Category: Marketing Automation

We’ve talked a lot about the customer journey — how it impacts sales, service, and marketers.
But one segment that feels a little different is the ecommerce customer journey. The customer journey is different from service based companies, because it can be much quicker (buying from Amazon or an Instagram ad).

However, if you work at an ecommerce company, it’s important to understand the customer journey: all the touch points and stages.
Below, let’s learn how to map your ecommerce company’s customer journey. Plus, you can download some templates to help you get started.

Touch points can include when someone sees a social media ad, when a friend tags them in a post online, when they come across your website, when they read a blog of yours, when your product shows up on Google, when they search on Amazon, etc.
The journey from when they first come in contact with you to when they purchase your product to if they reach out for a return is included in the ecommerce customer journey.
Writing down these touch points might make you realize that the journey on your website isn’t ideal. If that happens, you can look for solutions to help you, like WooCommerce (a WordPress plug in).
Now, let’s explore the various stages of the ecommerce journey.

1. Awareness
The first stage of the ecommerce customer journey is awareness. During this stage, a potential customer is experiencing a problem and is doing research to understand their problem.
During this stage, customers are researching the issue they’re having, seeing if it has solutions, overcoming misconceptions, and prioritizing solutions.
2. Consideration
In the consideration stage, potential customers are researching products and methods to solve their problem.
For example, let’s say that I want to start a morning routine. I do some research on Google and see a few ads on social media and realize I want a morning routine journal.
Now that I know what I want to buy and how to fix my problem, it’s time to research solutions. I’ll go to Google and Amazon and see what morning routine journals are available and which ones have the best reviews.
3. Decision
During this stage, potential customers are now narrowing down their list to the top products they want to buy.
This is when they’re learning what makes your product stand out from the competition, and why your product is the one they need. During this stage, it’s important to understand the various touch points so you can communicate what makes your product unique.
4. Retention
For ecommerce, I decided to add one more stage to the customer journey. That stage is retention. After a customer buys your product, their experience and decision to buy from you again relies solely on the quality of your product and customer service.
Let’s say the package was missing, delivered to the wrong address, or they want to return the product. If that experience doesn’t go well, they won’t buy from you again. If it does go well, they’ll probably consider leaving a positive review.
Additionally, during the retention stage is when you can consider retargeting marketing and social media ads so more of your products show up for them online.
Once you’ve delighted your customers, they start to see you show up online, and want to engage with you, they’ll buy from you again and again.
To learn more about ecommerce marketing, you can check out HubSpot Academy’s free ecommerce marketing course.
Now that we understand the ecommerce customer journey, let’s visualize it with a customer journey map.
Essentially, this map will be a visualization of the start-to-finish customer journey. The point of creating this map is to not only understand the customer journey, but also to plan how you’re going to improve the customer experience at every touch point.
For example, HubSpot customer, CODE41, was able to optimize their ecommerce customer journey through HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub.
With Marketing Hub, CODE41 sends millions of emails (yes, millions) to their lists. With Sales Hub, they have the customer support team automate reminders to minimize the customer support failures: not following up on client requests, not forgetting to check payment status, etc.
Lastly, the company uses Service Hub to generate reports for how many tickets they have that were returned, complaints, repairs, etc. This helps them improve their customer experience and retention in the process.
If you want to get started with your own ecommerce customer journey map, you can use HubSpot’s customer journey map template, where you’ll brainstorm what the customer is thinking or feeling, what their actions are, what they’re researching, and how they go from consideration to decision.

For more information, you can check out this post on customer journey thinking, and watch the video below to learn more:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do I create an ecommerce customer journey map?”
Well, first you’ll create your buyer personas, and then envision what your ideal customer goes through when they’re seeking your product.
Once you do that, take HubSpot’s ecommerce marketing course, and download our templates, then you can just fill out the template and brainstorm how to improve the journey at every touch point.
Ecommerce customer journey mapping is an essential part of understanding your target audience and improving the customer experience. Focusing on providing the best customer experience will help retain customers and drive more leads and sales.

Growing your email list means you have more and more leads to engage with, nurture, and potentially convert to new customers. There are various ways to grow your list, but most of them involve increasing your site traffic. And when evaluating your site traffic and determining where it’s coming from, it’s important to be able…
The post What is the Difference Between Earned, Owned, and Paid Traffic? appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

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Hi all, we are searching for someone who makes marketing in Reddit in order to promote something. Furthermore we re also searching some Reddit’s accounts with more than 1000 of Karma. For any question or offers you can Dm us. Hola a todos. Estamos buscando alguien que haga marketing en Reddit pata promocionar algo en especial. Además también estamos buscando algunas cuentas de Reddit con 1000 o más de Karma. Cualquier consulta u oferta pueden escribir al mensaje privado.
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Article first published May 2018, updated April 2021
When it comes to email marketing, you probably spend most of your time thinking about the message you want to get across. You’re likely to focus your energy on crafting the perfect copy, as well as including compelling images.
However, every email you send has a footer. When was the last time you thought about yours? Footers may not be the first thing you think of when creating emails to send to your subscribers, but they’re an essential piece of the puzzle.
At Campaign Monitor, our drag-and-drop email builder has a range of flexible options for editing your footers so that you can customize them to align with your email design and brand.
The footer won’t get the attention of your readers before they open the email, but it can make a difference to someone who’s thinking about unsubscribing. It can also unexpectedly delight the people on your list. Read on to discover what your footer should include, as well as five examples of fabulous email footers.
What is the footer of an email?
The footer of your email is located at the very end of your email and is often referred to as the email signature. This is typically the ending of your email where you wish your regards to your reader and then include your name and other pertinent information.
However, in our digital age, there are a wide variety of different ways to maximize the impact your email signature.

What should I include in my email signature?
The signature is more than your sign-off at the end of your email. The purpose of signatures is to include important information about yourself to your reader. This usually includes your name and some form of contact information, such as:

Phone number
Email address
Website

Most web clients now allow users to customize their email signatures in several different ways. These typically include:
Plain text signature
These are standard, text-only signatures. They aren’t very fancy and generally include the most basic information, such as the sender’s name and maybe a quote or their business name.
Take this example from Team Beachbody:

Source: Gmail
Their email signature is simply “—Team Beachbody,” with nothing fancy included.
HTML signature
HTML signatures are different from plain text signatures because they allow for expanded creativity. Users can customize their email footers with varying images, colors, shapes, and links.
Here’s an example from keywee’s Chief Commercial Officer:

Source: Gmail
Here, the sender includes not only a plain text signature with his name and position, but he also includes a hyperlink with his website and email, followed by a full-color logo/image.
Should you include your email address in your email signature?
The answer is no. It’s simply not necessary.
When your clients or subscribers receive an email from you, all they need to do is click “reply” to begin drafting a message back to you, so including your email address in your email footer is simply redundant.
In fact, if your marketing team is using an ESP like Campaign Monitor, then you can even enter personalization tags in the “From” area to allow the system to automatically replace the default email address to the most appropriate reply-to address, such as the contact email address for a salesperson in a given area.
1. Share a motto like United by Blue.
United by Blue sells outdoor gear that’s reliable and durable. In their email footer, the business includes the motto they live by, staying on brand. They also make it easy for their customers to get help by including their phone number and hours of business. Everything is organized, easy to find, and they have their hashtag to find them on social media.

Takeaway: Include relevant information for customers, such as valuable contact information.
2. Share your business personality like Moosejaw.
Moosejaw, a lively outdoor gear company, has to include information required by law for their sales and clearance prices. However, they keep it on brand by having fun with the wording, even thanking their subscribers for making it down that far in the email. They also have a link to their privacy policies, a link to an email preference center, and an easy-to-find unsubscribe link. Plus, the link to a picture of a giraffe does, in fact, go to a picture of a giraffe.

Takeaway: Follow the compliance laws, but don’t be afraid to make it your own.
3. Add images.
Alaska Airlines has added a lot of personality to the footer of their emails. They have a clear unsubscribe link and address, but they’ve kept with their branding by including colors and their logo. They also have a fun way of asking their subscribers to follow them on social media.

Takeaway: Using your logo is a great way to stay on brand with your email footers.
4. Include an email preference link like Patagonia.
Patagonia has icons with links to a few of the programs they run, plus many social media icons to help their customers connect with them. They also have a great message to get their subscribers to use the preference center with a promise that they’ll then get the right sorts of emails.

Takeaway: Having an email preference center with links to it in your email footer is a great way to give your readers the freedom to make changes as they wish.
5. Share your company values like MiiR.
MiiR, a company that creates water bottles and coffee cups, has a clean and simple footer with a powerful message. They, of course, have all the required information, but they’ve made their unsubscribe message friendly and nice. They’ve made a point to highlight their company mission, reminding subscribers of who they are and what they stand for.

Takeaway: Make your objective and brand stand out by including it in your email footer.
Wrap up
While footers may seem unimportant, they can be optimized to add some oomph to your emails. They allow you to provide subscribers with more information about you and your brand, as well as ways to adjust their preferences and improve their experiences with you.
Try out Campaign Monitor today to trial our range of flexible options for editing your footers – you can choose a layout, customize text color, font and size, add a logo, add hyperlinks, customize background color, and more!
These email footer examples are only the beginning of crafting a high-performing email. Take that knowledge further with our advice on creating compelling copy and optimized header, footer, and CTAs for email campaigns that are sure to perform.
The post 5 Examples of Fabulous Email Footers appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Are your emails getting hit by the spam filters? In this article, we’re sharing 12 reasons why emails go to spam instead of the inbox and what you can do to stop them from doing so. With these tips you’ll improve your email deliverability and won’t have to dread the junk folder anymore.

Anyone here taken it? Any tips would be appreciated
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For B2B sales and marketing teams, few metaphors are as powerful as the sales funnel.
It’s a near-supernatural, multi-layered vortex that pulls in leads from the wider world, then draws them down toward closing. At the top of the funnel (TOFU) are fresh new leads who are just discovering your offerings. In the middle of the funnel (MOFU) are leads who are interested to learn more. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) are those leads who are poised and ready to make a purchase.
Modeling your sales funnel so you can better target and nurture leads at each layer is critical to increasing your conversion rate. But for accurate modeling, you need a lot of reliable data. And one major opportunity for collecting that data lies in your social media tools.
The importance of social media in marketing is unquestionable. In fact, businesses that market on social media are 40% more likely to hit their sales goals. Plus, a whopping 95% of buyers purchase from sellers who provide content that addresses their concerns and questions at each sales funnel level — and, nowadays, a lot of that content is posted on social platforms.
But the question remains: How can you measure and analyze the true impact of social activity on your sales funnel?
Here, we’ll explore what social media data is, and how you can use that data to strengthen your B2B sales funnels.

What is social media data?
Social media data (or social analytics — the terms are interchangeable) includes any information gleaned from the activity of visitors, prospects, and leads on your social media channels. Any data you obtain when someone interacts with your profile or content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media channel counts as social data.
Specific metrics can vary from platform to platform. However, the following social data points are common to all of them:

Shares/reposts
Likes
Comments
Mentions
Impressions
Conversions
Clicks

Clicks can be the most revealing of all social data points. Many outside factors can determine what post a visitor might choose to comment on or share. Click metadata can tell you what types of content they would like to explore further.
Why is social media data important to B2B funnels?
You can’t analyze the efficiency of your B2B social media marketing efforts without raw data. With so many marketing activities and steps in the buyer’s journey taking place on social media, analytics without social data won’t yield many useful insights.
With social analytics, you can answer some crucial questions about whether your social media activities can help you meet your goals. Analytics help answer questions such as:

Which social media platforms are generating the most leads?
What kind of content is making our audience click, share, and convert the most?
What are our top-converting posts?
Are our audiences more interested in engaging with TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU content?

By analyzing the right social data, you can learn what is and isn’t working — and then tailor your social media marketing strategy accordingly.
How Social Media Data Impacts Your B2B Funnels
Many aspects of the marketing, sales, and product development processes feed into modeling your sales funnel. The goal is to create a funnel that effectively addresses your buyer’s needs and brings them closer to closing a sale. Within this process, there are two critical areas where social data analytics are especially beneficial.
1. Lead Enrichment
Lead enrichment involves supplementing, correcting, and normalizing your data on a lead. The goal is to establish a more in-depth, up-to-date, and accurate picture of who your leads are and what they want. You can automate lead enrichment by importing third-party data into your CRM. You can also accomplish the same outcome by conducting manual research and verification on leads.
Lead enrichment makes it easy to perform several associated functions that will improve your sales funnel’s efficiency. These are:
Lead Scoring

Image Source
How do you know which leads are eager to buy and which ones are just looking? The solution is to quantify their signs of interest, assign them a score, and rank them.
The process of lead enrichment ensures you aren’t missing essential information about your lead, such as whether they are a decision-maker at their company. Social data can provide evidence of their signs of interest, as shown through their social media page interactions.
Lead Segmentation
A lead with a low score isn’t necessarily one you should ignore. However, a low-scoring lead might need different levels of attention or types of content.
The same goes for leads showing the same level of interest. If they’re in different industries or countries, the same approach might not work on all of them.

Social data can enrich your lead profiles with these details. Then you can segment your leads into separate audience groups, which enables you to target each group with custom-made content to address each group’s top concerns.

Lead Nurturing
You move a lead from one level of your sales funnel to the next by nurturing them.
Lead nurturing is accomplished by providing leads with content that answers their questions, addresses their concerns, and builds interest in your offers. The more data you have on your leads, the more hints you have about creating content most likely to engage them.
Lead Attribution
It’s great when your latest lead steps up engagement within your sales funnel. But if you don’t know what motivated them to provide their contact information, download that ebook, or request pricing, you’re missing out. That kind of knowledge is vital to improving your sales processes.
Enriched leads and social data analytics strengthen your attribution models. Lead attribution gives you the best chance of finding out which content deserves credit for the conversion.
2. Perfecting Your Messaging
The second key area impacted by social data is your messaging. Ultimately, all of your content is just a form of communication between you and the buyer.

When your messaging is perfect, it strikes the right tone, and speaks to your lead’s most pressing concerns — while also entertaining and educating. That’s when you know you’re putting your best effort into closing the sale.

When your messaging falls short on these fronts, leads can lose interest and drift away.
So, how do you perfect your messaging? The two easiest ways are through personalizing your sales outreach, and creating more engaging content.
Personalize Sales Outreach
Social data can tell you what your leads are most interested in and which channels are best for reaching them. This information allows you to personalize your sales outreach.
Let’s look at how this works in practice. Say you have a lead who consistently likes your tweets about a specific function of your product.
From that small piece of data, you can create a personalized outreach. A Twitter DM might be a great way to make a “sales call” — and now you have an even better idea for a good conversation starter.
Create More Engaging Content

Image Source
Content that engages is critical to move leads toward conversions. But what content should you be making to engage more leads?
First, step back to take a broader view of what your social data is telling you. Measuring how and where your leads engage with your sales funnel allows you to create more engaging content at all levels.
Let’s say you’re doing well at moving leads through the MOFU and BOFU, but many of them seem to get stuck in the TOFU. The leads who spend the most time in the TOFU aren’t converting their way further through the funnel at high enough rates.
Through careful parsing of your social data, you discover that the leads that slowly escape the TOFU heavily engage with your video content. This data tells you that you probably want to have video as a more significant share of your TOFU content.
It’s true that collecting, organizing, and analyzing raw social data can be overwhelming at the outset, but having the right resources can take a lot of the difficulty out of this endeavor. Tools like Oktopost can help you automate and optimize your social data processes, making it easy to finetune your content at every level of the sales funnel.
By leveraging social data to create better B2B sales funnel models, you will reap the benefits of its true impact with higher engagement rates, more conversions, and better ROI.

Imagine this: You run a successful online store and have a sleek app that makes shopping a breeze.
Most of your sales come from paid ads on Facebook and Instagram, and your usual process involves retargeting customers who open your app but leave without purchasing anything.
The more app installs you get, the more sales you log. This process is seamless because you’re able to track user activity across apps and optimize your ad spend as you see what works and what doesn’t.
But, with this week’s release of IOS14.5, the data you collect from Apple mobile devices will change. Here’s how.

Apple’s New Privacy Policy
Apple has confirmed that along with the launch of iOS14.5, there is also a change coming to Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) Framework, which is essentially its data sharing and privacy policies.
Apple will now require that all mobile app advertisers gain opt-in from users to track their web and app activity.
While this provides consumers with the ultimate privacy, security, and control over the ads they see across their web and mobile devices, it’s expected that not all users will accept this prompt to opt-in. This could make it more difficult for businesses to reach their target audience, and deliver relevant ads.
From now on, whenever an Apple user downloads your app, they’ll be shown a prompt, asking if it’s okay for the app to track them. Additionally, with limited app user data, companies like Google report that ads could show poorer performance and returns than before the change.
While Apple’s pivot might seem shocking, it is not the first major tech giant to take action when it comes to data privacy. Just in the last year, Google, another major player in the advertising world, announced that it will phase out third-party cookies on Chrome and will be offering replacement tracking tools, such as its Privacy Sandbox, after 2022. You can read more about that news here.
What will happen to Apple’s IDFA (Identification for Advertisers)?
To better understand what’s happening with Apple’s new update, let’s take a moment to learn about Apple’s identifier for advertisers (also known as IDFA). IDFA is tied to each Apple device and is used by advertisers to identify users.
Typically, the IDFA code is visible to advertisers, and it enables them to retarget consumers. Now, it will only be provided to advertisers if users give them the go-ahead and permission to track their usage across apps.
To prepare app owners, Apple has laid out the instructions for gaining proper tracking permissions on its website:
“You must also include a purpose string in the system prompt that explains why you’d like to track the user. Unless you receive permission from the user to enable tracking, the device’s advertising identifier value will be all zeros and you may not track them,” Apple explains.
 
How this Affects MMPs (Mobile Measurement Partners)
Traditionally, MMPs have been able to pull data from mobile apps and serve up data such as installs, views, and ad clicks, in an organized and insightful fashion. They provide advertisers an understanding of where their consumers come from, and what the results of a mobile campaign are, within their platform. With the changes coming to ATT, their ability to have access to all this could be diminished.
However, some MMPs, like AppsFlyer, are leaning into Apple’s SKadNetwork to glean insights for their mobile advertisers.
The SKadNetwork is a secure way for MMPs and advertisers to understand app installs and campaigns, without connecting those installs to specific user identities. Apple coordinates this attribution, and while using the SKadNetwork is a good alternative, it does not take into account view-through attribution and only provides data 24 to 28 hours after the first launch.
The Early Response to Apple’s Privacy Pivot
As you can imagine, this new update has caused ripples across the mobile advertising ecosystem, and brands like Facebook have already responded.
“Apple’s policy will prohibit certain data collection and sharing unless people opt into tracking on iOS 14 devices via the prompt. As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, ad personalization and performance reporting will be limited for both app and web conversion events,” says a Facebook for Business statement.
Meanwhile, Google, which has also been taking on its own privacy initiatives, provided information for developers and advertisers about how the change will impact them while also reminding readers of the importance of user privacy:
“At Google, we’ve always put users and their privacy first. Transparency, choice and control form the bedrock of our commitment to users, and advertising is no different. We remain committed to preserving a vibrant and open app ecosystem where people can access a broad range of ad-supported content with confidence that their privacy and choices are respected,” the Google post explains. “That’s why we’ll continue to invest in privacy-preserving technology ― including aggregated and on-device solutions ― like what we’re developing for the web, along with ecosystem partners, in the Privacy Sandbox.”
Quick Tips for Navigating Apple’s Privacy Changes
While this change will likely impact your current ad campaigns, and the size of its impact is still somewhat uncertain, there are a few areas you can still lean into and optimize your content for the right audiences:

Don’t forget about Android campaigns: the iOS 14.5 update only affects Apple devices and users, so you can still segment your audiences by Android users and target them.

Turn to your website: Use your website’s tracking capabilities or analytics tools to understand where your visitors are coming from, and create audiences based on those visitors.

Amp up organic efforts: take a closer look at your organic social media and content strategy. Then use that data to strengthen your brand.

While the times ahead are uncertain and may not seem as ideal for marketers and advertisers, the industry is likely to evolve and find ways to reach prospective customers. As Apple rolls out this update, we’ll be paying close attention to how advertisers respond and will continue to update this post in the future.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice for your company to use in complying with data privacy laws like the GDPR. Instead, it provides background information to help you better understand current privacy shifts. The tips provided are not the same as legal advice, where an attorney applies the law to your specific circumstances, so we insist that you consult an attorney if you’d like advice on your interpretation of this information or its accuracy.
In a nutshell, you may not rely on this as legal advice, or as a recommendation of any particular legal understanding.