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Creative Ways to Engage Employees and Boost Performance

Every time you hire a new employee, you spend money on the hiring process and lose productivity during training. The most financially sound businesses are those that have low turnover and make infrequent new hires. In order to be this company, you must retain employees, which means keeping them happy and encouraged. Engage employees in a variety of ways to keep them involved in the company and boost their work performances.

Keep Work Fun

A company’s employees are part of a team, but with cubicles keeping them pinned up all day and departments segregated in different areas of the building, it may be difficult to feel that team spirit. Help employees see the bigger picture by getting them together frequently with company activities, like monthly or weekly games or scavenger hunts. Encourage participation by giving prizes to winning groups.

Ask for Advice

To make employees feel like part of the team, prove they are part of the team. The execs may know the ins and outs of the business, but employees often come up with solutions that those locked away in their offices may not see. When changes need to be made to company operations, go to employees for their thoughts. Keep an open-suggestion policy where any new idea is considered. When employees have a say in the running of their own departments, they’ll be looking for ways to improve the process every day, upping employee engagement.

Rewards

Nothing makes employees go above and beyond like rewarding them for that effort. Make the workplace one of recognition by handing out award certificates on an annual, or even monthly, basis. Rewards don’t have to be for common categories, like attendance and sales volume. Think high school yearbook, and consider awards for “best hair” or “best potluck dish.” Do it until every employee has awards peppering their workspaces.

A Word on Bonuses

When you do give out official performance-related rewards, keep them in line with your employee’s purpose. Remember, employees come to work each day to make a living, so rewards that acknowledge that have the most impact. If the company has the funds, immediate rewards like cash bonuses or trips have the most impact on employee engagement. If a company is growing, stock options may be more budget-friendly, and still offer financial incentive. No matter what business you’re in, you must engage employees to keep the workplace from becoming a place of tedium and dread. Create a workplace to which employees don’t mind coming, foster relationships within the company to create loyalty, and reward employees for their hard work to keep them on the team and working for the good of the company for years to come.…

Marketing Automation – Fixing Your Follow-Up Failure With Technology

People buy when they’re ready to buy – not before. 67% of the prospective buyers that tell you no today will be ready to buy in the next year. ~ Gartner Research. So how will you be ready when they are? By following up, that’s how. Sadly many businesses do a poor job of marketing follow up, and in this article you’ll learn the startling facts of just how bad it is, but more importantly you’ll discover just how easy it is to fix your follow up failure and double your sales. 

Why companies don’t follow up:

They forget

They focus ONLY on hot leads

They let unconverted leads languish

They think prospects will call back

They don’t want to be pushy

AND they don’t realize the potential impact follow-up can have on their profits!

While 67% of prospects will be ready to buy within 12 months, 80% will buy within 2 years. Will you still be there when they’re ready to buy?

5 Common follow-up mistakes:

No follow-up at all

Weak follow-up

Irrelevant follow-up

Jumping to a sales pitch

No centralized database

How many touches does it take to close a sale?

2% close on the 1st touch

3% on the 2nd

4% on the 3rd

10% on the 4th touch

81% close on (or after) the 5th touch!!!

When do most companies stop following up?

48% quit on the 1st touch

24% on the 2nd

12% on the 3rd

6% on the 4th

10% quit on the 5th touch

Imagine what would happen if you simply followed up with even 20% more of your leads. Can you see what this would mean to your profits. Remember, there is no additional costs in lead generation, this is merely “harvesting” more of the profits by using follow-up marketing.

Here’s a typical follow-up sequence for new prospects:

Send the info they requested immediately. (email)

Send a letter with more valuable info. (letter)

Call to see if you can answer any questions. (call)

Send a value-added email with tips/education. (email) 

Send a promo offer to stimulate action. (email) 

Follow-up with a limited time promo. (postcard)

Call with a final reminder for promo. (voice broadcast)

Offer subscription to future marketing offers and other value added content. (email)

Of course you can get as creative as you want with your sequences, but the above example should get you started.

Fix Your Follow-Up Failure Plan

Get organized – tag customers and prospects. Segment your data.

Integrate your shopping cart and e-commerce into a follow-up system

Add upsells to the follow-up process

automate process to save human interaction and avoid errors.

Offer free report or other high incentive optin piece

Add an automated affiliate referral program

Fixing Your Follow-Up Failure 

Converts more leads into sales

Gets repeat sales from customers

Grows your business without growing your staff

If you want to learn more about fixing your follow up, I’d encourage you to watch the full video presentation …

Using Social Media to Connect With Customers – Meet Them on Their Turf

It’s not all fun and games when it comes to social media. The intention of social media, initially, was to bring people together in a social environment, allowing friends and family to associate online in a way that gives everyone the opportunity to communicate. However, this type of environment can do a lot more than just let friends chat with each other. It is also a great vehicle for businesses to connect with people on their own ground. Much like taking a business promotion to the general public, using social media to connect with customers is a great way to bring your business to a place where people feel comfortable.

Your business can have a Facebook page or a Twitter page where you can connect with customers on a friendlier and less professional basis. Using social media to connect with customers also gives you a forum to discuss the latest happenings, offer exclusive deals, and let people get to know your business on a personal level instead of always being professional about your operations. People like to know that they’re understood and appreciated, and social media is a great way for your business to show them just that.

It wasn’t long ago that people started noticing the website addresses on the bottom of every TV commercial, at the end of radio ads, and in other business advertisements and marketing campaigns. Today, it’s not uncommon to see a business promoting their Facebook page or their Twitter account, where anyone can become a fan or follow their business activities. A lot of companies even offer special incentives to people who visit their social media websites. This is a way to drive traffic and get people’s attention, and for now it is working.

If your business is looking for a better way to communicate with customers, It is a great alternative to traditional business marketing and communication. It allows you to get on their level, become a real person to them, and show them how great your business is without them feeling like they are even dealing with a business at all. All the benefits of this have made it a great tool for businesses that are looking to create a better relationship with customers. As time goes on and more people depend on this social outlets, businesses will continue to reap the rewards of using this to connect with customers.…

Are You Making The Right Use Of Marketing Automation Solution?

Marketing automation solution is often looked upon as the panacea to all the sales and marketing woes. To most of the marketers it is like a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of solution that can move the leads swiftly through the sales cycle with no extra effort required. But unfortunately what they don’t realize is that using the solution alone will not suffice. In fact most of the organizations fail to realize the full value of the investment made in marketing technology. The truth is that if you are going to depend solely on an automated tool to nurture your contacts and leads, you are in for some big trouble.

Using barely marketing automation solution to grow contacts list

One major disadvantage of using only an automated solution for the purpose of adding new contacts to your database is that you will run out of people you can direct your marketing efforts to in a while. Generally, email marketing lists keep losing its relevance to some degree with every passing year, retaining on average 75% of the members after each year due to overturn at companies. With people swapping jobs and companies undergoing management changes, the current email addresses no longer remain valid after sometime. As a result you end up having a pretty deflated email marketing list that you cannot rely on to generate leads.

Merging marketing automation solution usage with sales efforts

Marketing automation in itself is not bad. But you need to concentrate on filling the top of your sales funnel by luring and adding net new contacts to your database while optimizing marketing automation efforts simultaneously. Practicing inbound marketing is the best way to achieve your target. You can create interesting and search engine friendly content that addresses your prospects’ needs and queries and use social media to promote that content and extend your reach. Convert the visitors into prospects or leads using proper call-to-action and land pages. They will make up for the 25% of members that you lose to list expiration each year.

Using marketing automation solution in all its complexity

Even if you are focused on growing your email marketing list alongside the automated solution usage, unfortunately, most organization fail to make optimum use of marketing automation solution; barely leveraging the complex features like lead intelligence, contacts’ behavioral traits, etc that can be utilized to plan and craft segmented and personalized marketing campaigns. Rather, they go with a one-size-fits-all approach that results in a series of spam mails that lack targeting. And this is mainly due to dearth of integration between their marketing channels.

Conclusion

Marketing automation solution is a crucial element for every organization to grow market share. If the marketing automation solution, marketing database and marketing analytics tools are properly integrated you can easily segment your communication in the best possible way to address your contacts’ needs and interests. So what you need to do is include technology marketing into …

Article Marketing Automation Review

Article Marketing Automation (AMA) is probably the best tool when it comes to getting a bunch of valuable links to your site and boosting your rankings. After years of experience on the internet and possibly testing all the different kinds of links building I came to the conclusion that nothing comes close to what this system has to offer.

So what it comes down to is the fact that Article Marketing Automation does indeed work and it is certainly the best link building tool available on the internet if you use it correctly.

So what is AMA?Well it is a blog network consisting of over 10 000 blogs where you can submit your article, choose your category and your article will then be distributed to the other blogs in the network. These 10 000 blogs are also targeted to your niche as you can choose the categories where your article should be posted.

You can also get other people to submit their content on your site. All you do is enter your blog’s details, choose your category and then you will get content on a daily basis, which you can approve or reject.

But what makes AMA unique?The anchor text is placed in the content and not in a resource box below the article. So that means that you will get a much better click through rate on your articles.

You can send your articles to all the sites in the network. In the old days you would send one article to hundreds of article directories and hope for a lot of back links to your site. But the problem with this is, because of the duplicate content, most of them will fall under Google’s supplemental index so that means only one or two links will actually count. But when you do it via article marketing automation then every link will count as a valuable link as you will get your article published on a site that is relevant to the theme of your site.

The articles are also distributed over time so it looks much more natural to the search engines.

Now for the resultsIn only four months of using the AMA system I’ve seen much more traffic coming into my sites and I already have first page rankings for almost every niche that I enter. And all this has been achieved by using AMA and some other techniques where I basically just build more value to the links that’s coming in from the AMA system. With one of the niches I entered I had 3 results on Google US for my main keyword and that’s only one of the keywords. So this proves that this system works!

So should you sign up for article marketing automation? Most definitely yes! If you don’t then you are probably missing out on the most effective link building tool on the internet.…