we organize our EPD teams, created new roles on the team and hired 10 new product and engineering team members to our now 48-person EPD area.
That’s a lot of change. Thus, in the spring of 2021, we put out a survey to the EPD teams to understand the level of engagement of our team members and our “eNPS” — employee NPS, or if team members would recommend Buffer as a place to work.
I did a deep dive into the experience of the engineering team in particular – the results were an honest, eye-opening look into the experience of our team members, and we have a lot of action steps to take from our learnings.
A few key takeaways:

Engineering teammates have very distinct and differing needs depending on their tenure at Buffer (6+ years, 2-6 years, less than 2 years).
Women on the engineering team have a much lower eNPS than their male counterparts.

Below, we’d love to share the survey results transparently through the note I shared with our team.

Hi team,
Thanks so much for completing the EPD Engagement survey. Here’s the breakdown for us in engineering:
Engagement is quite high, and eNPS at 38 is ok. About half of you actively recommend Buffer as a place to work, half feel it’s kind of ok, and a couple of people actively do not recommend Buffer.
If we break it down, a few more interesting things emerge:
Breakdown by tenure

Veterans: 6+ years at Buffer
Veterans feel most committed to the company (100%), positive about coworkers (100%), and feel they belong here (100%) but don’t see themselves really growing in their careers anymore (29%).
This makes sense: only people who like their coworkers and company would stay over six years, and also, at that time frame, managers need to work harder to find career growth opportunities.
So the focus for this group is career growth, and that’s the main driver of going from “it’s ok” to “it’s great here.” This honestly does get harder as time goes on — to keep a growth curve after many years — and so we need to get more creative with these conversations. With Lattice reviews and growth plans happening now, that’s one way to think about what’s next for veteran teammates.

Tenured Teammates: 2-6 years at Buffer
Teammates who have been here 2-6 years are our largest group. Engagement & eNPS are the same as the all-engineering average, and this includes some people who actively don’t recommend Buffer as a place to work.
This group is happiest with Management (94%) and Team Culture (94%) but is also the most exhausted group. Only 38% of this group have energy for leisure, friends, and family after work. They also don’t feel that this hard work is noticed: only 44% of respondents say people notice that they are going the extra mile (or hundred miles).
For this group, work-life balance and managing workload is the main focus, with burnout and not feeling valued as the main concerns. This is an active focus for me and for engineering managers who have been hearing this, too.

Newer Teammates: Less than 2 years at Buffer
Teammates with less than two years at Buffer are by far the happiest. Again, nobody in this group actively thinks Buffer engineering is a bad place to work. I’m happy to see this because it means that our outside image, and who we are on the inside, aren’t hugely different (if we talked a big game during recruitment and the blogs but were horrible to work at, we’d see eNPS of new people be lower with many detractors).
This group scored every metric as 100% (seriously!) except for feeling valued, at 67%.
For this group, recognition of contributions, praise, and valuing their opinion is the most important thing to improve. We hear you!

Breakdown by Gender
Gender is one factor where people can have very different experiences at the same workplace. There are other factors too, but we don’t have data for those. We do have enough people to have data, which is great. What’s not great is that women in engineering have a very different and much worse experience than men.
Note: all respondents happened to identify within the gender binary as either “male” or “female,” so I only have two categories represented for gender. That said, there are many genders.

Men in Engineering

Women in Engineering

Obviously, this is a problem. I would rather have a team with an eNPS of 20 and all genders scoring “it’s ok here” than have some genders saying it’s “good to great” and other genders saying that “it’s just ok” or “it’s awful.”
It’s also notable that participation in the survey from women in engineering was a bit low. This means that an eNPS of 0 is probably over-estimated. People who don’t fill in the survey are not usually super happy. More likely, the non-respondents are either passive or negative (“it’s fine, and I don’t have time for surveys” or “it’s so horrible and hopeless that there’s no point in even filling in a survey”).
There is some good news: at least some women are saying it’s great to work here! Also, women rated Management at 100% (we have 50% women engineering managers, so that could be part of it), and they rated Team Culture at 100%: women think their coworkers are skilled and do quality work.
Job Satisfaction at 80% is good, and so is Fit & Belonging (80%). So the good news is that women don’t feel actively excluded, held back, and discriminated against. That’s a low bar, but it’s one many teams fail to clear.
For women, Work Relationships was one of the lowest scores. While “my supervisor cares about me” and “my coworkers want me to succeed” is at 100%,  “people know what’s happening in my life” is at just 20%. Women don’t feel comfortable talking about what’s going on for them outside of work.
Women are also more exhausted than average, with just 40% having energy for other things outside work.
One hypothesis or story here is that the pandemic has been extra hard on working moms, and women still pull a double shift in many cases. There’s also often a stigma around being a working mom or caring for parents and relatives, and so women feel exhausted and also unable to talk about everything draining them at and outside of work. Women are socialized to smile, be nice, don’t complain, have it all together, and face a lot of guilt and pressure to be always on, always  “doing it all.” This is true in society at large. So, it could be true of our women in engineering, and a problem if Buffer isn’t doing enough to support them.
Another interesting data point: women scored lower than average for trust in senior leadership’s decisions, with no “strong agrees” and a few “disagrees.” Recently, I read a post on Being Glue that offers a possible explanation here:
Women are socialized to be nurturers and often pick up extra work to shield their team members from decisions made in leadership that could be challenging for others to adapt to. Recent org chart changes come to mind; there could be other factors too. If women statistically feel the impact and are tired from trying to mitigate that impact, while men are more likely to feel the benefit of that Glue/nurturing work without as many costs, that could explain some of the differences between men and women’s experiences. That’s a hypothesis. It’s a story I could tell from the data I have on this team and from the data in the industry. I don’t know whether that is our story.
To find out more about what the story (stories?) really is, Melissa [our new VP of People] and I are going to run a session with women in engineering to hear more about the experience of being a women engineer at Buffer and why it is different — and worse — than the experience of being a man in engineering.
For men reading this, you are absolutely welcome to share your thoughts with Melissa or me directly. If you’ve noticed anything that would negatively affect your women coworkers, I absolutely want to hear about it, and if you have ideas, please share.
The reason I’m not including men in that live discussion is that I want to hear the women’s stories from the women because, in the data, we see that the story for women is different. I hope this makes sense. I am happy to talk more about it too.
Limitations
I don’t have enough data on race and sexual orientation to have statistically significant sample sizes, so I can’t draw any conclusions for these groups as part of this survey. We do know that these groups also can have a harder time in the industry at large.
In the long run, a more diverse team will mean more data. In the shorter run, we’ll need to rely on other methods to ensure everyone has an equitable experience. There is work to be done, and not having it in survey results does not erase that work.
-Katie

As we continue to make changes and improvements to the engineering experience at Buffer, we look forward to sharing our learnings along the way.
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @gokatiewilde to continue the conversation about building engaged and fulfilled engineering teams. Always happy to chat!

There’s a frustrating truth that every business deals with early into its growth: More money, more problems.
It seems counterintuitive — if sales and revenue are up, isn’t that a good thing? How are bigger profits a potential problem?
Put simply, it all comes down to the fact that the more you sell, the more money you need to spend. This includes marketing and sales campaigns to reach more customers, the production costs of more goods, and the time and money required for new product development.
Known as variable cost, this sales/spend ratio is something every business owner should understand, but online advice listicles and action plans often assume readers have an intrinsic knowledge of this concept rather than providing a working definition.
In this piece, we’ll clear up variable cost confusion: Here’s what you need to know about variable costs, how to calculate them, and why they matter.

Let’s examine each of these components in more detail.
Variable Cost Per Unit
The variable cost per unit is the amount of labor, materials, and other resources required to produce your product. For example, if your company sells sets of kitchen knives for $300 but each set requires $200 to create, test, package, and market, your variable cost per unit is $200.
Number of Units Produced
The number of units produced is exactly what you might expect — it’s the total number of items produced by your company. So in our knife example above,if you’ve made and sold 100 knife sets your total number of units produced is 100, each of which carries a $200 variable cost and a $100 potential profit.

Variable costs earn the name because they can increase and decrease as you make more or less of your product. The more units you sell, the more money you’ll make, but some of this money will need to pay for the production of more units. So, you’ll need to produce more units to actually turn a profit.
And, because each unit requires a certain amount of resources, a higher number of units will raise the variable costs needed to produce them.
Variable costs aren’t a “problem,” though — they’re more of a necessary evil. They play a role in several bookkeeping tasks, and both your total variable cost and average variable cost are calculated separately.
Total Variable Cost
Your total variable cost is the sum of all variable costs associated with each individual product you’ve developed. Calculate total variable cost by multiplying the cost to make one unit of your product by the number of products you’ve developed.

For example, if it costs $60 to make one unit of your product and you’ve made 20 units, your total variable cost is $60 x 20, or $1,200.
Average Variable Cost
Your average variable cost uses your total variable cost to determine how much, on average, it costs to produce one unit of your product. You can calculate it with the formula below.

Total Variable Cost vs. Average Variable Cost
If the average variable cost of one unit is found using your total variable cost, don’t you already know how much one unit of your product costs to develop? Can’t you work backward, and simply divide your total variable cost by the number of units you have? Not necessarily.
While total variable cost shows how much you’re paying to develop every unit of your product, you might also have to account for products that have different variable costs per unit. That’s where average variable cost comes in.
For example, if you have 10 units of Product A at a variable cost of $60/unit, and 15 units of Product B at a variable cost of $30/unit, you have two different variable costs — $60 and $30. Your average variable cost crunches these two variable costs down to one manageable figure.
In the above example, you can find your average variable cost by adding the total variable cost of Product A ($60 x 10 units, or $600) and the total variable cost of Product B ($30 x 15 units, or $450), then dividing this sum by the total number of units produced (10 + 15, or 25).
Your average variable cost is ($600 + $450) ÷ 25, or $42 per unit.
Variable vs. Fixed Cost
The opposite of variable cost? Fixed cost. Fixed costs are costs that don’t change in response to the number of products you’re producing.
Some common fixed costs include renting or leasing a building, utility bills, website hosting, business loan repayments, and property taxes.
Worth noting? These costs aren’t static — meaning, your rent may increase year over year. Instead, they remain fixed only in reference to product production.
To calculate the average fixed cost, use this formula:

Both variable and fixed costs are essential to getting a complete picture of how much it costs to produce an item — and how much profit remains after each sale.
To calculate variable cost ratio, use this formula:

Let’s put it into practice. If you’re selling an item for $200 (Net Sales) but it costs $20 to produce (Variable Costs), you divide $20 by $200 to get 0.1. Multiply by 100 and your variable cost ratio is 10%. This means that for every sale of an item you’re getting a 90% return with 10% going toward variable costs.
Combining variable and fixed costs, meanwhile, can help you calculate your break-even point — the point at which producing and selling goods is zeroed out by the combination of variable and fixed costs.
Consider our example above again. If your variable costs are $20 on a $200 item and your fixed costs account for $100, your total costs now account for 60% of the item’s sale value, leaving you with 40%.
Put simply? The higher your total cost ratio, the lower your potential profit. If this number becomes negative, you’ve passed the break-even point and will start losing money on every sale.
So, what’s considered a variable cost to the business?
Some of the most common variable costs include physical materials, production equipment, sales commissions, staff wages, credit card fees, online payment partners, and packaging/shipping costs.
Let’s examine each in more detail.
Physical Materials
These can include parts, cloth, and even food ingredients required to make your final product.
Production Equipment
If you automate certain parts of your product’s development, you might need to invest in more automation equipment or software as your product line gets bigger.
Sales Commissions
The more products your company sells, the more you might pay in commission to your salespeople as they win customers.
Staff Wages
The more products you create, the more employees you might need, which means a bigger payroll, too.
Credit Card Fees
Businesses that receive credit card payments from their customers will incur higher transaction fees as they deliver more services.
Online Payment Partners
Apps like PayPal typically charge businesses per transaction so customers can check out purchases through the app. The more orders you receive, the more you’ll pay to the app.
Packaging and Shipping Costs
You might pay to package and ship your product by the unit, and therefore more or fewer shipped units will cause these costs to vary.
Expect the Unexpected
While variable costs, total variable costs, average variable costs, and the variable cost ratio often seem complicated on the surface, these terms are simply ways to represent the changing nature of costs to produce new items as your business grows.
By understanding the nature of these costs and how they impact your current and projected revenue, it’s possible to better prepare for evolving market forces and reduce the impact of variable costs on your bottom line.

This article is part of a larger series that focuses on diversity and equity in marketing. As a company, we are committed to identifying actions we can take in the fight against racism and injustice, and elevating BBIPOC voices is paramount to inspiring change. Follow along and read other posts in this series here.

This post is authored by Marissa Taffer, Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting. 
Building and developing a diverse high performing team isn’t something that happens by accident. Earlier in this series, Jada Harland shared some of the secrets to recruiting diverse candidates and hiring changemakers, but what happens when these folks come on board in an organization? How do we as leaders ensure they are set up to be successful and thrive in their new roles? 
Inclusion and belonging are the elements that transform teams from existing as a group of people who work near each other to executing as a high-performing team. In my experience, hiring a diverse group of individuals and not focusing on team building, inclusion, belonging and engagement is a mistake. It leads to high employee turnover, missed goals and metrics, and failed projects. All things that we know cost organizations a lot of money. 
In the marketing function specifically, having a diverse team that represents (or has a strong connection with) your target market will be an asset to the business. Research has shown time and time again that diverse teams produce better business outcomes. The Economic Development Collaborative shares that, “A diverse marketing team will be more likely to recognize subtleties and identify facets of diverse marketing efforts that might prove off-putting or offensive in international markets. Something as simple as color – which is often either considered artistically or is taken for granted – can have an impact on marketing efforts. For instance, one scholarly study found that the colors purple and gray hold opposite meanings in different cultures.”
While it takes time for teams to go from people who were hired to work together to high performing and collaborative, here are 5 tips for guiding your team and building the culture everyone wants to be a part of, and creating an environment where people can speak up and feel that their opinions, culture, and experiences matter.
Five tips for creating a high performing and diverse marketing team
1.Role model the behaviors you want. 
As the leader of the team, it is your job to role model the behaviors you want to see from everyone. If you are welcoming, positive, and work in a way that supports your team—and their lives outside of work—your teammates will start to do that for each other as well. 
You can take this a step further by creating a set of team working agreements that everyone can contribute to. For example, consider setting an agreement that no one will send emails after 10 pm and before 8 am. If you are a night person and you’d like to work outside of those hours, use the email scheduling feature or save the message to your drafts and send during the agreed-upon times. For some of the more creative roles, inspiration can strike at any time, so make sure your processes support that but also create healthy boundaries within the team. 
Other behaviors you may want to consider role modeling include taking breaks including vacations and PTO, shutting down early on Friday afternoons to spend time with your family, or whatever else might be important to you or members of your team. 
From a career development perspective, you can role model continuous learning. That can mean asking a team member to teach you a new skill or using professional development budgets to ensure you are also taking new classes, attending conferences or virtual sessions, or creating development plans for everyone in the department. Taking stock of your own strengths and weaknesses and allowing your team to do the same will ensure you have a culture where continuous learning is prioritized and making mistakes is rewarded—because it means team members are trying new things and stepping out of their comfort zone. 
2. Be transparent.
When things are left unsaid or unexplained, people tend to make up their own explanations. This explanation could range from “they asked Dave to lead the presentation because he’s a white man” to “I’m not getting the promotion because I have a disability” and everything in between. It could be Dave was asked to lead the presentation because he introduced the agency to the client and the promotion might be going to another colleague because they expressed interest and took on a stretch project that you didn’t.
Racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression show up in work and life in a number of ways. Explaining decisions and inviting questions about who on the team is doing certain things and why can help in a few ways. First, if there is unintentional systemic oppression at play, it can expose it. As a leader, you can’t fix what you can’t see or don’t even realize you’re doing. Second, it prevents people from making assumptions about why things unfolded the way they did. 
3. Invite (and give) candid feedback.
Going along with being transparent, invite candid feedback. As leaders, we are not perfect people. In her book, Radical Candor, Kim Scott tells the story of her time at Google. After a presentation, her boss at the time Sheryl Sanberg pulled her aside to give her feedback on her delivery. She asked Kim if she wanted some time with a speech coach to help her stop saying “um” when she made presentations. Kim shrugged it off. Then Sheryl came to her point more directly and told Kim, “When you say ‘um’ it makes you sound stupid.” 
Sheryl was practicing what Kim now calls Radical Candor, that is when you have built trust with someone so that you can both care about them personally and challenge them directly. 
This is not something that happens overnight, so don’t try this with your brand new hire. When issues arise in the early days and stages of team formation, this is not how you want to handle them. But, as your team becomes a well-oiled machine, using Radical Candor can have many benefits for the individuals on the team, as well as the team as a whole. 
These are the kinds of conversations that can be difficult to have without trust but are important to the development of the team. When preparing for a candid conversation ensure that you are unemotional and well prepared. You might want to have a few notes about what you want to get across and why this is important. 
Remember that the conversation is a two-way street and it is just as important to listen as it is to be heard. You want to ensure that like Sheryl you are getting your point across and it is understood, but you also want to hear from the other person. What is going on and why is this happening? Is there something you aren’t seeing that is contributing to this issue? If you are catching the other person off guard, give them time to process the situation. Ask them how they’d like to move forward but give them time to think and consider their options. 
As the team leader, it is important that you provide candid feedback to your team members but also invite them to give it to you. It might be hard to hear that you did something that was perceived as racist, sexist, ableist, or culturally insensitive, but not knowing allows those cycles to continue. 
4. Check your “blind spots”.
As a caucasian and cis woman, I have very little concept other than what colleagues have shared with me over the years about what it is like to show up on our team as a queer person or a person of color. These are what I call my blind spots. I also don’t know what it is like to show up with a visible disability, or as someone practicing a religion other than my own. 
Several years ago, when Wil Reynolds was trying to hire a talented woman into his company, Seer Interactive, he was shocked by her strange response. She wanted to start working for him but not for 7 months. Wil was confused, he needed someone now and didn’t understand why she wanted to wait for such an oddly specific time to start. 
She shared with him that she was (obviously) pregnant. She was so sure that she wouldn’t get an offer if the company knew that after only three months with them, she’d need to take maternity leave. At the time, she had a job with a large company that would pay for her leave, and starting a new job meant she would no longer be covered under FMLA or any type of short-term disability insurance. Not something she wanted to give up for a new job.
Wil shares that this was a pivotal moment for him in his understanding of what it was like to be pregnant in the job market. He said, “It never occurred to me that anyone would ever not hire a woman who was able to help them right now for the next three or four or five months and then take some time off and come back.” 
While not every blind spot is the same as what Wil experienced, I can share from my own experience what it’s like to be interrupted by a man in a meeting (repeatedly) like we saw in the vice presidential debate last year between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. Although, I never had the courage or conviction to so directly let my colleagues know I was speaking. I also know what it’s like to be invited to a team birthday celebration as someone with dietary restrictions that were not accommodated so I couldn’t even eat my own cake. 
When running in-person (or even virtual) team-building events and meetings, think about how you’d feel as someone with celiac disease being served pizza and beer, or someone who is in recovery from an alcohol addiction being invited to a cocktail-heavy happy hour or receiving these foods and drinks delivered to your home. While excessive drinking in the workplace is never appropriate, there are many people who choose not to drink alcohol at all, whether it is because of an addiction issue, religious belief, or just personal choices. 
Like Wil’s story, we also need to learn to check our blind spots in the hiring and onboarding processes. Hiring for “culture fit” is another way that we limit diversity on teams or alienate people when they join. Think about a time when someone “didn’t fit in the team.” How were they treated and what was the impact on the work? 
Other ways you can check your blind spots might include things like asking people to put their pronouns in their Zoom name or on a conference nametag, having everyone in a group pronounce their names so you can make sure you’re saying them correctly, or even just asking privately if anyone needs any type of accommodations proactively. This can help so many people feel more comfortable in speaking up and getting what they need to be successful or sharing more of their identities. 
5. Hold space for the way people show up. 
If we’ve learned nothing from working through a pandemic, my hope is that we have learned to hold space for how people show up. Earlier in my career, I was working for a small startup filled with younger, predominantly white colleagues. I had an amazing and talented colleague of color and she was trying to explain code-switching to me and I was not getting it at all, not even a little. My response to her was tone-deaf at best and racist at worst. To this day it’s still something I feel bad about. 
Think about how you can hold space for how people show up. In the wake of tragedies like the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the onslaught of racism and violence against the AAPI community, and the conflict in the middle east, as a leader, it is important to hold space for how people show up. Between a global pandemic and all of these heavy events, you might not know exactly how your team members are impacted so it is important to hold space for how people show up. 
One easy way to do this is to start your meetings with a one-word check-in. Ask your team members to go around the room and share one word about how they’re feeling. It could be in the moment, that day, or in general. This serves two purposes, the first is to take the temperature of the room. Are they tired and overwhelmed or energized and ready to go? Even without the explanation behind the word, you still have some context to the energy in the room and can adjust your leadership style or even the meeting agenda accordingly. This exercise takes about 10 minutes or less for a group of up to 40 people. Another benefit of the one-word check-in is that it can be a good warm-up. Now everyone has spoken in the meeting room at least once and may feel more comfortable contributing to the conversation. 
If your group is too big for a one-word check-in, another strong way to start is by using a diversity welcome. The diversity welcome can help you welcome in and acknowledge all of the identities present and even ask attendees to think about who is not in the room. 
The bottom line: Diversity in your marketing team is good for the company and good for the team
Creating an environment where people feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work and are supported is important, especially now. In the last few months, we’ve seen leaders in many industries step down and step away from their roles in order to listen, learn and better align the organization’s leadership with the diversity of their teams. 
In April of this year, the CEO of Basecamp, Jason Fried announced to the world in a blog post that they had made some changes at the company. These changes included banning political discussion at work and canceling some employee benefits including those they labeled paternalistic including fitness and wellness benefits and a farmer’s market share. The final point they made about their changes was “No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it.” 
These changes were not welcomed by the entire organization and they saw about a third of their team decide to leave the organization following this blog post in what was described as a tense internal meeting. This is only one example, but we’ve seen similar occurrences in other industries this year including the culinary/hospitality industry and the media. 
It is my sincere hope that these tips and examples help you to think about how you want to show up as a leader and a team member moving forward and that you strive to create the kind of environment that everyone wants to belong in. 
 

Marissa Taffer, PMP is the founder and president of M. Taffer Consulting. In her practice, she supports business owners and marketers with business development strategies, project management, and content development. She’s created content for new and established brands and conducted project management training and process optimization for large and small digital agencies, nonprofits, and marketing departments. 
Marissa is a Project Management Professional (Project Management Institute, 2016), Asana Certified Pro (2020), HubSpot Certified Content Marketer (2020), and holds a certificate in Women’s Entrepreneurship from Cornell University. In 2021 she served as a co-facilitator for a diversity program called The Culture of Respect and participated in the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s Designing Leadership program. 

 
Visit this page to see more in the series, or check back in a week for our next guest post. 
CM Group is a family of global marketing technology brands including Campaign Monitor, CM Commerce, Delivra, Emma, Liveclicker, Sailthru and Vuture. By joining together these leading brands, CM Group offers a variety of world-class solutions that can be used by marketers at any level. Headquartered in Nashville, TN, CM Group has United States offices in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York City, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and global offices in Australia, London, New Zealand and Uruguay.
The post Leading a Diverse and Inclusive Marketing Team appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Did you know that nearly 81% of emails are opened on mobile devices? More and more, your subscribers are using mobile to read and engage with your email content. And while you already know that this means your emails have to be optimized for mobile through features like subject line and preheader length, image sizes,…
The post Mobile Eye-Tracking and What it Tells Us About Our Emails appeared first on Benchmark Email.

As marketers, we crave data.
Each day, our analytics platforms help us define who our audience is, measure how well we’re tracking them, and determine what strategies we should take on next.
And, if an analytics platform is free or affordable to use, that’s an even bigger bonus to teams in SMBs or startups.
That’s why many marketers were caught off-guard when Facebook announced that it will be sunsetting its free Facebook Analytics tool on June 30th.
But, while Facebook’s announcement might seem a bit scary, it might only impact a small number of businesses.
“Even though this tool is going away, we continue to invest in measurement products that provide insights and data analysis capabilities,” the short Facebook announcement said. 
Below, we’ll explain why Facebook’s removing its Analytics feature, why you might not need to panic, and alternatives you can use to get similar data about your audiences.

Why Facebook is Sunsetting Analytics
Facebook Analytics launched in 2018 as a free alternative to platforms like Google Analytics (GA). On top of tracking all your Facebook Business Page data in one place, users could also create and embed Facebook tracking pixels on their websites to see how audiences behaved and what their customer journey looked like.

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Facebook Analytics could also give brands a look at your Facebook page’s details and audience demographics to help brands better inform their strategies.
Because much of the information shown on Facebook Analytics can now be found through other competitive and affordable data platforms — as well as Facebook’s Insights, Business Suite, Ads Manager, and Events Manager — Facebook decided to discontinue Analytics in an effort to consolidate its tools.
While Facebook hasn’t said if online privacy trends were a factor in its decision, the pivot comes at a time when Google and Apple have already begun to limit data tracking through the planned phase-out of third-party cookies and Apple’s recent IOS 14.5 opt-in requirements for mobile app tracking.
Because of the ongoing moves towards data privacy, it seems that Facebook could also prevent future data concerns with the streamlining of nearly extraneous Analytics tools.
How Marketers Can Prepare
Until June 30, brands can still access Facebook Analytics and download reports of all the data they might need.
To export data into a CSV file from Facebook Analytics on your desktop, click the [share icon] in the top-right corner of each chart or table,” Facebook advises. 
Aside from downloading data, brands that used the tool should also consider alternatives that can highlight similar data. Although Facebook Analytics was a helpful tool for some businesses looking for free or cheap platforms, there are affordable alternatives that can help you track your customer’s journey from social media to on-site conversion.
Below is just a quick list of Facebook Analytics alternatives to consider.
Facebook Analytics Alternatives
Free Tools
Facebook Business Suite
Once Facebook Analytics is no more, Facebook will encourage Business Page admins to use its Business Suite, which allows users to connect and track multiple Instagram and Facebook Business Pages at once.

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At the moment, Facebook Business Suite is still rolling out and might not be available for some admins just yet. However, the tools below can help you fill your data gaps as you wait.
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is an analytics dashboard where you can track business page user behavior and post performance. You can also see insights like page views, post reach for paid and organic posts, and competitor page data.

If you have a Facebook Business Page, you’ve probably used Facebook Insights to gather data that can fuel your social media tactics. Luckily, Facebook says Insights won’t be impacted by the removal of Facebook Analytics.
To learn more about Facebook Insights if you’ve never used it before, check out this blog post.
Facebook Ads and Events Managers
Facebook Ads Manager and Facebook Events Manager help you launch and track ads and website conversion events attached to your Facebook Business Page.
While Ads Manager lets you view, edit, and track your Facebook campaigns, ads, and ad sets, Events Manager lets you use Facebook’s pixel and Conversions API to track and report on actions visitors take on your website, app, or even in your physical store. To use Events Manager, you’ll need to add the Facebook Pixel code to your website to make it trackable. Instructions for this can be found on Facebook’s business knowledge base.
Paid Tools
HubSpot
HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software not only enables you to link and share posts on your Facebook account, but you can also track conversions and other engagements.
HubSpot’s social media tools can help you understand which of your marketing tactics are working best among your audience, determine how your marketing efforts are impacting your bottom line, see if your campaigns result in more paid or organic social media sessions, and learn about your search engine optimization (SEO)-related ROI.

Additionally, if your website is built on HubSpot’s CMS or has a HubSpot tracking code installed, you can track site conversions, traffic, and traffic sources to learn more about where your audiences are coming from and what they engage with.

Google Analytics
While Google Analytics is often seen as a high-end analytics tool, it certainly has a lot of great features that have helped marketers around the globe to transform their strategy.
While it will likely take a bit of onboarding and training for your team GA allows you to see traffic patterns, traffic sources, visitor demographics, and visitor behavior among a plethora of other helpful insights.

For a crash course on Google Analytics with photos, check out this Ultimate Guide.
Navigating Data Software Shifts
As the world evolves towards more online privacy and streamlined technology, Facebook probably isn’t the only platform that will change or evolve in years to come.
As a modern marketer, it’s important to know when to invest in new analytics platforms, alternatives, or workarounds if the tools you use are no longer relevant.
For tips on developing effective data-driven strategies, download the free resource below.

 

 

Building an omnichannel experience is slowly becoming the market standard in e-commerce. One of the premises of this trend is to create a consistent experience in all channels and throughout all touch points between the customer and the brand. One of the most useful tools in the implementation of this idea is dynamic content connected to the CDP platform engine. Keep reading to learn the secrets of Omnichannel excellence.

 

Fifteen years ago the average consumer typically used two touch-points (any time a prospect or customer comes in contact with your brand along the purchase path) when buying an item, and only 7% regularly used more than four. Today consumers use an average of almost six touch-points with nearly 50% regularly using more than four (Marketing Week). This gradual shift in habits is forcing a change in the perception of digital marketing. Simply communicating and interacting with customers across multiple channels is no longer enough to win and retain customers. 

 

71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal. — Segment

70% of millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant emails. — SmarterHQ

74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized. — Instapage

 

Dynamic content is a very powerful tool when it comes to personalizing the shopping experience. Various studies confirm this.

 

65% of email marketers say dynamic content is their most effective personalization tactic. — Instapage

80% of frequent shoppers only buy from brands that personalize their experience. — Epsilon

56% of online shoppers are more likely to return to a site that recommends products. — Invesp

 

It has a major impact on the quality of your customer base. According to Aberdeen Group Inc. companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers on average, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies.

 

What is a true omnichannel?

 

Omnichannel is a consistent consumer experience across several or all communication channels used by a brand. The term omnichannel was coined to differentiate between a multichannel experience, which is communication with a customer across multiple channels, and an in-depth experience that incorporates a user’s behavior at various touchpoints with a brand.

 

Why does the omnichannel experience require dynamic content?

 

From the very description of omnichannel, it’s clear that it will be a highly personalized experience — different for each viewer. And since there are hundreds, thousands of customers browsing through stores every day, it would be difficult to predict each purchase path separately. Therefore, a great help in building a consistent customer experience can be content that will adapt itself to their actions and preferences. Let’s start with the basics.

 

What is dynamic content?

 

Simply put, it is content that changes in response to specific behaviors even though the medium in which it is delivered (website, email, advertising medium) remains the same. An example of such content can be the language of Web Push notifications, which automatically adjusts to the language of the browser set by the user. It could also be a banner on a page that will display content tailored to the user’s interests (for example, based on the viewed/liked products). In this case, the URL is the same for everyone, while the homepage changes its appearance for individual visitors.

 

Types of dynamic content

 

Dynamic content is a fairly broad term that can describe many types of content. As technology advances, the list grows. Today, the most popular dynamic content types include:

 

Page language that adapts to the browser language
Emails
Email recommendations
Web push notifications
WhattsApp notifications
Text messages
Messenger content
Landing pages
Live chat recommendations
Banners
Recommendation frames
Contact forms
Social proof widgets
Pop-ups.

 

Of course, this is not a complete list, just a subjective selection of popular dynamic content types.

 

Down the sales funnel

 

The most important premise of omnichannel is, on the one hand, to leave the customer alone and let them ripen on their own (move down the sales funnel), and on the other hand, to wisely push them towards a purchase decision with carefully selected content. In a perfect world, this content would be prepared individually for each of the recipients separately. In practice, it is impossible. Mere marketing automation and personalization are not enough to deliver a 1:1 personalized experience to customers.

 

The journey down the purchase path is a journey with a changing landscape. As a consumer matures into a purchase, they need completely different content. It won’t matter in which channel they get it. The degree of customer engagement increases regardless of the channel they are in, but the personalization requirements are constant.

 

That’s why matching content to specific user behaviors and ensuring that they only view content that is relevant is an important part of building an omnichannel experience. Using dynamic recommendations, emails, pop-ups, etc. will help minimize the risk of your audience being flooded with repetitive, irrelevant content.

 

Secrets of omnichannel excellence

 

It’s natural to raise the question of how to ensure an even better, consistent omnichannel shopping experience for customers. Today’s tools offer many features that help you build it.

 

CDP Data

 

Customer Data Platforms are a worthy successor to CRM systems combined with Marketing Automation. They help connect mixed, unstructured data from multiple channels. Data from offline channels is as important as data from online channels. Facebook data stands on par with location data from a smartphone, from sources like TGI from Kantar Millward Brown, Google Analytics, website heat maps and eye-tracking tools. All of this information describes with great detail the behavior of real people in real time.

 

In digital marketing, CDP data can be used in a variety of ways. The most basic is creating a 360-degree profile of every customer and user whose data is in the system and deep behavioral profiling. The 360 profile in SALESmanago includes the complete history of a consumer’s interaction with a brand across all monitored outreach channels, as well as Semantic Webhooks that translate complex customer behaviors into specific preferences. This technology enables eCommerce operators to determine a customer’s true interest and propensity to purchase specific products.

 

Profiles update in real time, allowing for dynamic segmentation and even more accurate personalization of content. CDP data is used in most automation mechanisms available on the platform.

 

You can check all data in real time on the CDP dashboard. You can set up campaigns and manage your contacts directly from the dashboard. However, this data is used in most marketing operations on the platform — even as actionable tips and tricks displayed in the Marketing Insights module.

 

Dynamic Hyper Segmentation

 

Base segmentation is the foundation of personalized omnichannel efforts. However, ordinary segmentation may not be enough. Rigid, outdated segments do not relate to the idea of omnichannel customer follow-up. To fully respond to changing customer tastes and needs, it is much better to use dynamic segments. Creating dynamic segments allows you to:

 

automatic updating of target groups without having to manually generate data reports each time to select the right contacts,
managing multidimensional data without external BI systems, IT support and analysts,
immediate and precise target group sizing for mass or automated campaigns,
detailed analytics showing how the size of selected segments changes over time.

 

To create a Dynamic Segment in the SALESmanago system, go to

 

SEGMENTATION → DYNAMIC SEGMENTS → ADD NEW SEGMENT

 

The Dynamic Segments wizard allows you to combine elements that define any way you want:

 

contacts tags,
contact details,
sources of visits,
transaction data (products, spending, dates),
sources of transactions,
transaction statistics (money spent, number of transactions over time).

 

You can use any number of criteria and combine them by using connectors and/or. After saving them, the system will analyze the collected information and recalculate the number of contacts that meet the indicated criteria. The result will be visible immediately.

 

Hyper- makes a difference

 

Combining CDP data with AI capabilities helps take segmentation – including dynamic segmentation – to a whole new level. Hyper Segmentation goes beyond basic demographics by taking into account consumer interests and behaviors to understand their individual preferences. Easily, it helps identify segments and accounts with high potential and high probability of purchase to target ads and deliver the right messages and offers at the right time.

 

To use Hyper Segmentation in your system go to

 

SEGMENTATION→ CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION CENTER

 

and add a new segment or edit an existing one.

 

Dynamic content

 

Wherever you interact with your customers, you can try to make your content even more relevant to your audience. Whether it be:

 

an entire website,
a dedicated landing page,
a pop-up,
data collection form with a customized discount code,
personalized email,
live chat etc.

 

You can make good use of the prepared product feed (a complex XML document about the products in the store) combined with CDP data. Strategically placed elements will give the recipient a sense that the page is evolving with them. Depending on the level of engagement, a dynamically changing element can direct them to category pages or specific products, for example. And all of this is in line with a person’s current interests.

 

Predictive marketing

 

One of the most important applications of artificial intelligence in marketing is a branch called predictive marketing or predictions. In short, it answers the question of what comes out of the data, but also what can be done with it next. Predictions in marketing can range from the likelihood of a purchase, to preferred communication channels, to the risk of churn, or the termination of a relationship with a brand.

 

This kind of peek into the future makes it much easier to build a multichannel experience. Especially since predictions can often be used in segmentation and automation processes.

 

Exclusions

 

Dynamic content aligns perfectly with the stage of the purchase path a customer is at. But what about other content? To make the experience consistent, you’ll want to wisely apply exclusions when setting up content displays and sending. There are multiple ways to do this. Some content types have built-in options to limit displays. For example, a pop-up can display during a specific visit, or be displayed a limited number of times. While setting up audience groups, you can exclude contacts with specific tags. Exclusions can also be set from the level of the workflow. The most important thing is to think carefully about the automation processes and consider when the content will be really useful for a given recipient, and when it will rather discourage them.

 

True omnichannel is not easy to achieve. Along the entire purchase path, the customer jumps repeatedly between channels and is subject to various influences. Developments in technology, especially those that help draw actionable insights from data and don’t require coding skills, are making this task much simpler. This is happening to the benefit of both businesses and consumers. There’s a reason the vast majority of customers say they’d gladly provide additional information in exchange for a more personalized approach.

 

If you’re interested in hyper-personalization and building a consistent customer experience in the changing e-commerce landscape, be sure to try SALESmanago for free for 30 days!

You know how it goes — the bigger your subscriber list, the better your email marketing campaign will turn out to be. On the flip side, with a less than stellar email list, your email marketing campaign is never going to skyrocket, regardless of how great your content is. There’s a lot riding on building…
The post How to Grow Your Subscriber List Using Benchmark Email appeared first on Benchmark Email.