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Using Coupons to Drive Engagement & Retention

Posted: 26 Sep 2019 01:00 PM PDT

Amazon is arguably one of the first online retailers to leverage past purchase history to make recommendations to consumers about what they might want to buy next. It's a service that consumers grew to love – and one that gave Amazon quick bottom-line results. That concept of sending custom offers to past customers to encourage new purchases is one that all retailers can leverage.

Recent CodeBroker research on coupon and offer personalization supports this practice. In a survey of more than 1,100 U.S. consumers across the country, 73% responded with a resounding "yes" to the question, "Do you prefer to shop at stores that send you custom discount offers based on your purchase history?" Consumers value strong relationships with vendors they've done business with. Strengthening communication efforts in personalized ways can build loyalty.

Opportunities to connect and engage with past customers

The ability to personalize offers represents a ready-made opportunity for retailers to give consumers what they want – as long as these offers are relevant. Although some consumers are uncomfortable about the idea of retailers tracking their shopping behaviors, most still welcome personalized offers based on their shopping history. Their reasons vary. Here's a sampling of responses.

  • "I like coupons for products I've purchased, but not comparable products."
  • "It's a nice perk for places I shop at frequently to get discounts on items I am already buying."
  • "Having customized discounts increases the attractiveness of a merchant. It makes the store more personal and intuitive to patronize."

The ability to stay in front of customers after they've made a purchase is critical to effective engagement and retention. Customers don't want to feel forgotten. Follow-up offers that are aligned with their needs, interests and purchase history can spark both action and loyalty.

It's not all about you

Here's an important point, though, for retailers hoping to gain relevance and spark engagement among their customers. It's not all about you. It's all about them. If you hope to stand out from the myriad of communications that consumers receive on any given day, you need to get into their heads and deliver value.

Customers are engaged with a wide range of retailers and make ongoing decisions about where to spend their money. While price is certainly a factor in encouraging sales, it's not the only factor.

Customers also value experiences with retailers that are unique, personalized and provide higher value than what they might receive elsewhere. Marketers need to consider how they can effectively position themselves as high-value providers that are tuned in to customer needs across all channels.

You won't have a positive impact with customers if you send an SMS coupon for a product the customer has recently purchased, offer a "we miss you" promotion to a customer that just made a purchase the day before, or promote childcare or pet care products to consumers who have neither children nor pets.

Today's consumers are increasingly savvy and know all too well how technology can be leveraged to provide exceptional experiences. They've learned this largely through interactions with retailers like Amazon. They expect the same experiences from you.

Technology matters

Technology is a big driver and a critical aid for harried marketers. Joseph Brady of Reliant Funding Technology says IoT (the internet of things) and CI (customer intelligence) technology can help retailers reward loyal customers. The offers must be used in relevant ways, though, or its efficiency and impact will be diminished.

For instance, although high-value coupons and offers are nearly 100% effective for reactivating lapsed customers, it's critical to leverage purchase history and preference data to generate a positive impact. Two factors that will impact customer decisions to use a discount are store location and product need/desire. These factors need to be considered when designing offers that are likely to spur the desired action.

Technology can also impact the retailer experience. Retailers must exercise caution in terms of security for their couponing efforts or the bottom line can suffer. If offers can be used multiple times or can be shared by recipients with non-customers, the impacts can be dramatic. Many retailers are revisiting their approach to couponing and making shifts, although they face the risk of disengaging – even losing – loyal customers. The craft retail chain Michaels lost sales when the company attempted to replace its coupons with everyday low prices, according to Daphne Howland of Retail Dive. JC Penney made the same misstep a few years ago and is still feeling the impact. The right balance between customer engagement and bottom-line impact is critical.

Balancing customer needs and the bottom line

Using data to identify customers poised to make a purchase and tying coupon and promotional efforts to personalized offers can help to engage and retain customers. But, at what cost? Retailers must ensure that their promotions are well designed and that they eliminate the potential for reuse and sharing. This is where single-use coupon security comes in.

Single-use coupons and offers are being employed by numerous retailers today to ensure that high-value coupons do not get used more than once, or go viral.  What makes the single-use model work is that it employs security on two fronts: offer distribution and offer redemption.

Secure coupon distribution and redemption ensures the following:

  • Retailers are able to generate millions of unique, single-use coupons or promo codes daily that can be accepted, validated and redeemed by the POS system or e-commerce platform at high speed, in real-time.   
  • Consumers can only obtain offers that are meant for them.
  • Consumers can obtain an offer only once, even if they try to access the offer multiple times over different channels.
  • Offers can be redeemed only one time, even if customers try to redeem the offer on a different channel.

That's the power that the right technology, used the right way, can bring to retailers seeking to balance the need for customer engagement and loyalty and a healthy bottom line.

Editor's note: Looking for the right POS system for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you about your needs.

 

High value, personalized offers are effective for engaging certain customer segments, however, it can be risky to use them without single-use coupons. Think about it. You don't want customers to exploit coupons more than once or have your offers go viral without your oversight.

There's another big benefit to single-use offers. Single-use offers allow for data collection because you know where and when the offer was used. That provides you with key information about your customers and their purchase patterns and preferences – information that can be applied to future marketing initiatives. Single-use offers fueled by the right technology will help you personalize your offers in a risk-free way while adding accuracy to your metrics and allowing for improved A/B testing to boot.

By establishing a reliable method for reaching out to key market segments on an ongoing basis, you can positively impact engagement to drive customer retention. Ongoing iterations based on what you learn will serve to continually help you reduce costs while boosting revenue – just like Amazon.

Don't risk losing customers dismayed by your lack of tech-savvy to understand and deliver on their needs and expectations, or lose revenue due to unfettered coupon distribution. Today's retail technology puts you in the driver's seat.

How to Generate Creative New Content Ideas At Any Time

Posted: 26 Sep 2019 11:00 AM PDT

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write only to realize there's nothing to write about. Especially when your company relies on great content for marketing and growth.

Writer's block is dangerous. Not only does it bring content production to a grinding halt, it also affects morale. It's bad for business all round.

It's not like content marketing is an easy enterprise to begin with. Fail to create something really compelling and engaging and readers will simply move on, leaving you with nothing but wasted time and effort.

The best way to avoid the trap entirely is to maintain super high levels of creativity. Your brain needs to be constantly working away at ideas and concepts that intrigue. Writing then becomes a much easier by-product of the creative process.

Creativity tends not to be something you can conjure up on demand. I know. But it may just be easier to kick-start than you think.

Understanding creativity

For me, creativity is the result of associations your brain makes between "things." When we sit down and try to be "creative" we tend to quickly become frustrated and give up. It seems to be too hard. The problem, most likely, is that you aren't giving your brain the building blocks it needs to make associations that result in creative inspiration. The building block of creativity is association.

Association needs two or more "things" that our brains can work with in order to come up with a potentially new and unique link. Fortunately, it's easy to give your brain plenty to work with.

Generating creativity

The more "things" you collect, the more likely your brain is to relate them in a truly new and unique way.

From a content perspective, the "things" we are talking about are niche concepts - titles, headlines. We want to collect as many related (both closely and loosely) topics as we can and combine them in different ways to come up with interesting new angles and blog post titles.

The best way to do this is called the SubMerge technique (taken from how to make money blogging) that you can follow step by step. Here's a brief outline:

  1. Copy a list of subheadings from an article related to the niche topic you want to talk about.
  2. Search Google for related results based on each sub-heading.
  3. Merge the results collected from each Google search with each of your sub-headings.

This process does two very important things:

  1. It generates a lot of "things" to work with.
  2. It keeps them loosely related to a specific niche.

Let's say you want to write a guest post related to an article you recently published. Perhaps you have 10 subheadings in that article. For each of those subheadings you gather 20 related Google search results and merge each set of 20 results with each of the 10 sub-headings to generate:

10 subheadings x 20 results = 200 potentially new blog post ideas

Not every combination is going to work well. Some concepts will be too closely related, or possibly identical, and so are not great candidates for inspiring unusual associations. Many, however, will be loosely related. Your brain will have to jiggle and tweak the concepts to merge them into a workable new title.

The process of merging two concepts into a single workable title is what forces your brain to make interesting new associations, which is the creative process in action. Some of the concepts will not make sense at all, as they are simply too disconnected. Be very careful not to simply discard two concepts as nonsensical. More often than not, the most interesting and creative ideas will come from associating two seemingly disconnected concepts.

This strategy doesn't only work for generating blog post ideas. You could easily apply it while searching for new ideas to update and improve older content, or guest post pitches related to articles from an editor you want to reach out to.

Creativity and inspiration often go hand-in-hand. Get one right and the other flows naturally. SubMerging gives you a way to put plenty of "things" on the table to help your brain make creative associations.

Next level creativity

There's no rule preventing you from merging more than two lists. Up 'til now we've only considered merging two lists to generate a bunch of ideas.

That puts a lot of "things" on the table and provides your brain with building blocks to work with. While associating two things can produce really creative ideas, there are a lot more possibilities available when associating three (or more) things.

A few simple calculations can help demonstrate this. As before, assume we create a list of 10 subheadings and gather 20 related topics for each one. This time we also create a list of 10 subheadings related to a third concept.

We can directly merge these with each of the 200 possibilities we have to give:

200 x 10 = 2,000 potentially new blog post ideas

That's a lot of potential.

We can take it even further and collect 20 related results for each of our "third concept" subheadings and merge those. Then merge them with the original list. This would mean we're merging a list of 200 with another list of 200:

200 x 200 = 40,000 potentially new blog post ideas

Hopefully you're getting the sense that the sheer number of potentially creative new ideas we can generate using the submerge technique is essentially limitless. This is a great thing because it means that writer's block should hopefully be a thing of the past.

Remember, it's not necessary to comb through each and every possibility. The goal of this exercise is to provide your brain with the building blocks it needs to make at least one new, creative idea.

Out of the potentially thousands of new associations your brain will make while submerging, there will inevitably be a few that really spark your imagination and help you find new angles that simply would not have occurred otherwise.

From a motivation and morale standpoint it's also far better to use a strategy like this because it puts your brain to work. Makes you feel like you are working toward an objective. It doesn't rely on waiting around for a flash of inspiration that may or may not come. 

Coming up with a truly unique and compelling idea for new content will also help motivate and inspire you to create the better content because less energy is wasted in the often fruitless and draining phase of ideation. The time it takes to get pen onto paper is reduced and the effort required is dimished.

On demand new ideas will make you excited about writing and leave you with plenty of enthusiasm for creating content: more energy. more passion; that's when you'll be at your best.

How to Improve Your Content Rank Fast

Posted: 26 Sep 2019 08:00 AM PDT

We've all been there. You've spent a couple days creating amazing content for your customer base that once they find it online, will blow them away and have them crawling at your doorstep ready to hand over their money.

A week goes by and nothing. Then two and three weeks go by. Reality sets in. There appears to be a problem. The search engine gods have buried your content to your demise.

Your new content doesn't rank, at all

Fortunately, if you follow a few simple strategies in this article, the search engine gods will start to favor your new content.

Ranking new content starts with Google indexing. Google will crawl through websites, discover pages, and then apply an algorithm to determine your overall rank on a search engine result page (SERP). Once your website has been crawled and indexed, you're on the map and can focus on ranking accordingly.

Unfortunately, unless you're Kim Kardashian, you're new content isn't going to be immediately indexed after being published. Luckily, you can change this.

Using a number of best practices, you'll be able to rank new content and fast. In turn, growing in the rankings will help you increase your conversion rate, gain more brand exposure, and improve your profits.

High quality content that people are searching for

The first step in ranking new content is making sure that it is not only high quality, but the content is targeting what your customers are searching for. Targeting featured snippets is a great place to start.

For those needing a refresher lesson on what's a featured snippet? Let's say you're looking for "what are the best blinds to keep heat out?". After typing that in, Google is going to show you an answer box that says, "Venetian Blinds. These wood blinds are very good insulators but can warp in extreme heat. They are excellent in the heat and light control simply because the slats could be tilted - By Rapid Blinds & Shutters."

Once you've determined content ideas around featured snippets that your customers are searching for, it's time to start creating. The blog should be long enough so that your keywords flow naturally with content that is valuable, reliable and accurate. Aim for about 1,100 – 2,000 word blogs that includes keywords relevant to the snippet your targeting. Be sure to add different variations and cover all keyword possibilities that are relevant.  

When done correctly, your rankings will improve slightly just by utilizing multiple keyword variations. Over time, this ranking will continue to improve as long as the keywords stay relevant and the content is in demand (being searched for).

Once you've developed high quality content, focus on the following SEO tactics.

URL optimization and speed

There are two things that you want to do with your URL. First and foremost, you want to use Google's URL Inspection Feature. It's fast, free and imperative to optimizing your URL. To do this, you'll need to login to your Google Search Console and follow the on-screen instructions. This will index your URL so it's more accessible to search engines.

The second step is optimizing URLs for the content you've created. Create URLs that include the snippet topic. Here are two examples: 

Correct: https://www.yoursite.com/best-blinds-to-keep-heat-out

Incorrect: https://www.yoursite.com/9-10-19/post45

With URL optimization, comes page speed optimization. With patience being at an all-time low, website speed is extremely important and could be the final decider on whether or not a user stays to read the new content you spent hours on.

One or two seconds longer in load time could have someone bouncing back to the search engines, which is not good.

Sitemap

Having an XML sitemap is an important technical aspect of SEO and is pretty easy to implement. A sitemap lists your website's entire library of individual page URLs/content and creates a map of how everything is connected and structured. It makes it way easier for your website to be indexed and acts as a form of communication between your site and search engines.

Make sure that your sitemap is accurate and up to date. This will help your site get indexed faster and in turn, ranked sooner.

Title and mega tags

Another important SEO tactic is utilizing and optimizing title and meta description tags. A title tag is what appears as the hyperlink on search engines for visitors to click on.

A meta description tag is the little preview of information that appears on a search engine underneath the title tag. It is used to help describe the content of your page to both search engines and visitors. When you have a strong meta description tag, search engines are better able to match your content with what people are looking for.

To get the most out of these features, make sure that you create compelling content that acts to persuade people to visit your site. With an increased click through rate, you will experience an increase in your overall ranking. Use subtle keywords and make sure you adhere to the character limit for both.

Internal links

We're all familiar with the importance of backlinks, but internal links are another crucial aspect to focus on. What's better is that unlike backlinks, you're in control of developing internal links and you don't have to rely on others.

To get the most out of this step, go through your website and add internal links to connect all of your content. If you haven't been doing this from the beginning, it will take some time to get everything up to speed. Once you're caught up, it's easy to internally link articles or blogs in the future. When you add internal links to your content, they're easier to index and satisfy search engine's algorithms for ranking. Just make sure that you're linking together pages that are relevant and avoid adding links just for the sake of it.

Utilizing social media

Finally, what's the point of creating new content if you can't share it on social media? Viral content is huge these days and if you want to be a part of the action, you need to increase your social shares. To get the best results, promote your blog or article on all platforms such as: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit.

Doing this doesn't always directly impact your ratings but it will increase brand awareness, build credibility, help you gain more backlinks, and increase the likelihood of new conversions.

If you post new content, share it on social media. If you go viral, you'll experience increased rankings immediately. However, with time, your rankings will level out. That doesn't mean this step is wasted, it just means that people will eventually move on to the next best thing and you won't be able to continually benefit off of one piece of content. They will, however, now know exactly who you are and what your company does.

Bottom line

To get the most out of your website, it's important to take the time to create new content that people are searching for and optimize it for search engines. The above tips, in addition to other SEO tips and best practices, are a great way to ensure that your online presence stays relevant. Your website is a well-oiled machine and when you leverage all of the above tips together instead of picking and choosing a few tactics, you'll see the best results.

How to Improve B2B Email Marketing ROI with Respect-Based Practices

Posted: 26 Sep 2019 05:00 AM PDT

B2B marketing (business-to-business marketing) is a construct of many different marketing strategies that cibbect one business or organization to another, one of the most popular and effective being Email exchange.

B2B email has several key components that are crucial to its success: email layout, reach of relativity, call to action, and, perhaps the most important, the building of trust and rapport. 

Enticing subject lines

The subject line of your B2B email is your first step in the door. Forty-seven percent of email recipients open an email based solely on the content of its subject line. A strong, catchy message is an absolute must-have.

You want your email to grab the reader's attention, and an easy way to do that is with simple tactics like; fear of missing out subject lines: "Entry deadline fast approaching," "More Bang For your Buck," "Increase Your ROI by 30%, Guaranteed," or an appeal to the recipient's place in the organization.

Email outline and theme

Once the email's recipient clicks open, what greets them? Your customers and business partners are more likely to engage and respond favorably to your email if it has a strong theme that fits your company, your sales pitch and are aesthetically pleasing to the senses. Too much animation in an email or too many visuals can have the opposite effect that you may be going for. Consider complementary color schemes and easy to read font choices. Keep it clean, simple, direct and engaging.

Segmenting email reach for optimal relativity

B2B Marketers know that segmenting their email lists can improve not only open but also click-through rates. Sending a more pointed email to a certain user can have a far-reaching advantage in your relevance. Breaking up your knowledge of your email recipients list into distinct sub-groups can be extremely helpful. You can use pointed verbiage toward company positions, genders, ages or income levels. A simple way to grab new data that you may not have had before is by offering a survey or quiz via email, or your website when the user opts-in to your list.

Another invaluable way to gauge your virtual audience is by closely examining your email exchange with customers. Monitoring your back and forth with potential consumers is important when marketers have seen up to a 760% increase in revenue from segmented email campaigns.

A call-to-action that no one can resist

A CTA is when an email or website demands an action from the audience, whether that be "Sign Up," "Learn More," or "Join Us." A CTA will differ depending on what the company goal might be. A "Sign Up" could be pitched as a "Free Trial," letting a customer experience a product or service for a short period before having to pay. If the goal was informational, the Call To Action would be to ask a user to "Subscribe" to learn more.

How do I build trust with B2B marketing?

Trust is a fundamental part of any relationship, and a business relationship is no exception. B2B Marketing Emails need to build trust and respect while still maintaining a professional demeanor. To gain your client's and respect via B2B, make sure that your Emails consist of three key things: education, trust and engagement.

Continuing the education process

When a potential customer opens your email, they likely already know a little about what they clicked on. One of the main goals is to now continue their education. Make each of your emails a small lesson that can help them learn even more, and increase their chances of accepting your business.

Stop to consider what a problem your potential client might have, and then offer a partial solution to that problem via email. Offering to solve a problem for your customer will be intriguing; however, not offering the solution in its entirety is key. If the customer feels they have the entire need met, then it allows them to stop where they are. If you only suggest a partial solution, while alluding to the remainder, they will feel compelled to seek more information.

Building trust through video

Face to face interactions are the strongest connection point when getting to know one another, but digitally, a video is the next best thing. Adding an introduction video to welcome B2B prospects to your email sequence can have a huge impact on your potential clients. Video is a powerful bonding mechanism and can be a valuable way to earn the customer's trust.

Don't worry about not having the time or budget to create a blockbuster feature for your B2B email either, a short and simple video of you speaking from your office will do the trick. Never underestimate the advantage of sound and picture on the sense, versus plain text on a page. You are allowing the prospective customers to see and hear you can bring on a "human-to-human" connection, instead of just a "business-to-client level."

Engaging in a memorable interaction

There are many different levels and types of engagement to consider while creating your B2B Email strategies, some of which may be as easy as a personalization, or a reminder, but others can be a bit more creative.

There is an effective and semi-subtle tactic known as an open loop. An open loop is when you present your email recipient with an idea or story, something they can easily relate to, but instead of finishing your thought, you move on to something else. An example might be, "Cold weather is around the corner." If your company specialized in new tires, or weather preparedness, this one sentence alone could put your business into the front of their minds.

Another common engagement tool is something called a cliffhanger. This one has far-reaching popularity, mainly into storytelling. We all are guilty of binge-watching from time to time; the main reason being the art of the cliffhanger. A cliffhanger leaves the audience wanting more, and often leaves us with a number of unanswered questions; questions that we will actively look for the answers to. A possible cliffhanger for your B2B email could be "Savings are around the corner, and you won't believe what big-ticket items we're dropping prices on."

What are the prospects and payoffs of successful B2B marketing?

The potential payoffs of properly executed B2B Email Marketing are quite frankly, countless. 79% of B2B Marketers credit Email as their most effective channel of distribution demand and B2B marketers see an average of 760% increase in revenue from customized and segmented Email campaigns.

When considering today's digitally driven world, those numbers makes absolute sense. Thanks to current technology, an individual can check their email anywhere in the world, at any time of day. With timing like that on your side and respect-based B2B email practices in your pocket, you're ready for success.
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