Social Marketing

Without email automation, your marketing team misses major opportunities to nurture and engage your target audience and contacts. Without email automation, your marketing team misses major opportunities to nurture and engage your target audience and contacts. In this article, we’ll review common types of email marketing automation, the tools to help you establish and maintain an email marketing automation strategy, and different automation triggers you may implement at your company. But first, let’s begin by answering the most crucial question: what is email automation? What is email marketing automation? Why You Should Use Email Marketing Email Automation and Marketing Statistics Marketers Should Know The Benefits of Email Automation How to Automate Email Workflows Email Marketing Automation Examples Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns Another common example would be receiving an automated email reminding you to check out the items in your virtual cart after you left a website without making a purchase. Email automation helps convert leads into customers, delight existing customers, and encourage activities like greater product adoption, upsells, evangelism, and additional purchases. Top 7 Email Marketing Tools To Automate Emails & Get Clicks! Why You Should Use Automated Email Marketing Email marketing automation eliminates time-consuming tasks, such as preparing email lists, sending generic messages, or scheduling events manually. This gives marketers and salespeople more time to work on projects that require their attention (or cannot be fully automated). Email marketing automation is centered around workflows, a predetermined, triggered set of actions you’re directing your automation software to take for you. Email Automation and Marketing Statistics Marketers Should Know Email is the most frequently automated marketing channel with 65% of marketers leveraging email automation 71% of B2B marketers say they use automation in their email marketing efforts The number of email users worldwide is expected to 4.6 billion by 2025, more than half of the expected world population. In 2022 alone, 333.2 billion emails were sent per day. The Benefits of Email Automation Let’s take a deeper look into some of the ways email automation can benefit marketers. 1. More Seamless Workflow Email automation allows marketers to send emails to all of their customers quickly and efficiently — allowing marketers to move on to other tasks while keeping customers satisfied. In fact, 49% of sales and marketing professionals listed “time savings of repetitive tasks” as one of the top three advantages of automation. 45% listed improved efficiency/ROI as another advantage. 2. Better Customer Experience 43% of marketers say improving customer experience is the number one advantage of leveraging marketing automation. Automated emails will help you deliver messages that delight customers, such as incentives, helpful reminders, and onboarding content. Keeping regular contact with your customers will build a better relationship, boost retention, and generate more leads. 3. Improved Email Segmentation Automated emails make it easier to segment your email recipients based on attributes, behavior patterns, and engagement levels. Doing so leads to an increased engagement rate, open rate, conversion rate, and click-through rate. 4. Fewer Errors Even if you’re just copying

Our recent State of AI 28% of marketers who don’t use AI in their roles say it’s because generative AI tools are too expensive. This makes sense because, as a good marketer, you should be skeptical about high-priced tech, especially with emerging technology. Our recent State of AI 28% of marketers who don’t use AI in their roles say it’s because generative AI tools are too expensive. This makes sense because, as a good marketer, you should be skeptical about high-priced tech, especially with emerging technology.  But, at the same time, there are many affordable AI tools that can help you save time and meet your marketing goals. And, for what it’s worth, 60% of marketers in the same survey also reported that AI/automation tools are important in their day-to-day roles. In this piece, we’ll share a list of free AI tools, outline the three-step process for implementing AI on a budget, and share how marketers currently leverage AI tools in their roles.  Table of Contents Affordable AI Tools for Business How to Implement AI on a Budget [3 Steps] What AI tools are marketers currently using? [Research] Familiarizing Yourself With AI Affordable AI Tools for Business Even though marketers who responded to our survey say that they’ve not yet adopted AI because of the price, also consider that all survey respondents who use AI/automation tools say it saves an average of two hours and 24 minutes per day.  Watch on YouTube Here’s a list of affordable and free AI tools to consider adopting into your marketing processes.  1. HubSpot Price: Free CRM; Plans start at $50 per month and vary based on team size and tier subscription tier. HubSpot incorporates AI in a number of ways. Here are just a few: Content Creation: Content Assistant uses generative AI to help you create outlines, emails, and even blog ideas so you can share high-quality content with your audiences.  SEO: HubSpot’s COS and CMS use algorithms to scour your posts for search optimization suggestions before you post. Emails and Workflows: When a customer does something such as engage with an email or landing page, this will trigger a canned email to be sent to them with their name and other personalizations in it. Social Media: HubSpot’s social media platform allows you to autogenerate post caption copy using machine learning. This technology recognizes sentences that you might regularly tweet or meta descriptions in a link you’re sharing, then crafts a caption that you can then edit or tweak. Deduplication features: If you upload a new list into a HubSpot CRM, or a pre-existing contact subscribes to your marketing newsletter, HubSpot will search the CRM to find matching contacts and prevent any duplicates from being added. 2. Grammarly Price: Free; Paid plans $12/mo – $15/mo per member Grammarly is an intuitive copy-editing tool that uses machine learning to recognize and highlight spelling, grammar, and other phrasing errors on platforms like Google Docs, email, and social media sites. Image Source As an individual user, Grammarly

Google Data Studio is now Google Looker Studio, and it’s making data reporting even more accessible, visual, and impactful than before. The new interface, features, and functionality have some serious advantages when it comes to visualizing competitive data insights. Google Data Studio is now Google Looker Studio, and it’s making data reporting even more accessible, visual, and impactful than before. The new interface, features, and functionality have some serious advantages when it comes to visualizing competitive data insights. In this guide, we’ll introduce some of the coolest, newest features of the platform to get you ramped up quickly. We’ll also walk you through the most notable changes between Google Data Studio and Google Looker Studio. Pro Tip: Even with the major overhaul, Google Looker Studio is still entirely free and accessible to all (even if you don’t have any data of your own!)— that means you can follow along with this tutorial in real-time. With Looker Studio, you can create custom dashboards, reports, and visualizations to gain insights into your business operations. The platform offers a wide range of data connectors and report templates, allowing you to interpret data from various sources. 1. Log into Looker Studio To log in to Looker Studio, you’ll need a Google account — I recommend using the same one as your Analytics, Search Console, and/or Google Ads account. After logging in, you’ll land on a page displaying your most recent Looker Studio reports. 2. Explore the Looker Studio Dashboard If you’ve used Google Docs, Sheets, or Drive before, this dashboard should look pretty familiar. In the center, you have the option to start a blank report, start a tutorial, or see report templates. To the left, you’ll see a column that houses several tabs including Reports, Shared with me, Owned by me, Trash, and Templates. At the top, you’ll see three more tabs: Reports, Data sources and explorer. Let’s go over each of these tabs in detail. Reports Here’s where you can access all of your reports (equivalent to a workbook in Tableau or Excel). To create a report in Google Looker Studio: Click the Create button. Choose Report. Add a data source. Customize your report. Once you’ve created your report, you can access it later in your dashboard. To soft through several reports, filter them by name, owner, or last opened date by using the dropdown filters. Data Sources Data sources list all the connections you’ve created between Looker Studio and your original data sources. To create a data source in Google Looker Studio: Click the Create button. Choose Data source. Enter in your company information, click Continue. Set up email preferences. Select a Google Connector. Authorize the Google Connector using a Google Account. Choose the account and property you want to view. Click Create Report. Pro Tip: If you’re using Google Analytics and/or Search Console (which I highly recommend), you’ll need to individually connect each view and property, respectively. So if you have three GA views for three different subdomains, you’ll need

Heat maps are a game-changer for marketers who want to optimize their website and blog for better engagement and conversions.Heat maps are a game-changer for marketers who want to optimize their website and blog for better engagement and conversions. By using heat maps to track user behavior, marketers can determine what their visitors like, what they don’t like, and what they’re ignoring. Here, we’ll take a closer look at heat maps, how they work, and the different types of maps you can use to optimize your website for more conversions and less friction. Table of Contents What is a heat map? How do heat maps work? Different Types of Heat Maps [+ What They Can Tell You] How to Use Heat Maps Imagine a marketer is re-designing a landing page and wants to position a call-to-action in a high-traffic area. Instead of taking wild guesses on where it should go, she generates a heat map of her website, allowing her to see where visitors are most engaged. This is what makes heat maps so effective. They allow marketers to visualize, understand, and interpret complex data at a glance. By identifying patterns in movement and behavior, marketers tailor their websites to improve user experience, increase conversion rates, and even reduce bounce rates. How do heat maps work? Different color schemes can be used in heat maps — from grayscale to rainbow. However, rainbow-schemed maps are typically preferred because they enable you to interpret data points more easily. The “hot” sections of a heat map — typically represented by warmer colors — are most popular with users. Alternatively, the “cold” sections — typically represented by cooler colors — are less popular. There are two main categories of heat maps: Interaction heat maps are used to identify how users interact with a website or blog. They do this by tracking clicks, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior. Attention heat maps are more complex, leveraging eye-tracking technology to record the movement of a user’ eyes as they scan a webpage. Next, we’ll discuss the different types of heat maps and the benefits of each. Different Types of Heat Maps [+What They Can Tell You] 1. Scroll maps Scroll maps show you the percentage of visitors who scroll through each section of your webpage. The hotter the section, the more visitors have viewed it. This data can help determine where to place CTAs or important information on your webpage. For instance, if your visitors only scroll down 50% of the page, placing a CTA closer to the top — rather than the middle or bottom — would make sense. Remember: When using scroll maps, always look at metrics on different devices, including smartphones and tablets. (Image Source) 2. Click maps As the name suggests, click maps identify the parts of your page that visitors click on the most. The hotter the section, the more frequently your visitors click on it. This data can show you if visitors care to click on your CTAs or other buttons that

Welcome to HubSpot Marketing News! Tap in for campaign deep dives, the latest marketing industry news, and tried-and-true insights from HubSpot’s media team.Welcome to HubSpot Marketing News! Tap in for campaign deep dives, the latest marketing industry news, and tried-and-true insights from HubSpot’s media team. Coachella didn’t start off as the Met Gala for influencers. The festival was first held in October 1999 and was intended to be an accessible event for alternative music fans. Held just three months after the infamous Woodstock ‘99, the first Coachella had an audience of just 25,000 people and failed to make a profit, costing organizers nearly $1 million. After taking a year off, Coachella made its comeback in April 2001. While Coachella began picking up popularity in its first decade, the 2010s ushered in a distinctly new era for the festival and it became a profitable and style-defining event. So, what changed? In its first few years, Coachella featured predominantly alternative artists, with headliners like Beck and Rage Against the Machine. By the 2010s, mainstream artists including Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and Beyonce started drawing bigger crowds. What started as a single-day event evolved into a six-day festival spanning over consecutive weekends.  By 2016, there were over 99,000 attendees at Coachella each weekend — combined to be nearly 10x the attendance of the first event. How Influencer Marketing Changed Coachella The rise of social media also had a major impact on Coachella’s growth. Influencer culture and “festival fashion” became nearly synonymous with the event. As content creators and celebrities began attending Coachella in droves, what they wore nearly overshadowed what was happening on stage. Brands, particularly brands that relied on influencer marketing, began leveraging Coachella as a pivotal part of their business strategies. In 2015 and 2016 H&M partnered with Coachella organizers to launch #HMLovesCoachella, a clothing collection that captures the boho aesthetic the festival is known for. H&M also hosted a pop-up shop at the 2016 festival where attendees could purchase the clothes on-site. Perhaps no company has used Coachella as an influencer marketing tool as heavily as the LA-based clothing company Revolve. How Revolve Uses Influencer Marketing at Coachella to Drive Revenue It’s reported that nearly 70% of the company’s sales come from influencers, and experiential marketing with content creators at events like Coachella is a core revenue driver. Since 2015, Revolve has hosted Revolve Festival, an invite-only party for celebrities and influencers.           View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by REVOLVE (@revolve) Over the years Revolve Festival has made headlines for partnering with celebrity brands like Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Beauty, and for last year’s transportation issues that left influencers comparing the party to 2017’s disastrous Fyre Festival.   Despite the controversy, Revolve Festival, combined with content distributed by influencers dressed in Revolve’s clothes, has helped the brand generate an astounding five billion social and media impressions. Between sponsors throwing money at the