Category: General Article

Marketing Automation Today

The world of marketing is complex enough; add to it the intricacies of its activities and the tremendous amount of data involved, the whole thing is simply astounding. With the advent of advance automation technology, the monotonous tasks are greatly reduced with the help of intelligent software. Marketing Automation endeavours to greatly improve productivity and efficiency. First and foremost it automatically handles the tedious tasks that normally drain marketing personnel. Marketing covers a wide range of components that it seems just humanly impossible to maintain a high level of efficiency over a long period of time. Marketing Automation is designed to address the issue of flagging competence; and aims only to improve the effectiveness of every activity to ensure the sustainability of a healthy business organization.

For an organization to envision growth and stability, it has to invest in marketing its products or services. They implement these by aggressively coming up with ideas of different marketing strategies and marketing campaigns. The result is a scary combination of huge amount of data and terrifying tasks. It is where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation will sort out the necessary data for detailed assimilation. Then it will make an elaborate profile on the potential clients and initially categorizing them by priority.

Marketing Automation is also heavily used in launching marketing campaigns through the web. It is such a very powerful tool in using the internet media as launching pad of these marketing activities. It is widely used to bring about adequate consciousness regarding the products or services of a particular company. These are implemented by making use of the email technology or taking advantage of the popularity of the social media. There are softwares that are designed to automatically send a valuable advertisement through an email and some even invade social media sites for a greater marketing access for the users. This scheme for sure increases the market range of these products or services.

Marketing automation will be of great use if you intend to increase your sales revenues. The ease to which you will achieve your goals will dramatically influence the growth of your organization. Marketing is such a competitive field; the most astute wins. With the use of this automation, you can amplify your marketing strategies which will apparently result an astonishing success.

Marketing automation is also capable of deriving a detailed analysis on the trend and tendencies of the potential and current clients. They can formulate a practical idea based on the given information and therefore craft an effective marketing plan. This is such a great help for the marketing personnel. Thorough information is a very potent tool in the field and will determine the success of the sales team.

There are so many softwares now that amplify the principles of marketing automation. Some of it are considerably expensive. You have to be able to identify your specific needs before you consider subscribing to any of these softwares. Migrating to an automation system is not an …

Understanding Marketing Automation Software, Email Marketing Software, and Customer Analytics

Using marketing automation software can be a beneficial thing for anyone wanting to streamline their business. Marketing automation technology can help take things such as understand customer analytics that would have to be performed manually much more automated and quicker allowing you to spend time on more important tasks. Marketing automation is best achieved through the use of email marketing coupled with a sales process in order to reach a wider audience of customers.

When it comes to customer analytics you want to know as much as you can. It is wise to know all about the spending patterns of your customers as well as potential future trends that may affect your business. A big part of marketing automation software is understanding customer analytics. This is because you can use this to help understand your customers and the profitability particular customers or demographics bring to you. Because if you understand who your customers are and who potential customers can be you can branch out with things like email marketing software in order to gain more customers. If you know who your customers are you can make sure that you’re going after all of the potential customers you could have been missing in order to achieve a higher level of success. Keep in mind that this can also help you from wasting your time in trying to contact those that are not within your range of customers, this way you can focus your energy on where you have been and will be successful.

What email marketing software does is send large bulk emails to potential customer in order to draw them in. This isn’t like spamming your customers, because if you use professional email marketing software the email you send out can be a simple thing such as notifications of sales or coupons and provide your customers with links to the products and services that they would be interested in taking advantage of. Email marketing has been used for a number of years by some pretty big name companies. It is a proven tool for success that can be used to draw people to your business. It is a good idea to have the email you send revolve around some new information or potential sales or products that are exclusive to your company in order to ensure the highest probability of success. Using your best judgment and solid business practices you can be sure to send out email only when necessary so your customers do not feel as though they’re being bombarded by your marketing.…

Automating Your Marketing Process

Lets start with a definition. To automate your marketing process means to simply have a documented process for this task to be completed effectively and efficiently. Now when starting out your marketing plan might change until you find the right marketing mix, but once you do find that right mix automate it.

So, here’s a few suggestions to help you get your marketing automated:

1. If you don’t already, learn to embrace technology. By embracing technology I mean regardless of if you sell online have a website for your business. Millions nationwide use the internet and more specifically the internet search engines when looking for their problem solver. I know when I’m looking for a product or service I take it to Google. So, when a potential client “Google’s” their problem you want to be sure to come up as their solution. So, DON’T miss out on valuable leads set up a website. I would also recommend having a twitter and/or Facebook page for your business as well. Twitter and Facebook are great promotional use tools for your business. You can use these tools to tweet/post specials, sales, updates, & coupons to millions instantly.

2. Have a lead capture system. Most potential clients won’t buy until they trust a product and/or service or they simply won’t buy until they are ready. So, for these reasons have a way that you can capture and store the details of those who visit and buy from your website or physical location. Capturing these details will enable you to build relationships, updates, and also do follow ups. When capturing these details you can also on your website or in store offer to the customer/potential customer the chance to sign up for free newsletters and to be sent promotional offers and etc. Be sure that when a customer signs up to send them a thank you.

3. Lastly, make use of auto responders. Auto responders are fabulous because they allow you to capture leads as well as manage and see statistics on your subscriptions and unsubscriptions. Also, with your useful auto responders you can automatically send or schedule to send messages, updates, newsletters, and etc. to every subscriber on your list or at a subscribers request. Remember automation is a good thing. Having automation in place for your marketing means less frustration, more time spent on other tasks, and better chance for business success because you are organized.

So, try automation NOW!…

5 Ways a Small Business Can Put an Automation Engine to Use in Their Email Marketing Campaigns

A huge marketing list chock full of customers does not always translate into repeat sales. In order to get customers to shop with you again, you must have a strategy that keeps them attentive, active, and engaged with your brand. A good automation engine can help your small business accomplish each goal, especially when using it for your email marketing campaigns.

1. Capture leads

A common feature of an automation engine is allowing users to capture leads from their website. This function typically integrates with the existing HTML forms on your site, collecting the data from leads and automatically sending it the destination of your choice, or the systems centralized database. Throw in an arsenal of lead management tools, and you have a solution that can be used to effectively track leads throughout the entire conversion cycle from prospect to customer.

2. Establish Relevance

When used effectively, an automation system will allow you to create one-on-one relationships with subscribers by ensuring that your communications are relevant. The technology makes it easy to employ the best practices of email marketing, providing a way to utilize segmentation, targeting, and event triggered communications to deliver content that it is the most relevant to the recipient. These solutions are increasingly proving to be quite efficient at engaging consumers.

3. Achieve Personalization

Aside from relevance, personalization is something all email marketers should strive for. It helps you stand out from the spammers by showing that your business has a human pulse and is not just firing blindly to the masses. Personalization becomes significantly easier to achieve when utilizing a fully integrated automation engine. Coupled with customizable email templates, rich, detailed profile data enables you to easily tailor your messages to the preferences of individual subscribers. There are even some systems that offer flexible batch signature rules that help you build trusting relationships with leads and customers.

4. Create Multi-Channel Campaigns

More small businesses are using automation engines to enhance their email marketing campaigns by integrating them with other communications channels. Most solutions allow you to reach out to clients and prospects via direct mail, voice messaging, and even fax. This gives your brand even greater reach by allowing your audience to communicate through their channel of preference. Furthermore, the ability to launch multi-media campaigns will help you enjoy an edge over competitors who are still confined to the email platform.

5. Analyze and Execute

Most automation engines provide analytics methods such as forecasting, dating mining, and market analysis, each of which helps the email marketer predict customer behavioral. This is in addition to opens, clicks, conversions and other standard metrics. The analytics data is provided to you in the form of comprehensive graphs, charts, and tables, making it easy to dissect the information and execute your campaign strategy accordingly. An automation engine is only as effective as the data it has to work with, so the more data …

How To Easily Avoid The Duplicate Content Ban Hammer

Duplicate content can be a serious problem for you because it can lower your ranking in search engines. Content that is not original will lower the value relevance of your site in the eyes of search engines, so your search engine position will likely suffer accordingly. Many web publishers do not intend to use such content but, unless your content is 100% original, you can get surprised.

Because there are millions of sites that are searched on the Internet, browsers quickly get aggravated by duplicate content, whether such duplication is intentional or unintentional. It can destroy any web site credibility and authority you may have in the eyes of your visitors. As they are searching they can easily see similar information in the description of your site as it appears in search results and they will pass you by because it does not offer something unique.

The first strategy to eliminate the trap of duplicate content is to create unique information yourself or hire writers. This content needs to be focused on your primary keywords. Otherwise, you are wasting time writing or money on ghostwriters. This includes creating a compelling description that surfers will see as they search for information online.

So, your main job should be to create unique information yourself or edit articles you pay writers to create for you. If you already have articles or content on your web site you need to run it through free online tools to check originality and make changes if needed.

Search engines like Google have “spiders” that crawl sites regularly and scan the content. These “bots” can identify copied or similar information and will penalize your site without any chance of appeal. Google will think you are a spammer even if that was not your intention.

One key is that the content of your site should have relevant and unique information to provide to your visitors. Get in the habit of creating unique information related to a specific theme or subject that will appeal to people interested in the subject. This will ensure that your site is highly regarded by visitors who may link to it and this gives you back-links that search engines love.

To make it easier for you, there are tools available to help eliminate duplicate content. These tools, like CopyScape (Google it), will show whether you have content too similar to other sites, particularly in articles, page titles, images, and other elements that can be found by searches on other sites.…

Whether you’re trying to increase your home’s value or simply beautify the place a little bit via a few needed improvements, you need to know what you are doing in order to avoid mistakes. This is the nature of home improvement work. It takes some skill to be a gifted carpenter. A handyman might not always know how to do home improvements. That is the main reason you should read these tips.

The more personal your renovations, the less likely it is that someone else will want to buy it for enough to cover the cost of the work.

An over-the-range microwave is a great way to save space in the kitchen. Most of these units have a recirculating air filter rather than an actual vent, so cooks that need strong ventilation should look elsewhere.

Paint stripes on your old walls prior to installing paneling! Regardless of the care you take when installing paneling, old walls have a tendency to peek through. To start, you can measure the places the sheets of paneling will connect.

Construction adhesive is great at stopping floor squeaks.

Consider radiant heat tiles if you’re revamping your flooring. These tiles use electricity to produce enough heat as well as providing a great looking floor. You can do this yourself if you have detailed instructions.This project can do yourself without any help.

Be sure to protect the floor while you paint. This will help ensure wet paint from damaging your carpet or floor. A cheaper way that this done is to layer old newspapers. Other options include a drop cloth or large plastic tarp; both are available at most home improvement centers.

Don’t get rid of bedroom doors simply due to them being dirty. Remove your door from the frame, and sand them down to the bare wood. Then buy any oil based paint of your choice and paint your door with a paint roller. For doors that you want to look new, consider changing your doorknobs.

The proper tools can make all the difference when working on a home improvement task. The right tools will help make the job is done right and done well. It also important that you know what the best way to use your tools properly.

Visit some open houses to find ideas of what home improvements you want to make. Lots of model homes are a great place to get good ideas.

Humidity caused by hot baths and showers can result in the growth of damage to a bathroom. Simply repainting over the bathroom walls doesn’t destroy the mold. You will need to be proactive to prevent mold from getting there in the first place. Put in a fan and make sure there’s ventilation.

Some home improvement projects are surprisingly simple and even fun. You may even think some projects are downright simple! But if you do not understand how to properly pull them off, you are going to cause a lot more harm than good in your home. You have …

Linking People, Ideas And Technology With Marketing Automation Solutions

Today’s marketers are using Marketing automation solutions to match buyer’s requirements, launch new activities and to direct the sales team to focus on leads and increase the ROI. The internet has changed the way buyers think. They dig out information on their own and decide when they are ready to. It is time for the shrewd marketers to join the bandwagon of inbound marketing and marketing automation solutions.

Why does my company need Marketing Automation Solutions?

There is too much data out there and managing it is getting challenging by the day. Information is power and tons of data is being exchanged daily. The marketing dept, the sales team, the customer service, everyone is using this information. But is it being used effectively?

Automation is filling the critical void faced by companies wherein there are separate tools being used for CRM, sales and marketing. With an automated platform these three can be integrated and the result will be a combined system that offers email marketing, web analytics, social media campaigns and content management.

Adopting effective Technology Marketing Solutions

Businesses are still scrambling to get their processes right. They lack in organization and planning. This is where Marketing Automation Solutions come handy and help business enterprises to streamline their marketing and sales function. Creativity and Innovation go hand in hand and help achieve maximum sales leads. Thus it provide a stable platform for the continuous changing marketing scenario especially for the B2B and B2C companies.

Every aspect of the business world has been digitized. E-commerce is being used for business expansion through various marketing tools like email marketing. This form of marketing is relatively cheaper and combined with automation; it can help enterprises to draft emails effectively.

Marketing automation solutions facilitate effective communication between the marketing and sales teams. Social Media Campaign, a part of an automated solution, is an equally powerful tool to acquire sales leads. This in turn will create a better ROI and a competitive edge for the companies.

How will the New Year be for Marketing Automation Solutions?

The marketing automation solution platform is going to gain immense popularity especially for the SME market.

It is expected that there will be a rise in the quality and number of features in the major marketing automation platforms in the coming year. The more the market gets competitive, the more the functionality will be sophisticated.

Conclusion

Thus an effective marketing solutions process can turn quality leads into sales. With an automated system, sales team can come up with better campaigning strategies and based on real data, the companies can gain greater control. Marketing automation solutions allow marketing to automate the most difficult part at the front end of the sales funnel so that qualified leads only make it to the top. These tools provide relevant marketing history to the sales teams so when they get in touch with the customer they are well prepared. And chances of a well prepared …

Article Writing – How It Can Help With Back Links

Apart from being an art, article writing is also a technique to draw online traffic. Articles need to be informative and well-written. Its purpose is to provide a means for expressing ideas and for informational communication. The sole intention is to engage the reader to click on the back link while informing about a service or product.

Article writing provides many advantages like increasing back links, link building, site traffic, and an effective way of making money online. It is considered to be a great marketing strategy to obtain free publicity and listings within search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and others. It is considered to be a popular and economical way of advertising exposure and website promotion.

What should be the features of an Article?

Construction of an article involves the blend of information and marketing. The five essential components of an article are title, introduction, body, conclusion and resource box. You should keep in mind that the title must be attractive and include the primary keyword. The brief description of the article and a hint to the conclusion should be contained in the introduction. The body of the article comprises of the article’s main part, which also provides you the option of placing certain anchor text links. It is advisable not to place any anchor text link in the article body so that readers can complete reading the article. The conclusion should not only summarize the already discussed points but should also act as a prelude to the resource box. The resource box is in reality the author’s bio, which should be written in a modest manner with the HTML tags that form the back links.

Specific keywords should be used in the articles. As per the requirements of a search engine, the content needs to be revolved around a theme and should be interrelated. For attaining your website’s credibility and exposure, you need to submit articles to various related newsletters and article directories. At the time of submission, the website’s URL must be provided and the readers should be invited to visit the website.

Developing quality back links via Article writing

From various popular websites, back links can be earned to your site via article writing. Various articles on innumerable topics are contained within the article directory. The republishing of your articles by relevant websites can lead to the attainment of many quality back links. Your article can be liked and posted by web publishers on their websites. Though the publishing can be done for free, the publishers are required to copy the author information at the articles’ end. By this process, you are provided with back-links from their websites that offer exposure of your website and help in driving traffic to it. The modified versions of the same article in various other directories will ensure numerous more links. More number of links will ensure more readers or visitors of your website.

Readers reading the article can …

Marketing Automation Software For Huge Success

Today everything is available online. Business organizations are going online and of course your customers are online. So, if you have a business and do not market it online then you will be losing the competition and will left behind in the race.

In such a scenario, when everyone is online, if you do not have an effective online marketing strategy then of course, no one will know you and, hence you can not do business. So, online marketing is to be done will full force. There are a lot of methods that cold be used to market your business online. It includes email marketing campaign, business ads, article marketing, optimizing your website to be ranked in top searches of several search engines and a lot more. It is true that no single technique could sort out your problem and you have to use multi techniques to stay ahead of your competitors, especially when it is the case of online marketing.

So, what is the key to gain successes in marketing the business online? Well the answer to this question is applying several online marketing techniques as we discussed above or you can choose an alternative. So what is that alternative? The answer is an integrated software that could take care of all your marketing needs. There are a lot of marketing automation software available in the markets that provide instant marketing solutions for your business automatically. Such software are best used for all kind of business online. If you have just begin with online business or have a small business which is not enjoying good profits then such software is a must for you.

Marketing automation software are designed especially to cater business marketing needs that includes

1) Marketing your business or products.

2) Generating leads to your business website.

3) Increasing sales.

4) Attracting new customers / target audience / potential customers.

5) Retaining and developing new clientele.

6) Branding your business organization, etc.

The functions listed above are a difficult and individual task in itself. You have to focus and take necessary steps to attain the objectives given above. If you have a small business or do not have a team of professionals then attaining the objectives listed above is most difficult for you. Some small business owners get stuck in fulfilling efforts for these objectives and get unable to focus of their business.

Online marketing is not an easy task. Even if you have technical knowledge of technologies and facilities available online, you won’t be able to achieve the top results. For example article marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. are few fields that requires professional.

Marketing automation software integrates client relationship management; bulk emails or email marketing campaigns, ecommerce solutions / gateway, etc. Such piece of software has a database management system that allows you to store and manage details of your clients or prospective customers.

It is better that you go for such automated software rather than purchasing different software …

Customer Care Through Social Media

We explore how you can harness social media to enhance customer experience

In 2005 when Jeff Jarvis wrote of the ‘Dell Hell’ in his blog, the company retaliated with ‘We do not respond to customer complaints through blogs’. Dell was criticized for their ‘look don’t touch’ policy when it came to blogs. Today, Dell has a Direct to Dell community which features blogs by its officers, forums and even customer support. Dell’s also on Twitter and Facebook, out to solve client issues. Many big brands including Starbucks, HP, Comcast, Ford are using social media for customer service. It’s safe to say that the customer service canvass has been repainted thanks to the social media. Presenting a few tips that will help you jump the bandwagon of social media customer service-

1. Listen-browse around social media sites. Have your eyes and ears open for what people have to say. Before you jump in to defend your brand, listen and understand what the customer’s saying.

2. Act-so, now you know what’s really bugging your customer. This is the time to act. I was surfing the net and came upon a blog where the blogger said that he hated HP. As I scrolled down the comments section, I noticed that one of the HP guys had responded, ‘Sorry that you had a bad experience with us. Can we touch base and discuss this?’ Sometimes, hapless customers dash off complaints and type out all their frustrations onto their blog/Facebook page. Once they get it out they’re generally much calmer and would be willing to speak. Or may be they just wanted to be noticed so that their problem can be solved. So go head and start acting the way that helps solve their issue.

3. No scripting- be yourself on your blog/Facebook/Twitter interactions. Do not, and I repeat, do not use scripted answers. Remember your clients should know that your company cares. They are not looking for an automated response.

4. Don’t ignore-if you’ve got your brand on the social media, then you have to be diligent. Never ignore customers. Sure, you may have someone asking the simplest of questions, but they’re putting those questions to you because they need help. Revert at the earliest.

5. Don’t bluff-this rule applies to customer service through any channel, not just to social media. But bluffing on social media can prove even more costly. Your inability to stand good on your promise could be broadcast to net surfers around the world.

6. Ask-the best thing about social media is it puts you directly in touch with your customers. Use this powerful medium to talk to your customers. Ask them what you can do to make their lives simpler. That’s the easiest way to increasing customer satisfaction and them what they want! Check out Dell’s IdeaStorm page to see what I’m talking about.

7. Customers, your brand builders-Brand building has evolved. It’s not just about advertisements or discounts any more. Today, a brand …