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Email Marketing Strategies

Planning is the first step that should be considered before taking any form of decision to enable you to remain in line. Before you begin collecting emails, you need to have a plan with clear set goals. You need to understand what you want to achieve, how well you expect your sales to increase, how cordial you want to be with your subscribers, how email marketing can fit in with other marketing strategies you want to employ, and the effect on your overall marketing income. Because of the dynamic nature of humans, these goals will be updated as you go, but it is important to know what you want to do first while making sure that they can be achieved. These goals may change or evolve over time; it’s important to consider the purpose of your emails and set goals that are both measurable and attainable.

As previously said, it is never too early to begin to plan. This will help you grow faster, as you have a plan and enough time to dedicate to ensuring the success of the plan. Some of the strategies to consider include:

Quality Blog Content

The most common strategy in building an email list is creating a blog, delivering quality content, which drives traffic to your website. If people love your content, they are likely to subscribe to receive updates on future content and exclusive offers related to the content they have just consumed. Content creation may be demanding in terms of time and personnel, but it is definitely worth it, as people are always looking for answers online to numerous questions they have.

Give them answers to these questions, especially those linked to your niche, and try to get a few information from them to give them more content. The email address is the most important detail to get, but you can get a few more details. Your content must be valuable. In any marketing strategy, you want to apply, content is key. No matter how you water a bad seed, it won’t germinate properly, but if you water a good seed appropriately, you will get the desired plant. For visitors to turn to subscribers, they must love your content.

Engaging Email content

It is important that the content in your email is conversational; your content should be aimed at getting the recipient to open and engage. This will foster goodwill as your audience will interact with your website. Ask what they think, let them share opinions. This causes loyalty and gets the emotional part of them, causing attachment to your brand.

Use Irresistible Lead Magnets

As you already, lead magnets are enticing offers that provide value for free or cheap. To ensure optimal effectiveness of your lead magnets, you should ensure that;

It is easily exhaustible; people get bored easily, so if you are offering a free guide, you should keep information concise for easy consumption. If your audience does not consume the lead magnet, then it has lost its purpose.Your lead magnets should be applicable and effective. When the free product has reasonable effects, people won’t hesitate to pay for products.Ensure that your lead magnet is relevant for your target audience. If you use a lead magnet for the wrong audience, your efforts will be futile. Remember to have a well-defined market persona.Make sure it is readily available; you don’t want them to forget about it. 



Utilize Sharing

Social sharing is a great tool; adding a “share” call-to-action in your email content can double your click-through rates. Sharing is not limited to getting more clicks and engagement; it should also increase your subscriber list. If your offer is valuable, and someone shares with his contacts, if they profit off it, they are likely to stay subscribed to get first-hand information about future offers. Sharing is a great tool for exponentially increasing brand awareness.

Personalize Email Content

Cordiality is something you want to achieve, and personalizing the content of your emails is a great approach to achieving this. The emails will make more meaning to them. Personalization goes beyond addressing subscribers by their first name but giving content that will exclusively be beneficial to each of your subscribers. This can be achieved by segmenting your list of subscribers (Discussed in the next chapter). Segmenting your list has a lot to do with giving exclusive offers and information to people on different lists, helping you build a better cordiality with your subscribers.

When they have the knowledge that they are receiving exclusive content tailored to suit their needs, you will get loyal subscribers.

Utilize Urgency

Humans naturally have an inclination to procrastination or second-guessing situations, but if your emails add a sense of urgency, you will convert more subscribers to customers. “Only available to the first 100 clicks”, “grab your spot now,” “Hurry,” and other similar words and phrases can put your subscribers under pressure because they do not want to miss out. Because of the inclination towards procrastination, a push to hurry will be effective to ensure they click as soon as they is a limited-time offer or limited-customer offer.

Use cliff-hangers

A cliff-hanger is a suspenseful and intriguing ending to a plot that makes you interested in what happens next.  Just like in movies, and novels or even Television shows, where cliff-hangers keep your mind fixed on the next episode or chapter. They can also be useful in emails sent to your subscribers. They should be excited to open your new email because they want to see the new content your email brings. It is a good way to make your subscribers anticipate and get cordial with you. Cordiality is important in keeping your subscribers loyal because humans can easily get bored with routines. 

Avoid Excessive Call-To-Actions

You should avoid clogging your email with several Call-To-Actions, let every email have a target, request just one action from your subscribers because multiple CTAs make conversion difficult. Subscribers have different options of actions and often get lost in the process of deciding what to do, in the end, they may as well do nothing. It is better to have one clear CTA per email, which can be repeated a few times because people may forget easily.

Aesthetics Matter

It is important to ensure that your emails are pleasing to the eye. No matter how great your content is, if it is not pleasing to the eye, it may not even be read at all. The eye is very sensitive to colors, the beauty of design even more than text, which can be an influential factor to determine if your subscribers will enjoy reading your emails.

Your email marketing service provider will likely provide you with templates, pick cool colors that are easy on the eye yet catchy enough. It is also important to pick a color that is in line with your brand. Avoid clutters of colors and designs as it can make the email look really terrible, especially for mobile users. It is important to note that the majority of subscribers will view their emails on mobile. Strategically place images in between large texts to make the texts better processed as readers will largely skim through; long texts are usually tiring and may be avoided. Some catchy images in between can help break up the texts. It is also important to avoid clogging emails with texts and images, blank white spaces between texts and images – where appropriate, helps the eyes read them better. Blank space in your emails frames your content nicely, which helps increase readability. Use catchy colors for your call to action and ensure the command is large enough to attract attention. Always have it in mind that your content will be viewed on different types of devices. Hence keep them simple.

You can format your emails in a text or HTML format. An HTML format gives you the liberty to have special characters, colors, and text processing to bold, italics, etc., while plain texts allow only text, no images, or extra formatting is allowed. If your HTML link is broken, it can totally distort the output in your subscriber’s device. Still, fortunately, many email marketing service providers usually have a default option of displaying text only if the HTML link is broken. You should use tools like “Email on Acid” to get a preview of how your email will look on different devices to ensure you’re getting it right.

Properly Schedule Emails

Timing is important when sending out your emails to ensure that people are reading them and taking action on them. There is no specific time this guide can recommend for you, but you should make a market survey of the modal send times of emails from companies in your niche. You can also employ a trial by error method with the use of analytics. Send at different times, and see what works best. You should also have a steady send schedule. Your subscribers should know what day(s) of the week to expect your emails, be consistent with it.

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Types Of Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing service providers are supposed to provide you a platform to send broadcast emails and autoresponders to your leads while ensuring proper segmentation, analytics, templates, and properly obeying commercial email regulations so that your emails won’t end in the spam box.

Examples of top email marketing providers

A few good examples are:

Constant Contact. Drip.Send In Blue. AWeber.Convert Kit.Get Response.And Mailchimp.



The Types of Emails You’ll Use in Email Marketing

In pushing your business with email marketing, there are three types of emails that you’ll rely on. They are Transactional emails, Relational emails, and Promotional emails.

Transactional emails are sent to your customers to confirm transactions they have made on your website. They include; 

Order Confirmations

When customers place orders, confirmation emails of such orders are sent to the customers. These emails have high open rates because the customer has just spent money, and wants to be sure that there is no mistake. If there are no issues, the customer is probably happy with the purchase and waiting to receive, you could seize this opportunity to suggest related items. If the customer orders equipment, you could recommend additional accessories that can enhance that equipment’s usage, and even if the customer doesn’t order immediately. He will have it in mind.

Purchase Receipts

Just like order confirmations, these emails are usually frequently opened because people definitely want to see their receipts and need a call-to-action button to make a complaint if something is off. Here you can throw them a survey about the user experience on your website; they may be happy to give this information, to help you serve them and others better.

Shipping Notices

This email s probably one that will be opened more than once as they want to grab hold of their shipping and tracking details. You should give a link to your website for tracking items; there is a huge chance they will navigate your website again and see other items they are interested in.

Return Confirmation

When customers return your product, then they are definitely disappointed and unhappy due to the fact that they have spent some time waiting for the order to get shipped and they have gotten something they don’t want, and they have to wait for a couple of hours or even days for a refund. This is a time to offer coupons and offers to persuade them to try you out once again. Even if they don’t take it, your excellent customer service can help salvage your reputation.

Relational Emails are used to engage subscribers and customers and keep your relationship with them intact. A few examples are:

New Subscriber Welcome

This email should be sent immediately to every new subscriber, telling them that they have signed up as subscribers to your updates, let them know what to expect and the value they will derive from being on your list. You should do the same for users who newly created an account with you, provide them login details. You can give them a link to frequently asked questions or other things that can make it easier to understand your services. 

Lead Magnets Delivery

You have most likely collected the details of an email subscriber by promising to give a free item of notable value. When you deliver this item, you should utilize survey tools to ensure that after consuming the freebies, they can say how helpful it is for them. This will always help you improve on your content to deliver the best available offer. 

Newsletters/Blog Articles/Events

Whenever you create content or host events, you should inform your subscribers in simple, straightforward messages, providing links to it. Backlinks to your website will improve your website authority and improve rankings for search engines. 

Support Tickets

Support tickets give you an opportunity to discuss a customer’s grievances, with several follow up emails to ensure customer happiness and satisfaction. If it cost the customer time or money, you can attempt to compensate with coupons.

 Promotional Emails are used to influence customer decisions to generate sales. While they can fetch you a lot of money and clicks, they should be used alongside relational content, personalizing the email to subscribers and customers, keeping them engaged, and they may just want to check out your promo. Some examples are:

Promotional Sale Announcements

Human beings naturally like free and cheap things, so an announcement of promotional sales will fetch you a lot of engagements because of the lower prices they anticipate from it. An example is the black Friday sales, announcing this will generate a lot of traffic and engagement to your website. People would love to seize the opportunity to buy items that were too expensive before that time. This also turns your customers and subscribers into marketers for you as they will be eager to tell their families and friends about the cheap deal they are about to get from your website.

New Product Release

Be quick to let your subscribers know about a very anticipated product, and even give the first few persons to buy a coupon or a discount. Make them anticipate the release as well, from a month to go, two weeks to go, a week to go, a few days to go, and the launch date. This action keeps interested customers on their toes, and they will make their purchases almost immediately. 

Methods by Which You Can Send Emails To Your Subscribers

You can either manually send emails to your subscribers via broadcasts to your entire list or a segmented part of your list. These are usually done for relational and promotional emails, although there are templates provided by your email service provider to make the process less stressful. You can also have templates to achieve this yourself.

You can automatically send emails to your customers and subscribers via Autoresponders, which are programmed to send an email when a customer triggers an action. For example, when a customer signs up and gets a confirmation link in his email address within seconds, it is a result of autoresponders. You can automate some relational emails. If your templates and algorithm are properly set, it won’t even look like an automated email. For many email marketers, the larger parts of their emails are automated. Autoresponders are created in advance to ensure that you send emails to customers at the appropriate time, walking your subscribers and customers through necessary processes and helping them make decisions.

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Email Marketing Metrics To Build Successful Campaigns

Email marketing analytics is a tool provided by your email marketing service providers; it uses numbers and statistics to track the progress of your marketing strategy. You definitely do not want to just market and hope for returns without monitoring it. To know whether your strategy is working, you need to check the numbers, and usually, the numbers don’t lie. Your email marketing analytics will enable you to discover your open rates, click rates, delivery rate, unsubscribe rates, among others. This will help you filter your list for proper cleaning.

Key metrics to track for your email campaigns



Open rates

Your open rates, as the name implies, give you a report of how many people opened your email and when they opened them. The main factor that determines your open rate is how catchy your subject line is. If it isn’t intriguing, people may not be compelled to take a look at the content, or you send your emails at a time that isn’t the best for your audience. 

To improve your open rates, you should ensure that;

Your subject lines are catchy, drawing their attention and giving them an insight into the content of the email.You do a proper market survey about your audience and other companies in your niche to determine a good send time and send cadence.Your content should be valuable so that people who open once will definitely open your mails subsequently.



Click Rates

After opening your email and reading through the content, your subscribers are following your call-to-action. The amount of people who click on your CTA accounts for your click rates. The content of your email and how much value they can get from it is a huge determinant of whether they will take further action or just close it. This is why this guide never gets tired of reiterating the importance of valuable content.

To improve your click rates, you should ensure that;

Your content quality remains very high to engage your subscribers.You properly segment your audience to adequately personalize useful content to each segment.You should remove links that have very low clicks, as your audience probably doesn’t want it, and you should find a way to strategically repeat links that people like for more people to see it in the future.



Unsubscribe Rate

No matter how valuable your email content is, some people will unsubscribe. However this becomes alarming when the rate is too high, then you are doing something wrong. People unsubscribe because they do not get what they want or because they feel choked by your email frequency.

To reduce this rate, you need to;

Have an autoresponder that communicates with every subscriber that unsubscribes with a survey. This will give you a hint as to what you are doing wrong.Ensure that you are sending valuable messages to each segment of your subscribers. If they don’t find the content they receive useful, they might as well unsubscribe.Reduce the number of promotional emails you send, and relate with them with increased value.



Delivery Rate

Your delivery rate is the number of emails that successfully gets to the recipient’s inbox without bouncing. Bounces are the major causes of reduced delivery rate, and to improve your delivery rate, fix your soft bounces. It is also important that your email marketing service you use adhere to the regulations of your region. In the United States, it is mandated that all commercial emails must include unsubscribing buttons, clearly show the senders postal address, avoid deceptive subject lines, and many more. These regulations differ in different regions.

Complaint Rate

Complain rate is the percent of emails “marked as spam” out of the total emails sent. If your complaint rate increases, it will affect your deliverability to others who didn’t even complain, as email vendors will consider it spam. To reduce your spam rate, clean your list regularly, and remove subscribers who have marked you as spam.

Proper email analytics will also give you an insight into how much money your list makes you. If you have a list of 10,000 people and from your email marketing clicks you earn $50,000, you’d definitely know that not all 10,000 people have fetched you that money; you need to remove the spam complaints, unsubscribes, bounces to get an idea of how many people made you that money. Then you can carefully add more subscribers, and you’ll watch your revenue grow.

In conclusion, if you have ever been in the school of thought that Email marketing is dead, you are wrong, and it is time to backtrack on that. With proper strategy, it is one of the best digital marketing approaches available to business owners, big or small. So get started today, let your subscribers enjoy value from you, and take some of their money in return. Good luck!

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Email Segmentation: 15 Segments to Break Your List Into

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies to build a solid business. Email marketing segmentation represents the grouping of email subscribers into subgroups divided by various criteria, such as preferences, interests, location, activity, and more. Email segmentation can dramatically improve the conversion rate from email marketing activities.

A quick intro to email segmentation

Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your subscribers into smaller groups for better-personalized emails. Rather than sending the same email to all your subscribers, segmentation will foster better engagement and hence better click rates. In all, segmentation will help improve the effectiveness of your campaign.

Upon segmentation of subscribers, your automation will work better, as you have different autoresponders for different segments of your audience. 

Segmenting your email list starts when the users submit their data. You need to know why and how they got on your list, their names, location, and lead magnets that attracted them to your list. This will enable you to personalize emails to them that will trigger their interest.

15 Segments to Break Your List Into



New subscribers

Send new subscribers a series of welcome emails during, and after sign-up.

Preferences

Subscribers who want to hear about blog posts vs. those who only want sale notifications.

Interests

The purchase history of subscribers is an indication of interest. Send customers recommendation emails about related products.

Location

When you have events happening in a location, you should notify your subscribers who live in that area about the event, they may not be able to attend, but it helps you build goodwill. Also, if you have a physical store as well as an online store, you can inform customers about their closest walk-in store for promotions that are in-store only.

Open rate

Reward subscribers that engage your emails with special offers to maintain their loyalty.

Inactivity

Let inactive members know what they have missed since their last activity; using analytics on how more people are benefitting from your offers may just remind them of how much they are missing out on, and they get active again.

Lead magnet

Send content to your subscribers on their lead magnet preference. Different people have their choices for consuming information. Some subscribers may put in for more than one lead magnet, so it is important to include them in separate lead magnet lists so that they can get information for all new information.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

This is quite common for E-commerce businesses as some customers will fill up carts without checking out due to many reasons best known to them. It is important to remind them to complete their purchase and to offer a freebie if necessary. E.g., “complete your purchase and get a 15% discount off your next purchase”.

Abandoned Form

Some visitors will appear on your website but will not complete their registration. It is important to make their email address the first detail you will ask for so that if they don’t even complete the sign-up, you can always reach out to them some other time. You can also use WordPress’ WPForms Form Abandonment Add-on to save emails even if they don’t submit.

Customers Who Didn’t Buy

You might have launched a product with limited quantity, and your visitor missed out on the opportunity to buy. You can try to compensate them by offering really valuable offers to them that salvages your relationship with them. 

Segment by Purchase

Treat customers who purchase large amounts by offering them appreciation coupons or free gifts that will make them attached to your brand. Also, customers who have returned to make more orders – say 3 times, have shown some sort of loyalty and you should reward them by giving them cheaper offers on their next few purchases. You should also take note of certain purchases that are seasonal. If a customer purchases a weatherproof jacket for the snowy period, you should be able to suggest lighter cotton clothes in your promotional emails during the start of the summer season.

Change in Purchase Pattern

If you have a virtual product or service where you need the customer to regularly subscribe, if they stop suddenly, you should check in with mails to ensure you aren’t doing anything wrong. Always ensure to conduct a survey on why the user canceled as it will help build user experience for other subscribers.

Segment by Reviews

Testimonies of your customers can never be overestimated, as they propel other skeptical users to make their purchases. Sometimes customers are too lazy and selfish to drop a review, but constant friendly reminders with targeted emails can do the trick and boost your brand reputation.

Segment By Website Activity

You can monitor your visitor’s activity on your website to know what exactly what they are looking for, using tools to extract their browsing data and sorting similar users together to create personalized offers and products for them just as if they are inside of you.

Segment by Gender

If your business sells separate items for men and women, most notably fashion, you should segment your subscribers by gender to exclusively give them relevant updates. You definitely do not want to update women about men’s clothing and vice versa.

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How To Improve Email Marketing Campaigns

Email lists usually encounter an inevitable decline with increasing time, for many reasons. Some people will simply lose interest in your products and services, some people will forget their login details and just easily create a new email address, and even some people will die, all reducing the quality of your list due to the depletion over time.

If you build a list today, in the next 6 months, it will be worthless, and even far less in a year. Hence highlighting the importance of cleaning your email list.

Cleaning an Email list in simple terms is the process of “removing subscribers who do not engage your content” so that you can market to people who engage, showing a clear indication of interest. If you do not periodically clean your list, then you are wasting a lot of money and effort on marketing to people who aren’t interested in your business or to abandoned accounts. 

It is important to clean up your email list once or twice yearly. Usually, you’ll notice when you need to clean this list from your statistics and analytics, seeing a sizeable amount of reduction in click rates, open rates and an increase in unsubscribe rates, and a lot of spam reports is a huge sign that you need to clean your list and add new sets of subscribers. This is why the collection of email addresses for your list should not stop; you should continue to collect from time to time. 

These declining statistics are a huge matter of concern because if your analytics has taken a nosedive, your conversion rate has definitely gotten poorer. Then you’ll be having reduced sales, and as expected lower revenues. Hence, cleaning email lists can help compensate for the deficits.

Some of the obvious benefits are:

Better Open and Click Rates

When you clean your email list, it means that you leave only interested subscribers on your list. Hence, you are assured that the people who get the emails will open and click through your call to action. If you clean your email list of 10,000 people and you weed out 4,000 people, it means that you will have 6,000 people on your list. 6,000 of 10,000 people is a success rate of 60%, while 6,000 of 6,000 is a 100% success rate. After weeding out the unneeded subscribers, you can add a new set of subscribers to your list till you decide to clean your list again.

Reduced Spam Complaints

Cleaning your email list helps ensure that you rid yourself of subscribers who mark your emails as spam because in the long run, many spams complaints from your website will get email vendors like Gmail and yahoo mail to send your emails straight to spam, even from users who haven’t reported you hence losing the potency of your list.

Cleaning your list helps to avoid situations like this because it is a very common occurrence. Some people who subscribed for your content may not be interested again, or for some personal bad mood. They can just mark your mail as spam without your knowledge, of course. To a large extent, many email marketers suffer from this, and the deliverability rate declines quick.

Fewer Bounces

When an email bounces, it means that it doesn’t get delivered. An email bounce could be because of wrong email addresses, misspelling email addresses, or just random errors like typing “gmial.com” the inbox of the recipient may also be filled up and rejecting new emails.  Bounces affect your reputation just as much as spam complaints. Your analytics and statistics can tell you your bounce percentage, and upon cleaning, it will definitely reduce. When you discover bounces on your email list, it is worth giving them a second trial. As you now know, emails could get bounce for a barrage of reasons. There are two types of bounces: Hard Bounces and Soft Bounces

Hard bounces are caused by permanent errors that cannot be traced, and your message will never reach the recipient, while soft bounces, on the other hand, are temporary issues that can get fixed. 

Hard bounces happen because of wrong domain names, inexistent email addresses, and delivery blockage by the email server.

Soft bounces can happen due to a mistake, or typographical error in an email address, maybe when you are editing or collating the list. Multiple occurrences of soft bounces will lead to hard bounces.

Most email marketing service providers will give you options to correct mistakes that could have led to the bounce because they are quite obvious and easy to correct. You just need to edit the subscriber’s information, and you’re good to go. 

Reduced Cost

Your email marketing service provider will charge you according to the number of emails you send, probably per 1,000 emails sent, or according to the number of subscribers you have, or even both. So cleaning your email list helps you ensure that you are not spending excessively on the emails you send, or better put, you are not spending money to send emails to people who will never receive it. Every subscriber on your list that doesn’t engage your content costs you reasonable money. Hence proper email list cleaning helps to boost your ROI by spending less to achieve the same results. 

Better Judgment

A properly cleaned list will give you accurate information on how well your segmentation and other strategies are working. If your list is full of inactive subscribers, your analytics reports will be skewed, and you won’t be able to accurately judge your strategy success. Cleaning your list can really help you to judge your strategy progress with accuracy, and when you are sure that a very large percentage of your emails are being delivered, you can find out what you are doing wrong to have low clicks. But if you have many inactive subscribers, your strategy may be working, but you won’t even notice.

Email Lists You should Clean

You probably have a couple of lists upon segmentation, and you want to prioritize the email lists you should clean. Yes, this is recommended because certain lists will drive conversion and leads more than others. These are your most active email lists, and since it brings about better engagements, you should pay attention to them. 

Another list you should consider paying attention to is older lists because the older your list, the more you will have uninterested subscribers who will engage less. Although it is recommended not to allow your lists to get too old before you clean them. Two to three times in a year is fine.

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How To Set An Autoresponder Sequence For Business

An autoresponder is a program that automatically responds to emails, and it can be used as an effective business tool to drive traffic and conversions toward your products. Indeed, an autoresponder sequence can be used to trigger a set of actions and rive sales automatically.

How to set up your autoresponder to generating business

It is possible to over automate or under automate your processes; you don’t want to over automate so as not to make the subscriber feel like they are communicating with a robot, though they are. You also do not want to be tagged as a business with a low response rate. To ensure the optimal use of autoresponders, the following strategies should be considered. 

Send new subscribers an onboarding/welcome sequence. A welcome sequence is a set of emails sent to the new subscribers that brings them through a journey where there is a clear goal (like learning something new) and a clear action they’ll need to take (perhaps being your premium products). This is one of the most important moments, to show your new subscribers your competence, what you offer, build trust, and showcase your products. In this phase, you can make the most and create a great first impression to give a head start to the relationship with the potential customer.  If your business offers services or you have an online store, you could use autoresponders to automate sales. After you offer free lead magnets to people, in the form of exclusive links of web content and blog posts, which you can attach with an automatic coupon for those who follow that link. So you do not have to send a new series of emails, and you make sales with the automation of your emails. All transactional emails are automated, and with the proper use of autoresponders for order confirmations, you can suggest similar products for the customer. Some relational emails, too, can be automated if you have segmented your email list. (Email list segmentation is discussed in the next subtopic) it helps you sort your customers and subscribers by criteria that make it easy for you to make personalized offers. In your emails, there should be a segment that highlights “Other items you may like” based on that purchase. Autoresponders can also be used to ask for reviews, If a customer buys a new product from you, it should trigger a “leave us a review email” automatically sent a few days after the delivery when the owner must have tested the product, and if the call-to-action isn’t followed then, the emails can be scheduled to keep sending a couple of more times to encourage the customer to leave a review.Automation also helps balance promotional emails and relational emails. Your subscriber’s cordial relationship is important to you. Therefore you need to send more relational emails; with your already preset templates, automation will make this easy. In reality, a larger part of your emails should provide valuable content to keep subscribers attached so that your promotional emails will not be too regular to balance the books and to ensure that it holds value when you choose to offer promos. Outline your email to figure out your email sequence. Your email sequence is the number of emails you want to send in a particular time frame. There is no specific figure for how long it should be or how many emails it should contain, but it is recommended that it is as short as possible so you don’t bore out the subscriber. But long enough to cover all the necessary parts of your campaign. Therefore your sequence will vary for different campaigns.

In your sequence, you need to set a cadence (the intervals between two successive emails). There are times when twice a week is fine for blog posts and information emails, while you need to send more frequent reminders for a promo that will soon elapse, depending on your goals. 

Patterns to follow to set up the autoresponder



Thank your subscribers for subscribing and let them know what you intend to offer, highlighting the problems you discover and how you intend to solve them.Remind them of previous discussions and mention the launch of your product or service.Send a couple of reminders with the cadence becoming more frequent when the launch date is almost set.Launch your product, and add a sense of urgency to drive-up traffic.Send reminders to customers who haven’t purchased to let them know how much they are missing out on. If you have made a decent amount of sales, share the statistics. Everyone likes to jump on a moving train.The last few days before you’re the end of your campaign, send more reminders with words that spark urgency to make other skeptics try out your offer. Also, remind them of the problem your product or service intends to solve.After your campaign ends, send an email to customers who purchased thanking them for their support and telling those who couldn’t purchase that you will inform them of other opportunities in the future. If you are proud of your figures, share them as social proof, and these numbers will encourage skepticism to try you out some other time. 

Writing the content of the messages in your autoresponders can be quite strenuous; you can outsource it to freelance copywriters ensuring that the copy addresses their problems and possible solutions to their problems, not just focusing on throwing you products into their faces. When you make it about them, they will pay attention to you.

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The Quick Entrepreneur’s Guide To Email Marketing

Email marketing leverages a set of tactics to build a stronger brand, drive traffic to your products, and build a solid funnel for converting leads into loyal customers. While email marketing isn’t new, it’s still one of the most effective marketing strategies to build a valuable business.

Introduction to email marketing

Email marketing is an underappreciated digital marketing medium that involves the strategic sending of emails from a company to prospective and existing customers. When correctly done, email marketing converts skeptics and prospects into customers and turns one-time buyers into lifelong loyal customers.

One preposterous take from digital marketers, especially those who work with social media, calls Email marketing outdated because it is an old digital marketing method. As old as Email marketing is, it is still one of the most effective digital marketing methods because it directly reaches the audience. Nearly all internet users have an email address, and virtually all persons check their mails daily in the modern age, especially with the growth of technology, which enables all internet activity on mobile just as much as desktop.

A simple notification at the top of a person’s screen shows a preview of the message, just like every other instant messaging apps. Such a person can just check immediately; even when the person doesn’t have time to actively check through social media, they still have a very high (almost impossible) tendency to check their emails. So calling email marketing “dead” is a rather outlandish conclusion, as it is one of the best ways to communicate with an audience, promote your brand, even with a low budget, and consumers like it.

Email marketing helps you directly connect with your leads, just like texting your friends, keeping up with them, and making them attached to your brand, beating your competition. It is also customizable, as you can create several emails for several segments of your list. Because you own your list, you are sure that you can keep total control of it if you lose your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account; however, you can lose communication with your leads.

Like I said earlier, email marketing has been a relatively underappreciated channel, especially with the rise of social media, but you can derive optimal use from it for your business. Generally, for every mail you send, on average, you are likely to get a 20% open rate. It could be more or less, depending on many factors, including your content appeal, your niche, and your cordiality with your audience.

Addressing your potential and existing customers by the first name could make people pay more attention to an email, as it sounds personal (This will be discussed further as we progress).

So if you have 10,000 people on your email list, with a 20% open rate, you should be expecting nothing less than 2,000 website visits, especially when you have a call to response protocol. As I said, it could be more, and it could be less. This guide thoroughly examines the dos and don’ts of email marketing to ensure you get the best value for your marketing.

Building an Email List

An email list typically includes a list of names, email addresses, and perhaps other data (like company name or income level). There is a trendy phrase about email marketing that goes; thus, “the money is in the list,” which means that the better your email list is, the more leads and clicks you are likely to get from it.

Even as a beginner, it is never too early to create an email list; in fact, it is one of the very first things you should consider; your list should grow alongside your website. If you have a brick and mortar store, you can start with the list of people coming around, but if you have an online store, you have to build a list from the very first visits to your website and even from among your offline connections.

One shortcut that many business owners get enticed with is the idea of buying an email list rather than going through the laborious yet rewarding method of organically creating a list. It looks like a way to cut corners and save time, but this is wrong and fallacious; in fact, it is a massive waste of time and money, and you will never get the actual value of email marketing. There are a few reasons I will highlight as to why buying a list is bad, and you should totally avoid it! They include:

Poor Quality Lists

People who sell email lists aren’t obliged to be honest with you, you want a list quickly, and they want money just as quick. Of course, they will make several claims about the authenticity of the list, but you cannot verify it, and it likely has a lot of problems, some of which you may not even discover. For example, inactive email addresses, you definitely do not want to send your mails to ghosts, and these bought lists will give you a high number of “ghosts.” It is also possible that the data is false; the names and other information about people on the list could be wrong, making you address people wrongly. There is no shorter route to abandoning a mail than that. If you receive mail that was wrongly addressed, you will most likely report it as spam for fear of fraudulent activities, and you definitely do not want this to happen to you if you buy Email lists. 

Illegal Collection Of Emails

The Email addresses on a bought list are usually illegally gotten from the internet randomly. Obviously, nobody has chosen to be on your list if you bought them, so it’s going to be worthless because nobody has asked to be on them. You could also face legal charges, as much as tens of thousands of dollars per email you send illegally. Like the CAN-SPAM Act of the United States, several countries and regions have their email policy with different charges and penalties for illegal emails.

You’ll Be Spamming

According to Oxford, Spamming is “sending unsolicited messages indiscriminately to a large number of internet users.” If nobody has chosen to be on that list you have, sending emails to them is tantamount to spamming. I’m sure you personally detest receiving unsolicited emails, almost everyone does anyway, and you probably delete those emails, mark as spam, and probably unsubscribe since you never asked for it. You may believe that your email content is well packaged and catchy with credible information. Still, the recipient only sees another company spamming their way into his/her inbox and will most likely not pay attention to the content. 

Other Companies Use The same List

As mentioned earlier, the individual or organization that sells you a list owe you no loyalty or exclusivity, as they want to make quick money. There is the possibility of selling the list to another company. People typically unsubscribe to emails and even pick the option of “not receiving emails from similar companies,” Your messages will go directly into the spam box. Even if it goes into their inboxes, you have lost the touch of exclusivity and owning your list, and you are now in competition with other companies for the attention of your audience. 

It Is Against the Policy Of Email Service providers

Many Email service providers (the companies that send out your emails) have terms of service that considers buying email list spamming, which is against their terms of service. It could lead to your account‘s closure, you could get fined, and even some email providers may file legal charges against you.

This will be triggered if too many of your messages get marked as spam, and you will quickly get your account flagged. You’ll quickly get on the wrong side of your email service provider. 

Poor Open and Response Rate

Upon several research and data, it has been found that a reasonable open rate is usually not less than 20%, and a response rate of 5-10% is usually considered adequate. Open rate is the number of people that open an email you sent out of everyone who receives it (not everybody will receive the emails you sent), while the response rate judges the number of people that respond to your emails. If you have an email list of 10,000 names and send out an email. An excellent open rate will guarantee you that at least 2,000 people will open your emails, and out of those 2,000 people, 500 to 1,000 people click on your links, you will have about 500 to 1,000 purchases of your new product. A $50 product could fetch you between $25,000 to $50,000, which is an excellent sell rate.

If your list, however, comprises of people who do not want to be there, it’s just as good as shooting yourself in the foot because the majority will not open, not to talk of following the links. You can have an open rate as low as 5% and a click rate even worse; you may as well sell nothing.

It’s Bad For Brand Reputation



[image error]A brand pyramid is a representational framework that answers fundamental questions about a brand and market positioning. The framework is particularly useful for new brands to enter a market for the first time. It moves from bottom to bottom with these elements: features and attributes, functional benefits, emotional benefits, brand persona/core values, and brand essence.

Apart from the fact that your email service provider can file serious charges against you, getting you in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, even worse repercussions can be encountered from buying email lists. People on your email list can interact with one another on Twitter about how your company violates privacy rights and illegally collecting details to send emails.

These can even appear on Google’s first page when the name of your company is searched for. This is a red flag for potential customers and people who aren’t even on your list. You could also be tagged as fraud by an angry online mob who feels that your offers are unsolicited and could be fraudulent. Reputation is crucial online, and you will need to spend a lot of money and effort to fix a destroyed reputation online because “the internet never forgets.”

Now that you understand the importance of building your list yourself and not just buying any list from a random individual or online body, you must learn how to properly build a list. The first thing to achieve this is knowing who you want to sell to.

Understanding your target audience is essential, as you need to know who you are targeting before you start building an email list. Understanding the buyers’ perspective is usually helpful in delivering content to them. If you understand what a person likes, it will be easy to make attractive offers. You should have a marketing persona – a virtual character representing your ideal customer by having data of the primary characters of a group of your potential customers, to design the best content and user experience for them. A market persona, in short, will help you have an idea of who these people are, helping you understand them and hence improving your services and offers to them. 

How to start building your email list

Having lists is vital, as you already know by now, but having an engaged list of subscribers is more important. This epitomizes the interest of people in your brand and what you have to offer. To grow your email list while ensuring that you get a list of people interested in your service, you need to consider a few things. They are:

The sign-up form

The sign-up form on your website in the dialog box where your visitors submit their email address to subscribe to your emails and get your offers. The most important information is the email address. Still, these forms usually have other information like location, interests, and other details that allow segmentation of the email list (This will be elaborated as we proceed). Sign-up forms typically appear during a session when a visitor is on your website as a pop-up covering the entire screen or takes part from the side or from the top.

A sign-up form is where you must convince your website visitors that your emails are worth signing up for. An alternative to Sign-up forms are landing pages. However, I recommend using them together with information while offering freebies to entice the visitor to submit details, called lead magnets.

Landing Pages

A landing page is a page where a visitor “lands” following an ad or alternative clicks, containing information about your product and what you want to offer. The important thing on the landing page should focus on what you want to offer, possibly painting it as a one-time offer; a “take it or leave it scenario” that probably boxes the visitor into a corner, making them subscribe as they anticipate some value in return. There are many approaches to go about landing pages; in truth, one isn’t better than the other, but depending on your niche, product type, and prospective customers, some approaches are usually more appropriate than others. The simplicity of design (optimizing fonts, images, texts, and colors) and their overall appearance.

A bad landing page will ruin the collection of emails for your list in ways you don’t anticipate. If a visitor lands on your page, and it is poorly designed, there might be hesitation in trying out your lead magnet because the eyes are the most sensitive sense organ, sending signals to the brain more times than any other sense organ. So working on perfect aesthetics is never a waste of time. It should not be overloaded with information as you don’t want to bore out the visitor; you only need to get their details, so use a proper lead magnet and make your landing page have as little information as possible. Some Landing pages work better with specific lead magnet, so you may need to try out different approaches to help you choose the best possible landing to click conversion ratio.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are freebies you give away as bait. To get people’s details for your email list, they could be free videos, e-books, coupons, discount offers, and generally things that entice a visitor to make them subscribe. But your lead magnets need to be attractive and offer value to your prospects. Your prospective customers must be able to see that you are giving them something valuable – worth reasonable money for free. In fact, it must be something they will be willing to pay for. Just like a magnet that was built to attract metallic objects in its field, if it is bad, it won’t attract any metal, or metals that even get attracted will not stick. Hence your freebie needs to hold value, otherwise, you risk losing out on potential leads, and even if they have initially subscribed to your email list, poor content can make them stop checking your mails or worse – unsubscribe as they are uninterested in the preview they have gotten.

If your giveaway item, on the other hand, is very attractive, your new subscribers will be on the lookout for more of your mails because they believe in the inherent value. Even paid items will appear to them as a bargain. So you shouldn’t feel you are giving too much as a lead magnet because in the long run, you will definitely make gains from it.

It is possible to integrate a sign-up form into a landing page, Usually signing up isn’t the first thing you’ll see on a website, but with a landing page, you can incorporate sign-up form, especially if your product or service needs more information for email list segmenting. With extra details provided by the sign-up form, you can effectively optimize your email list. 

Types of sign-up forms

There are different types of sign-up forms, based on how they appear on a User’s screen. Some of which include:

Static sign-up form

These are static blocks of form that appear when an internet user visits your website. Usually located anywhere on the page. It can also have a specific dedicated page for users who will follow clicks and backlinks to your page. 

Pop-up form

Pop-up forms appear on a webpage, especially when reading a blog post, often after the internet user has settled in and absorbing information. Usually, a little less than a minute after landing on the page, the pop-up form will show. Usually, the content in the form and the lead magnet will relate directly to the blog post or piece of information being consumed, further enticing visitors to input their details. Pop-ups usually boast of high conversion because the content is directly linked to the form; Internet users are intrigued and probably want to try it out, especially when the lead magnet is almost irresistible. Although it is worthy to note that if the visitor hasn’t consumed enough information, the pop-up may seem like a distraction, and he will just close immediately, thereby ignoring the form. This is why the timing of the pop-up is very important.

Notification bar form

A notification bar form is less intrusive than a pop-up form; it comes from the top of the page, catching some attention while giving the user permission to keep reading. However, because it offers no form of hindrance to the reading of the article or blog post, the visitor may forget to check out the notification. This can be a very common situation as human beings have low attention spans

Slide-in form

A slide-in form is also less intrusive than a pop-up form and can be more effective than the notification bar form. It is also a good way to incorporate sign-up forms into web pages with a lot of content. Because the visitor would have consumed very little information within the first one minute, it is important to wait until a very sizeable part of the information has been gotten. A slide-in form usually “slides in” from the lower corner of a page. Particularly the bottom right, so Users would have almost exhausted the content before getting the slide-in form. Because they have good information and valuable content, they will sign-up if it suits their demands. However, sometimes users aren’t patient, and they may not even get to the end of the post, probably after gaining the needed information from earlier parts of the web content. Making you miss out on some potential leads.

Your form should give the visitors explicit information on what to expect from you; this is important as it will ensure that the people who are signing up to your list are the exact people you want to make the quality of your list very high. Making your emails stay further away from the spam folder. The form should clearly explain what users stand to gain by signing up for your list and how frequently you’ll be sending (i.e., daily, weekly, twice a week, fortnightly); explicit information on all these will mean that the subscribers are fully aware of what they have signed up, increasing the chances of a very good open rate and avoid being in the “spam” discussion. 

Other important things to note about your form are;

The call-to-action command

If you have registered on a website before, you probably would have seen different Call-to-action (CTA) commands. The call-to-action command is usually at the completion or submission stage of the sign-up form. Where after imputing details, you need them to submit. Here, you should get creative rather than using the normal cliché “sign-up” command; you can use more catchy phrases like “Get my free eBook now” or “I want to try out new product offers up to 30% discount”. Get creative and draw your readers in; it’ll really help to get more people to submit their details. It also serves as a reminder of the lead magnet and help the visitor consider the offer. 

The location

Many websites focus their sign-up forms on only their homepage as they believe that it is the first place that visitors will encounter before going anywhere else, forgetting that some people will visit the website via search engines or other backlinks to the website. The sign-up form should not be limited; it should appear on nearly every page that users will get the tiniest bit of information. The aim is to grab attention, and your blog posts are even more likely to get visitors attracted than your homepage. It is also possible that different locations have different types of forms to ensure optimization and the best possible User Experience. User experience is very important as it is a factor considered by Google in ranking websites. In conjunction with other factors, User experience determines your website rankings on search engines.  

The design

Create simple designs that make information easily processed and maybe a color that matches your website or in sync with your brand identity. You can use more than one color to show emphasis on important things, and a very bright, catchy color should be used for the CTA command.

Other Channels to Build Your List



Social Media

Reach out to your social media audience if you have one and encourage them to subscribe to your email list, of course, by using coupons and bonuses or other valuable lead magnets. This will expand your reach and expose you to a potentially higher number of visitors. Share intriguing or even controversial posts from your blog, which will make people get snippets of engaging content, making them interact and follow up on the links. If you have a Facebook business page, you can add a sign-up form to it, and voila! You get email addresses from your own followers. In other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram you should have your bio link, make promotional posts, and direct them to your bio.

Collect subscribers offline

Interact with people from several events, telling them about your products and services, and if you own a physical store, great! Send a Google forms link to your customers; this approach ensures one-on-one interaction, and you can even convince them better, no matter how small the audience is.

Read Also:

E-commerce GuidePodcasting Guide

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Business ModelsBusiness StrategyMarketing StrategyWhat Is Business Model InnovationPlatform Business ModelsNetwork Effects In A NutshellDigital Business Models

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All The Product Strategy Key Concepts To Know

A product strategy represents a set of steps, tactics, and a long-term direction a company undertakes through the launch, growth, and maintenance of a product or set of products to reach a defined audience.

Technology Adoption Curve



[image error]In his book, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows a model that dissects and represents the stages of adoption of high-tech products. The model goes through five stages based on the psychographic features of customers at each stage: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggard.



Design Thinking



[image error]Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, defined design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Therefore, desirability, feasibility, and viability are balanced to solve critical problems.



Customer Obsession



[image error]Customer obsession goes beyond quantitative and qualitative data about customers, and it moves around customers’ feedback to gather valuable insights. Those insights start by the entrepreneur’s wandering process, driven by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and a builder mindset. The product discovery moves around a building, reworking, experimenting, and iterating loop.



DevSecOps



[image error]DevSecOps is a set of disciplines combining development, security, and operations. It is a philosophy that helps software development businesses deliver innovative products quickly without sacrificing security. This allows potential security issues to be identified during the development process – and not after the product has been released in line with the emergence of continuous software development practices.



Value Disciplines



[image error]The Value Disciplines Model was developed by authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema. In their model, the authors use the term value discipline to represent any method a business may use to differentiate itself. The Value Disciplines Model argues that for a business to be viable, it must be successful in three key areas: customer intimacy, product leadership, and operational excellence.



Five Product Levels





[image error]Marketing consultant Philip Kotler developed the Five Product Levels model. He asserted that a product was not just a physical object but also something that satisfied a wide range of consumer needs. According to that Kotler identified five types of products: core product, generic product, expected product, augmented product, and potential product.



Bowman’s Strategy Clock



[image error]Bowman’s Strategy Clock is a marketing model concerned with strategic positioning. The model was developed by economists Cliff Bowman and David Faulkner, who argued that a company or brand had several ways of positioning a product based on price and perceived value. Bowman’s Strategy Clock seeks to illustrate graphically that product positioning is based on the dimensions of price and perceived value.



New Product Development



[image error]Product development, known as the new product development process comprises a set of steps that go from idea generation to post-launch review, which helps companies analyze the various aspects of launching new products and bringing them to market. It comprises idea generation, screening, testing; business case analysis, product development, test marketing, commercialization, and post-launch review.



Ansoff Matrix



[image error]You can use the Ansoff Matrix as a strategic framework to understand what growth strategy is more suited based on the market context. Developed by mathematician and business manager Igor Ansoff, it assumes a growth strategy can be derived by whether the market is new or existing, and the product is new or existing.



BCG Matrix



[image error]In the 1970s, Bruce D. Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, came up with The Product Portfolio (aka BCG Matrix, or Growth-share Matrix), which would look at a successful business product portfolio based on potential growth and market shares. It divided products into four main categories: cash cows, pets (dogs), question marks, and stars.



Customer Segmentation



[image error]Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers into sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing, and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down in several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics, and more.



Scrum



[image error]Scrum is a methodology co-created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland for effective team collaboration on complex products. Scrum was primarily thought for software development projects to deliver new software capability every 2-4 weeks. It is a sub-group of agile also used in project management to improve startups’ productivity.



Business ModelsBusiness StrategyMarketing StrategyWhat Is Business Model InnovationPlatform Business ModelsNetwork Effects In A NutshellDigital Business Models

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Problem Solving Strategies For Business

Feynman Technique





[image error]The Feynman Technique is a mental model and strategy for learning something new and committing it to memory. It is often used in exam preparation and for understanding difficult concepts. Physicist Richard Feynman elaborated this method, and it’s a powerful technique to explain anything.



5 Whys Method



[image error]The 5 Whys method is an interrogative problem-solving technique that seeks to understand cause-and-effect relationships. At its core, the technique is used to identify the root cause of a problem by asking the question of why five times. This might unlock new ways to think about a problem and therefore devise a creative solution to solve it.



Second-Order Thinking



[image error]Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and any eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.



Lateral Thinking



[image error]Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.



Value Stream Mapping



[image error]Value stream mapping uses flowcharts to analyze and then improve on the delivery of products and services. Value stream mapping (VSM) is based on the concept of value streams – which are a series of sequential steps that explain how a product or service is delivered to consumers.



Fishbone Diagram



[image error]The Fishbone Diagram is a diagram-based technique used in brainstorming to identify potential causes for a problem, thus it is a visual representation of cause and effect. The problem or effect serves as the head of the fish. Possible causes of the problem are listed on the individual “bones” of the fish. This encourages problem-solving teams to consider a wide range of alternatives.



RFM Analysis



[image error]The RFM analysis is a marketing framework that seeks to understand and analyze customer behavior based on three factors: recency, frequency, and monetary. The RFM analysis allows businesses to segment their customer base into homogenous groups, understand the traits of each, and then engage each group with targeted marketing campaigns.





McKinsey’s Seven Degrees Of Freedom



[image error]McKinsey’s Seven Degrees of Freedom for Growth is a strategy tool. Developed by partners at McKinsey and Company, the tool helps businesses understand which opportunities will contribute to expansion, and therefore it helps to prioritize those initiatives.

Other Frameworks:

Growth Strategy MatrixBCG MatrixAnsoff MatrixGrowth HackingGo-To-Market StrategyAmazon FlywheelCustomer ObsessionCoca-Cola FranchainedDropbox Self-Serving ModelZoom Freeterprise

Read Also:

Business StrategyTypes of Business ModelsWhat Is a Value Proposition?What Is Business Model InnovationPlatform Business ModelsNetwork Effects In A NutshellDigital Business Models

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Growth Strategy

A growth strategy is represented by a set of actions that can help a company gain traction, thus acquire market share more quickly, and combined with business modeling, it can be a driver for long-term success.

Growth strategy frameworks



[image error]Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.



[image error]In the FourWeekMBA growth matrix, you can apply growth for existing customers by tackling the same problems (gain mode). Or by tackling existing problems, for new customers (expand mode). Or by tackling new problems for existing customers (extend mode). Or perhaps by tackling the whole new problems for new customers (reinvent mode).



[image error]In the 1970s, Bruce D. Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, came up with The Product Portfolio (aka BCG Matrix, or Growth-share Matrix), which would look at a successful business product portfolio based on potential growth and market shares. It divided products into four main categories: cash cows, pets (dogs), question marks, and stars.



[image error]You can use the Ansoff Matrix as a strategic framework to understand what growth strategy is more suited based on the market context. Developed by mathematician and business manager Igor Ansoff, it assumes a growth strategy can be derived by whether the market is new or existing, and the product is new or existing.



[image error]A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.



Growth Strategy Case Studies



Amazon Flywheel Model



[image error]The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy that leverages customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.



[image error]Customer obsession goes beyond quantitative and qualitative data about customers, and it moves around customers’ feedback to gather valuable insights. Those insights start by the entrepreneur’s wandering process, driven by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and a builder mindset. The product discovery moves around a building, reworking, experimenting, and iterating loop.



Coca-Cola Franchained Growth & Expansion Strategy



[image error]Coca-Cola follows a business strategy (implemented since 2006) where through its operating arm – the Bottling Investment Group – it invests initially in bottling partners operations. As they take off, Coca-Cola divests its equity stakes, and it establishes a franchising model, as long-term growth and distribution strategy.



Dropbox Self-Serving Model



[image error]Dropbox generated over 90% of its revenue via its self-serve channels to convert users into paying customers through in-product prompts and notifications, time-limited free trials of paid subscription plans, email campaigns, and lifecycle marketing. Dropbox generated over $1.1 billion revenue in 2017, with an average revenue per paying user of $111, $305 million in free cash flow, and 11 million paying users



Zoom Freeterprise Model



[image error]A freeterprise is a combination of free and enterprise where free professional accounts are driven into the funnel through the free product. As the opportunity is identified the company assigns the free account to a salesperson within the organization (inside sales or fields sales) to convert that into a B2B/enterprise account.

Read Also:

Growth Strategy MatrixBCG MatrixAnsoff MatrixGrowth HackingGo-To-Market StrategyAmazon FlywheelCustomer ObsessionCoca-Cola FranchainedDropbox Self-Serving ModelZoom Freeterprise

Read More:

Business StrategyTypes of Business ModelsWhat Is a Value Proposition?What Is Business Model InnovationPlatform Business ModelsNetwork Effects In A NutshellDigital Business Models

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