3 Ways to Activate Your Website

Business person using laptop with icons of website, email, customer, data, marketing automation for PROSAR blog

It’s common practice to check out a company’s website before deciding to use their product or service. We all do it; either to learn specific information about the product/service, gain further insight into its use, or simply to feel more comfortable with the company before making a purchase or commitment. This is true for both B2C and B2B, online and in-store purchases, packaged goods and professional services.

Understandably, companies are doing their best to create websites that engage with targeted audiences. Savvy organizations are:

  • Presenting what they do in a stylish and easy to navigate manner.
  • Making their website easy to use on tablets and smartphones.
  • Ensuring their website is accessible for people with disabilities (a legal requirement for some organizations).
  • Incorporating meta information and strategically worded content to build a solid foundation for SEO.
  • Engaging readers with relevant and interesting information.
  • Positioning their brand with messaging and imagery for greater impact.

So, let’s assume you’ve done all the above and have a good looking, informative website that provides a good user-experience on any device. Good for you… however, you can do more. If you expect your website to play an active role in your marketing, it needs to go beyond passively presenting and further engage your audience.

Here are three areas where your website can play a more active role in increasing awareness, improving your message and brand, and facilitating growth. Note that PROSAR is a SharpSpring Partner, so naturally we recommend SharpSpring as a cost-efficient and comprehensive marketing automation solution, but there are many good automated marketing platforms such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, etc.; and software specifically for email such as MailChimp.

 

Automated Emails

Going beyond an auto-reply email greeting when someone completes a form, your website can assist in nurturing relationships and prompting conversations when people have indicated an interest.

In their pre-purchase research, consumers may visit several websites looking for something specific or simply wanting to feel comfortable before they commit. Most consumers don’t announce that they are ready to buy, but they do provide signals. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your website could help identify those potential customers and reach out to them?

  • When a known user returns to your website within 24 hours or visits specific pages, a personalized and customized email could automatically be sent them. Perhaps providing details on the products they were looking at, informing them of an incentive (price, warranty, added value, etc.), suggesting an appointment, call or chat to answer questions… there are many ways to engage and determine how you can help them.
  • When someone downloads a resource from your website it can trigger a scheduled series of personalized and tailored emails with tips, related products/services, articles of interest, other relevant resources.
  • On an e-commerce website, an abandoned shopping cart or product comparisons could trigger a series of emails designed to provide information and insight, or bundling cost advantages on the specific products.

Workflows are series of emails crafted in advance and triggered by prospects’ specific behaviours. The flowchart can be as simple or complicated as you wish, with every if-this-then-that sequence of decisions triggering different emails. The prospects’ actions control what emails are sent to help them with their purchase decision.

Notifications should be added to the workflow so that marketing and sales staff can be alerted when and how a prospect would like information or assistance. Notifications can even alert when a prospect is on the website browsing.

Automated emails are not an excuse to force your information on unwilling recipients; the objective is to provide information to those who are seeking it. Harassment is not good business, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) imposes strict and sensible regulations on how a company can engage with people via email, you can read more about CASL here.

 

Dynamic Content
On your website, as in your daily life, what you say and how you say it matters. When we speak, we typically cater our words to the audience we are addressing. Most websites are static in nature (ours included these days!). They are filled with relevant, but generic content. Many larger companies have people dedicated to their website and social media accounts, so content can be updated, making it more relevant and topical. However, it is typically focused on a single targeted audience, or worded to address as large a segment of the public as possible.

Personas are being used more and more by organizations to better understand and target specific audience segments. SharpSpring tools enable different versions of emails and website pages so that headlines, text and images can be customized for specific audience segments. When the website identifies a user, it will present the content that relates to that persona. One of the underlining benefits of marketing automation is the ability to target your ideal customer personas and treat them as individuals.

Dynamic content facilitates more appropriate and persuasive communication with targeted audience segments. It also improves SEO by tailoring versions of your content with specific search terms. Such strategically worded content impacts being found online, effectively presenting your message, and converting leads to customers.

 

Conversion Process

Combining personas, dynamic content, workflows and email campaigns with tracking, lead scoring and a full CRM tool (Client Relationship Management) provides a platform to nurture and convert prospects. This complete package is how things come together to more effectively (and efficiently) manage prospects and customers. By tracking user behaviour and notifying marketing and sales staff, your website plays an important role in supporting your customers and identifying prospects.

Marketers can identify trends and create customized content and workflows (emails and landing pages) to address them. Salespeople are notified of potential interest and reminded of customers who have not been active, triggering workflows to engage and retain lapsed customers.

Your website can be more than a 24/7 online brochure. It can be actively participate in the marketing and sales process by attracting, engaging and converting leads, as well as maintaining existing customers. Unlike social media, your website is a stable hub that you control. It is an ideal resource to go beyond passive information presentation and effectively engage with your targeted audiences.

 

CTA to download Email Best Practices

3 Steps to Implementing Personas

PROSAR persona audits - illustration of many different faces

Personas are more than a buzzword, they help you to define and cater to a company’s multiple audiences. While audience segmentation is nothing new, marketing automation tools and content-based marketing (with heavy analytics integration) has made personas a powerful tool for maintaining customers and getting new sales. The more you integrate personas into your marketing automation processes, the more likely you are to speak directly to your audience segments and connect with them, directing your messaging specifically for them.

If you haven’t started using personas, what are you waiting for? Using them is as easy as 1, 2, 3!

 

1- Determining Your Personas

Determining your personas involves a mix of looking at your ideal audience and your actual, established audience. Even if you have a large client base already, have you really taken the time to figure out who, exactly, it is your serving.

This is a good opportunity to see how well you’re serving your market. If your ideal audience and your actual audience are too far separated, you might want to re evaluate your marketing plan.

You’ll want to gather data in generally-homogeneous groups, but what those groups are is up to you. Depending on your market, you might divide it by job title, age, relationship status, company size, or industries that use your product.

It’s important to not limit the number of personas you use, but don’t over segment your audience either. You want to look for groups that have similar buying patterns and product/service needs.

 

2- Persona Templates

There are as many persona templates as there are CRMs. If you have a platform like SharpSpring, you’ll want to follow their template.

Be mindful to make the persona template as usable as possible — you will, after all, be using these to guide your marketing strategy and content. This means that beyond demographics, you’ll want to focus on USPs, Motives, and Pain Points.

USPs, or Unique Selling Propositions, is the objective the persona is looking to fulfill. Their motive is why they want it, and what will drive them to eventually buy it. And pain points consider possible problems/barriers they have that you can help them solve.

Other pieces of information — like their overreaching price-sensitivity, the length of their sales cycle, and what they value in a product/service (including the level of customer service they want, how much they want something to solve their problems) — are also important to keep track of. That data is going to influence how you speak to your personas, and can help you figure out how many audience segments you have.

By honing these elements down to something that is unified across market segments, you get an idea of who your clients are. You can then adjust your content accordingly, and take one more step to increasing conversions.

 

3- Using Personas

Once you’ve determined your personas and completed your templates, you need to start applying the insights you’ve gained.

If you have a CRM or automated marketing platform with dynamic content, personas are the way to segment them and help reach your audiences more effectively. This allows you to have a single piece of content that speaks to each persona, helping to create relationships, increase conversions and lower the amount of campaigns you need to run.

Dynamic content also applies to digital campaigns, as most online platforms allow you to segment by demographic information, interests, how much they’ve interacted with your company before, and a lot of other metrics that allow you to have a dynamic content experience.

Beyond dynamic content, personas can help focus your content strategy for your campaigns, website text, social media posts, and more. Once you’ve created your audience segments, you can start speaking directly to them with your content and structure what pre-existing content you have into categories that allow each persona to find the content they need without fuss. Personas should influence your website content, blog writing, whitepapers, landing pages, and any other marketing efforts you create. Some of your content likely already fits your personas (it’s how you got your current clients, after all), but refining it is a prime way to help draw more people to your website and conversion process.

CTA graphic with link to download the Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation Terminology PDF

Does Your Content Go the Distance?

PROSAR Blog Image_Letter cubes spilled from a cup,spelling CONTENT

With exponentially more content available to your target audiences from myriad sources, your content had better be performing. Follow the A, E, I, O and U principle.

For all organizations — large and small, corporate and non-profit — content marketing has become a more complex activity. It’s no longer adequate to drive traffic to an information-loaded, passive website. Today’s digital devotees are responding to curated content, presented with their perspective in mind, thoughtfully packaged in accessible and easy to absorb (and share) formats. Successful writers and editors have expanded their skill set and become veritable content engineers.

Enticing such a savvy audience requires a professionally branded online presence (website, appropriate social media and content) along with strategically developed content resources that will Attract, Engage, Inform, Offer and Understand.

 

Improve SEO and Engagement with Relevant Content Encourages Action

Writing content designed to attract, engage and inform seems to be the goal of most good writers. Material that improves organic SEO and interests the reader is key to good content, but the goal post should be moved further. Every organization has motive for publishing/posting content; that goal is to persuade the reader to take some specific action: buying a product/service, registering for a seminar, joining an association, signing a petition, etc. Creating awareness is a critical first step, but on its own — without the offer — it has achieved little value for the organization.

To be successful, the offer needs to be of value to the reader, and should therefore be appropriate for where the content is in the sales funnel. For example, an association looking for new members shouldn’t necessarily ask a reader to join simply because they registered for a blog article. An invitation to download more detailed, or related, information would be more appropriate. On the other hand, a reader on an HVAC site, who has visited several product pages on air conditioners and downloaded “10 Things You Need to Know When Buying an Air Conditioner,” may be ready to book a sales appointment in the showroom.

The take-away here is that interesting content with the right keywords is not the end goal; you should include an offer associated with the content to move the reader further down the funnel.

 

Create Personas and Content Strategy for Better Results

The next step in the process of attracting, engaging and converting readers is understanding. Hopefully, you have already created personas for your target audiences and you have a solid understanding of their perspective, needs and wants. Now is the time to demonstrate that knowledge and try to develop a relationship. People are relationship driven and we choose to deal with those we trust and those that show they care. The best way to develop and maintain a trusting relationship is via the content you produce and the communication you have directly with the reader (which is, after all, more content).

The reality is that most of your readers will not engage with you. (I know, it hurts.) Even if they liked what they read, most will be hesitant to move further with your relationship attempts. Understanding their point of view and the type of information that interests them allows you to provide more information and other offers that help you gain trusted relationship status. Welcoming readers further along your funnel with relevant content and thoughtful offers is part of the nurturing process, as well as an important aspect of actively maintaining customers.

Back to the content engineering: doing it right is a lot of work. Developing strategy, researching and defining personas, creating a content plan, developing topics, themes and keywords… this all happens before the actual research writing and editing. Then you have the actual implementation monitoring and responding. If you’re taking advantage of marketing automation you’ll also need to develop emails, landing pages and strategic workflows to nurture your interested readers.

Whether you contract out these tasks (which will still require some significant time from you and your team), or handle it all internally, you’re best advised to budget time and money to be successful. Either way, ensure to use a comprehensive process that will attract, engage, inform, offer and understand your readers.

Click to download Email Best Practices Whitepaper

The New Email Paradigm: Do More with Less

Header Image: Email Best Practices: Learn the tips to improve your email skills

As more companies adopt marketing automation tactics, you might expect that they are sending more emails; not if they’re doing it right. Some marketing automation software solutions have email engagement tools that enable better targeting and more effective email marketing. Not only does this improve your success and increase your ROI, but it also helps to maintain a good sender record.

The objective is to send relevant information and offers to those who will be most appreciative; and now there are more tools to hone that implementation. For example, SharpSpring introduced engagement-based monitoring and suppression tools late last summer. It assigns a score (from 0 to 16) to contacts, and that score changes automatically depending upon a contact’s actions (or inaction) with respect to your emails, forms, website and social media. If a contact reduces to a 0 score, they are deemed to be unengaged and are prevented from receiving emails. Their score will be automatically increased if they send you an email, visit your website, submit a form or download content. May sound harsh when many organizations want to get their information in front of as many people as possible, but this strategy has your success as its focus.

Inbound Marketing is More than a Trend

The genesis of inbound and automated marketing was the realization that interrupting prospects and trying to force their attention was becoming ineffective. Additionally, prospects are tired of receiving what they perceive as junk, and many countries have regulations in place to back them up. Engagement tools are an evolution along the inbound path, respecting prospects and helping you to determine who is interested in your information and who is at risk of becoming unengaged. (A comprehensive strategy would include campaigns to nurture those contacts and improve engagement where possible.)

Although it may seem counterintuitive, smart email suppression makes for more successful campaigns. To get a sense of how effective smart email suppression is, SharpSpring studied emails sent by 5,000 of their clients. Their analysis was done three months after they implemented engagement tools and automated suppression controls. It compared the month of September 2017 with September 2016. They found that the overall number of emails sent dropped by 30 million. However, as the graph below shows, both opens and clicks increased — dramatically fewer emails sent, but more opens and clicks generated.

Fewer Emails Delivered – Higher Engagement

To further illustrate the impact of strategically suppressed email delivery, the following chart normalizes the results for 1,000 email contacts (from this same study). The engagement tools allowed only 667 emails to be sent, but those emails generated more opens and clicks.

Targeting Engaged Prospects Improves Success

Suppressing Emails is Respectful, and Good Business

Another major benefit to employing email suppression is maintaining a good sender status. Big ISPs (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) have included engagement in their algorithms for designating email as Junk or Spam. Keeping your delivery rate high with email suppression helps to maintain a good sender status, facilitating favourable delivery by the major ISPs. The best designed emails are worthless if they don’t make it to recipients’ inbox. The example shown in the chart above eliminated the possibility of any of the 333 unengaged prospects to become annoyed, and possibly file a spam complaint.

As you’d expect, email marketing for most organizations involves e-newsletters, promotional offers and simple auto-responders. An obvious starting point, but certainly not sufficient to sustain a highly engaged database. These email initiatives should form part of a larger strategy that includes content of interest and meaningful ways for prospects to engage with you. (Remember, inbound marketing focuses on earning a prospects interest and trust, so using email to simplu push out your promotions is not a sustainable model.) You should start with a thorough understanding of your prospects and customers, analyzing the journey they take in dealing with you, and determining where, how and when you could most effectively communicate with them.

You’ll reap greater rewards by using a more strategic approach to your email campaigns, ideally integrated with structured automated marketing tactics. In addition to email suppression, companies striving for best practices are also using personas, buying cycles, behavioural and list segmenting, dynamic content, and planned workflows to nurture and engage their audience.

Like most business people, you are probably receiving more emails overall, your own experience will support the importance of understanding prospects and delivering the content and experience that will keep them engaged. (Click here for Email Best Practices download.)

It’s worth noting that with the increasing use of content and emails as a distribution channel, there is a corresponding increase in unsolicited emails. It is important to respect CASL legislation in Canada. Not only because it’s the law and good business etiquette, but dumping a bunch of emails on people who likely have no interest in your services is not a good growth strategy.

 

Click to download Email Best Practices Whitepaper

Who’s Your “Amy”?

three women with shopping bags
Photo credit: ThinkstockPhotos-454296797

Last week the Globe and Mail published an article by Marina Strauss on Sears Canada’s marketing focus (New Sears Canada president’s mission: Win over ‘Amy’) — spoiler alert, it’s all about Amy. Amy is “40 years old and has one child and another on the way. She’s time-starved and looking for reasonably priced fashions.” And she doesn’t exist as an actual person, she is a representative of the ideal customer that they believe will help Sears regain some of its lost market share in Canada. And, for the foreseeable future, most of their marketing decisions and service implementation will take Amy into account.

Defining your ideal client, even to the point of naming her or him, shouldn’t seem odd in this time of avatars and online profiles. In fact, determining your target market and understanding your customer is nothing new. However, the structure and detail applied in the current trend does seem to be adding an additional dimension to the practice. And, that’s a good thing. It is driven, in part, by the rise in content generation and inbound marketing tactics. It’s important to understand who you are writing content for and how best to attract their attention and online loyalty.

Sears realizes, of course, that they can’t ignore the existing customers who remain loyal shoppers. Have you met Linda? She’s an “over-50 customer with two grown children and an ingrained Sears shopping habit.” (Maybe Amy and Linda will go shopping together, and Amy can help Linda post her purchases on Instagram.)

Under the savvy stewardship of new President Carrie Kirkman Sears Canada is applying a disciplined marketing strategy. It sounds obvious, and you might assume that all companies employ this type of strategy, but most don’t. In fact, many SMEs don’t truly implement any structured marketing strategy. (Yes, they probably have some form of strategic plan, but they often don’t have a workable implementation plan, so it never becomes part of the day-to-day consideration.) And that’s the real strength of what Sears Canada is doing. This strategy is pervasive and lends itself to implementation at all levels — not easily, it will take real commitment. But making it more tangible (Would Amy use that product, notice that display, appreciate this service…) It’s easier to understand directives and more motivating to care about how they are fulfilled when you’re “doing it for Amy.”

In addition to facilitating implementation, here are some other advantages to a successful buyer persona directed marketing strategy:

Coherent Communication: For any organization, and especially large corporations, communication (both internal and external) can be rather confusing. Concentrating on buyer personas provides a simple and engaging storyline internally, and coordinates clear external messaging.

Resource Deployment: Having such a laser focus reduces waste as you more effectively direct spending and staff.

Staff Morale: Understanding who you are working for and why can be a rallying force for staff. If everyone understands their targeted demographic is, if everyone knows Amy, then the entire organization can understand what they are doing and why. Retail, and virtually every organization, is reliant on service; isn’t it easier to care of a friend?

Satisfied Clientele: Not trying to please everyone allows your organization to hone in on satisfying your targeted market — improving both ROI and customers’ experience.

Regardless of the type of organization, you will benefit from articulating your ideal client/customer/member/donor/patron, and focusing your strategy on that buyer persona. Any business is not necessarily good business, so determine who you should be catering to, and set out to rock their world.