Small and growing businesses need to squeeze every drop of value out of the technology they use. They typically have limited resources and need to maximize efficiency and productivity, often with a small team of marketers. Or even a single marketer running the entire show. Adhering to Marketing automation best practices is the key to growing a business.
What is the best time to send an email? The truth is: there is no universally accepted best time to send a marketing email. Your business is unique and different than businesses in other industries. The best time for you to send an email depends partially on the habits of your audience.
However, there is some reliable research available that sheds some light on the best day and time of day to send an email across industries. Let’s dig in and take a look.
You know those messages that appear on the lock screen of your mobile device? Perhaps alerting you to a new text message? Those are push notifications. They are used to share timely information with prospects and customers. You can leverage push notification messages on either mobile devices, laptops, or desktops to engage customers and prospects. With the use of a push notification service—such as provided in many marketing automation solutions—pushing out alerts is a breeze.
Email marketing remains a reliable and key element of any digital multichannel marketing campaign. Successful marketers still run email marketing campaigns for a host of reasons. They are used to nurture customer relationships and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. They are also effective in generating new leads and increasing demand for your product or service. And skilled marketers know that email marketing metrics are key to constantly improving and leveraging email marketing.
CRM became the largest software market in the world in 2017 and shows no signs of slowing down. The growing need for CRM for small business has generated fierce competition. Because of this, prices have dropped, and CRMs are now accessible to the smallest of companies. Freelancers are even using them, as there are free options out there.
Unlike early CRM systems, the CRMs of today often come with robust feature sets that include much more than simple capabilities to manage customer relationships. From marketing to customer support, the scope of features you can find in a CRM for small business has expanded significantly.
There is a restaurant near my house that I go to a lot. I almost always order the same dish. The first time I ordered it, I asked for it without two ingredients that normally come in the dish. I also added another ingredient that’s normally not included. The waitress brought it just as I had requested. Now, every time I arrive and order that dish, I don’t have to request it my special way. She just knows, and it always comes out right. She practices personalization when she delivers her service to me.
Despite what many believe, outbound marketing is still a viable option for moving leads through your sales funnel. There has been a recent push to focus more on inbound marketing, and inbound is certainly effective.
However, inbound also has its drawbacks. For example, it may generate demand for your content rather than your product or service. It is best used in conjunction with outbound marketing. You can’t rely on just one, so in order to convert more leads into customers, you need to leverage a combination of both. The question shouldn’t be “inbound vs. outbound,” but rather how can you combine the two to drive growth?
Customer relationship management (CRM) software has been around for decades. But over the past eight years or so usage has skyrocketed and today businesses of all sizes use a sales CRM. The technology has evolved considerably, but there remain several misperceptions about what a CRM solution actually is and does.
We’ll call them CRM myths. They are rooted in the early days of installed systems that large, enterprise level companies used. However, CRMs have come a long way and believing those misperceptions can have negative impacts on your business.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software houses all of the contact and prospect data that you keep stored. It is your one source of truth for driving prospect conversions and customer satisfaction. But a messy database with data integrity issues can do more harm than good, which runs counter to the purpose of having a CRM in the first place. Here we cover best practices for maintaining a clean CRM database, so you can maximize your ROI for the software you choose.
Email marketing still holds its place as a tried and true method for generating new leads and delivering news and other information to existing customers. These days, a vast majority of businesses use a marketing automation (MA) solution to create and distribute marketing emails. However, it can be difficult to keep things organized in an MA system, particularly if you’re sending a high volume of emails. Here we cover our top nine tips for keeping your email marketing efforts tightly organized and on track for success.
