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A Complete Guide to Infographic Marketing

Posted on May 29, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

If you have a content marketing plan, there are good chances that it will have visual format of content such as video and infographic. Infographic became popular back in 2010 and have been here ever since.

Although marketers debated their survival with the internet becoming overcrowded with too many infographics, good quality infographics are still the cornerstone of a good content marketing plan.

Many successful marketers swear by them. They can get you tons of backlinks and some serious traffic. Marketing guru Neil Patel was able to pull in more than 2 million visitors and 41,142 backlinks by posting regular infographics on his Kissmetrics blog back in 2010. Most of leading digital marketing agencies and brands are using infographics by now.

According to a study by Infographic World, 56% of companies surveyed had used infographics and 84% considered them effective in marketing.

In this blog we will look at why infographic are so effective and how to be successful at infographic marketing. Let’s first look at what an infographic is and what are the various types of infographic you can design.

What is Infographic?

Infographic is a visual image of information or data in its strictest sense. The visual representation could be process flow, timeline, comparison charts or sequential story too. There are many ways to represent information visually. Many infographics tell a story through the presentation of facts and statistics to add an element of surprise and evidence.

However, not all infographics should to have statistics and numbers. In fact, today, the types of infographics that we see are many. As long as it is an image that translates knowledge visually it counts as an infographic.

Types of Infographics

Here are some types of infographic and their examples.

1. Statistical Infographics

These convey statistics in a visual way and have a story to it. They are great for getting backlinks and social shares.

2. Informational Infographics

This is a blog post turned into a visual infographic. This can be a list-o-graphic, a process or educational guide. The idea here is to show visually what a blog post would say in text.

3. Timeline Infographics

These show the evolution of products, service, culture, etc.

4. Comparison Infographic

These compare products, service, concepts or processes. They make it easy for our brain to compare by placing the compared ideas next to each other and bring out the difference.

5. Geographic Infographic

This is an infographic putting together regional statistics or information on the corresponding map of a region. This is useful in representing information related to geography or showing geographical differences.

What makes Infographic So Effective?

Traffic to a website gets an average of 12% increase after uploading an infographic. So why are infographics so effective in getting traffic?

Infographics are visual

Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text according to 3M. 90% of information that goes to our brain is visual and we also easily retain what we see visually.

This is because the visual part of our brain has evolved for millions of years whereas the reading has been introduced to humans on recently in comparison.

We are naturally attracted to images and spend more time with articles/ blogs that have relevant images. In fact, eye-tracking studies show that readers spend more time looking at relevant images than they do reading text on a page.

Infographics are Shareable

People only share what they think will be enjoyed by their friends or help them. Since infographics are a story narrative with interesting facts and entertaining information they are perfect to share with your friends on social media.

Infographics are shared 3x times more than any other content on social media. They are easy to view, consume and share.

They Work for your SEO

Infographics do not directly translate into higher ranking but they do give out many signals that are great for your SEO. Informative infographics get lots of links from other sites. This not only increases traffic to your site but also tells Google that other people find your page helpful. This increases your domain authority, in turn boosting your visibility in Google.

Infographics also mean that visitors spend more time on your site and reduce bounce rate. This too is a factor affecting Google ranking directly.

Elements of Successful Infographic

Of course this does not mean that every infographic will be highly successful and get you links. Ever since the success of infographics online, the internet is flooded with infographics that are of poor quality (either in content or design or both) and are not successful by any measure.

Making an infographic that is not up to the mark will only waste your time and resources. Therefore, it is important to make high quality infographics if you want to succeed at infographic marketing.

There are many things that must be kept in mind for this. Let’s walk through the process of making and promoting a good quality infographic. We will discuss the best practices in each step as we come to it.

1. Set the Objective

What is the objective of making infographic? Is it to earn backlinks, convert leads or increase your brand authority? Not every infographic is suitable for all purpose. For example, if you want to earn backlinks, an infographic with original data is your best bet.

The designing of your infographic will also depend on your objective. Infographics meant for PR or internal communication can have heavy branding whereas those built for social sharing cannot have much branding on them.

Before you set out decide on length of infographic, colour scheme, design and content, it is first important to set the context right.

2. Select Topic

Knowing your audience is the key to creating the right content. The same is true for infographics. Infographic topics have to be either extremely helpful or entertaining.

The topic must answer your reader’s questions to be helpful and relatable to be entertaining. It should also be about a topic that has decent search traffic too.

One way to come up with a good topic is to look at the posts that are already popular in your sites. What posts drive maximum traffic and reader engagement? You may then repurpose old content or convert it into an infographic.

For example, if ‘Industry Stats for 2017’ was one of your best performing posts, you can consider making an infographic for ‘Industry Stats for 2018’.

Another way to pick a topic is to just tag along what’s trending. Topics or events that are in news are hot because media and social influencers are already covering it. If you can put a fresh angle to trending topics or add data to it, it is very likely to be picked up by journalists and bloggers and go viral.

3. Research Well

The next step after choosing a topic is to do a thorough research of the topic. Remember your content is only as good as the research that goes behind it. Talk to industry experts and try to dig out information that is not out yet.

There is nothing better than your own data from studies you have done. Bloggers and journalists love fresh content and stats to cite and prove their point.

Make sure your sources are credible and reputable. Wikipedia does not count as a credible source. You must also mention the sources at the bottom of your infographic to add credibility to your data.

5. Script and Story

The next step after you gathers data and information is to put it in a meaningful narrative. Most of the infographics fall flat here. Putting data and statistics in visual format is not a good infographic.

Content creators must tell a story through the information. This is what makes infographics captivating and shareable. Think of all the elements of story – a beginning state of things, struggle or objections and an end with a clear message of the story.

Sometimes you may want to develop a character to convey a story. At other times the reader’s journey itself can be a story. This stage requires lot of creativity and innovation.

At the end of this designers typically build a wireframe that puts all the information in a flow. By the end of this you should have a visual of how your infographic is going to look.

6. Designing

It’s time to convert your story into visuals and usually a designer works on this stage. There are many decisions that must be made when it comes to design.

What would be the best way to put the story in visuals? The infographic could be any of the type discussed above i.e. statistical, comparison, bar-chart, geographical or timeline.

The colours must be in line with the topic and appeal to the target audience. If you plan to brand your infographic the colours must also be in line with your branding.

The icons, 3D effects, fonts, formats and colours all will give your infographic a unique look and feel.

7. Editing

The next step is editing. By this stage you would have a first version of your infographic ready with you. You must now improve on it and cut out all the information that is not central to your message.

Just like a good written copy, cutting out the extras is what makes an infographic great. Don’t put data just for the sake of length. It is better to aim for an infographic that is shorter, to the point and crisp. The flow of information should feel interesting and intuitive.

8. Promote

Left by itself, it will take some time for infographic to start ranking in Google. If there are already better infographics by more authoritative sites in your industry, then you can forget about ranking ever on Google.

Promoting infographics helps in getting quicker return and early discovery by search engines. There are steps that you must take to promote your infographic.

SEO for Infographic – Search engines cannot read images hence it is important to give them text and HTML tags that they can. This is how search engines view your page is about and whether of not to rank them for a query.

Insert your keywords in the title of the image as well as alt text. So if your infographic is about coffee name the image file as ‘benefits-of-coffee.png’ instead of ‘image1456.png’.

This way search engines can easily know what your infographic is about. Similarly, alternative text is what shows up when your image doesn’t load but it is also a signal on image content to Google.

Also add supporting text before and after your infographic. This way you can have Headings H1, introduction paragraph and a conclusion that will be enough for Google to rank you well.

Blogger Outreach – A good infographic will earn backlinks naturally but you can kick-start your efforts with an outreach campaign too. Get in touch with industry influencers and leaders and let them know of this new infographic you have posted.

They will link to it if they find it useful. If they do not, then take it as feedback for you to improve your infographic. Do be spammy with your request or post your link in the comments as that will only hurt your credibility.

Sharing on other Platforms – You can share your infographics on other platforms too. Posting on LinkedIn and SlideShare have proved successful for many brands. We will discuss more on how to optimize your infographic for different platforms in the next section.

Make it Easily Shareable – Your infographic must be shareable on social media with a single click. Put social sharing buttons on your page and mention an embed code below the infographic. This way anyone who wants to use your infographic can do so with a legitimate link to you.

9. Test

The last step of infographic marketing is of course monitoring and feedback collection. Each site will have unique visitor profile and hence different kinds of designs, topics and promotional strategies will work for each. By monitoring user engagement and feedback you can fine-tune your infographic content marketing to perfection.

Tips to get Maximum out of your Infographics

1. Create Quality Infographics

As you can see above there are plenty of things that can go wrong in each stage of creating an infographic. Since you are putting in so much effort, it’s worth ensuring that you end up with good quality infographic.

Many companies think that their good content writer will also make a good infographic. This is not true as the skill required for visualising and designing visuals are totally new to a content writer.

It’s recommended to get your infographic done from a professional designer or at least learn about design before you design it yourself.

Below is an example of confusing infographic. The numbers are all over the place and there is no flow of story to the visuals. The small font is also very difficult to read. Such infographics can actually annoy readers and spoil your brand name.

2. Use Different Platforms to Promote

Post your infographic on more than just your blog. Take the example of below infographic by a security network company, Solera Networks. Their infographic on ‘Are you a Hacker’s Target?’ did not get a great response.

But it became immensely successful after they cut the graphic into slides and shared it on SlideShare platform getting them 40,000 views and organic links.

The lesson is to re-design your infographic and share it on different platforms your audience is on. You never know, the infographic that is not getting any traffic to your site might just hit it off on Facebook or Pinterest.

The key is to repurpose your content to match the mood of each social sharing platform. Pinterest is highly design based so too many numbers and data will not do well there.

Similarly, Facebook needs photos that are interesting and entertaining and too much of branding will not work in this social site.

There are also many niche sites for each target audience that you should explore. Imgur is a great platform for millennial males. You can also find sub-reddits on almost any topic.

3. Make it a Part of your overall Content Strategy

This is perhaps the most common mistake marketers make. You cannot treat your infographic like a stand alone piece of content. Infographics have to fit into your overall content marketing strategy. They must still address you target audience and target the questions they are asking.

Also infographics marketing cannot be your only content strategy. Build supporting text posts, images and videos that together form your content plan.

It is also important to keep in mind what format your audience prefers, if your audience prefers only ‘how to videos’, then building infographics just for the sake of it is a loss making idea.

How much does it cost to make an Infographic?

Infographics can cost anywhere from $5 to $5000. There is a lot of work from research to designing to promoting an infographic. The cost will also depend on the amount of work you need to get done.

You can expect less cost if you already have the data and just need the designer to put it together visually. However if you want research, content, designing, promotion of the infographic you can expect a significantly higher quote.

Here are your options at different price points if you want to get an infographic done:

1. Do It Yourself

This is the cheapest but obviously requires your time and effort. This option is suitable for small start-ups, independent bloggers and home run businesses.

You can choose many online tools available to design your own infographic. Sites like Picktochart and Canva are almost free and come with many free templates, design ideas and inspirations.

You can get started for free on both the tools, although there is limited you can do with Picktochart on the free model. They have a $15, $29 and $99 plan which give you access to templates, hundreds of images, watermark removal and much more.

Canva allows you to do much more with their free plan and is by far the best option to create drag and drop free infographic yourself.

You can also learn to operate tools such as illustrator and coral draw to create your own infographics but they will take up a lot of time to learn.

Remember that for this option you will have no help with designing and storytelling and will have to do everything on your own.

2. Hire a Freelancer

Your next option is to hire an infographic designer on project basis. You can hire one from your contacts of go to numerous freelancing sites online to hire freelancers from across the globe.

Sites like Upwork, Fivver, Design Hill , Freelancer.in and many more will give you many options to choose designers. Design Hill runs a contest for you starting at $289 where you get to pick from more than 40 designs submitted by designers competing for your project.

You can find freelance infographic designer anywhere in the range of $100 to $2000 depending on their quality of work, experience and demand.

Terms of payment, timely completion of work, negotiations, and dispute handling are some of the tricky things when it comes to hiring a freelancer on the other end of the globe.

3. Hire a full time Designer

You could also hire a full time designer in your company. This is only suitable if you have an internal content team and expect to churn our high number of infographics regularly.

The cost of hiring a full time infographic designer can vary anywhere from $800 to $3000 a month. Cost of hiring, training and employee benefits are some extra charges that you will have to bear.

4. Hire a Professional Agency

This is perhaps the best option if you have the budget. There is no risk of unfinished work and unprofessional services as in the case of freelancer. You can find reputable digital marketing agencies that will design infographics within your overall content marketing strategy.

There are even niche digital marketing companies that only make infographics. Check out Neomam’s work on interactive Infographics to see the possibilities with Infographics

These agencies may charge you anywhere from $500 to $5000 per infographic. You may get a better deal if your agency handles all of your content marketing and charges you for the whole package.

Some of the known names in field are Only Infographics, Visual.ly and DKNewMedia. DKNewMedia and Visual.ly are premium agencies and are known to charge in the range of $4000 and above.

Not all agencies are expensive though. There are many lesser known agencies that do an excellent job minus the exorbitant price.

Bringing It All Together

Infographics are great to capture your audience because they are visual stories that people love to read. By inserting data and statistics you can make them helpful as well as interesting for your readers. They work because visual, are sharable and easily digestible.

Creating an effective infographic that gets you tons of traffic requires that you set a clear objective for it. The infographic must answer what your audience is interested in and have a compelling story and design. Promoting infographic on various platforms is equally important to get early traffic.

Lastly remember to treat infographics as a part of your overall content marketing strategy and not a standalone piece.

Whether you decide to make your own Infographic or hire and agency, a good quality and helpful infographic is sure to get you backlinks, earn traffic and improve your brand awareness.

How to Implement a Successful Personalized Marketing Strategy

Posted on March 1, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

If you have purchased products from Amazon or Flipkart, you will be able to see the amazing effects of personalized experience.

You will be able to see a list of suggestions based on your search history. Also, most probably you will receive a follow up email which contains similar collection of books based on your recent purchase.

We will not be surprised to see if you return to purchase more; it is because they are based upon your likes and interests.

This is why most of the marketers believe that personalized marketing campaigns are crucial for the success for their business.

If you wish that your customers want to come back for more purchases, you need to provide them with personalized experience that matches their wants and needs.

This means that more visits equal to more leads and more leads equal to more happy customers. Let’s take a look at how to implement a personalized marketing strategy:

1. Review your strategy

Before you execute your marketing strategy, think about the following questions to perceive how your organization can handle the strategy implementation:

What brand value I would like to offer my customers?
What kind of customer trends should I enable for e.g., repeated customer visits, increased trust, lot of purchases etc.?
What are the marketing resources that we have/can create which may change one strategy over another?
How much time does the plan need – whether short term/long term requirement?
Do I actually have enough resources such as people, tools, time etc. to achieve success?

2. Research and Analyze your audience

When you are done with planning your strategy, it’s time to gather some information about your audience and you will be able to use that for your marketing program. These are the ways you can research about your audience:

Surveys
Questionnaires
Discussion groups
Feedback via website or email
Social media platforms

Try to collect maximum amount of information from your potential prospects or customers. One or two queries might be enough rather than a drawn-out survey.

3. Choose right marketing tactics

Choosing the right marketing tactics is very crucial in the process of personalizing marketing strategy. Here are some of the marketing strategies to choose from:

Send emails from humans, don’t sound like a brand

Email is one among the simplest ways to create a personalized experience for your prospects. Rather than having the sender name as company’s name, create it from the name of an actual agent working on your promoting or marketing team.

Also, think about adding that agent’s photograph and his/her’s email signature to the body of the email to indicate that actually that agent took their time and energy to craft the message and can get some responses.

Even if you employ email templates, guarantee that they don’t appear as if they have been designed by a promoting/marketing machine. It is because you want to sound credible in your emails.

Use recipient’s name for emails

Writing “Dear Customer,” “Hi Customer,” “To [First Name]” etc. are all not at all preferred for your email communication with your prospects.

A lead’s real name is one among the best items of lead intelligence to assemble. If a prospect has filled out a form at any point of time, you can easily get their first name and email address.

If not, most likely you should not be emailing them. Most of the email service providers give you the opportunity to customize the email messages with recipient’s forename; so what’s more to think? Take advantage of it!

Make use of marketing automation tools

Based on content interest, automation tools will be able to trigger lead nurturing campaigns. While you will address completely different business problems and topics inside your content, that does not mean that each one of the prospects have an interest in all told topics.

If a prospect downloads an e-book targeted on specific topic, for instance, program your automation tools to automatically enter them into a lead nurturing campaign which will deliver content relevant to the initial topic and personalizes email messages based on supported data of that original content which was downloaded.

Segment email database by marketing persona

There are number of ways to segment email database; but the most effective and easiest way is by marketing persona. For example, if you have classified three separate marketing personas that combine your ideal customers, segment your email list into three different blocks.

Then, personalize the messaging used in independent emails sent to each blocks using the language that individual persona always uses and responds to.

Focus on creating persona driven content

Persona driven content is a key factor to consider when you begin with the process of personalization. Produce new content or modify the existing one to handle the exact needs and problems of your varied marketing personas.

Contemplate the very fact that one persona might have issues that the other persona doesn’t have. When you prepare a non personalized campaign, your one-size-fits-all content policy won’t fit with the particular problem of persona, which will be a drawback.

However, with a personalized approach that is targeted at a selected group of prospects, you will be able to address that drawback and make more customized and valuable content for those potential prospects.

Respond personally to customers on social media

Nowadays customers depend upon social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google + to research about the products and to make buying decisions.

It may appear to be an easy task to assign a real person to respond to customer queries on social media; however, several companies choose to automate it.

You need to check your social media activity on a daily basis and respond to them in a personal manner which provides suitable and rightful content that can address each persona’s needs.

Generate targeted landing pages

If you lack the bandwith to create content targeted for each of your personas, you have an option to create targeted landing pages for your different offers.

Make sure to customize the messaging and language on your targeted landing pages to handle the precise needs of particular segment, and do that for every phase.

Build targeted company’s product page variations on LinkedIn

LinkedIn company pages provides amazing targeting tool that permits you to personalize the products or services that a visitor sees on your product page in LinkedIn.

You will be able to target based on demographic info such as trade, job function and geographic area.

Use Google + topic circles to target content

Google + topic circles is another way of using social media platforms to supply a lot of personalized content distribution. By using Google + Circles, you will be able to create many totally different topic circles depending upon the different interests of your targeted page followers.

The next step is to poll your followers, raise that Circles they would wish to be side to, and simply distribute only targeted content to those Circles. This offers an individuality and personalization.

Lead intelligence to help in personalizing sales follow up

Lead intelligence or knowledge you gather concerning your leads/prospects consists of demographic data, customer behaviour on your website etc. which can be very useful as you outline segments of your business’ client personas.

However, it may also function as a robust lever to assist your sales team to personalize their sales pitches and perceive the wants of a lead before they even pick up the phone to dial the prospect. A well prepared sales agent can close the deal in no time.

4. Regularly update and refine personalization process

Like all other methods, personalized marketing process needs constants review and improvement to make sure of 100% effectiveness. The best way is that let the campaigns run for some weeks and then evaluate the results.

By this way, your team will be able to get a correct impression of exact progress over time, instead of getting a quick picture of how your personalization process is advancing.

It is also crucial to re-check all of your technological integrations to make sure that you have got access to holistic image of information.

During the refinement phase, marketers may take a step back and judge certain strategies or aspects of their personalized marketing campaign.

Let’s see how incorporating personalized marketing campaigns can be beneficial for your business:

1.A large compilation of client data: Personalization methods track the habits and activities of potential prospects; which in turn provides marketers with valuable knowledge that may not be available with conventional marketing campaigns.

If you are passing your leads to sales team, they will get a better clarity of whom they are merchandising and how the products/services matches with the client’s needs.

2.Loyal brand followers: Once customers feel that their needs are fulfilled and a company actually takes care of them, it is doubtless that they will definitely come back to the company in future to shop additional services or products.

3.Valuable business insights: Data gained from trailing customers will assist you in confirming what works and what doesn’t work in regard to marketing tactics and messages.

Takeaway

It is evident that customers prefer to buy more from retailers who can personalize their shopping experience across various channels.

Don’t be too late if you haven’t started implementing personalization strategies listed above. Companies who can successfully implement personalized marketing experiences will be able to witness an increase in sales and customer loyalty.

How to Host Webinars to Increase Conversions

Posted on February 12, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Deciding on the format of content is one of the key aspects of content marketing. There are many formats that your content can take.

This includes blog posts, podcasts, video, e-book, webinars, etc. How do you know which one is best suited for you?

Well the best format depends on your target audience and the stage of buyer’s journey they are in. Webinar is known to give great results in converting leads to customers.

According to Content Marketing Institute, over 60% of marketers are using webinars as a part of their content marketing programs. In this blog we will talk about webinars and how you can use them to convert more customers

What is a Webinar?

Webinar is just like a seminar event except that it is conducted online. It is a presentation that is done live for the people who sign up for it.

Presenter and attendees are also able to communicate through live chat.

What makes a webinar unique is:

It gives a personal touch
It gives you more focused attention as it is live
It gives you more time. A typical webinar is between 45 mins to 2 hours
t gives you a chance to resolve objections in real time
It builds relation through a two way communication
You can reach anyone across the globeYou can see that a webinar keeps your audience more involved than a blog or video post. It is the closest to meeting to your leads face to face.

What are the conversion rates for Webinars?

For this reason webinars also have a high conversion rate. Whereas email marketing has a conversion rate of 3-5%, most webinars convert between 10- 20% of attendees down the line..

Companies like Adobe, Buzzsumo and KISSmetrics have confirmed above 20% conversion rates through webinars.

How to Use Webinars in Your Marketing Funnel?

Webinars can be used at two stages in a digital marketing funnel. Firstly, they can be used to connect with your visitors.

Webinars can even be used as lead magnets to convert visitors into leads.

Secondly, they are especially effective in the conversion stage, the last stage of marketing funnel.

Someone attending your webinar has set aside an hour for you, which means that they trust you to deliver value.

Most of the webinar attendees are hence qualified leads that are ready to buy.

How do I host a Webinar?

Hosting a webinar is not difficult. There are many webinar software that are user friendly and intuitive.
Here are the steps to follow to host a webinar:

1. Decide on the Topic and Presenter- Pick a burning question that your readers have or a pain point they face in their lives. A headline that speaks out to the visitor is half the job done.

2. Make your presentation – Make you presentation ready. A BIG mistake for any marketer would be treat your webinar as a sales pitch. A webinar is first and foremost a valuable training session for your attendees.

Remember they signed up to learn what you promised in the title, not to buy your products and service. Make sure you are giving tons of value in return of one hour that they have allotted to you.

3. Choose webinar software – There are many options to host your webinar like Webinars on Air by Google, Go to Webinar, Cisco WebX, Mega Meeting etc.

Go to Webinar is the most popular one with impressive features and reasonable pricing. It has a free 7 day trial and a monthly fee of $79 after that.

The software is easy to use with intuitive design. They allow you to share your screen with attendees, set up email notifications and reminders, take polls and surveys, chat with attendees and view webinar dashboard.

Practice a mock presentation a few times for successful live webinar.

4. Promote Webinar- Start promoting your webinar on social media, web-site pop-ups, email lists and any other channels you may have to reach your audience.

Make sure your topic matches your audience’s requirement. For example, a high school student is more likely to sign up than an undergrad for a webinar on ‘How to prepare for SAT Entrance’.

5. Host Webinar and Follow up- Use the tips shared below to host your webinar. Most of the attendees don’t sign up immediately but do end up buying up from you eventually.

Add the attendees to your email marketing list and follow up with your offer within 48 hours. Nurture these leads over time by sending webinar recording and other valuable content.

Tips to Host a Successful Webinar

Be well rehearsed

If you are a B2B company share your company story along with your personal story too.

Learn all the functions of webinar software and make sure you know how to get over technical setbacks even if they occur. Being well rehearsed will also make you sound confident.

Arrive before time

Arrive at least half an hour before the scheduled time. This will give you time to check if everything is working.

It is also a good opportunity to strike up a conversation with people have arrived early and are eager to start. Ask them about their expectation from the webinar.

Keep it interactive

The beauty of a webinar is that you can get direct live feedback from your attendees. Keep your webinar interactive by asking questions and also receiving questions.

Keep moderators on your team who will answer questions in chats and keep everyone engaged. Take names of people who are responding, mention geographies from where people are logged in. All this will make attendees feel connected and part of a live event.

Bring your personality

An event is way to know each other personally. So share your story and connect with your audience.

Tell them how you landed up here and highlight the similarities between you and your audience.

If you are a B2B company share your company story along with your personal story too.

Keep it Light

One hour is a long time to ask for focused attention from your audience. If your presentation is long and boring they will either exit or drift off.

So keep your webinar light and entertaining. Use a lot of stories, short videos, jokes and real life examples.

There will be parts where you will be giving heavy information, but make sure you prepare your audience and spread out the heavy material throughout the presentation.

The rule of thumb is to keep no more than three slides of heavy concepts.

Final Notes

Hosting your first webinar may seem like a difficult job. However, it is easy once you get used to it. With a conversion rate of 20% you are sure to do more of them once you get started.

22 Top Email Marketing Tools of 2017 [Infographic]

Posted on July 21, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Digital Marketing is indeed one of the best marketing strategies out there. No doubt in that. Among the digital marketing technique that exists email marketing is gaining so much importance and the reason being its flexibility, effectiveness as well as the amount of creativity that can be incorporated into it.

There is a widespread misconception that email marketing is just about creating an attractive email and sending it to many through an automated software. That’s all in the past. Now the tools used for email marketing has become so much sophisticated and guarantees excellent results.

An astounding feature of this new age tools is that they have the ability to predict the outcome of an email or even a social media marketing campaign.

However, those who are planning to get into email marketing might be baffled by an obvious question. “What are the effective tools that are put to use in email marketing?”

Don’t Worry! Have a sneak peek at the infographic illustrating the top marketing tools that are being used by digital marketing experts at present.

5 Innovative Email Marketing Strategies for Startups

Posted on March 30, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Did you know that email marketing has the highest return on marketing investment? This primary source of lead generation gives an average return of 38$ on every 1$ spent! Marketers world over are going bullish on this direct marketing channel as there is no dependency on social media platforms or search engines here. The frequent changes in search engine algorithms and social media rules can make any regular marketer dizzy and hence they are turning to low cost email marketing services for small businesses.

We have 5 innovative email marketing solutions for startups to kick-start their effort:

Integrate Email Marketing with Content Marketing

There is a high probability of your mail ending up in the spam folder if it is irrelevant to the recipient. Nobody wants a hard sell pitch in their inbox. Mails will not be read unless they are relevant to the audience and this is the reason why content marketing extends to include mails. According to Mailigen, emails that are relevant to the recipient drive 18 times more revenue than general broadcast email.

It is important to first build a relationship with potential customers by sending them what they want to read about. Your mails should be information that the reader looks forward to receive. This can only be achieved with providing quality content that is relevant to the reader.

2. How to build Mailing List

Email marketing is great for sales conversion. But how do you build your mailing list? Apart from gathering email IDs of existing customers and followers on social media, you can collect data of visitors to your site. You can also offer a free newsletter or information guide in lieu of email ID. You can also exchange data with businesses that are relevant to your industry but not a competition.

Always build a database of people who are actually interested in your product/service and information. Email list segmentation increases click-through rates by 5 percent. Buying random lists will only increase your cost with no return on investments.

3. Get Smart with Smartphones

The power of smartphones cannot be overstated.75% of the Gmail’s 1 billion users access mails on mobile handset. HubSpot reports that 69% of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile. It is therefore important to optimize your mails to mobile and also explore ways to take advantage of this. For example, many marketers include a link to their app on app stores in their mails.

4. Exciting Email Campaigns

There are many campaigns that can be strategically planned to keep your readers looking forward to your mail. Surveys and quizzes are a great way to engage your readers. Not only will this give you an insight into your audience, your readers will also look forward to the results of survey they were a part of.

Referral campaigns are another way to take advantage of your existing mailing list. Samples, freebies and discounts can be given on your product/service for referring a friend.

5. Personalize and Customize

Email marketing is the best suited channel for personalized marketing. Use all the marketing automation software available to give your readers a personalized experience. Many brands address to reader’s first name in mails and this instantly builds connection. Keep your mails interactive and ask for feedback often. It is important to grow everyday and avoid getting boring and stale in your mails.

Compared to Pay-Per-Click, and social media advertising, you need only little investment for starting email marketing campaigns. When you implement it in the right way you can get high returns and thereby more conversions in the long run.

11 Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing List [2016]

Posted on July 1, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

The demand for Email Marketing Services is increasing day by day. Unfortunately, many of the marketers are unaware of the ABC of email marketing.

If you’re a marketer, you should know the fact that your email marketing database is getting corrupted by about 22.5% every year.

It is not unusual that email addresses of your contacts’ vary as they move from one company to another or sometimes when they unsubscribe your email list. Change of their old AOL address which is used to fill in forms on sites can also affect your email list.

Adding fresh contacts to your email marketing campaigns in a regular manner helps you to have an upper hand in your business. (Make sure you never enhance your email marketing by purchasing email lists.)

You May Also Like: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

Here are 11 amazing ways to grow your email list, if you’ve run out of ideas to do so.

Some simple ways to build your Email Marketing List

Via Email

Create incredible email content

Why should you create remarkable content? It’s simply because people stay subscribed and forward your email to their friends and colleagues only if your content is interesting. Remember, these friends and colleagues will be new to your email list.

Push your existing email subscribers

Try to include social sharing buttons, “Email to a Friend “button in your marketing emails. This will drive your existing email subscribers to share and forward your emails to friends and colleagues. Sometimes these friends and colleagues might sign up for your email list and you will get access to fresh networks.

Online contest rewards you

Promoting an online contest will attract online users. New members begin to sign up using their email address (Make sure you promote your content on social!)

Make use of multiple email subscription types

It’s quite natural that email recipients click through emails that have been targeting them. So, if you can create multiple email types, the visitors might get attracted to any one of them and there is a chance for subscription.

Refresh unnoticed email list

If you have an ineffective older email list try to refresh it with an opt-in campaign. Think about sending an engaging opt-in message to your older list in order to bring back interested contacts.

Make sure you remove all contacts who don’t respond. It may sound unreasonable to remove people from your email records as a move to improve your email list. Keep in mind, emailing only active contacts can improve your deliverability.

Linking employees’ email signature

If you can add a link, directing people to your mailing list it will benefit you in the long run. Consider adding that link to your employees’ email signatures, so that people will be tempted to sign up for your mailing list.

Read Also: 6 Reasons Why E-mails are Important for your Internet Marketing

With Fresh Content

Try lead generating offers

Lead generating offers like free ebook, whitepaper etc. can attract visitors. Create such lead generating offers and allow visitors to download it by simply submitting their email address.

Via free online tools or resources

As people always search for online tools, you can offer a free online tool in order to improve your mailing list. Let the visitors use the tool for free, by just providing their email address.

With Social Media

Promote a lead generating offer via Twitter

Promote an ebook via a Twitter campaign, so that your followers can access it by submitting their email address.

Promote one of your top offers via Facebook page

Obviously, promoting offers via Facebook page will attract a huge audience. Make sure you add enough social sharing buttons to encourage your audience to share your offers that requires an email address.

Adding call- to- action button

A call- to- action button on your Facebook business page gives you room to improve your email list. Create a link to the call-to-action button in such a way that requires an email address for access.

6 Reasons Why E-mails are Important for your Internet Marketing

Posted on April 1, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches- at scale-David Newman

Today, email marketing is the most preferred online marketing tool for a wide range of businesses. Marketing through e-mails is a strong way to connect with people. Also, it helps to build loyalty and trust in the business.

It is found that most people use the internet for checking email and not just for visiting social media sites. Hence email is a great medium for companies to market their product or service successfully.

Read Also: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

Following are six reasons emails are important for internet marketing:

Email is more effective than social media

Though social media is a great channel for interacting with the audience, email is a great medium for customer acquisition. It is possible to personalize an e-mail and thus grab the attention of target customers easily.

It is cost-effective and economical

Email marketing is comparatively easy, effective and economic. It helps business owners to reach a large number of audience without much expense. For small business owners, it can be a better choice than seeking the usual advertising media such as television, radio or direct mail.

US retailers consider email marketing as one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. One of the greatest benefits of using e-mails is that it is possible to get follow-up information by clicking on the website.

It is personal and customizable

In email marketing services, it is possible to segment the audience and send message to each of them according to their preference. The send mail should have some value to the audience. Also, it is possible to address people individually by name, split the topic according to the type of audience and eventually send to their personal inbox.

Emails subject lines with recipients’ name has higher chances to get opened over the others. Email marketing helps to build relationships with expectation, leads, current customers and even the previous customers as it gives a chance to interact with them directly. Unlike other medium, emails can be made friendly and personable.

It is action oriented

People often respond to emails. They either reply, forward or simply click through the mail. E-mail can be used to increase traffic and thereby boost sales. Using e-mails, one can track the growth and progress of the business.

It is measurable

By using email marketing software, you can track who opened the email, which all links were clicked and how many people unsubscribed. With such data, you get an idea about how email campaigns are performing, how to make adjustments and improve effectiveness of such campaigns.

It is possible to check email using mobile devices

Today, people can easily check emails from their personal mobile devices. This is convenient for them as it allows checking email anywhere at anytime.

Social media platforms might be more popular. But there is no chance that e-mails will completely lose their prominence. Most people use their smart phones to access e-mails instead of using social media.

Recommended Read: Email Marketing: Still Far from Over

E-mail marketing has more impact than social media marketing as it delivers marketing messages directly to a target customer’s inbox. Most of the business owners use email newsletters to keep suppliers, employees and stakeholders informed about important changes and development.

Thus we can conclude that email marketing is the most effective and easiest means of communicating with the masses.

Email Marketing: Still Far from Over

Posted on January 8, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

The status of email marketing is a popular topic for debate in every Digital Marketing Agency. Is it dead or alive as of now? Well, email marketing is something that will never ever leave its place in the world of digital marketing. Its importance and presence can never be ignored. Email marketing is not dead, definitely not, and neither will it die anytime in the near future.

A simple statistic will prove the importance of emails in our everyday lives: Over 200 million emails are sent out in a single minute every day. So, you see how heavily email is used as a communication platform for brands, marketers, and even consumers.

There are even more numbers to prove this fact. Over 72% of the adults in USA have stated that they prefer the companies to communicate with them through email rather than any other platform. 91% said they would love to receive promotional emails from the companies that they do business with. As far as the companies are concerned, 72% of them have said that they use email marketing as an integral part of their business and marketing efforts. 25% of the companies consider email as the top most priority and channel for an advantageous return on investment.

Read Also: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

If you are still not convinced and doubtful about the existence of email marketing, here you have three major reasons why email marketing is not going anywhere. Go through them and decide for yourself.

The advantages of social marketing

Social media has a lot of fancy and exciting options to it. This is why there are several rumours that it is slowly killing email marketing which is more of old school. Well, even though social marketing may seem to be more effective in certain case, this one marketing medium is not able to do anything alone by its own. This is one point you need to keep in mind. Vanity metrics and other hollow impressions usually give the marketers a sense of false satisfaction about social marketing. There are simply distracting you.

There are a number of marketers who try their best to gather attention through slightly spammy tactics on social media like filling out Twitter feeds with automated tweets all round the clock, blasting their pages on Facebook with completely irrelevant posts and updates, sending direct messages that are nothing but automated, and also using a huge number of cat memes and circulating them. They do not understand how annoying these techniques can be. Spamming only reduces your followers. They tempt the users to click the unfollow button, and you do more harm than good.

Email marketing, on the other hand, provides useful and relevant content to the audience. This audience consists of people who have willingly subscribed to receive newsletters and other informative emails and would love to learn more. As per data collected in 2012, nearly 90 percent of the internet users have an email account while a smaller number of just 70 percent have an account on any of the social media networking websites. This proves that email is still reigning as the top most form of communication. If you want to reach a majority of the audience and increase your reach, then email is definitely what you need as it is the most effective method in this case.

It is evolving at a higher rate

With emails, brands could get the power to drive customer engagement by monitoring, testing, measuring, and tweaking the emails sent out as newsletters or targeted offerings. The whole game of email marketing has now changed and evolved to a greater extent. Slowly, it is ceasing to be a medium purely for communication purposes to a complete platform that could help the different brands deliver their experiences across various channels.

Here are some of the key email trends that have been explored by Liga Bizune in a recent article that illustrate how emails are slowly evolving to become more than just a channel for communication:

Wearable technologies are evolving. This will slowly change the way brands communicate with the email subscribers.
A new technique of email marketing will surface, which will be hyper-targeted and also location based. The credits for this goes to the integration of proximity and geo-location applications into emails.
Behavioural email marketing will start to get driven by predictive analysis.
As emails are transitioning to mobiles, it has become more necessary than ever to develop better and more creative content. This is the only way to capture the attention of the audience and keep them hooked on.
Videos have started to evolve and find their own place in the world of marketing. They will start playing an even bigger role in email marketing. A bigger emphasis needs to be put into this aspect.

You May Also Like: 10 E-mail Marketing Hacks That Every Marketer Should Know

Correct execution makes it most effective

Emails need to be used properly and effectively to make it more than just a passé. The biggest challenge you face in case of newsletters is that only a small part of the subscribers actually care to open and read the email newsletters you send out to them. This does not, in any way, imply that email is dead or dying. It just points to the fact that your newsletters are not able to make the mark among the audience. They either fail to create the interest in them or your calls to action are not effective enough. Ask yourself a few questions to get your answers:

How is the tone of your content? Is it purely promotional and impersonal, or is it helpful and friendly?
Are you making an effective and meaningful one on one engagement through your content?
Are you striking up a conversation with the reader, or are you just talking at them to get your job done?

These questions will help you understand where you are going wrong. Understand the effectiveness of email marketing to be able to use it in the best way possible.

One thing you need to remember is that email marketing is not going anywhere. Each and every Digital Marketing Agency makes sure to emphasise this point. If you even believe that emails are dying and there is no point in marketing via emails, you will surely start missing out on the wide range of opportunities that this platform has got to offer you. Do not make this mistake, and keep your place in the digital world.

14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

Posted on November 30, 2015 by NextJSjointviews

Email marketing is always an effective strategy to reach out to people. It is also one of the least expensive ways to ensure that you get your word spread out among prospective clients. Every Digital Marketing Agency you approach will surely bring out this one aspect out to you.

Even though email marketing works great, people keep getting promotional emails all through the day. Very few people bother to actually open emails and read their content. It is very likely that your email could get lost in this clutter and remain ignored. As such, it is a marketer’s job to ensure that your email is actually opened and read. You need to increase your chances of being noticed among the crowd. This does take some effort, but is worth it for sure.

Here are a few tips to help you get your emails opened and read:

Make A Targeted List Of Recipients

Make a list of targeted receivers. This is very important if your expertise covers various areas. You need to create content that is specific for a group of people with similar interests. This way, your email would match their interests and increase your chances of getting noted. Your content will be able to speak directly to the audience’s interests and will make the mark. Also, it is necessary to have a list that is clean, and consists of only people who have opted to receive your emails.

Set Up Specific Expectations

Each time a subscriber signs in to receive your e-newsletters or such emails, or subscribes to you, do send them an auto-response email to let them know what to expect from you. Give them a detailed idea about the kind of emails and also the frequency of emails you will be sending out. This lets your subscribers know what to expect from you in due course.

Show That You Are Real

This point should reflect in your content first of all. The content in your email should be real and accurate. No fake promises or messages should be promoted. This is also applicable to your email address. Use a real name instead of generics like info@abc.com and such ids for the address that you use as a “reply to”.

Keep A Catchy Subject Line

Your subject line needs to be a well researched one. Spend enough time to sit and think about what you would put as a subject for your email. This must be something that actually provokes your recipient to open your email and check its contents. It needs to be really enticing.

Read Also: 10 E-mail Marketing Hacks That Every Marketer Should Know

A Good Pre-header

A number of e-newsletters and emails have pre-headers that instruct the reader to open the email in a web browser in case the viewer is not able to see it properly in the mail. This is actually not a good way to proceed. You need to use this option to give the user a really compelling reason to go on and read the email completely.

Call to Action

A Call to Action or CTA is necessary in every email. This lets the user get to know what you actually expect them to do. A common mistake is to let this portion go towards the end of the email. Instead, place this somewhere near the top of the email. This will help the readers notice it soon \enough rather than giving them pains to scroll through the entire email to get it.

Give them Control

You need to allow the subscribers to opt out easily if they want to. There is no point in marketing to people who have no intention to do business with you. It is better to let them opt out and not disturb them with your emails again.

Personal Message

Make your email personal by greeting your readers using their name. You could also use their first names in the subject line. According to market studies, it has been found that the by using personalized emails you could increase the chances of getting your email opened by around 14%.

Share

It is a good idea to add some sharing features to your emails. You could make use of social sharing options to allow your readers to share the email to their family and friends. This could highly increase your chances of being opened and help you get a much wider audience. According to researches, it has been found that emails that have social sharing buttons have a 115% higher click through rate as compared to other emails that do not implement the feature.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is an essential part of every digital marketing strategy these days. With increased use of smartphones and tablets, this is one aspect that you can never overlook. Around 40% of all emails are now opened using these devices. This number just keeps growing all the time. As such, you need to have your email optimised for mobile devices so that your viewers are able to view it properly on any device. You can also use email services to do this for you. Such services also give you detailed statistics about how many of your emails are opened on mobile devices.

Analyze and Monitor

You need to analyze and monitor the behaviour of your email recipients. This will help you understand what content they prefer, when they prefer, and other such minute details. This will help you build better strategies and succeed in your ventures based on these statistics.

Update your Subscriber list Periodically

You need to keep this one point in mind. “Keep only those subscribers who open your emails”. This is an overlooked point that usually no one cares about. One sure thing is that every person is not going to open your email. The smaller the list, the higher will be the open rate you can achieve. Just keep those people in your list who are interested in receiving your emails and reading them. There is no point in keeping others there. You need detailed statistics to know how many of your emails are being opened and by whom. Once you have this ready, you can direct your emails to specific targets.

Based on the emails opened over the course of a few months, you need to edit your lists and update them. If there are subscribers who have had no interaction with you over a few months, there is no logic in emailing them all the time.

Before you cut them down, you could send them a small notification as to you are deleting their subscription or so. Another thing you could do is ask them if they are interested in receiving your emails. If you get a response, keep them in. If there is no response, you could surely delete them from the list. This is a subtle way of letting them know.

Recommended Read: Effective Social Media Marketing Tricks for 2015

Encourage Email Classification

You need to ensure that your recipients receive your emails bypassing any of the possible filters. This is a way to make sure that they open all your emails. You could send them detailed instructions to prevent the emails from going in to the spam folder or promotions tab. They need to follow the instructions to prevent it with the email provider. You could ask them to add you to their contacts, or even better, to their favourites.

Reward them for reading

Give your readers some kind of rewards for reading your emails. You could share a useful tip to make them benefit or try something simple like that. This inspires them and makes them feel better.

These simple and easy techniques will surely help you go a long way in getting your emails noted and opened by your recipients. Every Digital Marketing Agency is sure to suggest you the above. Email marketing is one with great scope. If you use it smartly, you can get lots of benefits out of it.

Why Is Segmentation Important In Email Marketing?

Posted on September 28, 2015 by NextJSjointviews

When we talk about email marketing, the success of your effort is mainly affected by the nature of your email segmentation. By knowing how to segment your email audience properly, you can create more effective email campaigns for enterprise level marketing and can achieve your goal efficiently.

When we discuss the significance of this type of email list separation, you must know exactly why segmentation is important in email marketing? It’s quite simple:

All Your Customers are Not the Same. Generally businesses serve more than one type of clients. Even if you deal with only single product or service, there are various types of clients that should be treated independently, with a specific end goal to get their attention in the most effective way.

You’ll Create Your Fame. It could be excessive, but here it’s one more of a chance: If you send focused, significant emails with luring content to your potential client base, you will come to be more fascinating and captivating to your customers. This will result in finding increased number of subscribers.

Read Must: 10 Best E-Mail Subject Line Formulae to Rock Your E-Mail Marketing Campaigns

You Need More and More Leads. The more you speak to your different customers about the value of your services, the probability of them purchasing from you is also higher. If you furnish content that speaks and relates to your clients, you will develop a bond with them. This bond creates an interest your emails, and they will come to see it! What’s more, with such a relationship, you will be the main priority when they want to buy a product.

Once you have segmented your lists, no matter to what extent, it’s vital to keep the categories up-to-date. Segmenting your lists can be tedious. This can be helpful when you have both prospects and buyers on the list. When someone becomes a customer, they can easily be moved from one segment to another without any kind of subscription process.

So, it’s necessary as it helps you to comply with applicable laws and send the right messages to your contacts. And you can expect immediate positive responses from your customers once you’ve gone through the process.