It’s a system we’ve all grown accustomed to — but things have changed.

Since Apple’s iOS 14.5 release in 2021, Facebook pixels can’t always see who’s visiting your pages anymore. As a result, Facebook can’t build audiences like it used to.

Apple’s changes may mess with Facebook’s tracking and targeting — but if you’re an Ontraport user, you’re ahead of the curve. Between our integrations with Facebook custom audiences and Facebook’s Conversions API, you can retarget for any conversions documented in your account, even if Facebook can’t track them, and even if they didn’t happen online.

For example, you can notify Facebook whenever a sales rep marks a lead as qualified in Ontraport, you make a sale offline, or a customer makes a new subscription payment.

Plus, you can still capture details about your page visitors with Ontraport’s built-in tracking and use that data to retarget them on Facebook — even if you can’t rely on pixels anymore.

You’ll be able to create all kinds of Facebook custom audiences for a precise, personalized retargeting strategy. Here are four audiences you can create to get you started.

Audience 1: Contacts who have opted in to any of your top-funnel channels

The first list you should create is made up of everyone who has opted in to any of your top-of-funnel channels — for example, signing up for your newsletter or opting in for a lead magnet. You can use this “Opt-ins” custom audience to do a few important things:

First, an opt-in audience is great for moving your new leads through the next steps of your funnel. After contacts opt in, nudge them to sign up for a free trial, sample or demo (or whatever your next step is!) with a Facebook ad campaign. Just select your “Opt-ins” custom audience when creating the campaign, and only the people on your list will see these ads encouraging them to take their next step.

Second, you’d be missing out if you didn’t use your opt-ins to create a lookalike audience. This means you’ll use your “Opt-ins” list to find and target more people with similar interests — a strategy that gets you more high-quality leads and, in turn, lowers your cost per conversion.

Finally, you can remove existing leads from your cold advertising efforts so you’re not wasting ad dollars by showing ads to people who’ve already opted in. This is easy to adjust in your targeting options on Facebook. Simply exclude your “Opt-ins” audience from any of your cold advertising campaigns.

To set up your “Opt-ins” audience, you’ll need to create a simple automation in Ontraport like the one below. Then Ontraport will automatically add people to your Facebook custom audience labeled “Opt-ins” when their contact is first added to your account, when they submit a form to share their email for the first time, when they’re tagged as an opt-in, or anything else that may indicate a new contact. If you want to adjust or update these settings over time, you can do it all within this single automation.

Audience 2: Leads who express interest in specific categories

Once you have a custom audience for people who opt in at the top of your funnel, you can segment those new leads into smaller audiences based on the specific content they opted in for.

This makes it easier to move contacts through your funnel in less time, since they’ll get more frequent interaction with your brand and product. It’s also a great way to get more personal in your messaging, since you’ll already know a little bit about each lead based on what made them share their email address with you.

For example, say you’re a marketing consultant who offers two different lead magnets in exchange for new email addresses. Maybe one of them is a guide on how to build a successful membership site, and the other is an ebook about how to analyze marketing campaign data. In this case, you’d create two Facebook custom audiences: one for the leads who opted in for your membership site guide and one for those who opted in for the marketing data ebook. You’d be able to retarget leads in each audience with ads that reflect those interests. This is just one way to do it; don’t be afraid to play around with different segmentation strategies until you find one that clicks.

Just like the “Opt-in” audience, you can set this up with a single automation. Simply add triggers that coincide with your audience’s varying interests, then link them to the appropriate Facebook custom audiences. So for the example above, you’d add one trigger for people who fill out the opt-in form for the membership site guide plus a second trigger for the marketing data ebook. You’d end up with two audiences: one for membership interest and one for marketing data interest.

There’s one important thing to keep in mind for these retargeting messages: your CTA. The whole point of creating this audience is to move new leads into the next step of your funnel, so make sure your CTA is pointing them in the right direction.

For instance, you might offer a free membership strategy session to those who opted in to your membership site guide, while promoting your marketing analytics services to everyone who opted in to the marketing data ebook. You’ll seamlessly guide them one step closer to a purchase — which is where our next audience comes in handy.

Audience 3: Opportunities who are qualified to buy

So far, you’ve got a general audience for anyone who opted in at the top of your funnel and some specific audiences for those who opted in through certain interests. Now, you can create a Facebook custom audience for prospects further down the funnel: leads who are just about ready to make a purchase (also known as qualified leads or opportunities).

Contacts are ready to join this audience when they’ve shown some kind of serious interest in your product or service. This can come in a few different forms, depending on your business. For SaaS products, you might drop contacts into this audience after they sign up for a demo or free trial. If you’re a consultant, you could add leads after they’ve scheduled a free consultation with you. Even something as simple as visiting your pricing page can indicate that a lead is getting ready to buy.

When people show this kind of serious interest, you won’t want to leave their decision to chance. It’s the perfect time to encourage them toward a purchase — because you know they’re already thinking about it.

So for your “Opportunities” custom audience, you’ll want to really start honing in on the sale. Use CTAs that drive people toward a purchase and make your messaging highly sales-focused. This isn’t the time to beat around the bush; these leads have seen what your business can do, and they’re just a few steps away from buying.

It used to be that you could create these custom audiences just by adding a Facebook pixel to your pricing page or the thank you page for your demo request… and you still can. But because third party cookies are on the way out, Facebook’s losing track of too many people now. Fortunately, Ontraport’s tracking is based on first party cookies, and that means you still know who’s who and can build these audiences using the custom audiences feature.

This is even easier to set up in Ontraport than the first two audiences — you can simply add a few new triggers to the automation you create for Audience 2 above. These triggers will really depend on your business and customers, since there are so many ways to indicate that a lead is ready to buy. You might use page visits, form fill-outs, email clicks or something completely different to add people to this audience.

Audience 4: Active customers

Eventually, some of your leads will make a purchase. Nice! When that happens, add them to a new Facebook custom audience for your existing customers. At the same time, you’ll want to remove these new customers from all your previous custom audiences designed for leads to exclude them from irrelevant marketing.

You’ll be able to use this audience to keep your customers engaged and offer upsells. You can also create a lookalike audience based on this group to find more leads who are similar to your customers and improve the performance of your cold campaigns.

The way you structure these audiences will depend on your business model. Here are some popular examples:

Customer audiences for subscription-based businesses

If you sell a subscription product, such as a digital membership, use automation to keep an up-to-date audience of all your active subscribers. You can use it to show ads encouraging subscription reactivations, subscription level upgrades, or engagement on your membership site.

To create this audience, add a new trigger to the same automation you’ve been using for Audiences 2 and 3. When someone starts paying for a new subscription, they’ll be removed from any previous “Opt-in” or “Opportunities” audiences and added to your “Active Customers” custom audience.

To be sure that the audience stays accurate over time, you’ll also want to add a trigger to remove cancelled subscribers from your “Active Customers” list. (Pro tip: Add those cancelled customers to their own custom audience to occasionally retarget them with a re-engagement campaign).

Customer audiences for ecommerce businesses

If you have an ecommerce business with multiple products or services, try splitting your custom audiences into categories so you can target customers with related products or upsells.

For example, if customers previously bought shoes from you, you might retarget them with ads for similar shoes or shoe polish. To do this, you would set up an element to your post-purchase automation to add contacts who purchased shoes to your “Customer: Shoes” Facebook custom audience.

With these four types of audiences, you can use Facebook custom audiences to earn more leads and sales, retain customers for longer, and even boost your revenue by upselling and cross-selling.

Note for Ontraport users: As of 2021, Facebook changed the way contacts are added to custom audiences. You can no longer add someone to a custom audience unless you made that audience yourself via Ontraport’s Facebook custom audiences feature — so we’ve released a new feature that allows you to do just that. You can find more information about how to set up Facebook custom audiences with Ontraport and details about what changed with the latest Facebook updates here.

The post How to retarget on Facebook in a post-iOS14.5 world appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Business owners and marketers come to us from a wide range of industries and with a diverse set of business skills. Some of our customers have been in business for decades and some are just getting started, but they all have the same goal: to gain customers.

The idea of gaining customers sounds pretty straightforward. You create a product or service worth buying, launch a website to sell it on, and sell it. You’re well aware of the value your offering brings to the market, and you assume that your potential customers are too.

But most businesses don’t start out with customers lining up to buy their product or service — and it isn’t because the offer isn’t good. Most of the time, it’s because people haven’t heard of the brand before. They aren’t aware of what their product or service does. Or, they don’t need it yet.

Exposure, Awareness and Interest are the three sub-stages that make up the Attract phase. Leads don’t always pass through them in order, but they all serve a particular purpose. Here’s a quick overview of each:

Exposure

The Exposure sub-stage is geared towards people who have never heard of your brand before, and it’s all about using organic traffic from social media and article mentions, media placements and backlinks to create brand awareness. Through your public relations (PR) efforts, potential leads in this stage are beginning to subconsciously learn about your brand’s existence via partnerships and connections you’ve built with industry thought leaders.

Think of potential leads in the Exposure sub-stage as you do your attention to Volkswagen Bugs before a game of Punch Buggy: You might subconsciously see them driving around, but they’re not top of mind. You’re likely more focused on when to make your next left turn or how fast your car is going.

Awareness

In the Awareness sub-stage, your potential leads have likely already been exposed to your brand, and your new goal is two-fold: You want them to click on your ungated (or free) content so they’ll be added to your retargeting list, and you want them to begin to view you as a reliable source of information. In order to do this, you’ll drive traffic to your ungated content — such as blog articles — on social media with boosted posts and ads.

Continuing with the Punch Buggy example, the Awareness sub-stage is when the game begins. The cars that were always on the road and you previously hadn’t noticed are suddenly your prime focus, and you start to see them everywhere — just as you hope to get your prospects seeing you everywhere. In psychology this phenomenon is called priming.

Interest

At the Interest sub-stage, your focus is on driving opt-ins to your gated content — also known as free value offers — so that you can get your new leads’ contact information and begin to market to them via email. The key to making this strategy work lies in the gated content you offer. It should be consumable within an hour and make such a difference that the reader would pay for that content (although you provide it for free). All of these factors combined build trust with your new leads, making them more likely to respond positively to your future marketing efforts.

Once your leads have made it through the Attract portion of your lifecycle, they’ll move on to the Consideration sub-stage, which is part of the Convert stage of the customer lifecycle where your customers will decide whether or not they want to buy.

Building your own attract strategy

Now that you have a basic understanding of how each of the sub-stages work together, you can begin to construct your own Attract stage — one that is tailored to the type of business you run and your ideal customers.

In every sub-stage of Attract, there are different activities you’ll want to set up, KPI’s you’ll want to track, and results you’ll want to work towards. Here’s what you need to know to plan each one:

Gaining exposure through partnerships

To succeed in the Exposure sub-stage, you want influential figures — such as media outlets, web or print publications, review sites, or influencers in your industry — to talk positively about your brand on their platforms. With every mention or backlink, you reap the benefits of gaining access to their large audience, getting a good word put in for your brand, and subtly beginning to build trust with potential leads.

These connections don’t just happen automatically, though. Because brand exposure is fueled by strategic partnerships — and developing those partnerships takes a lot of research, time and persistence — you’ll first want to come up with a list of people and publications you’d like to partner with and a plan for making it happen.

Creating strategic partnerships

Every great relationship takes time to build. Here are five steps you can take to set a strong foundation for long-term strategic partnerships:

1. Create a plan. During the planning process, it’s important for you to identify:
   • Your target customer: Determine what demographics and behaviors make up your ideal customer base, and use them to create a few key personas.
   • What you can offer: Take inventory of what you bring to the table. What can you offer to your partners in exchange for a mention or backlink?
2. Look for like-minded partners: When done well, a strategic partnership can mean you’re reaching hundreds or even thousands of new leads. With this in mind, it’s important to take the time to figure out if aligning with each potential partner is worth it. Find out if the potential partner:
   • Offers a product or service complementary to yours: If you own a wedding dress boutique, you wouldn’t want to partner with another boutique. Instead, you’d want to find an organization that targets the same customer base but offers a complementary service, such as a wedding photographer or an event rental company.
   • Caters to the same target audience: In order for this partnership to be effective for your Exposure campaign, you’ll want to look for organizations that target the same customer base as you.
3. Pitch your idea: After you’ve carefully chosen your ideal partners, come up with a list of benefits for both your organization and your potential partners’ organizations. A few sample benefits are that your partnership will:
   • Open the door to a cross-sell: A strategic partnership between a bridal shop and a photography company, for example, opens the opportunity to cross-sell to each other’s customers.
   • Expand both partners’ reach: Partnering means getting access to another company’s audience. The hard work of finding a new group of potential leads would be done for you.
   • Provide done-for-you content that they can share: If you pitch to write the content yourself, all the partner has to do is share it. This is beneficial to them in a few ways: It provides their readers with value, and it doesn’t take much effort on their end.
4. Get on the same page: Partnerships can fail because a deal is signed without first discussing a clear purpose and strategy for the partnership. It’s crucial that all parties involved know what to expect from the get-go. Before you seal the deal, go over the following with your partner:
   • The scope of the partnership
   • What assets will be contributed by each organization
   • The lifespan of the partnership
   • The obstacles (why the partnership might be terminated
   • How issues will be identified and resolved
5. Measure your results: Because the goal of your strategic partnerships is to gain brand awareness through third-party mentions and backlinks, you can expect to earn a higher domain ranking due to increased traffic flow, higher organic traffic flow to your site, and an increase in referrals.
   
   There are a few KPIs that you can use to effectively measure your results:

   • Number of brand mentions: You can keep track of brand mentions across a variety of mediums including social media, search engines and forums using free brand tracking tools such as Google Alerts or Social Searcher.
   • Organic traffic: You can monitor your organic traffic over time in Google Analytics. If you have the data, first measure your organic traffic over the last three months before implementing your Exposure activities. You can then use that quarter of data as a baseline for measuring future success.
   • Media placements: You might consider coming up with a threshold you would like to hit each month — perhaps three to start and, as you build more and more relationships, raise the number to four, then five. Every placement you earn will be a step towards your goal.
   • SEO backlinks: The more third party sites that link to your content, the better search engines will rank your domain. To earn more SEO backlinks, you might consider offering to place links to your partners’ high-value content on your blog.

Getting the most from your strategic partnerships

Earning a strategic partnership is hard work, and once you’ve established that relationship, it’s easier to keep it going than to start again from scratch with a new partner. To keep the relationship going, you want to make sure it works for all involved. You can do this in a few ways:

• Done-for-you content: As we mentioned above, providing pre-written content to your partners so that all they need to do is publish it will make working with you a no-brainer for your partners
• Promoting their content: In addition to providing your partners with done-for-you content, you can sweeten the deal by posting about each of your third-party brand mentions on social media. If you want to take it a step further, you could even spend money to promote each mention on Facebook — this not only brings more traffic to their site, but it also expands your reach and gains you even more exposure.
• Checking in: Maintaining relationships with reviewers, bloggers and other partners is essential to continuing your hard-earned partnership. Consider checking in quarterly with a new partnership to keep the relationship going.

Attracting potential leads with ungated content

During the Awareness stage, your overarching goal is to add as many potential leads to your retargeting lists as possible while simultaneously earning their trust. In order to do this, you’ll run cold ads to your ungated content on social media platforms such as Facebook.

Developing your ungated content

If you already have ungated content on your site — such as a blog with multiple articles that anyone can view without needing to fill out a form — you can skip ahead to the next step.

If you don’t already have ungated content, you can start small and work your way up. Consider the pain points your business solves, and create ungated content about each one: Perhaps you’re a dietitian and you solve clients’ problems with weight, eating disorders and health-related dietary restrictions. Write an article about each. By using your strengths and your expertise to build your bank of articles, you’re automatically creating content that will resonate with your potential customers.

Adding tracking to your pages

Once you’ve created your ungated content, you’ll want to add tracking to your pages so you can monitor your Awareness success later on. For each page, you’ll want to include the following tracking scripts:

• Google Analytics: This script allows you to keep track of important brand awareness KPIs such as number of unique views, time on page and pages per session.
• Social media scripts: Scripts for social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to take any site visitor, no matter where they’re visiting from, and cookie their browser so that they become part of your retargeting list.
• Search engine scripts: Similar to the social media scripts, scripts for search engines such as Google Ads and Bing allow you to cookie site visitors’ browsers to build your retargeting list.
• Ontraport tracking script: If your ungated content is built in Ontraport, this is already automatically taken care of for you. If your content is built on WordPress or other platforms, you’ll need to manually add this script unless you’re using the PilotPress plugin on WordPress.
• Bonus: Heat mapping script (Optional): Scripts for heat mapping tools such as CrazyEgg are a great way to see how viewers are digesting your content. Are they scrolling all the way down the page? Are they steadily reading each section of your content? Are they just reading your subheads and moving on? With heat mapping, you can find out and use that information to improve your pages accordingly.

Writing your ads and creating audiences with ad grids

Eventually, when your Awareness strategy is operating in full swing, you’ll have an entire set of ads dedicated to each of your pieces of ungated content. To start, however, pick a handful of your favorite articles and write ads for each.

When writing your ads, you’ll want to write multiple hooks. This allows you to test them against each other to determine what positioning or angles stand out most to your audiences. You’ll also want to test multiple audiences to begin to dial in who your ideal leads and customers really are.

Writing multiple combinations of ads sounds overwhelming, but there are tools you can use to simplify the process. Our marketing team at Ontraport uses a template called an Ad Grid. Here’s what it looks like:

When filling out your ad grid, you’ll first want to read through your article and identify who might be interested in reading it. Come up with three different audience ideas and build each of them as “Saved Audiences” on Facebook.

We recommend starting by building your audiences to ensure the copy in your grid is hyper-targeted and speaks directly to your ideal leads. You can run your awareness ads on any social media platform but, for this example, we’re going to use Facebook. There are a few elements that make up a strong advertising audience:

• Having enough people in the audience: We typically recommend building audiences between 1-2 million people. This ensures diversity. You don’t want a small number of people seeing a repetitive ad in their newsfeed
• Getting specific with your locations: Does it make sense for you to be marketing in multiple countries? If not, restrict your ads to only the locations that matter.
• Turning off unwanted traffic: Beyond location, there are many other demographic and behavioral settings you can play with in Facebook to ensure that you’re only marketing to the people you want to reach.

Once you have your audiences locked down, your next step is to identify three reasons why these readers would want to read this article. These will become your three hooks.

From there, you’ll be able to fill in the content. For each full ad, you’ll write body, headline and description copy. For reference, here’s what a complete Facebook ad looks like:

When writing your ad copy, it’s important to always think about continuity in your readers’ experience. If they click on your ad, will it take them to the article they’re expecting to see? Or will they close out of the article right away because it wasn’t what they thought it would be?

As you write, your audiences will act as a guide for your copy — all you have to do is fill in the blanks and keep it within the recommended character count range so that Facebook doesn’t cut off the end of your ad copy.

Adding UTMs to your URLs

The last step before you can launch your Awareness ads is getting the remainder of your tracking set up. In order for you to attribute success to specific ads and campaigns, you’ll need to add a UTM to the end of each ad’s URL. Here’s an article on how to implement UTM variables for your business.

Launch, optimize and repeat

You have your ungated content and ad grid copy written, your audiences created, and your tracking in place. Now, it’s time to launch your first Awareness ad campaign on Facebook.

On Facebook, you’ll create a campaign for promoting your article. Within this campaign, we recommend creating nine ad sets — one for each of the ads you wrote in the ad grid template — to guarantee fair testing. This means that rather than allowing Facebook to select its own favorite ad and put more money towards that, you control ad spends so that an even amount is spent on each ad and, as a result, accurately see exactly how your ads are performing compared to each other. Alternatively, if you would rather let Facebook decide for you, you can simply put all your ads from one grid into one ad set and let it self-select a winner.

When your ads have been running long enough to reach statistical significance based on impressions, clicks and conversions — and you’re certain that one ad isn’t outperforming another by chance — dive into your campaign stats and select your winners and losers. To determine your winners, you’ll look at impressions and clicks.

Over time, as you notice some ads outperforming others, you’ll turn off the “losers,” making room in your budget to spend more on your successful ads. Eventually, you’ll end up with only your highest performing ads running in your account, but don’t stop there. Continue to add new ads to your campaign to test over time and see if you can beat the original winner.

To take it a step further, zoom out to the campaign level and compare overall campaign stats. Perhaps the best ad in one campaign is performing worse than the worst ad in another. This will give you a bigger picture view into how your Awareness stage is performing.

And, of course, once you’ve completed campaigns for your top five articles, start creating them for the rest of your content.

Capturing interest with free value offers

Unlike the first two sub-stages, Interest is the first time you’re directly working towards capturing contact information from your potential leads. The purpose of this sub-stage is to start new relationships and build trust with potential customers before you nudge them along to a sale. It’s also your opportunity to begin to understand your leads’ interests so you can segment them, setting you up to market to them in relevant ways throughout the rest of the customer lifecycle.

To initiate those relationships, provide your potential leads with something of value upfront in exchange for their name and email address. This “something of value” — which we will call a free value offer — should be enticing, easy to digest within an hour, and related to your business offerings. Over time, as you prove to your leads that you have value to offer, they’ll begin to trust your brand and think of your business as the go-to for your industry.

Creating your free value offer

To develop your free value offer, ask yourself: Given their desires, goals and frustrations, what can I give them for free that would be so compelling that they would consider it to be clearly in their best interest to take me up on my offer? A few common examples are:

• A free report or ebook
• A free teleconference or educational webinar
• A free printed book or newsletter subscription
• A free podcast interview with a top thought leader
• Tickets to an event
• A free trial of your product or service
• A free sample product or service

Pick three or four of the free offers that make the most sense for your business, then brainstorm ideas for executing each one. For example, if you run a salon and want to offer a free report or workbook, it could be a report on how to keep curly hair from getting frizzy or a product comparison of the top-rated paraben-free hair products.

These highly tempting offers are meant to entice prospects enough that they’ll want to keep hearing from you and engaging with your content and your offers.

The most effective free value offers will excite your leads and give them something they can use or redeem instantly, and the value should be provided within an hour. Likewise, the content of your free item should be extremely useful, representing your best foot forward; after consuming it, your prospect should feel like it’s something they would have paid for and are surprised that you offered for free. That’s how trust begins to build: Your prospects now see you as an authority in a niche they care about, and they see that you’re actually providing something with their best interests in mind.

A good idea here, when creating titles for your free value offers, is to make a list of your ideal customers’ core desires, fears and hopes as they relate to your business offerings and use similar language so that you can be sure your titles connect immediately to your target audience. For example, if your market’s greatest desire is fun, freedom, and wealth and their biggest frustration is employees who don’t get their jobs done right, you could try something like, Making Your Business Fun Again: a guide to building wealth and freedom by getting the most from your employees. It’s important to note that your free collateral should not be a sales pitch. Your free content should stand alone. That is, getting value from it should not depend on doing business with you.

Now it’s time to create the free value offers. Create the top three or four best ideas you came up with. Don’t be too worried about making it perfect; just get it done. The information assets you’re putting together here will pay dividends for years to come.

Here are the pieces you’ll need for your free value offer

• Ads to promote your free value offer: You can write these ads using the same template as you did in the Awareness sub-stage, and they will run on Facebook and any other social media platform of your choice.
• An opt-in page: This is the page your leads land on after they click on your ad. Its purpose is to sell your free value offer.
• Your free value offer asset: This is the valuable content you decided to give away for free.
• A thank you page for post opt-in: Sending your new leads to a thank you page after opting in shows them that their form fill-out worked and assures them that they’ll be receiving the content they signed up for shortly.
• A delivery email: This email contains a download link to your asset.
• Bonus content: After your new leads opt in for your free value offer, you’ll send them a series of three emails over the course of three weeks. These emails will contain links to three pieces of your ungated content that are relevant to the offer they opted in for.

The post Creating brand awareness appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

What is marketing automation software?

Marketing automation software is a set of technology tools that enable marketers and business owners to deliver, test, measure and improve personalized communication and experiences to a larger audience than they possibly could do manually.

What does that mean?

Think about marketing as a mass-market version of sales. If prospects walked up to you at a party and said, “Hey, I might be interested in your product or service,” you’d automatically have a natural, personal and useful conversation with them.

You’d ask them what the problem is and what their goals are. You may ask them what they’ve tried before and why it didn’t work out. You’d probably also size them up, personally, maybe making a quiet internal guess about their age and budget. Then, you would tell them about how you can help, and you’d tailor your story to match the specific needs and goals and experiences (and budget) of each person you’re speaking with.

It would all make perfect sense and, if you’re a decent sales person, you’d create a nice relationship with each of these people, a sense of affinity, and you’d leave them feeling excited about the possibility of working with you. Then, at a time that’s not so soon that you seem desperate, but not so long that they’ve forgotten about you, you’d call them up and invite them to come in for a consultation or whatever the next step in your process is. They’d be happy to hear from you and would book an appointment without a second thought.

You get the idea.

When two people are in front of each other, having normal human conversations, all this stuff happens automatically without anyone having to think much about it.

This is exactly how most businesses get started… because it works great! You go to networking events, hit up your friends and family’s friends, people you meet at parties. Easy.

But what happens when you start getting more leads than you can manage? And what happens when they’re not standing across from you at a party, but instead they’re strangers who filled out a form on the internet from halfway across the world?

This is where marketing automation shines. The purpose of these platforms is to virtually and automatically have the same sort of interactions you used to have at a party.

How do you create and automate the delivery of personalized experiences with Marketing Automation?

It’s easy to understand how you would naturally inquire and discover the details of your new prospects’ needs if you were standing across from them at a party and how you’d use the information you gathered to compose a personalized pitch that would match what you learned about them. We all do that naturally, but how do you do that using software?

It’s not as hard as you might think, though it does take some doing.

A good marketing automation platform is like a Dyson Jet Powered Vacuum for details about your prospects. It will automatically capture and store every detail it can find about each one. If you’re smart, you’ll organize your website and emails and online ads to make that information gathering even easier and more effective.

What kind of data does a marketing automation platform collect? Depending on the toolset you choose, it can be a lot. It can track:

• Every click of every ad on every ad platform
• Every click on every page visited on your website
• Every email open and click, including which exact links are clicked
• Everything they fill out in any form online
• Everything they purchase from you and everything they return
• Everything they download
• Everything they tell your sales reps or service team
• Every referral they make
• And lots more…

Armed with this information, you can understand a lot about each prospect. You can figure out what their specific problem is, how they want it solved, what their concerns are, what they may have tried before, how much they want to spend, and so on.

And, of course, based on that information, your marketing automation platform can deliver personalized communications – emails, text messages, snail mail, tasks to your sales team to follow up, even targeted ads and more – to each individual customer.

Think of the whole thing as if it were you, cloned 1,000 times, at a huge party full of people, looking for prospects and having those conversations, doing the follow-up, setting the appointments, and so on. With a good marketing automation platform and some strategic thinking, you can scale that personalized experience to an unlimited audience, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring that every lead is managed, no ball is dropped and, just at the right time, you or your team is called in to deliver the real live personal touch.

The tools in a marketing automation platform

It’s pretty easy to understand this analogy; computers do the work that people used to do all the time. But how is this work really done? What are the tools in a marketing automation toolbox? And how are they put to work?

If you think about the ‘conversation’ analogy, it’s pretty easy to begin to see what’s important in a good marketing automation platform.

• You need tools to gather and store information about each prospect.
• You need tools to segment prospects into groups based on that information.
• You need tools to deliver the right communications to each segment at the right time for each prospect.

But that’s just the beginning… because, whether you realize it or not, there’s another very important thing that you’re doing with each prospect at the party: you’re learning.

Every time you have one of these conversations, you’re looking at your prospects’ face to see if what you’re saying is landing. You can tell if they’re digging what you’re saying, can’t you? And when they walk away with a grimace, you know you went wrong… and you try something else next time. Pretty soon, you’ve got your pitch down pat.

The same thing works online. Sometimes your ads work, your emails connect, your landing pages convert like crazy… and sometimes they flop. And you need to know which is which, or you’ll end up wasting a lot of time, money and good leads.

So, a good marketing automation platform also includes a lot of functionality around tracking, testing, and measuring the effectiveness of your programs so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

For example, it should include:

• Tools to see which ads are working to attract quality traffic to your site and which ads bring tire-kickers
• Tools to see which pages on your website are working to convert that traffic into leads
• Tools to see which messages are working to drive leads to your order or booking or sign-up pages
• Tools to see which sign-up pages are working to convert that traffic into customers
• And so on.

That leaves us with a big list of tools. In marketing automation terms, that list will look something like this:

1. Tools to collect data
   • Forms to collect data directly from users
   • Social connections to capture data from the networks
   • Email click and open tracking
   • Page visit and click tracking
   • Something for feedback/input from sales reps
   • Something to track outcomes of manual tasks
   • Inbound SMS capture
   • Inbound email capture
   • Phone call logging
   • Cookies to track anonymous users’ visits and lead source history
   • Tools to identify as many anonymous visitors as possible, as often as possible
2. Tools to store and view data
   • CRM integrated or built in
   • Customizable databases with custom field and custom record types
   • History logging and search
   • Customizable views of your data so you can sift, sort and order it
3. Tools to segment data
   • View dynamic groups or segments of data based on any criteria in your database, including purchase history, page visits, email interactions, sales team inputs, or any other ad hoc data or tags that you capture and store
   • Automatically sort contact records into fine grained segments for targeted, automated follow-up
4. Tools to automate follow-up
   • Campaign or automation builder to design communication workflows
   • Trigger actions based on any data or any update in all records
   • Add, remove, pause and move any contact around in your campaign workflows based on information that you gather about your prospects
   • Integrate personal, human interactions at appropriate times in your follow-up workflow
5. Tools to deliver relevant messages
   • Send automated follow-up and broadcast emails
   • Send automated follow-up and broadcast SMS text messages
   • Alert internal or external team members to take some action, such as a phone call or mailing a welcome letter
   • Send individual contact data to ad platforms like Facebook for retargeting
   • Send data to third party tools for other communication channels
6. Tools to deliver relevant web experiences
   • Personalize each web page visitor’s experience by customizing the page based on what you know about them in the contact record
   • Personalize web pages by merging data from the contact record onto the page
   • Show or hide certain pages for individual contacts, and redirect visitors without access to another page
   • Customize each visitor’s redirect after a form fill out based on the information they gave you in the form
7. Tools to track ads
   • Store UTM variables in the contact record
   • Track UTMs using cookies so that contacts who don’t fill out a form on the first visit still have their original source stored
   • Track both first and last UTM values in each record to track both where leads originally came from and where they most recently came from
   • Track referring page and IP address
   • See which lead sources and campaigns deliver the most down-funnel conversions (sales, upsells, retention, etc.)
8. Tools to track message and page effectiveness
   • Track email opens and clicks
   • Split test emails to determine which are most effective
   • Track SMS text message clicks
   • Split test text messages to determine which get the most clicks
   • Track specific link clicks
   • Track down-funnel conversions that come from each email/SMS/link click
   • Track number of page conversions per visitor, for multiple possible goals
   • Split test pages to determine which get the most conversions, based on any goal

As you can see, there are a lot of tools involved in putting together a solid, scalable and effective automated marketing program. And, like anything worth doing, it’ll take some time and focus to figure out how to use your tools and then to get them set up and working the way you envision. You’ll also have a lot of content to create: emails and text messages to write, web pages to write and design, and so on.

Since you can see that there’s going to be some real effort involved in creating 1,000 automated versions of yourself, before you dive in, it’s worth asking the question…

Is marketing automation a good idea for your business?

The answer is not necessarily yes, at least right now. Why?

Think about how people buy your product or service. If you sell shoes or t-shirts or coffee at a coffee shop, the decision to buy or not is made pretty much on the spot. It’s a low-impact, relatively low-cost decision that doesn’t take a lot of consideration.

On the other hand if you’re, say, a financial adviser whose decisions and advice will seriously impact your clients’ future, then the decision to buy your services is typically made VERY carefully, after much research, consideration, review of your historic performance and credentials, consultation with family and friends, and so on. The cost of your services is a lot higher than the price of a t-shirt, so people take their time making the decision… sometimes years!

Many businesses fall somewhere in between these two extremes but, in general, you’ll find that the more prospects think about the decision they’re making before making it, the more valuable marketing automation will be to your business.

Why?

Because marketing automation is fundamentally about a few things: capturing lead information, figuring out what your prospects’ problems are, following up in the most interesting and relevant way specific to those problems, and positioning yourself over the long term to be the obvious choice when they finally make a buying decision. And doing all that at scale, automatically.

As we said above, all that takes some work! If you’re selling t-shirts, this kind of work probably isn’t at the top of your list. People don’t need to be nurtured into a buying decision over a pair of shoes or a cup of coffee or lunch, do they?

That’s not to say that a restaurant or an apparel brand shouldn’t eventually put together a long-term follow-up program, but most folks in those industries have higher priority marketing work to do first. They need to figure out how to drive traffic and make sure their product is something people want.

But, if you are a teacher, a service provider, a professional of nearly any type, or you offer high-end experiences (think travel, retreats, seminars) and you don’t follow up over the long term, you’re just wasting time and money. Think about it: someone sees your ad for a couples retreat in the jungle of Costa Rica, or for your estate planning services, or your personal training program. They click, think to themselves, “Oh, that looks cool. I should do that sometime,” and then they scroll on… never to hear from you again. You paid for the ad click, you got the traffic to your site, but you didn’t make the sale. When, three months from now, they decide they’re actually going to pull the trigger on this, how likely are they to remember you, figure out how to find you online, and then actually find you and buy from you? IT’S NOT LIKELY!

Instead, they’re going to go to Google and type in ‘couples retreat’ and find a million sites that aren’t yours and the sale will be lost forever.

On the other hand, imagine you’d followed up with that lead. Maybe you started with a retargeting campaign that showed them a bunch of beautiful pictures of the area, reminding them again and again about what they’re missing out on. Then, you capture an email address and start following up via email with dates and descriptions, special offers, videos of past retreats, testimonial videos from previous guests…

And this time, what happens three months down the road when it’s time to book that trip? They’re going right to your email, clicking your link and making it happen, right?

The same is true for basically every high-value, considered purchase. If that’s you, then you need to be focused on putting together a solid marketing automation follow-up program BEFORE you start spending money on advertising because, without it, you’ll be flushing your ad dollars right down the drain.

Does that mean it never makes sense for a restaurant to get around to automated follow-up? No… it’s just lower down the list. A clothing brand or a cell phone case seller can safely start with ads and see how it goes. If it works, then putting together a good follow-up system will make sense as they scale up.

How to get the most from your marketing automation platform

Since choosing a marketing automation platform is an important choice and a real investment for most businesses, you have to know that you’re going to get out of it what you put in. Just as a bag of tools doesn’t build you a house, a marketing automation platform doesn’t start closing new business just because you turned it on.

A high quality marketing platform has a lot of features, and they can be bewildering to a new user. So, where do you start? How do you get the biggest bang for the least effort?

With 15 years of serving tens of thousands of companies around the world, we are pretty confident that nailing these few items right at the start will give you the best foundation for success in the long term.

1. Get your bearings. You don’t have to learn every detail of your new marketing automation platform right now… or maybe ever. But you do need to have your head around the basics. Just as you’d want to know how to use a hammer and a drill before starting out on building a home, there are some skills you’re going to want to get a handle on right away.They are:
   • How to import and organize your existing list
   • How to segment your list into groups
   • How to send a broadcast email to a segment of your list
   • How to capture a new lead from a form
   • How to automate the follow-up for that new lead
   • How to automatically segment your new leads and follow up in a more targeted, relevant way
2. Create your first, basic lead follow-up campaign. This should just be simple. Start with three to five emails, spaced a week apart. If writing is easy for you, then do more. To decide what to put in each email, check out these tips for writing emails.
3. Set up your first lead capture form. You can do this by adding a form to your existing site or, if your platform offers landing pages, build a new lead capture page and link to it from your site. In Ontraport, you can either build a form to put on your existing site or build a web page that we’ll host for you. Make sure that your lead capture form works and is set up to add new leads to your follow-up campaign.
4. Import and organize your existing data. This can take a little thinking and a bit of foresight. Unfortunately, too many entry-level email systems organize data using tags and/or lists, but that’s a terrible practice that you’ll want to put an end to when you move up to a professional marketing automation platform.Why? So. Many. Reasons.

   First, you’ll have the same contact on several lists, so if you send an email to three of them, one contact may get the same email three times. Some systems have ways of avoiding this, but even those take careful management, and there is no room for mistakes!

   Second, there’s little ability to segment your data after the fact: what if you decide you want to look at all contacts who haven’t bought product A, have been on your list for more than six months but haven’t clicked in three months, and who live in the United States. Tag and list-based systems commonly fall down hard on what should be a simple project like this. What about sorting by anniversary dates or birth dates? What about choosing people who have spent more than $100 in the past? What list are they on? What tags do they have?

   Also, tags get unwieldy very quickly. At Ontraport, we once had a major competitor (now a minor one) whose whole system was tag-based and when clients would move over, they’d commonly have contacts with literally HUNDREDS of tags. This is obviously no way to manage and organize things.

   Also, in most systems, tags contain no actionable ‘meta data.’ That is, you don’t know when a tag was added or removed or how many times it’s been added or removed, which leaves you missing a bunch of important information.

   The proper way to store and organize data, and the way it’s always done in larger businesses, is to store it in bespoke fields. That is, if you want to know when a customer cancelled service, you don’t add a ‘cancelled’ tag… you create a date type field and store ‘cancellation date’ instead.

   If you’re changing platforms, that is a really good time to clean up your data and get it organized in a way that it’ll be useful in the future. Lose the tags as much as possible (except where they make sense, for example tagging a user with the problems they have!) and replace them with fields.

   Then, import your data into your new platform. If it makes sense (and you have permission) consider adding your existing list to your long-term follow-up campaign, created above.

5. If your system offers landing pages, learn to use that tool. Being able to quickly throw together a new webpage is a key skill for an active marketer. Ideally, you’ll be able to personalize that page based on the information you have about each contact, but that’ll only be possible if your marketing automation platform offers a built-in web page builder.Normally, you can use those pages alongside your existing website. So, you’ll want to learn to use that tool, understand how to host pages on your domain, and how to personalize them using your contact data.

   Consider building a new web page that specifically targets each problem that you have a great solution for. Add a free offer and a form to each page.

6. Automatically segment and follow up with each. Once you have your long-term nurture campaign built (above) you’ll want to create a mini-campaign for each of the problems you’re really good at solving. Maybe just three or four emails for each segment. Then, if someone signs up on your Problem A page (built in the last step), you should send them some follow-up about your Problem A products or services. When those are done, move them to your long-term nurture campaign.
7. Learn how to integrate the human touch. Ideally, your platform should allow you to trigger tasks to your team members so they know they need to pick up the phone and make a call or attend a demo or free consultation. Figure out how this is done in your platform, and make sure your best prospects have a way of asking someone to reach out.

Of course, there’s a LOT more that you can do with your marketing automation platform but, if you get the above seven steps done, you’ll have put in place some great basics and you’ll have learned to find your way around your new tools.

Some ideas for projects you could take on after you’ve hammered out the ones above might include:

• Create a lead scoring system and have your team reach out automatically to your hottest, most engaged leads.
• Put together an email re-engagement campaign to coax leads who are getting cold back to life.
• Split test your emails and webpages to get the most out of every interaction with your prospects.
• Make sure you’re using UTMs on every ad and social post and that you’re able to track which of your efforts are getting you to most leads, sales, upsells and retained customers.
• Ensure that you’ve got sales data posting to your marketing automation platform if it isn’t already.
• Put together an abandoned cart campaign to re-engage people who almost, but didn’t, complete your checkout process.
• Add a ‘pipeline stage’ field and automatically update it as your prospects move through your sales process so you can always see how many people are at each stage.
• Integrate sales team feedback into your follow-up process. That is, if sales reps say they missed an appointment, launch a reschedule campaign. If they say they’re a hot lead with problem B, send them more info about problem B, and make a time-limited offer to buy now.
• Automate appointment or webinar registration and follow-up.
• Create a short, standard campaign to which you add people you meet personally at networking events. Ask them if they’d like to hear more from you, and maybe get them to click a link related to their problem so you know how to follow up.
• Build a birthday or anniversary campaign and offer a special discount as a thank you for their loyalty.
• Create a new client onboarding campaign that helps new buyers get the most from their purchase.
• Automatically request testimonials from happy customers. If they do give you one, encourage them to refer their friends! If your marketing platform includes partner program tracking, you can even give them credit for their referrals.
• The list goes on and on.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

As a small business owner, or the founder of a new startup, it can be tempting to view marketing as just another task to check off the list. Often, this means carrying out your marketing efforts as a series of disjointed, one-off tasks, such as firing off an email blast, launching some ads, and throwing together another landing page as the need arises. However, before you know it, you’ve got dozens of marketing pieces strewn around your business that don’t fit into your big-picture goals.

You want to make sure all your marketing campaigns support your business’s goals, determine what strategies work, and conserve your budget to focus on the most important growth opportunities.To do so, you need to focus on centering all your marketing efforts around well-planned, cohesive campaigns. Whether you manage your business’s marketing campaigns by yourself or delegate them to someone else, it’s important that the campaigns are well-planned and executed from start to finish.

Here are seven tips to incorporate into your everyday campaign leadership and management practices to increase your chances of a successful campaign:

1. Set measurable, realistic goals

First things first: start your campaign off on the right foot by getting clear about what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. The importance of setting clear goals upfront can’t be stressed enough.

Not spending enough time selecting appropriate campaign goals can result in vague and confusing objectives based on subjective measures of achievement. To determine if a goal is poorly defined, ask yourself this: At the end of a specified time period, could two people independently assess whether the goal was achieved and arrive at two different conclusions? If so, the goal is not defined clearly enough.

For example, here’s a campaign goal that a marketer might initially come up with:

Increase awareness of our product by 20% by the end of the quarter.

This goal is problematic because it does not clearly define how “awareness” will be quantified or measured. Here’s a better way to frame the same goal:

Increase the reach of our product marketing to achieve 100,000 unique advertising and social media impressions, which is 20% more than we achieved in quarter one, by the end of quarter two.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind when framing your goals:

Make sure they’re realistic. Although it’s wise to set challenging goals because you and your team may be capable of accomplishing more than you think you can, there’s no use in setting wildly unachievable goals. Knowing that your set goal is impossible to achieve will only demotivate you and your team.

Ensure that they support larger business objectives. Let’s say you’re using an Instagram contest to promote a new product. You might be tempted to define your goals in terms of Instagram success – the amount of views, shares, comments, etc. These are important metrics to be aware of, but they don’t tell the whole story. Your ultimate objective is not to gain Instagram popularity – it’s to sell your product, right? If your account gained thousands of followers but you didn’t sell a single product, that campaign would be a failure. Be sure to define your goals in a way that reflects what’s really important.

Align them in your marketing automation and tracking platform. If you’re planning to execute your campaign using an automated tool like Ontraport’s Campaign Builder, think about how your objectives will be translated into the goal elements you’ll place on your map to automate the customer experience. For more information on how to set the right goals in your campaigns, check out this article.

2. Outline your strategy and earn buy-in from your team

A clear, well-defined marketing strategy can guide your campaign in the right direction by promoting your brand’s mission statement while targeting the correct audience.

That said, the term “strategy” can be a slippery one. The dictionary defines it as “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result.” It’s easy to get hung up on the maneuvers themselves – these are commonly referred to as “tactics” and, while they are an important part of a marketing strategy, they are not a substitute for it. The difference is that a strategy is a plan. It’s not enough to just use tactics – you must follow a plan for which tactics to use and when to use them, all with the purpose of achieving the goal you defined.

In marketing, you can think of a strategy as a comprehensive plan for how to target the right audience with the right message to drive them to take a desired action.

Once you have your strategy outlined, it’s important to make sure everyone on your team is on the same page about it before moving forward. If you don’t, you risk having your team pulling in multiple directions, which means your campaign won’t go anywhere. If you’re the business owner, make sure everyone on your team understands the strategy. This includes freelancers and any consultants or agencies you’re working with. If you work for someone else, make sure you get his or her buy-in at this point. Even if you’re fully in charge of marketing, it’s always a good idea to make sure that anyone you report to is aware of the approach you’re taking. Seeking strategy alignment both upwards and downwards on your company’s hierarchy is always a good idea.

To visualize your strategy and unite your team around the plan, you can use campaign mapping tools such as LucidChart or draw.io, or create a preview of your campaign directly inside your marketing automation software if it has a visual Campaign Builder for building drafts.

3. Delegate tasks and follow up

Once you’ve got a strategy outlined and your team’s ready to work together to execute it, it’s time to prepare for launch. Based on the strategy you outlined, the first step is to make a comprehensive list of all the assets or deliverables you’ll need to launch.

This includes things such as copy and design for landing pages, ads and emails, advertising targets or audiences, press releases, a finalized campaign map, social media posts, or anything else that you’ll need to bring the tactics you outlined within your marketing strategy to fruition. Arrange the assets in the order they’ll need to be completed, paying special attention to items that must be completed before other items can be started. Think about how you can delegate items to individuals on your team to maximize their productivity and minimize the total time required to get the items completed.

For example, say that you have one item that will take a long time to write and a short time to design, and you have another item that will not take very long to write but will take a very long time to design. Your best move would be to start with the item that your writer can complete quickly, then send it to be designed while the writer gets started on the longer task. This way, you won’t have anyone on the team sitting idle waiting for another person to complete a task.

While progress is underway, regularly check on the status of each item to make sure nothing is being held up or causing a roadblock for other work that needs to be done. Pay special attention to any tasks that have other assets contingent upon their completion. For example, if you were launching a holiday discount campaign, you’d need to know the specifics of your offer in order to create ads, a landing page, and many other pieces to get ready for launch. If you wait to finalize the specific details of the sale and the timing, you won’t be able to get started on these things. But if you make it a priority to finalize the details of your sale at the beginning, before the creative work gets underway, progress can begin on many other tasks at the same time.

Prepare all the pieces of your marketing campaigns in advance so that they’re ready to publish the second you launch your campaign. For example, you can create your Facebook ad audiences and your campaign but leave them set to “off” until the launch day arrives.

4. Review your marketing campaigns before launching

As items are completed, be sure to review them to make sure they support the strategy you outlined and your brand’s standards. Don’t settle for mediocre. Make sure to allow time for review and revisions so that you can launch the best possible version of your campaign.

When everything’s completed, run through your asset list one more time to make sure nothing was forgotten. Then, set everything in motion by publishing your campaign in your marketing automation platform, turning on your Facebook ads or sending out the first email.

Once your marketing campaign is launched, test it to be sure everything is working as expected. For example, test your order form to make sure that payments are processed as expected and your post-purchase confirmation email is sent on time. Then, you can start driving traffic to the campaign by launching your promotional items.

5. Proactively manage your budget

Once the campaign is live, you’ve hit a major milestone, but your work is not done. A big factor in your success is smart budget management to get the most return on your investment.

In addition to the fixed costs of launching your campaign (paying freelancers, your software, web hosting, etc.) there are variable costs that can change from day to day depending on changes you make to your promotional efforts.

It’s important to make adjustments to your budget plan as you gather data about your campaign’s performance. As your campaign progresses, your budget may shift between different channels depending on the success of each one.

For example, maybe you discover that YouTube is a highly effective channel, sending traffic your way for mere cents per visitor. Meanwhile, you discover that your LinkedIn ads are unreasonably expensive per click and that traffic from LinkedIn has an overall lower conversion rate. At this point, you’d want to shift your budget mid-campaign away from LinkedIn and towards YouTube.

This also applies within channels when you are promoting your campaign to multiple, distinct audiences. Let’s say you promote your marketing campaign with Facebook ads that are targeted toward three different audiences. Initially, you give them all the same daily budget but, after gathering some data about the cost per click and the cost per conversion for each audience, you discover that one of them is driving high-quality traffic at a cheaper price. Based on that insight, you’d want to increase the budget for that audience.

Measuring this data to get insight you can use to shift your budget is easy when you’re using visual performance reporting tools. You can filter your reports to compare the performance of different advertising channels and audiences. Check out this helpful resource to learn how you can use UTM variables to set up lead source tracking to get this insight.

By actively managing your campaign’s budget rather than just letting it run its course, you can squeeze more results out of your campaign without spending more money.

6. Optimize your marketing campaigns and course-correct along the way

In addition to managing your campaign’s budget, it’s also necessary to zero in on the pieces of your campaign that aren’t working well. To do this, you’ll have to track your campaign’s KPIs and run tests daily. By split testing multiple versions of your campaign assets, you can gain valuable data about what works and what doesn’t. It’s smart to launch your campaign with a split test running so you can start gathering data from day one, but even if you launch with just one version, you’ll want to introduce split tests in an effort to fix poor KPIs for certain elements of your campaign.

Let’s say the conversion rate of your landing page becomes a problem. You know it’s the landing page because your ads are successfully driving highly targeted traffic to the page, but only a small fraction of the visitors are opting in for the campaign. This means it’s time to split test your page. For the most accurate results, test only one element at a time. For example, change the headline or the location of the call to action.

Sometimes, when you are dealing with a disastrously low-converting page, the best course of action is to rewrite it or redesign it aggressively, then test the second version against the first. If version B achieves higher conversions than version A (with statistical significance), then turn off version A and start optimizing version B.

7. Report on marketing campaign outcomes and gather insight for next time

At the end of your marketing campaign, after you’ve done everything you can to maximize your ROI, it’s time to size up your performance to determine whether goals were met so you can improve the next campaign plan.

Be sure to keep an eye on important campaign numbers such as goal conversion rates and total contacts who took an action.

Go back to the goals you outlined at the beginning of your campaign. Were they met? If so, challenge yourself to a more difficult goal for your next campaign. If not, meet with your team and do a post-mortem to discuss what went wrong, how you could have handled challenges differently, and ideas for the next campaign.

There are many deciding factors that play into the success of your campaign. What have you done to make sure that your campaigns go off without a hitch? Share in the comments below.

The post 7 Tips for Executing Your Marketing Campaigns From Start to Finish appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

As a result, it’s not uncommon for your customer experiences to begin mirroring that disjointed approach. They are neither seeing consistent messaging nor appropriately moving through your marketing funnels to grow their relationship with your brand.

Marketing campaigns solve that problem. Campaigns are well-planned, coordinated funnels that incorporate every piece of your marketing. Take it a step further and put those campaigns into a visual campaign builder, and you’ve got automated, responsive funnels that ensure you’re giving each lead and customer a cohesive, relevant and tailored experience.

Using a visual campaign builder also improves the experience for you: It enables you to manage all your customer data in one place and gain insight into your campaigns so you can optimize and reach your goals.

We’ve rounded up the top nine ways visual campaign builders solve today’s most pressing marketing challenges and give entrepreneurs what they need to grow their businesses:

1. They’re visual

With so many variables and an almost infinite number of combinations for follow-up steps and channels within marketing campaigns, a visual representation becomes very useful for understanding how all the pieces fit together and ensuring there are no holes in the flow.

Automated marketing campaigns allow you to instantly see and comprehend all the paths in your business that customers and leads may travel within your campaign — making it easier for you to build, manage and optimize.

Gone are the days of trying to remember where all the pieces of your marketing campaigns are and how contacts flow through them. Your new visual experience tells you exactly what’s happening to contacts, without you having to trace their path back or reference rules and automation settings that might be hidden from immediate view.

2. They do double-duty: Mapping and building

With marketing automation software, you can set up your campaigns faster than ever. As you diagram the way contacts will flow through your campaign, you are actually building the path they will travel. The map and the automation are one and the same. That means from start to finish, you’ll be able to create and launch your campaigns on a single platform — no third-party mapping tool needed.

Your visual campaign builder’s graphical representation of your automated systems may look like a simple flowchart, but it’s powerful enough to control everything that happens to each one of your contacts, leads and customers.

3. They bring everything together

Most marketing tools only manage pieces of your campaigns, such as your email funnels or your landing pages and forms, causing your campaigns to be fragmented and nearly impossible to fully coordinate.

Visual campaign-building platforms uniquely combine your offline and online campaign assets all on your single campaign map, providing you with a complete, integrated campaign and clear insight into how all your efforts are working together. They also ensure that all your customer data is in one place, giving you everything you need to make educated decisions about how to optimize your campaigns.

What that ultimately means for your customers is a seamless experience with your brand as well as truly relevant and responsive messaging every step of the way.

4. They shape tailored customer journeys

The series of interactions your contacts have with your brand make up the customer journey. Because each of your leads and customers are unique — they’re interested in different aspects of your brand or product, and they respond to different ads and messaging you present to them — their experience with you should be uniquely tailored to them.

Using an automated campaign, you can set up custom goals, triggers and filtering to completely personalize the path that each lead or customer follows throughout your campaign based on their unique interests and actions.

Creating a well-defined customer journey that is dynamic and responsive to every action someone takes within your campaign means each person has a relevant, timely experience — which leads to more conversions and loyalty.

5. They keep your campaigns and assets organized

Most businesses are running more than one campaign at a time, and campaigns involve many moving pieces. Most marketing automation solutions offer several features that help keep everything organized and easy to manage.

For example, the ability to “nest” campaigns allows you to combine numerous campaigns for the bigger-picture view on one simple map and then drill down into various parts to view the details.

Additionally, in platforms like Ontraport, as you build your map, checklists are automatically created and stored to remind you to create the campaign assets you’re mapping before publishing your campaign. Those assets, such as emails, landing pages and ads, are also embedded within the map, allowing you to truly see and access every part of your campaign in one place.

6. They show you how you’re doing

Once your campaign is running, you can visualize how contacts have moved through your campaign and understand your conversion rates by looking into your campaign data.

You can monitor how effectively leads and customers are moving through your funnels, see which marketing elements have the biggest impact on your bottom line, and get answers to some of marketers’ biggest questions about their funnels, such as:

• Where are my best customers coming from?
• How well is my funnel converting at each stage?
• Which campaign elements are most effective?
• How long does it take for prospects to become customers?
• What is the lifetime value of customers from each source?

Visual campaign reporting takes your metrics to the next level because it goes beyond mere numbers to present you with a visual performance model that makes sense intuitively; you can truly understand your contacts’ behavior and your campaign’s effectiveness at a glance.

7. They empower you to get better results

Using the insight you’ll glean from visual performance reporting, you can make faster, smarter decisions about your campaign based on data. You can then optimize quickly and try new things in rapid succession to get the best results possible.

In addition to the useful performance data, some marketing campaign builders allow for weighted split testing so you can test a smaller audience on something before committing more of your marketing dollars toward it. For example, to test two versions of a landing page, you can send 90% of your audience to a version you’ve previously found successful at encouraging conversions while testing a new landing page version with only 10% of your audience. From there, you can understand and steadily improve your conversion rates without putting all your eggs in one basket.

8. They save you time

With the option to select from a Campaign Marketplace full of dozens of pre-built campaign templates, you can skip the mapping and building altogether and launch a sophisticated campaign running in a matter of minutes.

Ontraport’s Campaign Marketplace includes turnkey, ready-to-go templates for campaigns including:

• New lead capture and follow-up
• Product fulfillment
• Reengaging shopping cart abandons
• Generating referrals
• Getting customer feedback
• Webinar sign-up and follow-up
• Live event management
• Sales funnel automation
• Managing demo requests

Each template comes complete with all the required campaign assets, such as emails and landing pages, which can be customized to your brand. It’s now simpler than ever to launch high-converting, proven campaigns even with little marketing experience or minimal time available.

9. They’re user-friendly

Whether you are tech-savvy or a tech novice, using a visual campaign builder simplifies the complicated process of creating a campaign. With drag-and-drop elements and intuitive if/then logic, you can expect less frustration and fewer roadblocks, making campaign building an encouraging experience. Entrepreneurs and marketers of all experience levels can create and launch sophisticated marketing campaigns in a matter of minutes. You can start from scratch or choose from different templates, as mentioned in the last section, depending on your preferences and experience level.

What’s your favorite part of Campaign Builder? Let us know in the comments below.

The post 9 Ways a Visual Campaign Builder Will Improve Your Business appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

If the Fulfill stage was the ice cream cone, the Delight stage is the cherry on top.

But don’t misperceive the Delight stage as simply a place for added bonuses meant to bring a smile to your customers’ faces: It’s actually a critical stage of the customer lifecycle where you’ll seal the deal for a long-term relationship with your customers and prime them to refer more business to you.

The Delight stage is about building loyalty and expanding the buying relationship by introducing your customers to additional products, events and services. These offerings, although referred to as upsells and cross-sells, are in fact perfectly timed suggestions for exactly what your customers need in that moment. Not only do these offers increase your revenue, but they also delight your customers as they become more committed to your brand.

Succeeding at this stage plays an important role in increasing your average customer lifetime value; it allows you to bring in more revenue per customer and at a lower cost. It costs five times less to gain new business from an existing customer than to acquire a new customer.

However, approaching this stage merely as an opportunity to extract as much money as possible from each customer is not going to get you very far. “Rather,” as customer success expert Lincoln Murphy suggests, “if we can work to help our customers extract as much value out of our product as possible, the benefit to us will be expanded revenue.”

“The way that we do that is to create a customer experience that delivers increasing amounts of value over time, creating a natural growth in base-product use, a logical expansion into additional functionality and, where appropriate, adoption of adjacent products from your company,” he continued.

Your upsell and cross-sell offers during this stage should be timed appropriately, based on the customers’ stage of consumption and level of commitment to your product. When offered to the right customers at the right time, this stage should involve less “selling” and more naturally “conversing” about what your customers may need or want next to get the most out of your product.

Upsell and cross-sell basics

Upselling and cross-selling are about understanding and anticipating exactly what your customers will want and offering it to them at just the right moment.

The segmentation efforts you began in the Attract stage and continued in the Convert stage come into play here. With a clear understanding of your leads’ and customers’ interests at this point, you know exactly which upsell and cross-sell offer will be most attractive to them.

Upsells defined

An upsell entails offering your customers an upgraded — and typically more expensive — version of a product that a customer is in the process of purchasing (or has already bought). This could include a bundle of items that include the initial item, or the next level above in a good-better-best product line.

Say someone’s in the process of buying a new smartphone with 32 GB of memory. Before the sale is finalized, a vendor such as T-Mobile may ask if he or she would like to upgrade to a 64 GB phone for a little extra. In that scenario, the upsell is a win for both the vendor and customer because the upsell clearly supplements the original purchase to the customer’s benefit, and the customer opted to pay a little more to get it.

Cross-sells defined

As opposed to an upsell, a cross-sell is an attempt to sell a separate but related product to supplement the original purchase.

For example, if you own a vineyard and sell your own label of signature wine, you might also offer other wine-related products: aerators, corkscrews, and monogrammed glassware. These supplementary goods clearly complement your core product and would make ideal cross-sell products.

Delight stage upsells and cross-sells

Although upsells and cross-sells can be offered during checkout, the types you’ll offer during the Delight stage come later and involve their own funnels.

Because these offers come later in your relationship with the customers, after they’ve presumably consumed your product and received its initial benefits, they generally require a higher level of commitment, either of time or money. As such, they should be strongly backed by an understanding of what your customer needs to be truly successful with your product and how you can best resolve their ongoing pain points.

“If you’d like to take advantage of expansion opportunities with your customer in a way that builds deeper trust, ensures the customer stays on or accelerates their path to success, and is truly the proverbial ‘win-win,’ you must clearly understand what the desired outcome is (for the customer, not you!), and then operationalize around the milestones required to achieve that outcome,” wrote Murphy.

Characteristics of effective Delight offers

Your Delight stage offerings should be the types of things you can only offer after someone has recognized the value of your product. Therefore, they typically require more of a commitment than anything else you offer, encourage your customers to make your product a part of their lives, or further enhance your personal connection with your customers.

Require more commitment

Just as in personal relationships, as your relationship with this customer has evolved over time, so has the level of commitment you can expect. An offer during the Delight stage might be an annual contract for one-on-one coaching services, an expensive in-person master class, or a higher-priced upgrade on your core product.

By making the decision to give more to your business either in terms of their time or money, your customer is growing his or her connection to you.

Make your product a must-have

The most strategic Delight offers are those which encourage customers to make your core product more a part of their lives. That could mean buying it more frequently, using it more frequently (if your product is subscription-based), or using it in new and more rewarding ways.

One great example in ecommerce of a smart Delight product is Amazon’s Echo, a voice-controlled home automation device. Targeted toward the most loyal Amazon Prime users, the product encourages customers to remain within the Amazon ecosystem by making it easy to listen to Amazon Prime music and order products instantly with their Prime account. It’s a brilliant offer at this stage because it encourages consumers to keep using more benefits of their Amazon Prime account.

Enhance personal connection

A good Delight offer should not only cement the relationship between you and the customer in terms of cost or time commitment, it should also develop it further. For example, a live event where your loyal customers get to meet the rest of your community, not to mention you and your staff, is a perfect offer at this phase. They’ve traveled to be part of an event and spent time talking with you — now their relationship with your brand is highly personal.

Offering a discount or sending a gift for your customers’ birthdays or in recognition of a milestone with your company, such as an anniversary from their first purchase or completion of your first membership course, is another way to create a personal bond during this phase. The fact that you’re recognizing their personal milestones automatically makes you appear less as a transactional business and more as a partner in an ongoing relationship.

Creating your Delight campaign

Your Delight campaign will involve similar asset types and steps as your offer campaigns in the Convert phase, but your audience and tone for the offer will differ.

The core of the funnel involves a five-part email series using the same five themes as the offer funnel discussed in the Convert phase: personal gain, FOMO, logic, “are you still?” and “have you yet?” Those emails will direct customers to your sales page where you’ll expand upon the benefits of the offer and include your order form or a link to your order page, then send them to a thank you page and deliver their newly purchased upsell item.

Delight campaign messaging

When crafting your email and sales page messaging, employ these concepts that are unique to upsells and cross-sells during this phase:

Address their status

It’s crucial that you make the offer personal by acknowledging that you know who you’re talking to, are aware of their stage of consumption, and are offering this based on their preferences.

You can do this simply through phrases in your emails such as “You’ve been using our product for a month now …” or “You’ve completed your first level of membership …” This type of language also serves to make your customers aware that they’re part of a special audience receiving an exclusive offer.

On your sales page, use a PURL to include their name and make it clear that this offer is only for long-time customers. You can even incorporate the fact that you appreciate their loyalty and that this is an exclusive offer for customers.

Remind them of your value

Because you’re asking your customers to make an additional purchase from you, it’s important to reiterate what they’ve gotten from you so far. They may not quite realize all the benefits they’ve received or assessed their progress since their purchase, so this is a good opportunity for you to remind them.

Your emails might subtly reference the stage of consumption they likely are in: “Using our wedding planning guide, you’ve simplified the often overwhelming tasks of determining your budget, your wedding theme, and your colors.” This also serves to set the stage for whatever you’re planning to offer next, such as your day-of wedding coordination service.

Your sales page can similarly acknowledge the benefits of your core product before selling them on what’s next.

Give something in return

The product or service you’re offering should be appealing in its own right, but there should also be a benefit to the purchase itself. For example, if you’re offering a bundled package, the benefit is the cost savings gained by purchasing in bulk. If you’re offering a one-on-one video consultation, do so at a 20% discount compared to the price you’d offer to a cold audience.

As with anything you’re selling, always be sure to explain the benefit and the reason they should purchase. Remember, all offers during this stage should be to support your customer in reaching the full potential of your product or service, so your content should position this offer within that context.

Now that you’ve learned about the Delight stage, you’re ready for Part 5: Refer.

The post Create Lasting Relationships and Delight Customers After the Sale appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

You’ve got a customer. Now what? The relationship doesn’t end when someone clicks the “buy” button; in fact, it’s really just beginning.

At the end of the Convert stage, you began transitioning into the Fulfill stage by delivering your newly purchased product or service, whether by email, mail or in person. Now it’s time to serve your new customers to the best of your ability, add more value, ensure their success with your product, and instill confidence in their choice to buy from you.

Succeeding at this step is the crux of your business; this is where you’re delivering on the mission of your company.

The Fulfill stage includes all funnels intended to manage onboarding and the initial client experience; delivering an incredible customer experience early on is critical for long-term retention. Although promoting paid upsells might seem to fit in this stage, that will come later.

Your first priority for new customers should be to encourage them to use the product or service they purchased and to take advantage of any free resources and services you provide so they can get the most out of their purchase. Offering these resources and staying in touch to ensure they’re satisfied with their purchase reiterates your value and sets the tone of your relationship.

Customer success consultant and author Lincoln Murphy wrote in his blog Sixteen Ventures, “The early days of your relationship with your customer are critical; whatever analogy you want to use (planting seeds, laying a foundation, etc.), just know that whatever happens in the first stage of engagement … really does impact the long-term growth of your customer as a customer.”

Investing in the initial success of your customers pays off later in the customer lifecycle: It not only keeps them coming back for repeat business, it inspires them to refer more customers to you. As Murphy wrote in another blog post, “You make sure your customers are successful and they’ll make sure you’re successful.”

On the other hand, if you lose customers at this critical stage, you’ve likely lost them forever. In fact, according to iperceptions, 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience.

Engineering your onboarding process

Because this phase is all about encouraging your customers to successfully use your product or service, you can consider someone “onboarded” once they are either getting value from the consumption of the product or service or, if your product or service is more complex or long-term, they see the value potential of their relationship with you.

“What this means is that you have to identify the point where they first get value — where they first start to achieve their goals,” Murphy wrote. “This is the time they first start achieving the things that are going to make sure that they’re on the road to their desired outcome.”

Once you’ve identified where your customers start seeing value from your brand, you can reverse engineer your onboarding process by determining what the customer needs to get to that point. If you have a membership site, is completing the first lesson going to give them a new perspective and, therefore, make them realize your potential and draw them in further? If you own a gym, is experiencing that rush of adrenaline and stress relief the thing that works for your customers, or is it losing a certain amount of body fat? Your communication and outreach methods will be focused on getting customers to achieve those milestones.

Customer feedback surveys

You can determine what this “Aha!” moment is by asking your customers via surveys. Surveys can give you insight into what your customers’ desired outcomes from your product are so that you can better understand their needs and build success milestones around it — as well as adjust your marketing if needed to speak to those desires.

This will set you up for success in later stages of the customer lifecycle. As Murphy states, “Keeping this ‘success milestone’ way of thinking after they become a customer — or are otherwise past the customer onboarding process — will allow you to surface upsell/cross-sell offers, as well as advocacy requests, at the perfect time so you’re more likely to get a positive result.”

Your survey can also measure the level of satisfaction your customers have experienced with your company and product so far — what they like or don’t like about your product and any specific needs they have that would help them in reaching their goals.

All of this information can support your understanding of how to enhance your onboarding process. If you use a marketing automation software to facilitate the survey via a form on a landing page, all the response data will be easily accessible and stored in your customers’ contact records so that you have it all in one place.

Types of onboarding funnels

Once you understand which milestones you’re aiming to get your customers to achieve, you can create your onboarding plan. The way you onboard a customer will also vary depending on the type of product or service you sell and your industry.

For example, a software company might offer an online training site with step-by-step videos on how to use specific features; a wedding planner might start with an introductory welcome call, and a massage therapist might send targeted emails with guidance on at-home stretches for muscle pain relief or tips for stress relief to get the customer started.

Here are details on six common ways to onboard customers:

Targeted follow-up emails: These emails are akin to the three bonus emails you send immediately after purchase. You’ll have a different follow-up funnel for each of your products or services, with related, value-add content in each. The content might include links to your blog articles, videos, podcasts, guides or worksheets. When choosing what to send for each customer segment, think about Amazon’s “if you like this, you might like …” concept, and apply it to your own content.

Product tutorials: If you’re selling a product or service that requires some light-to-medium instruction, direct your new customers to a dedicated product tutorial page post-purchase via a series of automated onboarding emails.

Training site: If your product is more complex, you can create a membership site to host a series of sequential lessons and courses aimed at bringing your new customers up to speed and using your product or service to its full potential. You’ll deliver login credentials to your new customers in an initial welcome email and encourage them to get started.

One-on-one onboarding call: Ideal for those offering personal or professional services or products with long-term usage, a phone call is a great way to make an initial connection and provide individualized guidance to your new customers based on their needs and interests. In your welcome email, you can prompt customers to schedule a call using calendar integrations in your marketing automation software. After the call, you can send a summarizing email with details on where they can go for more information.

Welcome call: A welcome call not only makes new customers feel appreciated, it gives them the opportunity to ask any burning questions about your product or service before diving in. This personalized attention starts the relationship on a positive note and might give your customer the extra boost to start using your product or service.

Order fulfillment: If you ship physical products, consider including instructions, a personalized message and/or a small gift to make customers feel special and encourage them to get started with the product. If you offer a digital product or service, you can still onboard customers via physical instructions or a welcome gift that supplements the service.

No matter which route you go, it’s common to begin with a welcome email. Your welcome email might include encouragement to your customers to join and introduce themselves in your Facebook community, links to follow you on social media so they stay in-the-know about your promotions, an introductory video from you or someone from your team, or links to an FAQ and contact information for your customer support team. Also, give them a heads up that you’ll be staying in touch with more information on how to use the product or related bonus content.

Creating your onboarding campaign

This onboarding campaign example involves three tactics discussed in this article — a one-on-one onboarding call, targeted follow-up emails, and a customer feedback survey — and can be applied to a variety of business types.

Here’s how it works: Once customers purchase your product, they receive a welcome email and then are sent three bonus emails over the following few days that provide useful content related to the product they purchased — perhaps educational content about how to get started or content on a related topic that further supports your expertise and value.

Customers will also be sent down a path to participate in an onboarding call with you or a member of your team. This is where you’ll welcome the customers, gain an understanding of their goals, provide personalized guidance to get them started, and answer any questions they may have.

Two weeks after purchasing your product, customers will receive a new client survey that seeks to understand how their experience has been thus far. You’ll use the responses to improve your onboarding process and, if you receive a negative response, a task will be triggered for you to call the customer to rectify the issue and bring the customer back on board.

Now that you’ve learned about the Fulfill stage, you’re ready for Part 4: Delight.

The post They Bought Your Product. Now What? appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The ability to keep leads engaged not only benefits you as a business owner, but it also makes customers feel more connected to your brand. In fact, the more engaged contacts are throughout the customer lifecycle, the more likely they are to become loyal to your brand.

According to research by Gallup, engaged customers tend to buy more and are more likely to tell their friends about your brand.

While creating an engaging customer experience for your brand does take nurturing over time, there are ways you can use automation to simplify the process. Here are five ways you can use a marketing automation platform like Ontraport to keep your contacts engaged at every phase of the customer lifecycle:

1. Retargeting: Attract phase

Before marketers were able to cookie site visitors’ browsers, any potential lead who opted not to fill out a brand’s web form, request a consultation or purchase a product was a lost cause. By adding tracking scripts to your pages, you can retarget your would-be lost opportunities on platforms such as Facebook, Google, Bing, Twitter, and more. This means you can show ads for your abandoned product or incomplete form to prospects as a reminder to come back and complete their purchase or opt-in.

While retargeting is especially useful for new leads who are not yet in your CRM database, you’re not limited to only retargeting new contacts. It also works for upsells and cross-sells later on in the customer lifecycle.

Some examples of potential pages on which to set up retargeting are:

• Webinar registration pages
• Appointment reminder ads
• Order pages (abandoned orders)
• Marketing emails or blog content
• Membership site course pages
• Event registration pages

2. Cold lead re-engagement: Convert phase

A good portion of leads who enter your sales funnel aren’t ready to commit to a purchase and may not be for some time. The nature of a long sales cycle might leave you with many disengaged leads. This is why continuously nurturing your leads to keep them engaged is so important.

In Ontraport, you can launch a lead re-engagement campaign that automatically identifies your cold leads and gradually regains their interest through a series of personalized, nurturing emails. Through the use of tracking pixels that you place on your web pages, Ontraport can detect when a contact hasn’t visited your website, bought from you, clicked on your content or engaged with you in other ways after a certain period of time.

Targeted to appropriate segments of your list, cold-lead nurturing ensures that you stay top-of-mind with your leads, pulling them back into your sales funnel with content marketing and other strategic calls to action until they’re ready to buy.

Here are a few examples of offers you can include in your own re-engagement campaigns:

• Free content such as existing ebooks or templates
• Contests or giveaways
• Discounts
• Live webinars
• Surveys
• Referral bonus

3. Product usage and customer service programs: Fulfill phase

Have you ever purchased a product or service and been impressed by the memorable level of care and attentiveness the brand gave you afterward? Companies like Zappos, Sephora and Amazon have mastered post-purchase engagement, and there’s a lot to be learned from their examples. The main takeaway? Customer relationships don’t end post-purchase; they’re just beginning.

There are many ways you can use your Ontraport account or marketing automation software to strengthen the post-purchase customer experience, including:

• Automated delivery or confirmation emails that fire immediately after purchase or opt-in
• Bonus content or offers that automatically send in the weeks after purchase
• Related upsell or cross-sell offers
• For a more complex product or service, automated invites to schedule onboarding calls
• Automated task reminders to follow through with any scheduled onboarding calls

If you’re looking for additional ways to give your customer service a boost, you may also want to consider:

• Creating a Facebook group to engage your customers
• Regularly replying to social media comments and shoutouts
• Replying to reviews on your product or service whenever applicable
• Customer service standards that the entire company follows

4. Cart abandonment: Delight phase

Statistics show that customers who have purchased from you before are likely to come back for more. Smile.io says, “After one purchase, a customer has a 27% chance of returning to your store. While that’s not a horrible return rate, if you can get that customer to come back and make a second and third purchase they have a 54% chance of making another purchase.” A great way to nudge existing customers who come back to shop on your site, but don’t follow through with their purchase, is to set up a cart abandonment follow-up campaign.

All you have to do is set up a messaging funnel in your automation software account that’s designed to encourage cart abandoners to return. You can use email, SMS or a combination of the two, and the messages should be spaced out over the course of three days. Consider the reasons your prospects may have abandoned their purchases. Maybe it was confusion about how to complete checkout, or maybe they didn’t feel secure giving you their information.

Your first message, to be sent within an hour of cart abandonment, should defuse these objections: “If you had trouble checking out or found something confusing, please contact our helpful customer support department. Click here to finish shopping.”

Your second message, to be sent on the second day, should create some urgency. Inform the shopper that their items are “on hold.” Consider including a deadline as a little nudge. “It looks like you have items waiting for checkout! Click here to finish your order before they sell out.”

If the sale hasn’t been completed by the third day, send one last message with a follow-up offer. This is your final chance to convert the sale, so make it something worthwhile such as free shipping with their order or a 20% discount on their entire order form.

Looking for additional ways to reclaim lost sales with cart abandonment follow-up? Here are a few examples:

• Retargeting: While this strategy can be used on existing customers, retargeting also opens the door for you to reach leads whose contact information isn’t yet in your database.

• Discount: Do your customers need the extra push to complete their purchase? Try offering them a personalized coupon code.

• Sales call: If you’re selling a higher-ticket item, picking up the phone and calling your cart abandoners could be your best bet. You can set your Ontraport account to drop these contacts into a lead router so your sales team can follow up.

• Downsell: Is high cost deterring your leads? If contacts abandon a cart full of your top-tier products, try offering them an entry-level version of those items or services whenever possible.

• Abandonment lightbox: Instead of waiting for your customers or leads to leave the page altogether, try adding a lightbox to your order page that displays on exit intent. In Ontraport, you can set lightboxes to appear the moment a mouse cursor charts a course for the exit button.

To build a cart abandonment funnel in your Ontraport account, you can use the free “Simple Abandoned Cart Follow-up” template in Campaign Marketplace. Simply fill in the blanks and publish the campaign.

5. Surveys: Refer phase

A survey is used to garner feedback with the goal to obtain testimonials or other valuable insights about your business from the perspective of your leads or customers. While it’s possible to reach out to your list one-by-one via email, as your business grows, that will become expensive and time-consuming.

An automated customer feedback survey created in your Ontraport account solves this problem. It opens a direct line of communication with your customers at scale using an email asking them to click to fill out a survey, which takes them to a landing page with a survey form.

By understanding exactly what your customers like and dislike about your product or service, you can begin to make improvements to better meet the needs of your customers — and attract new customers. You can also use the positive feedback as testimonials on your homepage or sales pages and on social media, paid ads, or even to help boost your SEO.

Here are two examples of automated feedback surveys you can create in Ontraport or your marketing automation platform:

• Service call feedback: Rather than calling clients for feedback a few days after a service call, add them to an automated funnel to handle the process for you. After the call, simply update your CRM with any necessary information and mark your service call task “complete” to trigger an automated email to your clients.
• Post-purchase: Drive customers to keep purchasing from you by delivering a post-purchase survey to their inbox complete with an incentive: 20% off their next purchase.
  

Have more ideas on how to keep contacts engaged throughout the customer lifecycle? Share them in the comments below.

The post 5 Ways to Engage and Re-engage Your Customers appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Did you know that 95% of text messages are read within three minutes of receipt, and 98% of SMS messages, in general, are read compared to 22.1% of emails? The engagement rates of all other cross-platform mediums combined don’t even come close. They’re not even in the same ballpark.

Text message marketing isn’t about just sending off a generic marketing message — there are a number of creative ways brands use texts, such as by offering coupons and promotions, providing customer service or important updates, and sending appointment reminders.  

After Ontraport Client and Spirepoint Real Estate President Paul Blacquiere incorporated SMS into his marketing strategy for his webinars, he not only got a 10% higher attendance rate, but he also found it opened up communication opportunities. “I got people who were texting me as if they were texting a friend saying, ‘Hey I’m running late,’” he noted. “I also found there were people after the webinar saying, ‘Is there a replay?’”

Paul isn’t the only marketer who has found success with this highly-engaging platform but, due to the intimate nature of SMS marketing, it’s easy to cross into unwelcome territory with customers or leads when you reach them on their personal phones. Here’s how to break into text message marketing without overstepping those boundaries.

1. Keep it brief

Brevity is your new best friend. Your standard SMS text message tops out at 160 characters; make that character limit count in the space allotted. Keep your outbound messages short and succinct, and make your purpose/motive clear. Leads and customers are easily turned off by wordy or ambiguous messages.

As with any marketing medium, you’re not going to get far without linking to your sales page. Here’s the problem: raw links in texts are unsightly. To remedy such a blemish on your message, use URL shorteners like Goo.gl or Bit.ly to save space when you must include a link. Shorteners compress long, convoluted URL links into sharp, functional snippets that don’t offend the eye.

Now, you may think: Why not tighten up my message with some shorthand texting lingo? While doing so does shorten your message, it can have a negative impact on your reputation. Use shorthand lingo sparingly and only when appropriate. As a business, you have an image of professionalism to maintain. Odds are, unless it totally screams your brand, not everyone you’re marketing to “gets” or tolerates your WTFs, LMAOs or OMGs. If you must use shorthand, keep it mainstream.

2. Make it personal

Have you ever received a text message from an unknown number only to follow up with, “Who is this?” You may even be conditioned to ignore texts from unknown numbers entirely. If subscribers can’t identify you by the content of your message alone, you’ve already lost them.

Your subscribers should never have to second guess who’s texting them. Be sure to announce yourself by including your brand name in every outgoing message. Your goal is to build a relationship and establish familiarity. We recommend using a conversational tone when writing, avoiding pretentious words.

If your SMS service offers merge fields/personalized data fields, use them. A personal touch enhances the customer experience, making your business feel like a close friend.

3. Include a clear call to action

Every message goes out with an intention. In SMS, this translates into a line of text prompting a subscriber’s next move. Typically, an SMS call to action asks the recipients to use a coupon code for their next purchase, urges them to share something with friends, or even simply reply YES to confirm their attendance at your event. Whatever the purpose, make your CTA the focal point of your message.

Your call to action should be to-the-point and simple. Complex, unclear texts don’t sell products. Similarly, make sure what you’re asking them to do can be completed in as few steps as possible. The more steps you add, the higher the drop-off. If you’re gifting subscribers a coupon code, be clear as to where/how to redeem it. If your goal is to get them to reply to a shortcode, say so.

4. Illuminate the exit door

There’s comfort in spotting an exit door anywhere you go — the more noticeable, the better. Your SMS subscribers will appreciate this. Make it obvious to your text recipients that they have the option to opt out of your SMS campaign at any time. It’s a one-step process. Be sure an opt-out shortcode is visible, in all caps, at the end of your outgoing campaigns every so often.

Some SMS marketing providers include opt-out instructions by default while others require you to enter it at your own discretion.

5. Tack on a disclaimer

No two mobile phone plans are the same. Some offer free text messaging; some charge a flat rate, while others charge per SMS message. You might think it’s implied; you might assume everyone should already be aware but, for the sake of transparency (and to avoid any backlash), it’s a smart marketing practice to tack on a disclaimer at the end of your outbound text messages reminding recipients that standard rates may apply.

Have you adopted SMS into your marketing? Share your strategies with us and our readers below in the comments.

The post The Do’s and Don’ts of SMS Marketing appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

New business owners often set out with one immediate goal in mind: to gain customers. Once you have perfected your product or service, the next step is to acquire and retain a loyal clientele in order to create a viable business. But the transition to recurring sales typically isn’t easy.

Before you can generate sales, you’ve got to spread awareness of your business. It’s rare for someone to buy a product or service upon first learning about its existence, so your first step is to capture an audience of prospects and introduce them to your brand, your offerings, and why they might need you.

The purpose of the Attract phase of the customer lifecycle is to initiate new relationships and build trust with potential customers before you nudge them along to a sale. It’s also the stage where you’ll begin to understand your leads’ interests so you can segment them, setting you up to market to them in relevant ways throughout the rest of the customer lifecycle. How do you initiate those new relationships? By providing something of value upfront in exchange for something small, such as their email address, so that you can remain in touch.

Provide value up front

To capture the attention of people who are likely to be interested in your core product or service, create content or small freebie products that are related to it. For example, a career coach might develop an in-depth digital guide about how to choose a career that fits each personality; an owner of a membership site for piano lessons might offer a free introductory video lesson, or a fitness center owner might offer a free trial membership.

These highly tempting offers are meant to entice prospects enough that they’ll provide their email address for it. In fact, these items are purposely “gated,” meaning prospects cannot access them without first providing you with their email address (or social media login, phone number or other contact information if you’d like) so that there’s a mutual exchange. For most, submitting an email address in exchange for something free is low risk, big reward. It’s a simple transaction that serves as a top-of-funnel lead generation tool for you and an actionable perk for your new leads. The most effective free value offers excite your leads and give them something they can consume or redeem instantly; the value should be provided within five minutes. 

Likewise, the content of your free item should be extremely useful, putting your best foot forward. After consuming it, your prospects should feel as though they would have paid for it and are surprised that you offered for free. That’s how trust begins to build: Your prospects now see you as an authority in a niche they care about, and they see that you’re actually providing something with their best interests in mind.

Using value offers to segment leads

In addition to gaining trust and authority by offering valuable items for free, these offers serve to qualify and segment your leads. Those who are interested in the free content you’re providing are likely also interested in your core product or service, automatically qualifying them as viable prospects. This is a much more efficient and inexpensive way of obtaining leads who are likely to buy than by simply mass advertising for your main product.

Taking it a step further, these offers are your first step in creating segmented contact lists to market to. If you use multiple value offers to cover a variety of aspects of your product or service, you can segment your leads and place them on specific follow-up campaigns to ensure you’re providing them with what they’re interested in within your offerings.

For example, a professional photographer’s value offer might be a free one-hour photo session for engagement, newborn, or professional photos. Those who opt in for the engagement photos will be placed on a campaign offering wedding photography services, while those who opt in for the newborn photos will be offered a photo shoot for the baby’s first birthday, and those who received a professional portrait will receive offers for additional photography for their business website.

Types of value offers

Guides or templates: Guides, also commonly referred to as ebooks, and templates, such as worksheets and checklists, are content pieces that provide in-depth information on a specific topic. It’s important that a guide delves into individual topics as opposed to encompassing a broad area. If a guide is too general, prospects might not find the detailed information they’re looking for or not get enough value out of it.

Free trials: Offering a free trial of your product or service is a great way to show prospects what you have to offer without requiring a full commitment. Free trials are especially common in the fitness and software industries and can also be applied to any type of membership site.

Free consultations: If you’re a personal service provider or consultant, offering a free initial consultation is an ideal way for your potential clients to get to know you and for you to understand their needs. Giving a short period of your time, such as 15 or 30 minutes, could go a long way in building a long-lasting relationship.

Webinars: A webinar is another way to provide guarded content geared toward a specific audience. A webinar can be a live broadcast where a member of your team leads a workshop, discussion or educational course, or it can be a pre-recorded video that is emailed to the prospect after they have opted in.  

First purchase discount: Offering a discount in exchange for joining an email list is a common practice among retailers and can be applied to any business, especially for an entry-level product. You can then nurture the lead over time into a purchase of your core product.

Quizzes or surveys: Online quizzes are very popular and their results are often shared via social media. Using quiz apps such as Interact, LeadQuizzes or DilogR, you can post quizzes on your blog or homepage to encourage visitors to give you their email address in exchange for the results.

The Attract funnel

Once you’ve got something of value to offer, you can create an entire funnel around promoting it, receiving opt-ins for it, delivering it, and then following up with your new leads.

Here’s the overall flow of the funnel:

Spark interest

You’ll start by drawing prospects toward your free value item, commonly via Facebook or Google ads as well as through links and pop-ups on your website or blog that send visitors to your opt-in page.

If you’re using Facebook ads, creating Facebook audiences based on the interest and demographic data stored in Facebook is one way to target those who might be interested. However, to reach a warmer audience, you can use Facebook’s tracking to retarget anyone who has visited your website, blog or other ungated online content.

Retargeting campaigns are based on the idea that someone who’s already shown interest in your ungated content is more likely to opt in for your free value offer on a similar topic than someone who doesn’t know who you are or hasn’t visited any of your pages. Facebook’s Pixel tracks visitors to your pages and ties their data to any known Facebook accounts. You can set up your Facebook admin account so that certain ads are shown to people based on the pages they visit. To learn more about Facebook Ad retargeting campaigns, check out this article.

Draw them to the free value offer

When your prospects click on your Facebook ad or your other promotions, they’ll be taken to a landing page. This is where you’ll further sell your item and encourage visitors to fill out your opt-in form, thereby providing their email address and being added to your Ontraport database in exchange for your offering.

Here are some quick tips for your landing page content to increase your odds of capturing the opt-in:

• Grabbing headline: Identify your target’s pain point or desire and frame your guide as the solution to that problem.
• Brief content description: Provide an enticing yet brief overview of what your lead can expect in your lead magnet.
• Opt-in form: This is the most important element on the page. Make sure you are only asking your leads to provide the contact information you need.
• Feature/benefit statements: Briefly explain the tangible things that your leads are going to get from your content. Include at least four feature statement bullet points.

After filling out your form, your lead should be directed to a thank you page that not only shows them appreciation for their engagement but also provides more value through additional content. Your thank you page should also direct them to check their email for the link to download their lead magnet or otherwise explain how to access it.

Deliver the goods

Next, you’ll provide the free value content to your new lead. Note, if your free offer is a piece of downloadable content, it’s important not to include the content on your thank you page, or your leads might provide you with a fake email address just to access it. Instead, deliver it through an email to the address they provided. Your delivery email can either include a download link or direct them to the webpage where your content lives.

Here are some tips to keep in mind with your delivery emails:

• No raw links: Do not include a raw link within the email; use either hyperlink text or a button. This will ensure that your delivery rates stay high.
• Whitelist instructions: To make sure that your contacts receive future emails in your funnel, include instructions on how to whitelist your email address.

Send them bonus content

After your delivery email is sent, your lead should immediately be placed on a bonus funnel. This bonus funnel is a three-day email funnel that sends them additional (and related) free content, such as blog articles, podcasts, videos or other content your team has created.

Just make sure that the content is relevant to the topic that they initially opted in for; this is a prime opportunity to provide segmented follow-up content to show your new leads that you know what they’re interested in and are speaking directly to them.

If you’re an Ontraport user, an Attract campaign is already built for you and ready to use for free. Simply upload it to your account from the Campaign Marketplace and add your content.

Now that you’ve learned about the Attract stage, you’re ready for Part 2: Convert.

The post The Secret to Gaining and Retaining Leads appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.