Category: Marketing Automation

Instagram is an undeniably powerful tool for businesses.
In fact, 83% of people say they’ve discovered new products or services on Instagram, and roughly 80% say Instagram helps them conduct research on a product and ultimately decide whether or not to make a purchase. 
All of which is to say: If you’re not using Instagram to reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and ultimately grow sales, then you could be missing out. 
In this post, we’ll review how to make an Instagram business account, and the benefits of having one. Plus, how to switch back-and-forth between a business and personal account.

1. Download the Instagram app.
To get started, you’ll need to download the Instagram app on your phone or go to the Instagram site.
If you don’t already have an Instagram account, you can either download the app and click “Create New Account”, or open the desktop version (www.Instagram.com) and follow the same steps:

2. Sign up.
Next, you’ll fill out the form with your email address (make sure you choose a business email address), company name, username, and password.
You can also sign up with Facebook. If you already have a business Facebook account, this could be a good option.
It’s important to note that your username should most likely be your company name, and your password should follow all recommended guidelines (include a number, special characters, etc.). 
3. Switch to a business account.
Now that you’re set up with a profile, it’s time to switch it to a business account.
To do so, go to your profile and click the three lines in the top right corner:

Then, click “Settings” in the navigation menu that appears: 

Now, click “Account” from the Settings page: 
Finally, click “Switch to Professional Account”: 
When you get to this point, you’ll see another option to switch to a “Creator” account. Creator accounts are meant to be used by influencers, public figures, or content creators.

If you’re a business that sells a product or service, then a business account is the right option.
4. Complete your profile.
At this point, you’re all set up with a business account, but you’re not done yet.
Before you can start promoting your social media, you’ll need to complete your profile:
To do this, choose a profile photo. Your profile image will typically be some variation of your logo so your audience can easily recognize it.
Next, you’ll need to write your bio and fill out your company info. This will include your website, store hours, and contact information.
5. Post some content.
Before you can promote your account, it’s important to post a few images first. Perhaps you can write an introduction or hello post.
When you start interacting with people and following people, they’ll likely visit your account. You want there to be something to see that explains who you are as a company.
6. Link your business Facebook page.
If you didn’t choose to sign up with your business Facebook account, then it’s time to link your account here.
This is an important step because you need to have a Facebook business page to use some of Instagram’s business tools.
To link your account, click the three lines in the top right corner (like you did for step one). Then, click “Settings” and “Business.”
Now, you can click “Connect a Facebook Page”:
It’s important to note — You’ll need to be logged in to Facebook to do this.
7. Start following people.
Your profile is essentially ready to go. To get started on Instagram, invite your Facebook followers to follow you on Instagram.
You should also start following people to get the ball rolling. However, make sure that you’re strategic. The people you follow should make sense for your brand.
8. Develop a strategy.
Starting your Instagram business account is just the beginning. Once you’re all set with your page, it’s time to learn how to use Instagram for marketing.
You’ll want to think about the hashtags you’ll use, the accounts you’ll target, and who you’ll engage with.
To get started, you can learn how to use Instagram for marketing with HubSpot Academy’s Instagram Marketing Course.
Now, what if you have a creator account and you want to switch to a business account? Or what if you have a business account that you want to switch to personal? Or perhaps you have a personal account you want to switch to business?
To do this, follow the steps below.
1. Go to your profile.
The first step to switch your account is to go to your profile.
2. Tap the Settings cog.
Next, click the three lines in the top right corner … 

… Then, click “Settings”:

3. Click Account & Switch to Business Profile.
Now, click “Account” and then “Switch to business profile.” If you’re a business page and want to switch to a personal account, this button will become “Switch to personal account.”
No matter what account you have or what you want to switch it to, this is the process to go through.
Interestingly, you can also do this by just clicking on your profile, and clicking “Edit Profile.”
At this point, you might be wondering, “Why do I need a business account?” Below, let’s review some of the top benefits of having a business account on Instagram.
1. Action buttons.
With an Instagram business account you can add action buttons to your profile, such as “Book an Appointment,” “Make a Reservation,” or “Get Tickets” depending on your needs.
In fact, plenty of scheduling software integrates with Instagram, so you can attach your Instagram business account to your scheduling software.
Additionally, you can add CTAs on your profile, including “Call” or “Email” so it’s easier for your audience to get in touch with you.
2. Auto-scheduling posts.
A major perk of having a business account is the ability to schedule posts in advance. This is helpful because you can implement and execute your strategy without needing to spend every day on the app.
3. Access to analytics.
With a business profile, you’ll gain access to insights about your followers. You can see a demographic breakdown and how your audience interacts with your posts.
4. Ability to manage ads.
This is one of the best features of Instagram business accounts.
You’ll be able to promote posts and can easily select your audience, set a budget, and get rolling with advertising.
You can even work with influencers by directly promoting their branded content (if you’re tagged as a business partner).
To get more in depth, your Facebook account will need to be linked so you can use the Facebook ad’s manager.
5. Swipe up feature.
Another great feature of a business account is the ability to include swipe up links if you have more than 10,000 followers.
Since Instagram is one of the only platforms where you can’t include any clickable links in your posts, this is an excellent way to get your content out there.
Getting started with Instagram marketing can be hugely beneficial for your company. And it’s even an easy process. If you aren’t sure where to get started, we suggest taking free courses on Instagram Marketing (like HubSpot’s).

Pardot Summer ’21 Release Highlights Continue reading →
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I care about customers. Whether they’re your customers, my customers, or my customers’ customers, I want every one of them to have a good experience every time they pick up the phone to call a business, open a marketing email, or visit a website.
It’s what gets me going every morning. That’s why I was thrilled in 2019 when I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot’s first-ever ‘voice of the customer’ team.
I assembled a group of passionate people, each more dedicated than the last to improving customer experience. We met weekly, talked about our customers, forensically analyzed feedback, and dug deep into the weeds to see where we could root out friction.
And then one day it hit us. The answers to most of our questions didn’t lie in more cross-functional meetings, increased headcount, or longer hours for support staff. The answers to our questions lay in operations.
Operations teams carry the responsibility for making sure that, well, everything works. If a marketer is having trouble segmenting a contact list, they reach out to operations. If a salesperson’s automated emails are misfiring, operations gets tagged in. If a service professional can’t access a customer’s communication history, it’s operations to the rescue again.
They’re the people who set every customer-facing team up for success. As such, they are the orchestrators of the customer experience. And yet, most companies view operations as a reactive function whose sole purpose is to frantically find fixes to issues as they arise.
It’s time for us as an industry to re-imagine operations and transform these teams from reactive fire-fighters into proactive friction-fighters. How can we do this? With revenue operations (RevOps).
It’s my firm belief that operations teams can only fulfill their potential when they work together under a unified RevOps strategy and are equipped with the right tools to execute that strategy.
Today, HubSpot is spearheading the onrushing RevOps revolution with the launch of Operations Hub — a new product specifically designed to empower operations teams to play an influential role in helping their companies delight customers at scale.
Because when a company scales, friction inevitably emerges, and customer experience is often the first thing to suffer.
Three Reasons Why Customer Experience Often Suffers When a Company Scales
There are few companies out there that impress me so much, I feel compelled to tweet about my experience, tell my friends, or write a positive review. These days, customers like me expect their interactions with every company to be quick, convenient, and contextual.
When a company scales and begins to achieve exponential growth, the challenge of keeping pace with customer expectations grows exponentially, too. There are three key reasons why:
1. More customers to support.
When a company is in startup mode, it will usually keep up with the growth of its customer base by increasing investments in staff. When customer growth starts to outpace the company’s ability to maintain a high standard of customer experience, it will likely raise capital and hire new employees to support the expanding demand. This works … for a while.
When that company is ready to scale – that is, to grow its business faster than its investments – it needs to support a growing customer base without simply hiring more employees and without letting the quality of the customer experience drop. To do this, it has to reinvent its approach to delighting customers or risk losing the trust of its user base – and its market share.
2. More tools to manage.
As a company grows, it will inevitably encounter new challenges. And in a world of over 8,000 martech solutions, there is no shortage of tools out there that could be brought in to help solve a problem quickly. So, it’s common for different teams to adopt different tools to help them solve different problems.
Over time, this approach results in a brutally bloated tech stack that takes so much time and energy to manage, there’s little left to dedicate to customers. What’s more, when tech stacks are unnecessarily complex, it becomes increasingly difficult for customer-facing teams to access reliable data, making it nearly impossible to deliver the type of contextual experience customers expect.
3. More touchpoints to maintain.
When a company is getting off the ground, it will tend to focus on a small number of high-impact channels. For example, its early social media marketing strategy may focus exclusively on, say, Facebook and Twitter, and it might only take customer queries over the phone.
As that company seeks to scale, however, it will add new channels to its marketing mix and offer its customers more ways to get in touch. Pretty soon, it’ll find itself interacting with its audience not only on Facebook, Twitter, and over the phone, but on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and via 24/7 web chat, too.
To manage this multitude of touchpoints, that company will need a new strategy to ensure it maintains the quality of experience it offered to customers when there were only a few channels in play.
These three issues are a by-product of scale. They are challenges a company wants to have … and solve. Yet, most businesses fall short. They naturally fall back on the methods that have helped them reach this critical moment in their journey — many continue to frantically hire staff long after it’s sustainable to do so, some rush to tack more tools onto their tech stacks without the infrastructure to make them all work together, and others simply leave certain touchpoints unattended, leaving customers unimpressed.
Operations professionals are uniquely positioned to help a company solve challenges like these. But historically, companies across our industry have failed to recognize the potential of their operations teams, leaving them stuck in silos and asking them to solve issues without the right tools or team structure to do so effectively.
Moving From Function-Out To Customer-In
Operations professionals are rarely among the first hires a company makes. They tend to be brought in only when systems start to creak and the friction between teams becomes unbearable. A company’s marketing leader might hire an operations professional onto their team to help improve its lead scoring system, while its head of sales brings in their own operations hire to work on reporting.
Before long, there are multiple operations teams working in different departmental silos, often out of different operating systems. In this setup, even if each operations team does an exceptionally good job at fighting friction within their department, friction can still be rife between their departments.
For example, the sales team might be having difficulty accessing and understanding the marketing team’s data, hurting their ability to personalize their outreach based on a prospect’s recent engagement.
With no team accountable for overseeing this critical cross-departmental touchpoint, prospects will continue to receive impersonal emails, the marketing team will continue to receive exasperated messages from their sales colleagues, and the sales team will continue to struggle to win over prospects.
I call this a “function-out” perspective, where each customer-facing team is only focused on the portion of the customer experience they’re directly responsible for, and each operations professional is tasked with supporting their designated function.
What companies need instead is a “customer-in” perspective, where all teams work in unison, informed by a holistic view of the customer, to deliver a unified experience. Operations professionals have a critical role to play in driving this shift in perspective. But to be successful, they too need to be unified.
How RevOps Helps Companies Scale Customer Experience
One of the most powerful things a company can do to scale its customer experience is to unify its functional operations professionals under one centralized revenue operations (RevOps) strategy.

When operations teams are unified, they are not serving their separate teams’ goals, they are serving the customer. They work with the same data, which gives them a single source of truth on what’s really going on with customers at a holistic level.

They collaborate on cross-functional processes that allow them to bridge the gaps between teams where friction frequently festers. And perhaps most importantly, they work together to proactively identify issues before they have a chance to hurt the customer experience.
Companies that don’t yet have a large number of operations professionals among their ranks don’t have to wait until they do to start adopting a “customer-in” perspective. If they haven’t hired an operations professional yet, they should consider bringing one in as a priority and giving them a meaningful say in how all customer-facing teams work together, not just one.
They should also examine the ways their internal teams are set up within their current operating model, assess whether the systems they’re using are contributing to silos, and begin to instill a culture of alignment around the customer.
After all, RevOps is not just the name of a team, it’s a philosophy by which to run a company — one that thrives when operations teams are equipped with the right tools.
Introducing Operations Hub
Today with the launch of Operations Hub, we are giving operations teams a suite of tools that allow them to assume their rightful place at the forefront of the customer experience and empower them to guide their companies through the customer experience challenges that come with scale.

With Operations Hub, teams can sync data across their business apps bi-directionally and in real-time, allowing them to manage a tech stack with ease, no matter how complex it is.

They can roll out workflows that automatically keep their database clean and up to date, helping them to maintain a reliable view of the customer, no matter how many touchpoints they manage. And they can design sophisticated custom automation actions to deliver a deeply personalized and contextual experience to customers, no matter how large their customer base grows.
Together, these tools free up operations teams to conduct bold ambitious experiments, test big innovative ideas, and launch ground-breaking new strategies, all in the name of delivering an exceptional customer experience. For too long our industry has put a limit on the potential of operations professionals. That changes today.
Back in 2019, I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot’s ‘voice of the customer’ team. That experience opened my eyes to the vital role operations teams have to play in scaling customer experience.
At the beginning of 2021, I had the opportunity to launch another team at HubSpot: the revenue operations team. With Operations Hub at our fingertips and our operations professionals unified as one, we are on a mission to elevate the role of operations teams not only at our company, but across the entire industry.
If you work in operations like me, you have a right to feel excited. Where you were once reactive, you can now be proactive. Where you were once siloed, you can now be in sync with your operations teammates. And where you were once an afterthought of the customer-facing teams you support, you can now be the orchestrator of your company’s customer experience strategy.

Traffic is a low-impact word for most people but a high-impact word for marketers. Traffic can ultimately dictate success, whether it’s the number of leads that come to your website, visit your social channels, or watch your videos.
There are two different types of traffic you can have, organic and non-organic, that can come from all over: email, social media, organic searches, backlinks — the list goes on.
Non-organic traffic can be a bit harder to come by, which is why, when creating non-organic content, you want to ensure that it will drive results. However, it’s easier said than done when it comes to figuring out what works for your business. In this post, hear from HubSpot content strategists and marketers about the types of content that bring in the most non-organic traffic as inspiration for creating your own.

4 Content Types That Get Non-Organic Traffic, According to Content Strategists
Data-Driven Content
Pam Bump, Audience Growth Marketing Manager & Staff Writer for the HubSpot Blogs, says that she often sees solid non-organic traffic from email and social media to blog posts that feature statistics or recent industry figures. Bump says, “People love to share, link to, or read up on new data that impacts their career, industry, or lives in some way.
The data-driven content you share can be related to overall industry trends, stat roundup posts (like this one), and data comparison pieces, like this one about Millenials vs. Gen Z, written by Bump herself.
If you have the means, it’s worth considering running internal experiments and publishing your own original data. This can help you drive referrals and backlinks from other websites as non-organic leads and build your domain authority. When HubSpot does this, Bump says, “A credible website might include our data and say ‘according to Hubspot,’ and link to our original data post because it simply has information readers can’t get anywhere else.”
Content Featuring Quotes and Interviews
In the same vein as data-driven content, people want to learn something from what you have to offer, especially if they’re learning it from experienced industry leaders and professionals.
Bump gives a piece titled Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021, According to 21 Experts, as an example. It was written by MOZ CMO Christina Mautz, and she included quotes from reputable industry leaders. The piece was shared on HubSpot social channels and emails and has since received a significant amount of views from non-organic sources in just three months.
When you create content like this, the industry leaders you feature in the piece may share the posts with their audiences, helping you gain brand awareness and traffic from additional sources. Francesca McCaffrey, Tech Content Strategies, notes that leadership-type content brings in significant non-organic traffic for the HubSpot Product Blog, especially when shared on social media. She says, “Leadership thought pieces are also a significant source of non-organic traffic for us, as they tend to inspire lots of commentary and clicks on networking sites like LinkedIn.”
Emerging Trends
Making an effort to create content about emerging industry-related trends can do wonders in terms of attracting email, social media, and referral traffic.
Bump wrote a post about Clubhouse, a relatively new social platform that didn’t have high MSV search terms affiliated with it yet. Bump added headlines to the content that would gain traction when the app got bigger, like “What Is Clubhouse?” Since publication, the post has earned an impressive amount of non-organic views and, as expected, has picked up organic traffic as the app grows in popularity.
Covering emerging trends also helps you stay on top of new keywords that aren’t as competitive. If you’re one of the only sources creating content for the keywords, search engines will recognize you as a source of authority when the trend becomes more popular.
Technical Guides and How-Tos
McCaffrey says that technical guides and how-to type content from the Product Blog submitted to reputable industry sites perform especially well with non-organic traffic.
She gives this piece as an example that was submitted to Hacker News, a reputable cybersecurity publication. McCaffrey says, “Making it to the first or second page of a site like Hacker News can really boost non-organic traffic, and translate into organic traffic over time. The piece made it to the front page, driving thousands of viewers to that post in a day.”
Like pieces containing quotes and interviews, this type of content performs well because people can learn from it; they can take away actionable skills to apply to their own lives.
All in all, the content you choose to create should directly relate to your business, as you’ll find the most success if you’re creating content your audience is already looking for.
However, it’s worth considering purposely creating content that you know has the potential to bring in a significant amount of non-organic traffic. Leverage these tips from expert HubSpot content strategists, and begin creating content that drives traffic.

Hi a lot of you where interested in my chrome extension for Instagram growth that I mentioned in my previous post. I have decided to give it away for FREE so I published it on the chrome webstore so that you guys can use it. You can get it via this link 👉 Instagram Automation
submitted by /u/connasaurus [link] [comments]

Website forms are essential for your inbound marketing strategy. Used strategically, they can turn a regular site visitor into a lead you can nurture and eventually convert to a customer. And if you’re one of the 63 percent of businesses that report generating traffic and leads as their biggest marketing challenge, you’d be hard-pressed to…
The post Website Forms 101: The Various Types, Where to Put them, and How to Make Them Effective appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

Since we first kicked off a 4-day work week in May 2020, people have had a lot of questions about it. What day are we taking off? How long will we continue this practice? Is everyone really working four-days a week or are some people working more? Some of the answers to these questions have changed over the last few months, and I’m sure some will continue to change and evolve as we learn more about operating within a four-day work week. A little while ago, I decided to answer questions about our four-day work week policy on Twitter, and I got a fantastic response. I’ve included a high-level recap in this post, but feel free to check out the whole thread if you’d like to see every reply. Without further ado, here are some of the questions I got about the four-day work week organized into a few top categories, along with my replies and those of Caryn Hubbard, our VP of Finance, and Åsa Nystrom, our VP of Customer Advocacy, who contributed to several answers.
Why a 4-day work week?
Pranay asked: Why did it take a pandemic to implement it and why is a 4 day work week matter – cant it just be about the work itself instead of timing it? We’ve thought about it for years, and I have a fundamental belief that 5-day workweeks aren’t necessarily optimal. The pandemic meant added stress for all of us, especially for the parents in the team. I wanted to get through it with the team, mentally, in the best position.I believe that many businesses that are squeezing every last drop they can get out of their companies in terms of profit, productivity, etc. suddenly ran into issues in the pandemic. Growth goals to hit and no profit margin, meant layoffs for many companies.And when you make layoffs, you erode trust significantly with your team. That can take years to build back. I wanted to build trust with my team through the pandemic. This was one of the best ways that I thought to do it.
How does it work?
Niel asked: Does everyone take the same day off? Or is it up to the individual? Or is it based on teams? Or something more nuanced?In the beginning, we experimented with teams deciding the day, but knowing which day and having adequate time for cross-team collaboration was a challenge. Frankly it felt quite chaotic. Now, we do Fridays other than Customer Advocacy which rotate the day.Shubham asked: Which 4 days of the week do you work? M – TH or Tu – Fr or something else? Do you find that the team tries to fit in 5 days of work in 4?For the majority of the team, we do M – TH. In the beginning I tried Wednesdays as my day off, and enjoyed that but I prefer Fridays now. 3-day weekends are very powerful. I think overall, the team tries to work smarter. Perhaps trying to fit 4.5 days into 4.David asked: woah didn’t know you were doing this – love it what would your reasons be for going back to 5 day? The reasons would likely be not achieving our goals, which would be sad because I fundamentally don’t believe it’s putting in hours that will get us there.And, one key thing is that over time, we’ve realized that 4-days should feel like a privilege, not entitled. So, if you get your tasks and goals for the week done, awesome – take that day off. If you didn’t quite do enough for us to reach our goals, spend part of Friday working.Scott asked: Doing a 4, 10’s type of deal? Or not tracking exact hours, rather output and movement?Not tracking exact hours, and more focus on tracking output. The goal is to achieve the same if not more, in less overall hours worked (more along the lines of 4 8’s).Gaya asked: That’s awesome! Hopefully more companies will follow to normalise this. Q: Did the salaries stay the same? I know people who are holding back from working less because of decrease in payNo change to salaries at Buffer with our 4-day workweeks. It’s less hours for the same pay. I don’t believe in same hours in less days, because for me 4-day workweeks are really about a more fundamental belief that hours worked are not correlated with results.Stone asked: Love that you did this! Do you build in any deep work/no meetings time as well? Do you think the pandemic was needed for the transition/will you keep@it when offices reopen? How confident are you that people aren’t working longer 4 days or actually taking Friday off? For many years we’ve had discussions and focus on deep work, and many teams have a day with no meetings. I don’t think the pandemic was needed to do it, but it was a motivator. I’m confident we’ll keep at it after, too. We’re already 100% remote so no actual offices.I’m confident in most cases people are taking the Friday off. That said, we also don’t actively discourage working a little on Friday, if the team member feels that is needed to achieve our goals. We have big ambitions for what we can do for customers *and* innovating culture.
How do specific teams and teammates manage a 4-day work week?
Dwija asked: Do you have mothers working as full time employees? If working hours of those 4 days increase – how do they manage? I know it depends on them but just curious. Females are taking a hit – BIG TIME in Covid. ( For example: Yours truly)From Caryn: We have many mothers and fathers at Buffer. Our shift to the flexibility of a 4 day workweek has been one of the most key things keeping my family of 5 healthy & safe this past year. The trust & flexibility to work the schedule that works for me & my family is everything.From Joel: To add to the great insights Caryn shared, our decision to try a 4DWW was very much with parents in mind. Working hours haven’t increased. We work hard as a team to strive to achieve our goals without regularly working more hours. More here.Mark asked: Does customer support participate in the 4-day week? If so, how do you stagger hours / meet customer expectations?Yes, they do, but we still want to serve customers to the same high level. Over time, we’ve tweaked our 4-day workweek to drive us to push ourselves in the 4-days and feel like we’ve really earned that day off, not entitled to it.Our customer support team is the one team that switches up the day off in order to make sure we maintain coverage for customers.Stefan asked: Are the customer-facing teams doing 4-day work weeks as well? If so, are they all off on Fridays? If so, are customers’ emails/calls not answered till Monday?No, we have to take a slightly more unique approach in our customer service team. We’re fully committed to providing world-class service, and we know the world works M-F (and even weekends). The specific day is different per team member, so more of a relay in that team.Have y’all had any issues with a handoff from one team member to another in this relay system?From Åsa: Jumping in to help with this q. No issues! We work in four-day blocks and use an assigned inbox flow to keep consistency in our customer communications. Our team covers most of the globe and are in constant communication across the week to keep on top of issues etc.Jean asked: Do you have a strong customer support team in terms of number of people? Are you also applying this formula to tech team?Our customer support team is 21 people out of 85. All teams adopt the 4-day workweek, but we also have goals we strive for and we see the 5th day as something earned not entitled.Mercer followed up with: Does that mean that your support team doesn’t always get the same time off? How do you strive to protect the time of your customer-facing teams (who so frequently don’t get the same blessings as the other teams around them)?It’s not necessarily that different for our support team, but it’s often more measurable for a support team. So we aim to be mindful of that. But we also have engineering teams that will work the 5th day if they don’t feel on track. Most teams work 4-days now.From Åsa: Everyone on the CS team works a 4-day block & has the same days off every week to make sure we have the same ability to disengage and recharge! Being customer-facing doesn’t mean we can’t participate in company initiatives like these, it just means we need to plan a bit more.Sllyllyd asked: Do the more senior team members stick to four days? In general, yes. Often the more senior team members are the ones who feel the most accountability and energy for goals, and so we sometimes work the extra day to get make sure we’re on track. It’s not the norm, though, and when we do it’s usually just a couple of hours.From Caryn: There’s a high level of flexibility and trust that we’ll meet our shared and individual goals w/in the schedule that works best for us. As a mom of 3, my needs look different than fellow colleagues but I thrive with that mutual respect & trust. Sometimes I choose to work 5 days.
How is it going?
Daniel asked: What’s better than you expected? What’s worse than you expected? Better: The extra day builds in reflection time that we often don’t make room for, where many of us solve problems. So in many ways, we do more meaningful work. Harder: Purpose becomes even more important. We need to feel driven to do great work in the precious 4 days we have.Purpose on an org level or individual level?Both. Especially with the past year we’ve had. The real magic is when org purpose feels intertwined with a personal sense of purpose, something worthy to go after that can really make a difference. If org purpose feels like it serves society, individual purpose usually follows.Jesse asked: Are people get as much done? Do you have hourly staff?We have no hourly staff, which is important. This isn’t less hours for less pay, it’s less hours for the same pay. In terms of productivity, that’s hard to measure in this wild past year we’ve had. But, things look promising. Philosophically, I believe we can get as much done.Awesome. Are people happier and more excited to come to work? Boost in moral? Did you see it level off?Yes, to all of that! You nailed it. We’ve not felt it level off yet, there’s still a ton of gratitude for the 4-day workweeks 9+ months in.André-Paul asked: What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed within your team? Any new routines/behaviours/processes?Well, there’s definitely a new level of gratitude. We’re here, trying out this wild new thing, and gaining this extra day for family or ourselves. It’s awesome. And with that, a sense of alongside gaining flexibility, giving flexibility too.What I mean by gaining flexibility and giving flexibility is, especially as a global team, we need to be open to meetings once in a while earlier in a morning or late at night, to make everything happen. Especially with a 4-day workweek.So, a renewed sense of, we’re lucky to have this extra freedom but let’s be smart about how we work in order to make 4-day workweeks really work for us as a company and for customers, so we can keep having them.Ali asked: Has the rate of burnout gone down?It’s hard to measure, but I believe absolutely, it has. Or rather, 2020 was a year that drove much more burnout than most years and we minimized the amount in part through implementing the 4-day workweek.Michelle asked: I can always find more to do. Are people self-disciplined enough to really take Friday off and are people good enough at knowing how much they can really get done in a week or do they set goals that are too lofty and usually end up working Fridays?Great question. I think it’s somewhere in the middle. I genuinely thing most people now take Fridays off. But, we still have big ambitions as a company and so once in a while we need to work a Friday. The real magic is when the Friday off helps you actually get more done.Luthfur asked: How are you measuring productivity? Put another way, how do you intend to make the decision on whether this is going well or not. Ultimately, we will make our decision based on whether we achieve our goals as a company. I fundamentally believe though, that the 5-day workweek is a relic of the industrial era and not necessarily the most effective way to work. So I believe we can achieve our goals in 4DWWs.One of the benefits we have, is that investors do not control our company. We can take longer term stances and decisions, that we believe will lead to great results in time.— If you or your team are trying a 4-day work week send me a tweet to share how it’s going for you, I’d love to hear about it!

We are thrilled to announce that Software Advice, an established software review and recommendation engine featured SALESmanago in its “Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools To Boost Lead Conversions” report! 

This is yet another great honorable mention after G2 Crowd awarded us with a “Users Love Us” badge earlier this year. 

The Software Advice report features some of the top marketing automation tools that assist modern marketers with setting up and running digital marketing campaigns smoothly and efficiently. Through hard work, passion, and dedication to what we do, we’ve been able to reach the top when it comes to helping our clients automate their marketing.

Over 100 reviewers have rated us 5-STARS on Software Advice and 90% of our reviewers are ready to recommend us to their colleagues and peers. Thanks to all our esteemed users who love our product so much.

Check out what our user has to say about us:

“We started using it for automated E-Mails and are beginning to dive deeper into customer segmentation and automated workflows. So far all our expectations were met and if we came up with custom ideas/problems the support team was very accommodating and always quick to find a solution.”

“It’s very easy to use and it’s giving a lot of useful data about products, clients and website. I’m very happy that we decided to implement this solution in our company.”

“We had a serious delivery issue with our previous email sending service, and we had to clean our database due to years of improper handling. With the help of customer service and automatic segmentation feature, we managed to reactivate about 25-30%(!) of our emails, after that we remove the useless, dead emails. The result was remarkable in the boost of email revenue. If you want an easy-to-use, feature-rich service with reasonable price, SalesManago is your system.”

Thank you Software Advice for recognition, and most of all, thank you to our clients who have trust in our company! 

Attracting customers’ attention in today’s busy world becomes harder by the day. But what if, instead of chasing customers, they welcome you in their inbox?
With opt-in email marketing, you get permission to land in the customer’s inbox and share the right message at the right time with the right people. 
Relying on social media algorithms can often feel like fighting with the windmills. Instead, you should focus on building an email marketing list that can be a true gold mine. 
Digital-native companies continue to double down on email marketing as it’s one of the most effective marketing assets in their toolbox. 
What is opt-in email marketing?
Opt-in email marketing is a permission-based collection of email addresses of potential customers willing to exchange their information for a certain incentive. 
By filling in an opt-in form to receive a discount, lead magnet, or another incentive, your recipients agree to receive emails, newsletters, or other forms of digital communication from you.
Due to strict laws regarding data protection, companies often employ double opt-in for growing their email list. A double opt-in means that after filling in an opt-in form, each new subscriber will receive an email with a confirmation link as verification that they want to be added to the email list.

 
Source: Campaign Monitor
Why signup forms obtain quality contacts
There are numerous ways to grow your email list in today’s digital-first world, but using signup forms is one of the most effective. Instead of collecting random email addresses with signup forms, you’re collecting quality signups.
Opt-in email lists are much more common after anti-spam laws in the 2000s took a hard stance against unsolicited email marketing. Today, it’s a best practice for marketers to have subscribers opt-in, that is, to give permission for companies to communicate via email.
The question is: How come signup forms are so critical to getting quality contacts?
Well, first, only interested subscribers sign up.
When someone fills out an email signup form, you know they are interested in your product or service. There’s a lot of value in that. This isn’t some random contact with little to no interest in what you do; it’s a subscriber who sought you out.
And signup forms are familiar to subscribers.
Subscribers see signup forms as a no-hassle way to interact with a business they care about. Because it’s familiar, subscribers don’t see it as intrusive and actually seek out signup forms to sign up with brands they like and want to hear from.
Benefits of opt-in email marketing
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach your audience, as there are 3.9 billion active email users. Getting a green light to send people email updates can bring significant benefits to your business. Let’s look at a few.
1. Encourage new business
Keeping fresh, ready-to-buy customers coming in the door is the key to growth for every business. By continually adding to your email list, you’re constantly cultivating new relationships. This ongoing outreach is vital because you never know which new customer will become a loyal one down the road.
2. Build personal relationships
Today’s companies are constantly trying to cut through the noise to reach their audience. Unfortunately, many businesses underestimate the power of personalization. Data shows that personalization increases open rates by 26%. Moreover, targeted email sends pay off. In fact, marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. With email platforms like Campaign Monitor, you can use data you have about your subscribers to send personalized messages to the right subscriber at the right time. 
Gusto Italian is committed to delivering a premium dining experience. When you sign up to their mailing list, you add personal information such as name, date of birth, and even your preferred Gusto restaurant. With this information, Gusto can create a personalized experience for their subscribers.

Source: Gusto Italian
 
3. Promote visits to your site
You can promote visits to a variety of sites through email marketing. You can direct subscribers to your homepage, to a specific blog article, a promotional landing page—the options are endless. Anytime you can motivate subscribers to interact with your brand on the digital front is a solid investment.
The more you grow your list with quality subscribers, the more visitors you can direct to the sites and pages of your choice.
The Swiss performance running shoes and clothing retailer On is revolutionizing the running shoe space with new technologies. They use email marketing with product recommendations to remind and encourage the audience to visit their online store. 

Source: On
4. Send cost-effective campaigns
Email marketing is one of marketers’ favorite tools. That’s no surprise, as it’s among the most cost-effective channels — for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI. Unlike traditional campaigns, building an opt-in email marketing list allows companies to reach the right audience at the right time at a very low cost. Besides, email marketing campaigns can be prepared in a short period, compared to traditional campaigns such as direct or print that take much more time for preparation and execution.   
5. Create your own communication channel
One of the biggest advantages of having an opt-in email list is the fact that you own that resource, and it can serve as a significant pillar for future success. No matter how many followers you have on social media, in the end, the algorithm determines how many people will see your content. Building an email list means taking control over your communication channels. The most successful companies will tell you that their email list is one of their most significant assets. The sooner you build your opt-in email list, the better results you can expect later on.  
6. Collect feedback from your audience
The only way to improve your performance is by asking for feedback and listening to your audience. Email can be a great way to check your customers’ pulse and adjust your strategy based on the responses you get. 
Customer satisfaction surveys will give you all the answers you need to improve your customer experience. Creating different email lists based on different buyer personas allows companies to tailor the questions they send to specific audiences.
The fashion retailer Rebecca Minkoff uses email marketing to send surveys to its subscribers to measure customer satisfaction and rewards participants with a coupon code for 20% off full-price items.

Source: Rebecca Minkoff
 
7. Future-proof your business 
Looking at social media platforms is like gazing into the night sky — there are so many out there. In the past decade, we witnessed an influx of social media sites, and yet, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach your potential customers.
With opt-in email marketing, you can create and grow your list of subscribers, which can be your most powerful weapon in the future. There’s fierce competition brewing in the digital space, so having a solid email list can be the ace up your sleeve. 
Grow your list with Campaign Monitor
Growing your email list has never been easier. With Campaign Monitor, you can choose to create a signup form for your website or let us host the form for you. From there, you decide exactly which fields you want to capture (e.g., name, email, location, gender, etc.), and it seamlessly integrates into your brand’s style. Any email addresses entered into the signup form are automatically added to your selected email list in Campaign Monitor.
The best part: you can create a signup form with no coding experience.

Wrap up
Intrusive and invasive marketing turns off consumers. Instead of relying on aggressive tactics that can easily backfire, you should focus on permission-based marketing. 
With opt-in email marketing, you reach out to people that want to hear from you. Building a channel that allows you to communicate with a broader audience through hyper-targeted email marketing campaigns that deliver additional ROI is the key to business growth. 
Ready to start building your email marketing list today? Don’t worry, we have your back! Learn how to create a seamless experience with custom email signup forms.
The post 7 Benefits of Opt-In Email Marketing appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Search engine optimization (SEO) may seem like a straightforward concept.
You pick keywords related to your business, create content with those keywords, and you’re set to watch your site grow — a simple three-step process, right? Nope.
While those are fundamental elements of SEO, it can actually be quite challenging to create a strategy that helps you drive traffic and enough of it to meet your overall business goals.
It can be difficult to get your feet off the ground. Thankfully, there are various tools specifically designed to help you with SEO, build domain authority, and achieve high ROI. In this post, we’ll hear inspiring stories from HubSpot clients that have used our SEO tools to achieve business success.

5 SEO Success Stories To Inspire Your 2021 Strategy
1. Ironpaper
Ironpaper is a digital marketing agency that helps their B2B clients grow. They worked with one of their clients, Goddard, to achieve significant success using HubSpot’s SEO tools.
Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper, says, “While Goddard fills a real need for their customers by designing medical devices, historically they’ve struggled to find quality leads that could use their services. Instead, their website attracted a lot of spam and unqualified contacts.” Ironpaper began making critical SEO updates with HubSpot tools on Goddard’s site, focusing on internal linking, content strategy with business-relevant keywords, and technical SEO issues like broken links and meta tags.
Over an eight-month campaign, Ironpaper helped Goddard gain 2,361 Google positions across various keywords relevant to their offerings. Franchell says, “Because we created targeted content centered on strategic keywords, Goddard’s Google rankings increased even throughout a dip in traffic.”
The company also now ranks in the top 100 for 50 strategically targeted terms and can use HubSpot’s insights reports and dashboards to monitor their progress to ensure that their future marketing efforts are hyper-targeted for the audience they’ve worked hard to develop.
2. Apptega
Apptega is a cybersecurity and compliance platform. As they grew their business, they knew they would need an optimized website that generated leads. They also recognized that their existing WordPress site wouldn’t be enough for them to reach their goals.
Joelle Palmer, Apptega’s Digital Marketing Manager, says, “We had built a Frankenstein monster in WordPress. Our dev team would constantly have to drop what they were doing and fix our website.” Apptega then decided to migrate its existing site into CMS Hub.
Apptega saw almost immediate success with HubSpot’s SEO tools: “We saw one of our core pages move from a number100+ ranking on Google to position number three in two weeks. SEO usually takes three to six months to work…that was truly amazing for us as a company to experience.”
Some of the tools Apptega used within Marketing Hub to achieve their growth are the on-page SEO recommendations that direct users to pages that need attention and additional ways to optimize content.
3. Beacon Digital Marketing
Beacon Digital Marketing specializes in driving results for FinTech, SaaS, and B2B businesses.
As HubSpot Platinum Partners, they understand how to use and implement HubSpot tools to drive growth and success. While they typically assist other businesses, they took an internal look in August 2020 and decided to implement an SEO overhaul of a post on their blog that they believed could perform better than it already was.
They focused on a few critical areas for improvement: updating metadata, optimizing for a featured snippet, and re-targeting original keywords. The HubSpot content mapping tool helped them create a strategic pillar-cluster plan, and the on-page SEO recommendations provided them with helpful tips. After implementing their new strategy, they noticed an almost immediate 50% increase in page views: July 2020 showed 991 organic search traffic views, and August 2020 had 1,552.
Their optimization allowed them to draw more traffic to an existing blog post, and they have also seen an increase in organic traffic to additional pages on their website. This goes to show that a well-rounded SEO strategy can impact all areas of your business, as an increase in traffic leads to curious customers eager to learn more about what you have to offer.
4. Take Note
Take Note is a UK-based business that provides a range of audio and video transcription services, captions, and on-site note-taking. When demand for their business grew, they struggled with balancing disconnected tools to support their needs and obtain consistent growth. Thomas Carter, Director of Marketing at Take Note, said, “I think for us, SEO is the way to grow within such a competitive market.”
The business officially signed on to HubSpot in 2018 and has since increased its website traffic by 22%. At the same time, their customer base and revenue have grown by 16-22%. They’ve also seen an increase in leads. Carter adds, “Long term, we want to continue to focus on ensuring the quality of our services remains exceptionally high while using technology such as HubSpot to automate and optimize behind the scenes.”
5. Revenue River
Revenue River is a digital sales and marketing agency that helps companies scale and become competitive in their industry. One of their clients, Kofinas Fertility Group, saw their site traffic significantly impacted by COVID-19. Eric Pratt, the Managing Partner at Revenue River, says, “The site saw declines from mid-February all the way through May.”
The business got to work and conducted competitive analysis and keyword research to identify areas of opportunity for growth. They decided that the best course of action was to create pillar content and supporting content clusters, which would help them establish their domain as a source of authority in their industry.
Since implementing the new strategy in November of 2020, the site has nearly doubled its organic traffic. Between March and June of 2020, they saw 86K impressions, and January-March 2021 saw 1.1M.
Pratt says this success “Came about because of a combination of SEO strategy planning for research, topic clustering, and on-site/page optimization features to enrich the SEO appeal of the content we’re producing and publishing through HubSpot.”
Improving Your SEO Doesn’t Have To Be A Challenge.
The success stories we’ve highlighted in this post show that SEO doesn’t have to be a challenge, especially with the help of a high-powered SEO tool. Learn from these clients and create a strategy that works for your business.