Survey funnels are essential for businesses seeking to use customer feedback and insights to create more personalized customer experiences.

• A. No collaboration options
• B. Lack of customer support
• C. Too difficult to use
• D. Hidden costs
• E. Rising costs

• A = Collaboration
• B = Accessibility and communication
• C = Usability and self-taught use
• D = Transparency
• E = Value for money

These values can then be used as the basis for our segments, which will inform what content we direct leads to upon completion.

• A. No collaboration options –> Team Features Landing Page.
• B. Lack of customer support –> Testimonial showcasing your excellent support.
• C. Too difficult to use –> Page highlighting the ease of use of your product.
• D. Hidden costs –> Pricing page illustrating your transparent pricing.
• E. Rising costs –> Discount promotional page.

If you’re looking for a way to increase your conversion rate, creating a survey funnel is one of the best ways of doing so.

Not only can you learn more about your audience, you can deliver personalized content, build relationships, and boost sales.

If you think we’ve missed anything at all, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

The post Survey Funnel 101: 3 Steps to Optimizing Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on Shout.com.

• “Eye view is bought view”
• 4 SEO secrets to improve your strategy
  • 1. Don’t use black hat methods
  • 2. Content creation tips
    • Keyword optimization
    • Title tag and meta description
  • 3. Optimize your image SEO
  • 4. Partner with a good SEO agency
• Wrapping up

The world today is a far cry from the marketing world of just a couple of decades back. Thanks to the steady proliferation of smart devices and 4G technology, now more people have access to the internet.

Because of this, eCommerce is now one of the preferred methods for making purchases. As of 2021, the number of digital buyers is at 2.14 billion, making digital marketing strategies more important than ever before.

In order for customers to find you online, you need to optimize content to drive traffic to your website. This is only possible if you make it to the top ten list of the more popular search engines.

“Eye view is bought view”

This age-old marketing adage applies as much to online marketing as it did to POS (point of sale) products. In a nutshell, if you’re not in the top ten or on the first page of search engines, it’s not likely that prospects will be able to find you.

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into the picture. Take a look at these SEO secrets to help you improve rankings and increase organic traffic.

As a side note, it’s also important to consider the visual design of your content pages. You could have written the best article on the web, but if your design is poor then readers are less likely to find you trustworthy.

We’d recommend using a WordPress marketplace theme (if you’re using WordPress) or ensuring your design team sticks to your brand guidelines.

4 SEO secrets to improve your strategy

Here are four SEO secrets we’ve learned that can help you improve your strategy for optimizing pages and other content.

1. Don’t use black hat methods

Black hat marketing methods are those that try to trick or cheat search engines into ranking their content in the top spots. For example, when the net was in its infancy, content creators would stuff their pages full of keywords. To maximize the number of keywords they could get onto a page, they would add keywords in the same color as the page background (hidden content).

The thinking here was that search engines would still recognize the keywords (because of the page code), but visitors wouldn’t be put off by the stuffing.

However, that was then and this is now. Today, search engines are far more intuitive than they used to be. Google’s algorithm can easily detect keyword stuffing and hidden content, and no longer assigns any value to pages that operate in this way. It’s even possible to receive a penalty for these kinds of tactics, which will prevent your page from ranking in the top ten.

Take a look at these other black hat marketing tactics to avoid when creating content.

2. Content creation tips

Content marketing is an essential element of your SEO strategy. By creating pieces of content that are contextually relevant to your website (and your products/ services), you’re more likely to rank well. Beyond this, you also have to ensure that your content (whether it’s web pages or blog posts) is of high quality.

How do you do this? You provide value to your readers. Value can come in many forms, whether it’s advice, news articles, or guides, as long as your readers can take something useful away, you’re doing a good job.

If you’re coming up short on article ideas, the best thing you can do is ask your visitors what they’d like to see. Build a form and embed it on your blog to collect feedback on what they’d find value in.

Keyword optimization

When creating high-quality content, you also have to think about how to get it to rank well. There are a number of factors involved in this, but the first thing you should think about is keyword research. This is the process of finding keywords relevant to the context of your website and creating content aimed at ranking for it.

When researching keywords, we recommend using an SEO tool like SEM Rush to find keywords with a high volume and low competition rate. You can then use filtering tools to find questions and queries related to the keyword which you can incorporate into your article.

This allows you to compete for SERP features, which are aimed at answering specific user queries and appear at the top of the first page.

Title tag and meta description

Your title tag is the title that appears in search engines for your article. This should be optimized with your keyword to encourage a good ranking, but it should also be enticing to search engine users.

This also holds true for your meta-description, which provides a snapshot of your content to search engines and users.

Make sure that you don’t overuse the keywords and just sprinkle the most commonly used ones liberally over your site’s pages.

Always remember that excessive use of the same keywords can lead to a negative impact on your ratings on the search engines. For more similar tips, you can contact an SEO Consultant to give you all the helpful hints.

3. Optimize your image SEO

Any page that has visual cues such as pictures and videos will likely rank higher in search engines. This is because they usually provide more context and information than text-based content.

To fully optimize these elements you need to include the keywords in the file name, image title, and alt-tag. Doing so will count towards your on-page optimization and also enable you to rank for keywords in image searches.

4. Partner with a good SEO agency

You should also consider collaborating with a reputable search engine optimization agency.

These give you access to SEO specialists who can help you with content creation, link building, and improving your user experience.

Find the right agency such as Toronto SEO company that will help you to get ahead of your competition.

Wrapping up

Getting your SEO right enough to get promising results is not rocket science. As long as you’re keeping your content relevant and up to date, you should start seeing positive results. If you have any SEO secrets, get in touch and we’ll add them to this article!

The post Grab Your Customers’ Attention with 4 SEO Secrets appeared first on Shout.com.

• 9 steps for setting up a product marketing strategy
  • 1. Know the market
  • 2. Know your competition
  • 3. Create customer personas
  • 4. Storytelling around the product
  • 5. Define your objectives
  • 6. Social media marketing
  • 7. Content marketing and SEO
  • 8. Email marketing
  • 9. Keep track of success
• Wrapping up

Advertisement spending in the United States crosses the $250 billion mark easily.

Companies spend up to 10% of their total revenue on marketing.

It’s not surprising that marketing seems to be the major concern for most businesses.

Setting up the right product marketing strategy is not only about pouring money. It involves creating an effective strategy with both paid and organic engagement. Marketing in an increasingly competitive market can be challenging.

At the same time, we now have more marketing channels than ever. Let’s find out how to make the most of them and set up a product marketing strategy.

9 steps for setting up a product marketing strategy

We have compiled 9 steps to create a product marketing strategy. These steps deal with the fundamentals of product marketing, irrespective of your sector or niche.

Note that the specifics can vary greatly depending on the nature of the product you are promoting.

Here are 8 steps for setting up a product marketing strategy:

1. Know the market

Before your products launch, the first step to creating a product marketing strategy is to know your target market. The market here refers to the wider consumer base that your product targets. Depending on the nature of the product, the market research would vary.

For instance, the market research for a SaaS tool would be different from that of a general-use gadget. Those who want a better gadget will have different motivations from those who want a better SaaS tool. The same person can be the customer in both cases, but it doesn’t excuse their desire or need for wanting the particular product.

Market research is a long and tedious process. You have to go through data, trends, customer behavior analyses, case studies, and a lot more. The idea is to figure out what the market, as a whole, needs.

All the subsequent steps are predicated on market research. If you have done a good job with market research, the subsequent steps to set up a product marketing strategy would be much easier.

2. Know your competition

The very next step after market research is competitor research and analysis. Unless you have a ground-breaking product, other companies have already done what you are trying to do. There may be differences in the specifics, but it’s impossible to find no predecessor for your product category.

Competitor research involves studying competitor companies to figure out how they became successful. You should also look at companies and ideas that failed to understand why they could not succeed. Studying balance sheets and financial reports of competitor companies is also useful in understanding their business.

While it’s important to study other businesses, it is also important to not replicate them. When you copy-paste another idea, it doesn’t give anything new to the market. At the very least, a new idea should work on and improve an existing idea. This doesn’t happen when with ideas that are rip-offs of other businesses.

Another important category of competitor research is researching the types of products and services they offer. These products are not your direct competitors. Instead, their success boosts your success.

For example, a computer peripheral manufacturer would benefit from studying computer sales, the market for computer users, and other things related to the larger personal computer market.

It would also benefit you to study the product marketing campaigns that your competitors have run in the past. Doing so will give you an idea of what to do yourself, but also present an opportunity to improve on those strategies and develop your own product marketing plan.

3. Create customer personas

Customer personas (aka. buyer personas) are fictitious profiles of your customers which highlight their broad pain points, situation, financial background, social standing, purchasing power, and needs. While customer personas are fictitious, they are based on real-world facts and events.

Creating customer personas requires you to thoroughly study the market and understand consumer behavior. One of the easy ways to do it is through online surveys. Simply choose a survey maker, start writing your questions and share them through all your marketing channels.

A customer persona will help you answer tough questions about your target audience. To begin with, it’ll help you understand the pain points of the customer and what they need.

You would also have an estimate of how much money they are willing to spend on this particular solution. Once you have the answers to these questions, you can position and price the product efficiently and more easily identify your ideal customers.

It’s important to collect a wide range of responses in order to build thorough customer personas. If you’re struggling to do so, take a look at how to find more survey respondents.

4. Storytelling around the product

Even if you have a great product, it would not be successful if not positioned correctly. Positioning a product means relating the product to the customers’ lives. To do this, you must already have market research data and customer personas.

Storytelling is crucial for positioning. While the product itself has its innate value, it is the story around the product that makes it more desirable. It’s the same reason you would choose a Nike cap over a generic cap.

For example, the Nike cap has a story of sportsmanship, fitness, and health built around it.

Creating a story for a product also requires you to highlight the most impressive aspects of the product. It’s important to talk about your product’s USP and explain how it will fit the lifestyle of your target customer. Storytelling does not have any fixed rules – there’s room for innovation and experimentation at all times.

5. Define your objectives

How would you know that your product marketing strategy is successful if you don’t know what you are aiming for? That brings us to the need of having well-defined objectives for your product marketing strategy.

Product marketing objectives typically revolve around hard numbers and figures. But unlike sales numbers, marketing numbers may not always accurately depict the success or failure of a campaign. The number of likes you get on social media may not reflect the number of people who are willing to buy your product.

To arrive at a more accurate conclusion, it’s important to set qualitative as well as quantitative objectives. That tells you not only how many people know about your product, but also what people think about it. Qualitative objectives may include getting positive user reviews, good press coverage, and general goodwill towards your company.

6. Social media marketing

When we talk about marketing in 2022, there’s no way to not talk about social media marketing. Social media marketing is a subset of digital marketing, but it helps with brand awareness like nothing else. The right social media marketing campaign can make your entire product marketing strategy a success.

While there are many benefits of social media marketing, there are some challenges as well. The first challenge is saturation. Social media is replete with advertisements and paid content. With the average person seeing around 10,000 ads a day, it is very difficult to have a meaningful impact with social media marketing alone.

Social media marketing also requires you to be consistent. With social media management tools, being consistent is easier than ever. You also need to strategically use paid social media advertisements to see maximum results. Influencer marketing is yet another strand of social media marketing that can help your product marketing strategy.

7. Content marketing and SEO

Unlike ads, customers have a genuine interest in content, especially when it isn’t promotional. There are many ways of approaching content marketing, and it includes producing content that is purely promotional. But it’s the other side of content marketing that gives you better results.

Content marketing can be educational, entertaining, informational, and even intriguing. The idea is to convert your content into a separate product that customers can access without paying. The goal is to lead them to the product through your content and powerful calls-to-action. When executed correctly, content marketing can be much more productive than paid social media ads.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also relies on content, but it has several other factors. Nothing gives a product more authenticity and credibility than organic search results. SEO has both technical and creative elements. SEO is indispensable to consistently rank in search results and draw more customers.

8. Email marketing

Email marketing remains one of the best converting strategies for businesses. One of the best things about this strategy is that it allows you to market to new customers who subscribe to your email list and also to re-market to existing customers who you’ve already be in contact with.

For example, with existing customers you can up-sell products related to what they’ve already purchased, or even offer discounts and other product offers to increase retention and build loyalty.

That isn’t to say you can’t use these same strategies with leads, but there needs to be a line of communication between marketing and sales teams where marketing qualified leads are identified. Doing so will save the precious time and resources of employees and ensure you’re only pitching to people who’ve shown genuine interest in your products.

If you’re just starting out, here are some lead magnets to help you build an email list, so you can start marketing your product.

9. Keep track of success

The final step to setting up a product marketing strategy is to keep track of your progress. This draws back to the previous point of setting objectives. Once you have set the objectives, you also need to track whether you are reaching them or not.

Keeping track of success means a lot of different things. You can extract the data from your sales numbers, but you can also use Google Analytics for traffic, conversion rates, engagement, and other metrics. You can choose a simple spreadsheet-based approach or use specialized tools to evaluate different KPIs.

It’s crucial to measure success continually, and not at the end of the campaign. Doing so helps you understand what is working and what isn’t. With social media analytics, it’s easier than ever to keep a continuous tab of your progress.

Measuring success is a continuous process. While a successful product marketing strategy would be self-evident, tracking successes and failures along the way help us reach our goals faster.

Another way of tracking success is reviewing your customer service interactions. Creating a list of the most common questions and bugbears of your customer base will help you spot the weak points in your product or its delivery.

Wrapping up

The right product marketing strategy is the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful business. You can have a great product, but it wouldn’t get anywhere without marketing.

We hope these nine steps will help you set up an effective product marketing strategy.

Of course, there are more ways to market your product and increase your sales. Here are some digital marketing strategies for small businesses to help you achieve your revenue goals.

The post 9 Steps For Setting Up a Product Marketing Strategy appeared first on Shout.com.

• Top marketing strategies for technology companies
  • 1. Build a community
  • 2. Print a booklet & create an irresistible call to action
  • 3. Create a lead generation strategy with presentation templates
  • 4. Build a Brand for a Professional Audience
  • 5. Create Content that Customers Want
  • 6. Grow Your Company’s Reputation
  • 7. Use Paid Advertising
• Wrapping up

Technology companies operate in a space where there are a lot of possibilities. But, with so many choices, many of these companies feel lost. “What’s the right strategy to go for? How can we be sure that we’re heading in the right direction?”.

The right strategy depends on what your company needs and what resources you have. Even the most tech-savvy companies may not know the best marketing strategy for them.

Top marketing strategies for technology companies

Here, we take a look at some different marketing strategies for technology companies.

1. Build a community

The first marketing strategy for technology companies to consider is to build a community. You can build a community around your brand on social media. Every social media channel has space for a community.

For start-ups, a community of ideal customers is a great way to build a brand. Building a brand as a company known for great customer service is indeed the way to succeed with this strategy. This will also help you build a brand for a business audience.

You can do this by responding to all of the questions you receive on social media. You don’t have to give detailed, step-by-step instructions. Instead, respond to the customer’s question and show how you take pride in your job.

In fact, if you’re not in regular contact with your customers it may be time to review your customer communication strategy.

Customers are looking for ways to trust that companies are here to serve them, so showing a commitment to service will help you build a brand and a reputation as a trusted company.

Once you’ve built a community, you’ll want to learn as much as you can about them. Specifically, those who have already purchased your product or service.

You can do this by creating a survey to collect all the information you’ll need, which you would then use to build buyer personas. These are an overview of different customer segments, which are your first stop when creating any marketing campaign.

2. Print a booklet & create an irresistible call to action

Number two for our suggested marketing strategies is to create an irresistible call to action. Most technology companies use the sales funnel. And that includes the call to action.

Why not consider getting some branded collateral designed and manufactured, whereby one of the strategies would be to create a branded booklet, that comprises your company’s branded message, product list, current specials, and so forth. Although we are deep into the digital era, there is something to be said about being able to feel something tangible within the palm of one’s hands.

A branded booklet is something a potential customer can take with them, and refer back to when confirming product specs and pricing. The key to this branded booklet’s success is to make your call to action irresistible. Click here to print a booklet with Helloprint.

Coupled with creating a top-performing CTA, is a chance to create a ProductHunt-like site. When it comes to marketing a technology product, the best thing you can do is share it. If you can share your product, you may be able to generate more sales. That’s why a ProductHunt-like site is so important.

By incorporating this Hunt-like site with a strong CTA, you’re set to get your brand noticed and customers to increase and keep coming in.

3. Create a lead generation strategy with presentation templates

The next strategy is to create a lead generation strategy. When you’re a new technology company, you have to generate leads. Lead generation can take many forms. For example, you can send direct mail, run email campaigns, or create presentations.

You will need a method or system for qualifying leads, as this will help you focus on leads that are easier to convert.

When it comes to creating top-quality presentations, kick-start the whole process by opting for some great presentation templates. The trick is to employ the use of a presentation template that fits your brand style and tone. You will be able to find a great selection of options from this collection of stunning templates. Simply browse the catalogue and decide which template works best for you.

The most important lead generation strategy is finding ways to generate leads from your product. You can also generate leads by attending events, and creating digital events.

4. Build a Brand for a Professional Audience

For many tech start-ups, the goal is to build a brand for a professional audience within the business world. This includes companies whose main customers are other businesses.

Some of the quickest ways to do this are through your company’s website and blog. Create a blog that links back to all of your social media profiles and shares relevant content. Spend time on your website; make sure it is clear and concise. Remember that a website doesn’t have to be fancy, but it needs to be functional.

It’s also important to keep an eye on your competitors. This will help you understand what they’re doing that customers are engaging with, which will help you decide on what to do next. You can also decide if you want to try and do something similar, or figure out a new way to stand out among your competitors.

5. Create Content that Customers Want

Readers will be drawn to your brand based on its content. In particular, you want to build your brand around what your ideal customers are searching for and engaging with. Successful technology companies often have an expert status within their industry.

This can be done through an ongoing podcast, article, or video series. Going live on social media platforms, conducting live podcasting sessions or even doing webinars allows brand to create hype and increases virality factor. This will help you establish your name as an authority within your industry.

This can also be done through events where you speak to larger audiences. This can be done online or in person, but remember to use branded visuals when doing so.

All of the above are great examples of how you can create the content that your customers are looking for, and that will add value to your brand in the long run.

6. Grow Your Company’s Reputation

A great way to grow your company’s reputation is through word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps one of the more under-rated forms of ensuring quality word-of-mouth marketing would be to do this by ensuring that your team members are always happy and satisfied with their jobs.

This will help your employees build a brand that they can spread among their own networks. This will help to grow your reputation because the general consensus is that happy employees are much better than satisfied customers.

Seeing as though technology companies face unique challenges when it comes to marketing, it’s important to dig a little deeper into the various strategies one can employ, while being mindful of the target goal for each marketing endeavor.

In a saturated market, it’s difficult to stand out. When you’re a tech company, your product is your marketing. It’s up to you to create demand and awareness for your product. With no existing user base, you have to build a community from scratch.

To succeed, you need to test different marketing strategies. Some strategies work better than others. But, if you take your time and test several strategies, you’ll see the results in sales, using your best-fit strategy.

7. Use Paid Advertising

The seventh marketing strategy for technology companies is to use paid advertising. Paid advertising is paid by the click and has a set cost per acquisition or impression.

In other words, it’s money you pay to have someone click on an ad. For paid advertising, you can use social media, online publications, trade publications, and of course, the biggest avenue of all: Google. The best place to start is with Google ads. You can also use Facebook ads, Pinterest, and Instagram ads too.

The great thing with these types of Paid Advertising avenues is that you can tailor your ad spend according to the campaigns and target phrases that are relevant to your customer’s search intentions.

Wrapping up

Marketing technology companies can be challenging, but there are strategies that you can use to help your company grow. You just need to find what works best for your company.

Successful marketing efforts are those that create a clear customer journey, which contains specific actions those customers can take to move on to the next step. Even your blog posts and other pieces of content should in someway help leads move through the pipeline.

Technology companies have many challenges when it comes to marketing. And, when you’re a new company it’s especially difficult to stand out.

As you can see, there are many marketing strategies for technology companies. It all depends on what you need to accomplish and what resources you have.

Which one are you going to try out?

Li-Anne Mcgregor van Aardt is a wordsmith who has written everything from editorials, blogs, and press releases to poetry and rap songs, to a South African travel book, which she magically knocked out in 24 hours. Expect deep hues and careening colors of various vibrancy when traipsing her cascade of words.

The post 7 Marketing Strategies for Technology Companies appeared first on Shout.com.

• First off, what is affiliate marketing?
• What is email marketing?
• 15 Tips for how to use affiliate email marketing to increase your affiliate income
• Wrapping up

Affiliate email marketing is the practice of promoting affiliate links to a targeted audience with compelling email content. However, you don’t want to start affiliate email marketing with a completely fresh email list, you’ll first want to engage your audience and build trust over time for these types of campaigns to be successful.

Read on for tips on how affiliate email marketing can increase income for your business.

First off, what is affiliate marketing?

An affiliate is a person or company that has an agreement with a merchant to refer customers to their business. The merchant then gives them a percentage of affiliate sales they make on affiliate products.

An affiliate income refers to a commission earned by referring customers to other businesses.

Affiliate marketers are paid commission in three ways, namely:

• Pay per click
• Pay per sale
• Pay per action.

Affiliate marketing is performance-focused marketing. A business pays the affiliate marketers for every user or customer that used their affiliate marketing efforts through affiliate networks.

Some of the benefits of affiliate marketing include a chance to earn passive income means you can make money while you sleep, the ability to work remotely with an internet connection, and affiliate marketing strategies have a low risk of failure since you only work on commission and do not invest in inventory.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing and advertising. In email marketing, businesses send commercial emails via email services targeted at individuals who have opted to receive relevant content.

Most email campaigns typically advertise products or services to entice consumers into buying them. 

Some of the essential aspects of email marketing include:

• A call to action – You want your readers to know what you ask them to do by visiting your website.
• Contact management and segmentation – You can also break up your list into smaller segments that will receive different emails based on their individual preferences.
• Personalization – The more you know about your customers, the better you can personalize your email list messages.
• Great copywriting and content – Email marketing campaigns grant your readers direct access to act on the message you send.
• An effective subject line – The subject line is one of your most important tools because it’s what will get your email opened and read.

Email marketing efforts offer many advantages over other forms of online marketing, including that  it’s cost-efficient, email marketing channels provide a more targeted audience, you can track email activity (including click-through rates), and it allows you to communicate with customers more personally.

Take a look at our complete email marketing guide for more information how you can grow your business and increase profits.

15 Tips for how to use affiliate email marketing to increase your affiliate income

An email list can be one of the most powerful tools in an affiliate product marketer’s arsenal. Here are tips for using email marketing to boost your affiliate sales and income.

1. Use the best email marketing tool for the job

If you’re going to use email marketing to boost your affiliate income, do it right. Use a suitable email marketing tool. One with excellent features such as drip campaigns, personalization, an analytics dashboard and specific email marketing services for affiliates.

You will be able to send out newsletters and build your lists. With a reliable email provider, you’ll also have access to much information from other marketers.

2. Build an organic email list

Building your email list organically is key to your strategy as then you know you are targeting those who are actually interested in what you have to offer. You need to generate leads through people signing up and subscribing to your email list.

If you have to do this and you opt for cold outreach then you risk alienating consumers and ending up being marked as spam.

If you’re struggling to build your audience, take a look at this lead of lead magnets to help you grow your email list.

3. Segment email lists to track referrals

Segmentation will allow you to focus on sending out more emails to people who are more likely to convert into paying customers.

For example, you could create a segment based on contacts who open or click above 80% of the time. Targeting your most engaged contacts will ensure a higher conversion rate for your affiliate email marketing campaigns.

With Shout, it’s simple to segment your contacts based on email metrics, contact information, and even survey data.

4. Write relevant content

Some affiliates have built up a huge subscriber base and generate significant revenue from regularly sending follow-up emails to their subscribers. The key here is to get to know your audience and then to offer valuable content through your affiliate dashboard and give your subscribers something useful.

Your subscribers signed up for your email list because they want information from you. Therefore, your affiliate email marketing campaigns should provide value first and promote affiliate links second. This is the only way to truly build trust with your audience and increase conversion in the future.

5. Keep your affiliate marketing goal in mind when crafting an email

Make sure to keep your end goal in mind when drafting your emails. Are you trying to get a user to subscribe, purchase something, or make a return visit?

Once you know your goal for each email, keep it in mind when writing a copy. Every email should include a link back to your site so readers can accomplish that action and then convert into paying customers.

6. Do not hard sell or spam

Hard sell means directly pressuring your prospects to buy your product or service with coercive tactics. Emails should not be vehicles for blatant salesmanship. Instead, they should give valuable information in exchange for your audience’s fair amount of trust and goodwill.

Spamming people is also a bad form. You don’t want to fill someone’s inbox with unwanted emails just because you can.

7. Use the right type of emails

People are more likely to open an email and click on links in emails sent from companies they trust and recognize. Some of the most common types of emails include:

• Welcome emails – used to welcome new subscribers to your list.
• Sales/promotional emails – used to promote your favorite products or services.
• Relationship-building emails – are used to build a rapport with your subscribers.
• Educational emails – are used to educate your subscribers about a particular topic and provide them with information.

You must utilize the affiliate marketing emails relevant to your niche and situation to boost your affiliate commission. Whichever type of email you choose, always make sure that you personalize it as much as possible. Personalized emails have a higher chance of being opened.

8. Automate your promotional email sequence

Most people do affiliate email marketing manually, so you have to spend time drafting and sending content emails. Instead of doing that, consider automating your promotional emails.

Doing so will help you promote your content more efficiently and allow you to earn more and scale as needed. Many tools are available for automation, so be sure to utilize them.

9. Naturally include multiple affiliate links

It’s tempting to include just one or two affiliate links but have at least five in every post you write. The more you naturally include affiliate links, especially ones that point to high commission products and categories, will help boost your affiliate income. Ensure that these links are relevant to your readers and offer value.

This applies to when you’re directing contacts to a landing page or blog post that, you don’t want to fill your email content with a bunch of links. This will appear spammy to contacts and email senders.

Creating content outside of emails allows you to share it across other platforms, such as social media.

10. Cover the entire buyer journey

As an affiliate marketer, you’re trying to help guide potential customers through every stage of their decision-making process. Be sure that your emails cover their entire journey as a customer and includes everything a buyer needs to make a purchase.

When making a purchase there are three stages a buyer goes through; awareness, consideration and decision.

In the awareness stage they have recognized their need, in the consideration stage they are weighing up their options and in the decision stage they’ll make their purchase. Your emails need to contain enough information and persuasion to get them to the last stage.

11. Utilize any affiliate email marketing assets you have

If you have an established email list from another business or site, utilize it to promote your affiliate offers. You can set up a campaign in any tool that you want to send out emails regularly to all of your subscribers.

It could be a signup form for an opt-in mailing list or free eBooks or whitepapers that you used to distribute. You can refer to these assets for ideas on what to write about next which will help boost your affiliate income.

12. Highlight the product featured

To boost your passive income, try to highlight your favorite products in each email you send. Doing so will make it easier for readers to click through and purchase items that interest them.

Make sure that you aren’t spammy with these emails. Use an opt-in form to collect names and email addresses to build a list of interested contacts.

13. Add a coupon or discount

Offer a discount on your product to people who sign up for your email list. Discounts will incentivize them to sign up, giving you an easy way to build relationships with customers in your niche.

You will make more money than you could have by selling just one product at a total price. Just keep track of how many sales each campaign generates, so you know which ones are worth repeating.

14. Monitor your affiliate related insights & trends

One key to successful affiliate marketing is to have a good understanding of your customers.

But, there are also third-party sales insights to get a better idea of what kind of offers might work best for your audience. It’s essential to keep an eye on these metrics, as they can help you make decisions that will boost your income.

Another thing to consider is any trends that come about. You need to ensure that you are ahead of the game so that your emails and your affiliate links get noticed over and above any one else.

15. Create a sense of urgency and need for action

You can do this by placing a countdown timer, an event countdown, or even an event registration form in your email.

You can also insert specific deadlines into your emails that trigger subscribers to take some action you have set up. Such affiliate efforts will increase conversion rates, open rates, and click-through rates.

Wrapping up

While it may seem like a lot to juggle, email marketing can work wonders for your business and for your affiliate marketing strategy. And when you consider that there are a number of email marketing tools available to automate this process, it really is a no brainer.

Combining the two will ultimately lead to an increase in sales numbers.

By optimizing your subject lines and including calls-to-action, you’ll be able to get your subscribers clicking through on their favorite emails in no time. More subscribers will lead to more clicks on your expertly placed links, leading to more sales, which will lead to more affiliate income.

The post How Affiliate Email Marketing Can Increase Income appeared first on Shout.com.

Digital marketing strategies for small business

The growing presence of brands online has changed how they function and engage with clients. Where technology is used to integrate branding and advertising into everyday professional, personal, and entertainment activities.

Communication is the first strategy for implementing a strong marketing plan. Fortunately, there is cloud software in the market to help you in planning your projects.

When your whole team is on board, you’ll need to decide on the kind of strategy you’d like to use. Do you want to invest in video? After deciding on the direction you’ll take, it’s time to set the budget for your marketing.

Digital marketing is a buzzword in business. It’s something that we’ve heard about so many times and we will continue to do so. Marketers in both profit and nonprofit organizations have also realized its importance.

The success of digital marketing comes after a careful analysis of your strategies. And accomplishing that isn’t as easy as it sounds. In this article, we present you with strategies that you need to incorporate into your business.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the most efficient methods for driving organic traffic to your website. For small business SEO, there are three types of SEO to consider: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO.

On-page SEO concerns optimizing each of your web pages to rank higher on search engines. It entails performing keyword research to identify those that fit the context of your page, then optimizing your content to target those keywords.

Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and servers to ensure search engine spiders can crawl and index your pages without any friction. Some examples of this would be:

Increasing site speed

Ensuring all pages are mobile-friendly

• Use SSL (HTTPS).
• Create an XML sitemap.
• Add structured data markup (schema) to pages.
• Set canonical links for content.
• Ensure there are no duplicate content issues.

Local SEO is a strategy that helps local businesses rank well for searches contextual to their geographic location. For example, if you’re a business operating in New York, local SEO would help you rank higher in searches than your competitor in New Jersey.

The advantage of SEO is that it’s highly scalable. You might start with a few pages targeting specific keywords, but once you’ve laid the foundation, your content (and therefore the number of prospects you reach) can expand exponentially.

It’s really important that you track the performance of your SEO activities. You can use something Google Analytics to monitor incoming traffic, but a tool like SEMRush will help you track your positions for individual keywords.

2. Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategy for attracting and engaging your audience by creating content they’re interested in. This can include:

• Articles
• Whitepapers
• Ebooks
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Infographics

There are a few things you can achieve with content marketing, so we’ll start with the most obvious.

When your content is optimized for search engines, blogging is a fantastic digital marketing strategy for generating organic traffic. If you consistently create informative content for readers, search engines will identify your website as a legitimate source of information.

It also helps in establishing your credibility as a thought leader for your readers. So, if they have related questions in the future they’re more likely to return to your content before going to competitors.

Starting a blog isn’t a complex process, it’s never been easier to build a website and start publishing content. As we stated above, consistency is key, so you should publish blog posts at least once a week will help you improve your site’s visibility online.

Beyond driving traffic, you can also utilize content to help leads make purchasing decisions. For example, you could write an article on why your product or service is a better fit for leads than your competitors.

Once you start blogging, include a call-to-action for visitors to subscribe to your email list. This gives you a way to continue engaging leads with content and promotions.

3. Link building

Link building is the practice of obtaining links to your domain from other websites. This is one of the key factors that SERPs (search engines) use to identify whether or not your domain is an authority.

The more high-quality links you can collect, the better your domain score will become. But you will want to avoid links from low quality or spammy websites that have lower domain scores.

You can use tools like ahrefs to check the score of any domain, which will help you identify whether or not you want to request a backlink.

Of course, not everyone will just offer up a backlink to your content out of the good of their heart. Don’t get us wrong, it’s absolutely worth asking, but you’ll want to think of something you can offer in return. Some examples of this would be:

• Backlink trade (you link to them if they link to you).
• Write a guest post for their blog (and include a link to your content).
• Create a Top 10 in the industry article (request a backlink from all those you intend to include).

If you’re focussing on local SEO tactics, your priority should be to obtain links from other (non-competitive) local businesses in your area.

When digital marketing for nonprofits, you may find that you have access to a lot more goodwill, so link building can be a little easier. Brands can benefit from associating themselves with you, and local (or even national) news organizations always need to produce content (for which you’d be a great fit).

4. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is an excellent example of one of the more cost-effective digital marketing strategies for small businesses. They give you access to audiences you may not have been able to reach otherwise and offer an avenue for businesses to market their brands.

The big three social media platforms for brands have always been Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But you may also find value in more multi-media focussed platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

Here is how you can use social media platforms in your marketing campaigns:

• Boosting brand awareness.
• Recruitment of employees.
• Recognizing your team for their efforts.
• Sharing needful information about your business.
• Engage with your audiences on topics they’re interested in.
• Provide customer support.
• Finding new prospects via keywords and hashtag searches.

It’s important to ensure social media posts are consistent with your brand messaging and targeted at your audiences. To make it easier, it’s best to have someone dedicated to this role such as a social media manager.

Social media marketing is aimed at personifying your brand. Thus, someone must be available to answer questions. They should be able to interact with users in your comment section.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most efficient digital marketing strategies for small businesses. The average email open rate for 2022 is 21.5%, which is 3.5% higher than it was in 2020 at 18%.

But what does it consist of?

Email marketing is essentially a strategy for engaging your readers (which can be customers, subscribers, or even employees). Each campaign will have its own goal, and the content you create should be focused on convincing readers to take actions that help you reach that goal.

For example, if you’re trying to increase conversions you may want to send a promotional code or discount to your subscribers.

Something that a lot of marketers struggle with is building an email list in the first place. We’d recommend using lead magnets to attract new subscribers, as it’s always best to offer something to people in return for a subscription (after all, they are giving you their personal data).

The most important aspects of email marketing are engagement and consistency. Everything from your email subject line to the content itself has to provide value or be of some interest to your readers.

You’ll also need to set KPIs and track the performance of email metrics to identify what’s working well and what needs improvement.

If you need a more thorough overview and some tips on getting started, head over to our email marketing guide for more information.

6. Video marketing

Whether they’re consuming content for work or fun, know that people love video content. Video marketing is a sure way of garnering interest and support from multiple audiences in a much more engaging format.

You can engage audiences with both long-form and short-form video content, but you must ensure that you keep content tight and relevant to the topic.

Here are four reasons that video marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies for small businesses:

• Personal. It inspires emotions and empathy. And you can’t get that from other forms of marketing.
• Educational. Video will help you to educate your audience about your products.
• Visual. People process video content faster then written content.
• Memorable. People remember video content for a longer time.
• Sharable. People are more likely to interact with and share videos over written content.
• Searchable. Videos have dedicated search engines on YouTube and Vimeo (and others).

The downside is that video content can take more time to create, as you’ll need to consider the visual elements, scripting, editing, and promotion.

You may also need to invest in software that allows you to create videos easily, meaning video marketing may not be as cost-effective as other digital marketing strategies on the list.

7. Advertising on streaming platforms

YouTube is the second most used search engine on the web, which means that exposure via video marketing is becoming more important than ever. However, it’s not your only option when it comes to increasing brand awareness on these platforms.

You could consider advertising on YouTube, where ads are placed on video content being shared on the platform. But you also have the option of partnering with YouTube creators themselves, many of whom are actively seeking sponsorship from brands.

Of course, YouTube makes up only a fraction of online streaming activity. You can also consider other platforms like Apple TV, Netflix, and Amazon are in the comfort of people’s homes.

These would likely need a much higher rate of investment, so may not be suitable for small businesses, but it’s worth keeping in your back pocket.

If you do choose to invest in this, make sure you research the demographics of viewers first. It will help you to choose the right platform for your target audience.

8. Pay per click ads (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a marketing strategy where businesses are charged each time the advert is clicked. This is essentially the inverse of SEO, where you pick a keyword to target but you pay for visits to your site instead of encouraging organic traffic.

If you have the budget and the keywords are relatively low competition, then you may well benefit from PPC as your ad is placed above all others.

For example, if you used Google Adwords for a PPC campaign, your ad would appear above all other links in a Google search.

This can be one of the more expensive digital marketing strategies for small businesses, so you will need to set a budget and carefully plan your goals.

9. Online surveys

Digital marketing is as much about retaining customers as it is finding new ones, which is why it’s odd that online surveys are often overlooked as a strategy.

Customers want to feel heard, and giving them the opportunity to be heard will go a long way in building relationships with them.

Small business owners can use surveys to collect valuable feedback from customers to identify what they’re doing right and where they need to improve. This will help you improve your business in the long term.

You can also send surveys via an email campaign to find out why potential customers just aren’t taking that next step. With that sort of information in your hands, you can action changes that impact your sales immediately.

But you can think bigger even than this. Market research surveys allow you to learn more about your customers, including their:

• Likes
• Dislikes
• Demographic information
• Geography
• Interests
• Hobbies
• Jobs

Using this information, you can build customer profiles that illustrate who your target audiences are. Taking this data-driven approach to marketing makes finding and building relationships with prospects more effective and efficient.

Which is why we think online surveys one of the most useful digital marketing strategies for small businesses.

10. Quizzes

Another underutilized tool for digital marketers is online quizzes. These offer a level of interaction that you don’t tend to see with other strategies.

Think about it this way, your marketing efforts are about more than increasing sales (although that’s obviously important). They’re also about engaging your audience and making your brand seem relatable and personable.

These quizzes don’t have to be brand specific, they can target TV shows, hobbies, or anything your audience may be interested in to illustrate common ground between you and them.

Lead capture quizzes are also a fantastic way of growing your email lists, which gives you the opportunity to engage these potential customers further. Personality quizzes are particularly good examples of this, as everyone wants to learn a little more about themselves.

They’re also just a fun way to keep your customer base entertained. Not everything you do has to be a hard sell all the time.

Wrapping up on digital marketing strategies for small businesses

So, that’s our top 10 digital marketing strategies for small businesses. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything on this list, it’s absolutely fine to start with one thing at a time.

SEO is the obvious place to start, it’s free and there’s tons of information available online to help you along the way. Building a presence on social media is also a must, as it increases awareness and provides a space to share all your amazing content.

Then you’ll want to think about building an email list, you can use many of the strategies described here to help you do this (e.g. lead quizzes and other lead magnets).

You can worry about paid advertising once you start to see positive progress with the strategies you can undertake for free. That way your return on investment (ROI) will increase, so you can allocate financial resources to improving products and services and growing your company.

If you have plenty of funds for a marketing budget, but not the time to implement these marketing strategies, you could always consider hiring an agency to do this work for you.

We’ve loved diving into this topic with you, please do get in touch if you’d like something added to this list.

The post 10 Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Business appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is email scrubbing?
  • Why email scrubbing is important
  • How often should you scrub email lists?
• Thing to consider before email scrubbing
  • Bounces
  • Email clients
  • List building and consent
  • Inactive customers
• How to clean email lists (email scrubbing)
  • 1. Identify inactive subscribers
  • 2. Segment the inactive subscribers
  • 3. Attempt to re-engage those contacts
  • 4. Clean the segment
  • 5. Remove duplicates, spam and bounced contacts
  • 6. Re-engage your clean email list
• Keeping your list clean after email scrubbing

What is email scrubbing?

Email scrubbing is the process of removing subscribers that are impacting your campaign performance and sender score with ISPs.

Here are some examples of contacts you should remove when scrubbing emails:

• Unused email addresses
• Inactive respondents (with low open and click-through rates)
• Duplicate emails
• Those who report your emails as spam
• Email addresses that cause bounces

Why email scrubbing is important

ISPs monitor your campaign stats and the number of bounces, blocks and spam reports to determine your sender score. If you have critically low rates of engagement and high bounce rates, you’re likely to receive a lower sender score.

The absolute worst thing that could happen is your email domain is blocked. By scrubbing your email list, you will:

• Receive fewer spam complaints and avoid your emails being sent to the spam folder
• Increase open rates and click-through rates
• Improve email deliverability
• Increase sender reputation (score)
• Save money per campaign and increase ROI

Maintaining a clean email list will allow you to continue producing email marketing campaigns that your audience engages with.

How often should you scrub email lists?

This is entirely dependent on your industry and the frequency of your email campaigns. If you’re a seasonal business, it’s probably not a good idea to clean your lists more than once a year. You’ll want to see what your engagement rates are like at your peak times and use that data to determine whether you should scrub email addresses.

But if your campaigns are more consistent, say two or three times a week, you’ll have a lot more data to benchmark on. You should consider cleaning your list at least once a year, but the higher number of emails you send the more of a foundation you have to make a decision.

Thing to consider before email scrubbing

Before cleaning your list, you’ll want to determine if there are any other reasons why your emails might be performing poorly.

Bounces

Before cleaning your list, you’ll want to determine if there are any other reasons why your emails might be performing poorly.

For example, is there a technical reason your emails are bouncing? Is there a way you can remedy that without losing valuable contacts?

Email clients

Or, are all your inactive users using the same email client, e.g. Gmail? This may be a sign that this particular client is diverting all your emails to spam or junk folders. You may have to query with the support team of an individual email client to resolve issues like this.

List building and consent

Or, are all your inactive users using the same email client, e.g. Gmail? This may be a sign that this particular client is diverting all your emails to spam or junk folders.

It’s also important to consider how you collected the email addresses and how they’re segmented into lists/ groups. Have you given contacts an option to change what email lists they’re subscribed to? Maybe they only want to receive emails related to products and services as opposed to marketing content.

More importantly, did you collect consent to send emails with a double opt-in? If you haven’t collected consent from contacts there’s a higher chance you’ll end up sending emails to a spam trap. These addresses look the same as all others but are sued by ISPs to identify senders who aren’t maintaining a healthy list.

Inactive customers

You should also be cautious when removing paying customers from email lists. The best course of action here would be to group customers into an ‘inactive customers’ list and break them down into product life cycles. If you have customers subscribed to an annual plan, they might not feel it’s warranted to read your emails.

It’s up to you to decide whether you continue to send emails to these customers, but why not consider a more personalized approach, where an automated email with new features or plans is sent towards the end of their current subscription.

How to clean email lists (email scrubbing)

Once you’ve explored all the avenues above, it’s time to start email scrubbing. We’ve broken this process down into six easy steps:

1. Identify inactive subscribers
2. Segment the inactive subscribers
3. Attempt to re-engage those contacts
4. Clean the segment
5. Remove duplicates, spam and bounced contacts
6. Re-engage your clean email list

1. Identify inactive subscribers

What is an inactive subscriber? These are contacts who haven’t engaged with your emails over a set period of time. This period of time is determined by you and should be based on how frequently you send emails.

For example, if you only send emails once a month, inactive subscribers could be defined as those who haven’t opened an email in six months. But if you send multiple emails a week, you can reduce the defining period of time to three weeks.

Of course, there are those who’ve never engaged with your emails. These may be people who’ve signed up with a secondary email address or even bots that have subscribed to your list. You can easily identify these contacts and remove them from your email list.

2. Segment the inactive subscribers

The simplest way to do this is from inside your email marketing tool.

With Shout, go to “Contacts”, select “Segment” and create a new segment. Enter the criteria you’ve set to define inactive subscribers and then give your new segment a name, like “Inactive Subscribers”.

3. Attempt to re-engage those contacts

If you can save some of the contacts you’ve worked so hard to collect, now’s the time to do it. Think of something enticing to get your subscribers to re-engage with you. For example:

• An exceptional piece of content
• A discount on their next purchase
• A competition or prize draw
• Early access to a new feature or product

Ask yourself why they signed up in the first place, there had to be some reason. Very few people will subscribe to your email list out of the good of their hearts. The problem may be your campaigns have veered too far from what contacts originally wanted or needed.

Or maybe that isn’t the problem, maybe you already solved their problems and that’s why they don’t feel the need to read your emails anymore.

Here’s your chance to make a survey and ask your subscribers why they don’t read your emails and what you can do to spark that interest again.

4. Clean the segment

Think of an amount of time you’re happy to wait and see if your subscribers re-engage, maybe that’s a week, maybe it’s a month, it’s up to you.

If they haven’t opened your email in that time, it’s probably time to remove inactive contacts from your email list. If they’ve opened the email, but haven’t clicked any links you need to decide how valuable those contacts are to you. We’d recommend keeping them and continuing to deliver top quality content, you might just have to find the right fit for them.

To scrub your email list with Shout, all you’ll need to do is select the segment then choose “Unsubscribe” from the dropdown.

You might want to export the list beforehand and keep the inactive subscribers on file, again this is your call.

5. Remove duplicates, spam and bounced contacts

You also need to remember to remove any email addresses that cause bounces (especially hard bounces), report your campaigns as spam (which can have a negative impact on your sender score) and any duplicates that you may have on your list.

If you’ve uploaded contacts to Shout, we’ll automatically flag any duplicates as the list is being uploaded. And even if they subscribe multiple times using an [online form], you won’t be charged for duplicates and we won’t send multiple emails to them.

To identify any subscribers that fit the above criteria, you can navigate to “Contacts” and filter by bounces, spam reports or duplicates to find them. You can then use a bulk action to unsubscribe them for a clean email list.

You could also consider using an email validation tool (email list cleaning service) such as Zerobounce, which provides a bulk email verifier. Essentially, you can upload your mailing list and their tool verifies email addresses for you.

6. Re-engage your clean email list

Now you’ve finished your email scrubbing, it’s time to set a benchmark performance. Create a campaign and send it to your newly scrubbed email list, wait the usual amount of time you would before analyzing performance and then take note.

You can compare this to your last performance review (before you cleaned up your email list) to visualize the effectiveness of email scrubbing, but more importantly, you’ll want to use these email metrics as your new benchmark.

Keeping your list clean after email scrubbing

Once you’ve cleaned your email list, you have to strive to maintain that standard. When collecting new subscribers, ensure to use a double opt-in process and send email campaigns that are relevant and useful.

This should be at the forefront of your mind from the very first email you send to contacts. Take a look at how to create a welcome email that engages subscribers and keeps them coming back for future emails. Then, once you’ve learned more about them, move onto creating drip email marketing campaigns that deliver valuable and personalized content.

Another way you can maintain list health is by allowing contacts to manage their own email settings. So, create a form they can use to change list preferences. If you don’t do this, their only option will be to unsubscribe, which means you lose them altogether.

Hopefully, we’ve given you everything you need to clean up your email list and improve the performance of your campaigns. If you’d like more tips, head over to our complete email marketing guide.

The post Email Scrubbing: How to Clean Email Lists appeared first on Shout.com.

Because of this, we’re all in constant competition to catch our customers’ attention and get the data we need to inform action.

The accessibility of online survey tools has expanded the methods by which surveys can be shared and increased the potential for a wider array of data to be collected.

But the rise in popularity of online surveys has also led to fatigue in survey audiences, which has meant lower response rates for many of us trying to conduct research and collect feedback.

In light of this, knowing how to get people to participate in a survey is more valuable than ever.

What is the average survey response rate?

It’s widely accepted that the average survey response rate lies in the region of 33%, when considering the effectiveness of all the different methods of distribution.

Of course, the average can depend on the type of survey you’re conducting. For example, Genroe found that NPS surveys have an average response rate of 20%. So, before you start collecting data, it’d be best to take a look into the average response rate for the type of survey you’re conducting.

This will help you manage expectations and set goals that are specific and achievable for your research.

What is a good survey response rate?

Anything above the average response rate should be considered a success, whereas anything above 50% would be considered excellent.

But those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Turning data into action requires you to make generalizations drawn from patterns and trends in your data. The smaller your survey audience is, the less representative those generalizations are of your actual audience.

This means that even if your response rate is 100% for a survey of 20 people but you have 2000 customers, the findings of the survey should not be generalized to your entire customer base.

That doesn’t mean that you should send blanket surveys to your entire audience. But rather, the audience you conduct a survey with should be a representative sample of your entire audience.

There’s more thought that should go into collecting feedback than achieving a high response rate. Don’t get us wrong, it’s important, but it’s not the be-all and end-all.

How to calculate survey response rate

Survey response rates can be calculated by the number of responses divided by the number of invitations multiplied by 100.

(Responses ÷ Invitations) x 100 = Survey Response Rate.

For example, if you sent out 200 survey invitations and received 78 responses, your response rate would be 39%.

Try it yourself with our survey response rate calculator.

How to increase survey response rates

As we mentioned above, you’re in constant competition with other businesses when it comes to collecting customer feedback.

I mean, how likely is it that your’s is the only request for feedback a customer has received that day? Not very likely.

But there are ways you can stand out from the crowd and maximize your survey response rate. Take a look at these 10 tips for increasing your survey response rates.

1. Manage respondent expectations

One of the best ways to encourage responses is to state the number of survey questions up top and approximately how long it will take to complete the survey.

Doing so allows you to manage expectations and stave off that natural frustration that occurs when completing a survey, as respondents will have a clear end goal in their minds.

It’s important that you’re truthful here. If customers feel that you’ve lied to them, you’re going to burn bridges and pretty much ensure that they won’t respond to any future surveys.

2. Make them feel wanted

In the same vein as the previous tip, you can also start by explaining what data you’re collecting and why. People are more likely to respond to a survey if they know they’ll be contributing to something important or if their feedback will have a direct impact on their lives.

A strong example of this can be seen in employee engagement surveys, where feedback is collected with the goal of changing work cultures or environments to improve the day-to-day for employees. These surveys are so successful because a clear line can be drawn between giving feedback and effecting change.

This should be no different for customer satisfaction surveys (where the same line can be drawn) or even for academic surveys (where data is collected to inform important research).

3. Offer incentives

Offering an incentive to customers who complete your survey is a surefire way to improve your survey response rates. Whether it’s a discount on their next purchases or entry into a prize draw, you’re guaranteed to see an increase.

However, we’re always wary of encouraging quid pro quo strategies when collecting survey responses. It’s not that they’re not effective (because they are), it’s more a concern for the quality of results that are collected when doing so.

When you have a more controlled audience (such as a list of customers), incentives can encourage retention and strengthen relationships. But when distributing to wider audiences (such as via social media) where there are more unknowns, you may find people responding just for a chance to claim a prize.

We don’t mean to imply that offering an incentive is a bad strategy, merely that you should factor this in when analyzing survey results.

4. Keep survey short and relevant to the target audience

This is an important tip for any survey. Don’t ask more questions than is necessary to meet your goals and don’t take up too much time. There is a direct correlation between the number of questions asked and the response rate for that survey.

On average, there’s a 17% drop in responses for surveys with more than 12 questions and that takes more than 5 minutes to complete.

The more questions you ask, the more disengaged survey respondents will become (this is known as survey fatigue). This will either lead to more dropouts (meaning a lower completion rate) or respondents will rush through surveys without thinking about their answers. The latter is known as ‘satisficing’, a common form of response bias in poorly designed surveys.

5. Limit the number of open-ended questions

We won’t deny that open-ended questions are essential to providing context to quantified data. However, there is a limit to how much respondents are willing to give you.

If they’re asked to write a full explanation for every close-ended question they’ve answered, they’ll go mad before they finish your survey.

Save these question types for the most important data points in your survey and give your respondents some breathing room.

6. Choose the right distribution method for your audience and research

We’ve alluded to this in a prior tip, but we wanted to really cement this in. Choosing how you share your survey is as important to data quality as the questions you ask.

Creating a highly targeted customer survey then sharing it on social media makes very little sense, as your respondents aren’t guaranteed to be customers.

But that isn’t to say you can’t use multiple distribution methods for the same survey, in fact, this is something we encourage when they marry well together.

For example, a transport survey can be distributed in the following ways:

• By email to all newsletter subscribers
• As a QR code at travel access points (such as train or bus stations)
• Embedded on the website of the transport provider
• As a pop-up when service users connect to complimentary WiFi onboard
• Purchasing a survey audience that meets the criteria for the form and location of travel

7. Send surveys at the right time

Following on from how you share your survey, you also need to consider when you share them. This will be more obvious for some than others. For example, Net Promoter Score surveys can be shared after a purchase or customer interaction and event feedback surveys can be sent following the end of the event.

But more general surveys that aren’t linked to a specific action can see a lower response rate if they aren’t sent at the right time.

Research has found that the peak times for survey responses were between 10 am and 2 pm on Thursdays and Fridays. Now whether this is linked to a decrease in productivity at the tail-end of the week is up for debate, but it’s certainly something you can capitalize on.

8. Don’t fatigue your audience

Since data-driven marketing strategies have become the driving force for many modern businesses, it can be tempting to conduct surveys as often as possible. But this is a mistake too many people make.

Sending too many surveys can lead to response fatigue, which is where customers (or any type of respondents) receive too many requests for feedback over an extended period of time and become reluctant to participate.

This is especially damaging as you have no way to mitigate response fatigue once it’s taken effect. The best thing to do is spread out your surveys across the year or allocate specific questions to touchpoints in the customer journey.

9. Create visually appealing surveys

Too often the visual design of a survey is overlooked. Whether it’s considered unnecessary or there’s a lack of customization options with other tools, we find the bulk of online surveys look much the same.

At Shout, we not only encourage design customization, but we also think it’s paramount to increasing response rates. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. They open your survey, it looks the same as every other one they’ve seen before, immediately it feels like work to answer your questions.

By creating something colorful, bold, or even just branded, shows respondents that you’ve gone the extra mile and will encourage them to do the same for you.

10. Follow up with respondents

This is possibly the single most important tip on how to get more people to participate in a survey. Share the results of your survey with respondents and let them know how you will or have acted on that feedback.

Not only does this show that you’ve actively listened, but it also demonstrates your integrity and trustworthiness to your audience.

In turn, this builds strong relationships and increases the likelihood of repeat responses for future surveys ten-fold. Why are repeat responses important? Benchmarking.

This is how you’ll measure change and success over time, and whilst new respondents are important for any survey, knowing how your evolving strategy affects the same people in the long term is gold dust.

How to share a survey

So, we’ve covered how to increase survey response rates. Now let’s dig into how to share a survey with your customers.

Send your survey by email

If you have access to a list of email addresses, this is one of the best (and easiest) ways of tracking response rates. As you’re sending surveys to an opt-in list of subscribers or customers, you’re also likely to collect higher quality (and more relevant) responses.

With Shout, you’re able to track those who’ve responded and send reminders to those who’ve yet to respond. Giving you the potential to increase your response rate without sending emails to an entire list (and annoying all the customers who’ve already responded).

You can also view all the surveys single contacts have responded to for a 360-degree view of individual customers and how they feel about different elements of your business.

Also, our list segmentation and contact grouping features enable you to send targeted surveys to specific audiences and customer types.

Embed surveys on your website

Web embed surveys provide a unique opportunity to collect feedback on customer friction and user experience. These surveys are particularly successful if your website receives high traffic, but can serve many other purposes than collecting feedback.

For instance, you can use our survey tool to create:

• Newsletter signup forms
• Lead generation forms
• Usability surveys
• Ease-of-discovery surveys
• Contact forms
• Booking forms

All of Shout’s projects are responsive, meaning they’ll display perfectly regardless of the device being used.

Purchase a target audience

Whilst this option does increase the cost of a survey campaign, it’s an efficient method of collecting survey responses. By using demographic and psychographic criteria, you can target specific survey audiences and collect highly relevant data.

Target survey respondents with Shout

Find survey respondents from all over the world to power your research (without compromising data quality).

Shout Audience

Share your survey to Social Media

Social media surveys are great for when you want to collect a wider array of opinions. By nature, they are less targeted. This is because anyone with access to the link will be able to respond (which is pretty much everybody).

But that isn’t always a detriment to collecting feedback. For example, say you want to conduct a brand perception survey.

It’s all well and good collecting customer opinions, but don’t you think the data will be skewed?

They’ve already committed to you, so their opinion will be biased. By sharing the survey on social media, you cast a wider net and collect a more balanced data set.

You can identify areas where respondents are less informed about your brand or products and how your actions as a company are perceived by the masses.

Use a QR code

QR codes are especially useful in cases where you don’t know your audience, but you know they’re likely to congregate at specific locations.

In one of our tips above, we used the example of travel surveys. Where you may not be able to contact service users personally, but can encourage them to take a survey whilst they’re waiting.

In cases like these, you might need to offer an incentive to encourage responses. But if the audience you’re targetting is particularly passionate about a topic, you may not need to.

A QR code is automatically generated for every survey you create with Shout. All you need to do is download and print it.

Wrapping up: How to increase survey response rates

Increasing survey response rates is a mix of good survey design, using the right methods of distribution for your target audience and strong relationships with that audience.

At the end of the day, if the first time a customer hears from you is to collect feedback, your survey is likely to fall flat. If you send a targeted survey to a general audience, your data will be useless (mostly). If your survey looks bad and reads worse, respondents will drop out.

But if your survey doesn’t go as expected that’s not the end of the world. Take time to learn from your mistakes, put in the effort where it’s needed, and try again.

The post How to increase survey response rates appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is a customer satisfaction survey?
• Other types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• Why are Customer Satisfaction Surveys important?
• Customer satisfaction question types
• How often should you survey customer satisfaction?
• Best Practices for customer satisfaction surveys
• Wrapping up

Your customers are the lifeline of your business, and their experience with you is integral to your continued success. This is why customer satisfaction surveys are so important.

Think about why they came to you in the first place; to solve a problem they had. By measuring customer satisfaction, you can identify what is working for them and what isn’t.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

Customer satisfaction surveys are designed to collect feedback from customers in order to measure the success of different elements of your business.

Opening a line of communication enables you to identify what makes your customers happy and what aspects need improvement.

How to measure customer satisfaction

Whilst your customer survey will have a whole range of questions relating to their experience with you, it is possible to measure customer satisfaction by determining your CSAT score. You can do this by asking a single question, but the question type you use will impact how you calculate your score:

• Measuring CSAT with a scale
• Measuring CSAT with a binary question
• Measuring CSAT with a star rating

Measuring CSAT with a scale

To measure your customer satisfaction score with a scaled question type, all you need to ask is:

‘How satisfied were you with the [product/ service] you received?

You can then provide a 1 to 5 (or even 1 to 10) scale:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied

Then, to calculate your score you’ll need to add up all the individual scores given, divide this by the maximum score possible and multiply that number by 100. This will give you your CSAT score as a percentage.

Measuring CSAT with a binary question

Measuring customer satisfaction with a binary (or dichotomous) question only requires two answer choices.

‘Are you satisfied with the [product/ service] you received?’

• Yes
• No

To calculate your CSAT score with this method, you’ll need to divide the total number of positive (‘yes’) responses by the total number of responses received, then multiply this number by 100.

You can also apply this calculation to a scaled question, by dividing all respondents who chose the top two numbers in the scale by the maximum score possible and multiplying that by 100.

Measuring CSAT with a star rating

Star ratings are more general in nature, they’re not usually used to explore specific customer experiences. However, they are useful for giving a more zoomed out perspective of how your customers feel about you.

‘How would you rate your experience with us?’

The calculation for a star rating is as follows; the total number of stars given divided by the maximum number of stars achievable, multiplied by 5 (the total number of stars a respondent is able to award).

Other types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction is directly influenced by their experiences. But there are other types of customer (or client) satisfaction surveys that you can conduct that tell you more about the way they feel about your business.

Two examples of these are Net Promoter Score surveys and Customer Effort Score surveys.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS surveys are used to determine your customer loyalty. You can quantify this by asking them one simple question:

‘How likely are you to recommend [product/ service] to a friend or colleague?’

To answer this question, customers choose a rating on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), from ‘Not Very Likely At All’ to ‘Extremely Likely’.

Respondents are split into three categories based on what rating they select along this scale:

0 to 6 = Demoters
7 or 8 = Passives
9 and 10 = Promoters

Calculating your Net Promoter Score

NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Your final score will be between -100 and 100, where anything over 0 is considered a good score.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES surveys are used to measure how easy a specific action or process was for a customer to complete. The purpose of these surveys is to identify areas of friction, so you can remove them and improve customer experience. The types of things you can measure customer effort for are:

• Navigating your website
• Making an online purchase
• Finding resources (e.g. help docs)
• Customer support

Again, you can calculate your customer effort score with a scale (1 to 10) or a binary question (easy or hard). When using a scale, divide the sum of all your CES by the total number of responses.

If you use a binary question, simply subtract the percentage of positive responses from the percentage of negative responses.

When using a neutral answer option, you can ignore this when calculating CES in this way.

Why are Customer Satisfaction Surveys important?

It’s essential that you reach out to your customers for this information because there’s no guarantee they’d get in touch with you if they have an issue. It’s even less likely that customers will get in touch to tell you you’re doing a good job. This same logic applies to your customers sharing their experiences with others.

A survey found that 95% of respondents who had a bad experience shared it with someone they knew. This kind of negative word-of-mouth can be detrimental to generating new leads and customers. These respondents who had a bad experience were also 50% more likely to share their experience on social media and review sites, which can be permanently damaging to your brand.

This is why it’s so important to ask your customers how satisfied they are before an issue snowballs.

Other than avoiding these kinds of nightmare scenarios, there are also major benefits to running customer satisfaction surveys.

1. Feedback can be used to improve products and customer experience
2. Identify gaps in your product or service
3. Discover loyal customers who can become advocates
4. Find out why ex-customer switched to a competitor
5. Collect testimonials and success stories

1. Feedback can be used to improve products and customer experience

There’s a whole range of things you want to ask customers about your product. Is it good value for money? Did the quality meet their expectations? Was it delivered on time? How does it compare to competitor products they have experience with?

Asking customers these questions shows them you care about their experience and will improve customer retention and loyalty in the long run.

2. Identify gaps in your product or service

Customer feedback isn’t just useful for improving experiences and reducing fiction. It also allows you to identify what’s missing from your product range, your service or even the availability of information.

Customers could be ecstatic with everything you’re doing, but may still go to competitors for features or products that you’re missing. This might not be something you can address immediately, but this kind of feedback gives you the edge when choosing how to expand your business.

3. Discover loyal customers who can become advocates for your brand

While it’s important to know what problems your customers have, it’s equally as important to know what you’re doing well and why. Identifying customers who’re completely satisfied with your products/ service enables you to create customer profiles (buyer personas) for your perfect target audiences.

Not only does this make your marketing efforts easier, but it also provides you with an audience who’s happy and willing to advocate for you.

4. Find out why ex-customers switched to a competitor

You aren’t limited to contacting your existing customer base, there’s real value in collecting feedback from former customers. For example, you can learn:

• The frictions they experienced
• What event or experience incited their exit
• What competitor they chose and why

All of this information is actionable and will help you grow to be a better business with stronger relationships with your existing customers.

On top of this, you have a chance to reclaim ex-customers if you’ve already addressed their issue, whether it was lowering prices, expanding your range, or improving time-to-resolution with customer support.

5. Collect testimonials and success stories

Customer satisfaction surveys are the perfect place to collect testimonials, in-house reviews, success stories and case studies. Even if you don’t collect this information in the survey itself, you can easily identify customers who’ll be happy to provide this social proof.

Content like this is essential to wooing prospects, who’re looking for advice and feedback from people like them. They certainly can’t just take your word for it, by showing proof that you’ve solved their problem for someone else, you’ve laid the foundation for a relationship.

Customer satisfaction question types

• Binary/ dichotomous questions
• Multiple-choice questions
• Opinion scales
• Star ratings
• Open-ended questions

Binary/ dichotomous questions

Binary survey questions provide respondents with two answer options, one positive and the other negative. This could be a simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’, or be more visual like a thumbs up and thumbs down or happy face and sad face.

These question types keep your survey simple and allow you to easily quantify responses into two opposing categories.

However, they don’t provide much information beyond that. On top of this, answering pages of binary questions can be tedious and so respondents may suffer from survey fatigue if your survey is too long. In these cases, respondents are likely to exhibit acquiescence response bias, where they lean towards positive answer options.

Here are a few examples of binary questions:

• Did customer support address all your concerns?
• Are you happy with the product?
• Would you recommend this product?
• Was this article easy to understand?

Multiple-choice questions

Multiple-choice questions usually consist of 3 or more options, where each answer is mutually exclusive from the others.

In customer satisfaction surveys, you can use these question types to categorize themselves based on the options you provide.

For example:

• Job role
• Level of education
• Employment status
• Industry
• Household income

Why is this information relevant to your customer satisfaction feedback? It will allow you to filter your results by demographic information and identify the wants and needs of individual audience segments.

If you’re planning to include more than seven answer options, we’d recommend you use a dropdown list question type instead. Too many options can be overwhelming for respondents, dropdowns package a list of questions in a more appetizing way.

Opinion scales

It’s almost certain that you’ll employ scaled questions in your customer satisfaction survey. Both CSAT and NPS questions require you to use a scale to measure satisfaction and loyalty respectively.

There are three types of scales you can use. The first is a standard numbered opinion scale where respondents select a number, e.g. between 1 and 10. The second is a slider, which also requires respondents to select a number. Both ends of these scales are labelled to provide context to respondents, e.g. ‘Not Very Good’ and ‘Extremely Good’.

The final type is a Likert scale (called a Matrix here on Shout), which are also numbered, but each point along the scale has a label.

Star ratings

Star ratings are simple in their aims, they ask respondents to rate an experience out of a number of stars. These are great for collecting reviews for different products, features or services you provide.

For example, you could use a series of star rating questions to measure satisfaction for:

• Customer support
• Product quality
• Delivery time

Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions are spaces where customers can write customized feedback and are essential to contextualizing your results

This qualitative data gives you insight into why customers responded a certain way and is the lynchpin for actioning change in your business.

It also ensures that there’s less bias when interpreting your results, allowing you to draw evidence-based conclusions rather than loose inferences.

How often should you survey customer satisfaction?

It can be tempting to ask for customer feedback as often as possible, but this can be counterproductive. Not only will you be drowning through a constant stream of data, you’ll also annoy your customers. This may mean they ignore all future requests for feedback.

We recommend you conduct full customer satisfaction surveys twice a year. This gives you enough time between surveys to act on feedback, so the results are not identical in each survey.

You may also want to avoid sending a full satisfaction survey to newer customers, they may not have enough experience with you to provide actionable feedback.

If you’re having trouble collecting a large enough data set to inform action within your business, take a look at how to increase survey response rates.

Best Practices for customer satisfaction surveys

1. Keep surveys short and sweet
2. Ask the right questions at the right time
3. Ensure questions are neutral
4. Test before you send
5. Act on results and follow up with customers

1. Keep surveys short and sweet

The longer your survey is, the more likely it is that respondents will suffer from survey fatigue, which can impact your survey completion rate. Before you start writing questions, think about the aim of this particular survey and what data you actually need (right now).

This is for your benefit as much as your respondents. Collecting too much data can be overwhelming, it’s better to collect a more manageable set and action changes one at a time.

2. Ask the right questions at the right time

Following on from our last tip, it’s important to split your surveys up by their context. Not only does this keep them short and targeted, it also ensures you’re collecting the right data at the right time.

For example, if you’re conducting an NPS survey, avoid asking questions about customer effort or satisfaction with individual experiences. You risk muddying your results or skewing respondents’ answer choices when mixing and matching these types of questions.

This is also important as each survey should be used at a different place in the customer journey.

3. Ensure questions are neutral

When writing survey questions, you’ll need to make sure the language you used doesn’t influence the way respondents answer. Loaded language that’s evocative or leading questions that nudge respondents to choose a specific answer will leave you with a useless set of results.

For the best quality data, write questions in a neutral way that encourages customers to express their own opinion.

4. Test before you send

It’s an unfortunate trend in survey research to distribute before testing it yourself. It’s totally understandable that you’ve spent all this time writing the perfect questions for your goal and want to start collecting feedback, but it’s important that you don’t skip this step.

You’ll want to check that your survey is void of any spelling or grammatical error and that all your questions make sense in the context of the survey. Secondly, you can use this opportunity to put yourself in your customers’ shoes to see if there are any biases or order effects induced by the survey.

If you want to go one step further (and we think you should), you can collect some dummy responses from your colleagues or a small pilot group to get an idea of what your feedback will look like.

This gives you the opportunity to chop and change your survey if the results aren’t as useful as you expected.

Finally, it also gives you the opportunity to check the technical elements of your survey. If you’re using an online survey maker, it’s likely you’ll be employing features like Question Logic and Text Piping to personalize survey content. It’s much harder to fix these things if your survey is live and has already collected responses.

5. Act on feedback and follow up with customers

There’s no point collecting all this feedback if you don’t intend to act on it. The only question you need to ask yourself is when and how you will act on it.

You’re going to receive a lot of different opinions and some of them will be contrasting, it’s up to you to decide how much of your audience needs to agree in order for their feedback to create change.

But this isn’t the final step, you should then get in touch with customers to let them know that you acted on their feedback.

This will show them you’ve gone above and beyond to improve their experience and will go a long way in improving customer loyalty and retention.

Wrapping up

So, that’s how to create a customer satisfaction survey. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s impossible to please everyone, we can’t think of a single company that has a 100% customer satisfaction score.

If you can please the vast majority of your audience whilst maintaining your values and mission, you’re doing everything right.

The post How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey appeared first on Shout.com.