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9 Things We Learned From Trying All the Best Marketing Automation Tools

Over the past five years or so, we must have trialled just about every piece of marketing automation software on the market. At the very least, we’ve had a good go with all the major names in this game and learned a lot about choosing the right pieces of software along the way.

If we knew five years ago what we know now, we would have found the right automation kit much sooner. Not only that, but we would have saved a good amount of time and money without trying to implement the wrong type of tools into our business.

In this article, I’m going to try and pass on the knowledge we gained and, hopefully, this will help you find the right marketing automation tools faster. So here goes: these are nine things we learned from trying out all the best marketing automation tools.

#1: Form tools generally aren’t good enough

Most enterprise automation platforms will come with some kind of web form builder that allows you to embed forms on web pages without any coding. This is a pretty fundamental feature because forms are where you generate all of your most valuable leads and you need to be able to create and optimise a range of different forms.

Sadly, even with enterprise automation tools, the form builders and optimisation tools built into these platforms simply aren’t enough to maximise conversions.

You don’t just want to slap forms across your web pages and hope for the best. You need tools that help you design forms that are built to convert from day one and then you need to analytics tools to measure performance, optimise your forms and increase conversions.

We were so underwhelmed by the flock of form tools out there that we ended up building our own.

Leadformly makes it easy to build and embed them on your site. While the analytics features mean you can see where users are running into problems and remove barriers getting int the way of conversions. You can also use this data to run informed A/B tests on your forms and constantly improve performance over time.

This is the kind of form tool businesses need to maximise leads and we just weren’t getting these features from the leading automation providers.

Bonus lesson: Sometimes you just can’t find what you need and have to build the right tool for yourself.

#2: Usability really matters

When you’re using marketing automation software on a daily basis, usability issues can really get in your way. This is especially true if you’ve got an all-in-one marketing automation platform and CRM which members of your sales team need to use every day.

Running into these issues every time you try to create a new automation workflow, manage segmented lists or complete other tasks gets boring really quickly.

I’m not going to name and shame any providers here and I’ll also make the point that usability is somewhat subjective. Just be aware that a surprising amount of marketing software platforms leave a lot to be desired in terms of UX.

Common problems we ran into include:

Speed issues: A lot of marketing automation tools – especially the more complex or feature-rich ones – have slowdowns and other speed issues.
Navigation woes: Another common problem is poor navigation that makes it difficult to find tools or complete basic tasks quickly.
Click fatigue: Closely related to navigation, it often takes too many clicks to make simple things happen on marketing automation tools.
Reports/analytics: Most automation suites offer analytics and reporting but they rarely offer enough in-depth data to gain genuine insights.
Customisation: If you can’t customise features, the ones you don’t need are going to get in your way and make it harder for new team members to learn the software.
Learning curve: You want to know new people can join your team and get to grips with your automation tools quickly.
Setup/integrations: The more complex marketing platforms can be a real pain to set up and integration with other tools is often patchy.

Those are the most common usability problems we’ve come across but the biggest lesson we learned was that some of the most trusted names in marketing automation can be the worst performers when it comes to usability.

So don’t think the oldest and most popular marketing platforms are necessarily the best. Quite the opposite.

So which marketing automation tools nail usability?

Here’s a quick list of some tools that really delivered:

Hubspot: Easily the best marketing and sales platform we’ve tried in terms of usability.
ActiveCampaign: For a platform this capable, it’s amazing how easy ActiveCampaign is to set up and use.
SendinBlue: Purely for email marketing automation but there are some great features and UX is a winner.
Unbounce: By far the best landing page builder tool we’ve used.
Leadformly: Usability is always a priority for us and we made sure Leadformly delivers on this.
Buffer: Social media automation made easy.
Zapier: For basic integrations and automations between different apps.

I’m not saying these are the only automation platforms that deliver on usability but I am going to reiterate how important it is you try things out before you buy. Besides that, don’t kid yourself that you’ll learn to deal with usability issues because they’ll only become more annoying and restricting over time.

#3: The monthly costs soon stack up

One of the hardest lessons we learned from trying out automation software is that the monthly cost of premium platforms can increase significantly. Any platform that involves email marketing automation or a CRM is generally priced on the number of contacts you can have on your system although other factors like the number of users you’re able to have on a single plan can factor into this as well.

The frustrating thing is the price difference between plans can be really steep. Not only that, but you’ll often be automatically bumped up to a more expensive plan if you go over your contact allowance (or any of the other limitations on your plan).

This can really catch you out.

The other problem with this is it’s easy to start using a cheaper plan, thinking it provides everything you need, only to realise later on that you’ve outgrown the limitations of that plan and you’re forced to upgrade to a more expensive option.

Unfortunately, these options are normally disproportionately expensive compared to the plan you originally sign up to. It just comes across as a blatant attempt to get you on board as a customer at cheaper rates and then hold you to ransom with higher fees once you’re locked into the platform.

There are some exceptions, though.

After becoming frustrated with the pricing models used by the major marketing software providers, we came across ActiveCampaign, which provides an all-in-one CRM, email marketing and marketing automation platform.

So this company is competing with the likes of Salesforce, Infusionsoft and Hubspot but it doesn’t employ the same kind of pricing model. Prices are far more competitive to begin with and they’re calculated based on the features you need, as well as the number of contacts you require – so you’re not paying for functionality you’ll never use.

Crucially, the price difference between plans is relatively modest and proportionate to what you get in return. So, as your business grows, you’re not suddenly going to find yourself paying out 5X as much for the same piece of software.

When it comes to pricing, always look at the more expensive plans and consider how you expect your business to grow in the future. Remember, automation software is designed to make your business grow and – if all goes well- you’ll be paying those higher fees in the near future.

#4: You don’t need one tool that does everything

A lot of marketing software providers make out their platform is the only one you’ll ever need. This is complete rubbish, of course. No single tool can do everything and most can’t even do multiple things as well as they should do, so don’t worry about trying to find a single automation tool that’s going to handle everything for you.

There are a few providers who do an impressive job of combining CRM, email marketing and marketing automation – ActiveCampaign and Hubspot being two of them. These three marketing essentials are deeply integrated and being able to manage them all from a single platform is a huge advantage.

Unfortunately, the majority of platforms we tried that offer all three were underwhelming. They simply fail to do a decent job of all three and even ActiveCampaign (the platform we ended up choosing) can’t do everything for us.

It gets us close, though – and at a fraction of the price charged by similar providers.

We also use SendinBlue for transactional emails, Leadformly to optimise our web forms and create automation workflows with ActiveCampaign, Unbounce to build our landing pages and WebinarJam to schedule our webinar screenings and dozens of other automation tools.

While ActiveCampaign and Leadformly are involved in every marketing automation strategy we implement, we’re often using five or six tools combined to make things happen.

To get an idea of how many tools we actually use, take a look at our article listing 53 Business Automation Tools That Skyrocketed Our Growth by 330%.

#5: Integration is essential

When you’re using multiple tools to get a single job done, you need to know they can all work together. Automation relies heavily on integration to transfer data between different platforms and not all tools are built to play nicely with each other.

This is something you need to pay attention to as you’re choosing marketing automation tools and many of the enterprise offerings are surprisingly poor when it comes to integrations. In some cases, they employ a walled garden that keeps you locked into its own toolset. In others, providers may have a list of partners which restricts you to integrating with select tools.

Then we have the occasional fallout between providers, such as the recent Shopify-Mailchimp fiasco, which left a bunch of online store owners with two tools that no longer integrate.

In an ideal world, you’ll know which integrations you need before you start using any new tool but this isn’t always the case. In these cases, it’s worth taking a good look at providers who offer a wide range of integrations as this gives you the best chance of working with additional tools further down the line.

#6: Automation must be GDPR-compliant now

Automation is a data-driven process and this often relies on user/customer data to function. As of May last year, collecting data from people must be GDPR-compliant and this has an impact on the tools you can use to capture information from people.

Above all, make sure you’re dealing with software providers who take GDPR seriously. You should be able to find new features and updates to features that make them GDPR-friendly – and you’ll need these to say on the right side of the European regulations.

ActiveCampaign updated its form tool to add GDPR-compliant consent requests.

Getting to grips with GDPR can be tricky and the EU’s documentation literally requires a legal team to decipher. Understanding these regulations is one thing but then actually applying them to the software platforms you’re using is something else entirely.

ActiveCampaign also provides extensive documentation on how to use its platform while adhering to GDPR regulations.

So it helps to choose tools that come with the necessary documentation to help you use them in a GDPR-compliant manner. Keep in mind, this documentation doesn’t qualify as legal advice and you should always seek independent advice from legal experts on how your business needs to comply with GDPR.

However, having platform-specific documentation will make life a lot easier when it comes to actually implementing this advice with the tools at your disposal.

#7: You need software that’s going to grow with your business

It’s relatively easy to choose marketing automation tools that meet your current needs today. The industry has boomed in recent years and there are more software providers emerging every year, bringing their own unique offering to the table. In terms of choice, marketers have never had it so good but choosing a platform for today’s needs is only part of the battle.

You need marketing automation tools that are going to help your business grow. Not only that, but you also need tools that are going to grow with your business and continue to meet its changing needs as your enterprise expands.

The problem is, most marketing automation tools specialise in one of two areas: small businesses or enterprise brands. There aren’t many providers making a genuine effort to create platforms that help small businesses grow into something bigger and then continue to meet their needs.

We didn’t want to implement marketing automation into our business and then have to change toolsets once things got bigger and our needs became more demanding. Likewise, we didn’t want to pay enterprise prices from day one, simply because we expected to need enterprise features in the future.

There’s still a huge gap in the marketing automation market for small businesses and new ventures looking for platforms that can grow with them. ActiveCampaign was the only provider really filling this role when we first starting using it and there aren’t many alternatives five years on – not affordable ones anyway.

This is incredible really when the whole point of marketing automation is to grow businesses.

#8: Automation won’t solve all of your problems

There’s a lot of hype in the marketing industry about automation (and many other industries, too, in fact) and there’s plenty of reason to be excited. But automation isn’t going to solve all of your business problems. It’s important you understand what the technology is/isn’t capable of before you start paying for tools and trying to implement them into your business.

Automation is great at handling repetitive data-driven tasks, but someone still needs to set up and implement those automation workflows.

First of all, you need to be able to spot opportunities where automation can make an impact. Automation tools will point you in the right direction (eg: ActiveCampaign encourages you to automate emails) but you can achieve so much more by combining different tools strategically.

For example, we don’t just use Leadformly to optimise our forms, we use it as the starting point for various automation strategies:

 

Pre-qualify leads upon sign up
Automate quotes and proposals for prospective clients
Assign users to email lists in ActiveCampaign
Automate email responses
Kick-start our automated webinar strategy

 

These automation strategies have transformed our business but we have to use multiple tools to achieve them – none of which are designed for those specific purposes. Leadformly isn’t a webinar or proposal automation tool by any means but we’ve used it as a crucial tool in both of those automation strategies and many more.

You have to sit down and really assess your business to spot opportunities where automation can make a real impact and then you have to devise practical strategies based on the tools and data you have available.

Automation tools will help you implement those strategies but you need to have the knowledge and creativity to come up with them in the first place.

#9: Marketing automation is an investment – and it must be profitable

Marketing automation is an investment and it can be a pretty sizeable one, too. As with any kind of investment, you need to achieve a positive ROI in a suitable time-frame, otherwise you’re simply going to automate your way into a bunch of problems.

If you’re new to this technology, the most important thing to know is that marketing automation is that it can’t make bad business processes any better. It can make solid processes faster, more efficient and scalable, though – but those systems need to be there in the first place.

To get the best out of these tools, you need a certain understanding of how automation technology, algorithms and data science work.

There’s a common expression in data science: “crap in, crap out”. You can’t expect to throw a bunch of low-quality data at an algorithm and expect it to come up with quality results. In other words, even the best automation tools are going to have a limited impact if you’re creating ineffective workflows or using low-quality data.

If you’re going to make automation profitable, make sure you have the core essentials in place first.

Automation for every business

Automation tools are both more advanced an affordable than ever, meaning businesses of all sizes can use the technology to improve efficiency and grow faster. In many cases, the hardest part is choosing the right tools and implementing them into your organisation.

Hopefully, this article has given you some insight into what can be a somewhat long journey in choosing marketing automation software. For us, this journey certainly would have been shorter if we knew five years ago what we know now.

The post 9 Things We Learned From Trying All the Best Marketing Automation Tools appeared first on Venture Harbour.

7 B2B Email Marketing Strategies for Customer Retention

Today’s B2B brands invest huge amounts of time and money on perfecting their lead generation, nurturing and customer acquisition strategies. That’s all good because every business needs a healthy stream of new customers coming in – but many brands overlook the importance of customer retention during the constant chase for new buyers.

What’s wrong with that?

Well, research from Invesp has found customer acquisition costs 5X more than customer retention. That means you could be paying 500% more to sell the same product to a new customer than you would spend on selling it to an existing one.

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This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, either. A customer who has already bought from you once should be more likely to buy from you again than a fresh new lead off the press will be. Likewise, you’ve already spent most of the money it took to get this customer on board and nurture them towards the initial sale. Customer retention expenses should be minimal at this stage – especially if your strategy is largely automation (and it should be).

The power of customer retention

Above all, existing customers should already have enjoyed a positive experience with your brand and be more loyal to you than people who are yet to trust you with their money.

Herein lies a problem, though. How can you build this kind of trust and customer loyalty if your customer retention strategy sucks?

The answer is simple: you can’t.

Without customer retention, your customers are going to become disinterested with your brand, look elsewhere and, ultimately, end up with one of your competitors that has a solid customer retention strategy in place – all before they ever get the chance to develop loyalty with your brand.

Every customer that gets away is a lost opportunity to develop a lasting, highly-profitable relationship.

Research conducted by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profit by anything between 25% and 95%.

Customer retention should be a priority for every business and, in this article, we’ve got seven email marketing strategies that are going to help you turn more buyers into loyal customers who buy from you time and again.

#1: Nail your welcome email / first response

The first email you send to new leads/customers sets the tone for everything that follows – so make sure you get it right. Now, how this is going to work exactly will depend on how you capture leads and customers and there could be some overlap here (hence why I’m talking about leads and customers).

If you’re an SaaS company, for example, many of your leads might be customer right from the start if they’re signing up to your services or starting a demo/free trial.

Think of a company like Dropbox. In many cases, its first dealing with a new lead/customer is going to be when they sign up to the free version of its platform and then the focus is on turning them into paying customers.

Now, Dropbox knows people aren’t going to become long-term, paying customers if they haven’t even got the app downloaded on their devices and this is why the company sends out emails to new customers prompting them to do just that (if they haven’t done so already).

This is a great example of an automated welcome/first response email strategy.

Here at Venture Harbour, most of our leads come in the form of email signups and inquirers so we still have a bit of work to do before turning them into customers. We also have a lot of different leads types that require us to send out different responses, depending on what each prospect is looking for.

So we use Leadformly to get information about what potential customers need from us and automate our responses, based on the data they give us.

Another great example of an automated welcome/first response email marketing strategy.

Bonus tip: Make sure you respond to new leads/customers within the first 24 hours of them converting (or sooner) because leads turn cold fast in this game – as you can read in our How Fast do Marketing Leads Turn Cold? article.

#2: Keep customers engaged with ongoing campaigns

Once you’ve turned leads into solid customers, you need to keep them engaged with your products, services and brand. Software companies have an advantage here as you can look user data to see how much they’re using your platforms and create engagement campaigns each group – eg: daily users, weekly users, monthly users, not used in the last 30 days.

For the rest of us, we have to take a more strategic approach to keeping customers engaged and this is where your email content really needs to add value to their lives and experience with your brand.

ProCopywriters sends out regular email designed to help its writers improve their skills and get more work. This includes free webinars from industry experts, recommended tools and business advice.

We also do a similar thing with our engagement campaigns here a Venture Harbour.

The key thing is to know what problems your customers face in their professional lives and provide content that’s going to help them overcome those issues. These problems need to be relevant to your brand, product or services in some way, of course, and you need to be able to establish yourself as an authoritative source of reliable information on these problems.

By adding value to your customers’ lives, beyond what you’re selling to them, you’re building a bond that established trust and loyalty.

Now you need to turn that loyalty into ongoing purchases.

#3: Maximise customer value with upselling / cross-selling campaigns

The entire purpose of customer retention is to maximise the lifetime value of each customer by turning them into repeat buyers. Two of the most important tactics in achieving this are upselling and cross-selling – both of which should feature heavily in your email marketing efforts.

Just in case there’s any confusion about these terms, here are a couple of quick definitions:

Upselling: Encouraging customers to purchase a more profitable product or service than their usual/recent purchases.
Cross-selling: Encouraging customers to buy additional products or services, based on their previous purchase decisions.

Common examples of upselling would be a SaaS company trying to get customers to upgrade to a more expensive software plan or an insurance company tempting existing customers with more comprehensive coverage.

An example of upselling from video online video platform Vimeo

Cross-selling generally involves targeting customers with products related to the purchases they’ve already made from you. So a web design agency might offer customers hosting management or content writing services, for example. Whereas a B2B eCommerce brand might want to use a product recommendation engine to tempt customers with related products in a similar way that Amazon does.

#4: Reward customers with gifts & offers

If you want loyal customers, then it makes sense to reward them with customer loyalty incentives. Whether it’s money-off deals on their birthday, the occasional freebie to thank them for all their business or rewarding them for referring new customers to you, there are all kinds of rewards, gifts and offers you can send customers’ way to increase loyalty and boost sales.

A referral programme once run by TransferWise that rewarded customers for inviting friends to use the service (Source: GetResponse)

Here we have an example of a referral programme TransferWise used to run, which not only rewarded customers for using its platform but also incentivised them to invite their friends to the service and bring more customers on board for the company.

While this offer boosts engagement and gives existing customers added reason to keep using TransferWise, it turns these rewards into a lead generation strategy that more than pays for the relatively minor financial reward.

#5: Nail customer support when something goes wrong

Earlier, I linked to a previous that explains how leads go cold within 24 hours or less and this gives you a good idea of how quickly you need to react when it comes to customer support. Now, keep in mind that leads are people who are looking to buy from you in the near future but existing customers who are having problems have already parted with their money.

Something is getting in the way of them patting themselves on the back for making the right purchase decision and this is bad news from a customer retention point of view. In many cases, when your customers rely on your product/services to run their business, every moment a technical issue runs on, they’re being hurt in the pocket.

Needless to say, you need to get things fixed as soon as possible and turn these people into happy customers once again.

The first step towards doing this is responding to customer issues now, not later. There’s no excuse for leaving customers waiting with the tools you have available these days. Automate your email responses so customers get an answer right away but don’t start sending out generic messages telling them you’ll be in touch once you’ve had a chance to look into their issue.

Use a tool like Leadformly to get information from customers about their technical issue so you can send personalised responses instantly. Tell them you’re looking into the issue as we speak and send them links to relevant support pages on your website and some simple instructions on what they can do in the meantime.

An example of BotXo handling a simple customer service issue.

Another option you’ve got is to use a chatbot to handle basic customer service issues and get things rolling. This will allow the bot to handle simple issues, direct customers to relevant information and send their case to a human member of your support team if the bot isn’t capable of dealing with any particular issue.

These are the kind of strategies you should be using to enhance your customer support email strategies so you’re able to offer instant support 24/7.

#6: Request customer feedback

Loyal customers want to feel like they’re a part of your brand and a valuable member of a two-way relationship. Their opinions matter and reaching out to ask them for feedback is the best possible way to show them that you acknowledge the importance of their opinions and get valuable insights as to how you can improve.

Positive feedback is always great to receive but negative feedback can help you fix issues that could otherwise prevent customers from continuing to buy from you.

 

An email from Indiegogo asking customers for feedback (Source: GetResponse)

You might want feedback about your products, the quality of your content recommendations or even how your customer service team dealt with that last issue – sometimes, all you need to do is ask the question.

#7: Bring back cold customers with re-engagement campaigns

Sometimes, customer relationships flourish in the early days but turn cold once the honeymoon period is over. When this happens, you need to try and get these customers back on board and get them excited about your business again. It could be they’re not using your software platform as much as they once were or they’re not making as many purchases as they once did.

Whatever is, you need some re-engagement email campaigns to get them back on board.

Grammarly sends out emails to users who are writing less than usual and urges them to hit the keys again (Source: Hubspot).

Grammarly even gamifies this process by awarding a badge to people who stop using its tool and sending out an email urging them to start writing again. What it doesn’t do is simply let its customers disappear without putting up a fight – and neither should you.

Make the most of every customer

If there’s anything to take away from this article, it’s that making the most of every customer should be a priority for every B2B business. Bringing in new leads is great but you’re never going to maximise business performance if you’re failing with customer retention.

We’ve given you seven tried and tested email marketing strategies in this article, to help you turn more customers into repeat buyers. So now it’s over to you implement them and continue getting results after the initial purchase.

The post 7 B2B Email Marketing Strategies for Customer Retention appeared first on Venture Harbour.

The Complete Guide to Lead Qualification & Scoring

According to the latest State of Inbound report by HubSpot, marketers’ top priority for the next 12 months is to convert more leads into customers. Meanwhile, the same report shows sales teams want to focus on closing more deals (75%) and improving the efficiency of the sales funnel (48%).

Lead qualification and scoring (Lead Q&S) is the first step to achieving these goals for marketing and sales teams. By grading your leads at various stages of the sales funnel and prioritising your marketing efforts on the most valuable prospects, you have a system in place that allows you to maximise conversions, efficiency, customer retention and – above all – profit.

In this guide to lead qualification and scoring, we’re going to show you how to implement this kind of system and achieve the top marketing and sales priorities for the year ahead.

Not all leads are created equal

With such a heavy emphasis on inbound marketing these days, it’s easy for teams to get caught up in the numbers game: traffic volumes, conversion rates, lead quantity, etc.

The problem is, not all leads are created equal.

Understanding lead quality

Some leads are far closer to making the purchase than others, meaning it should take less work to get them over the finishing line. While those who are further away from buying will need a different series of messages to nurture them towards the sale.

It takes very different marketing approaches to close both of these leads and you need a way to distinguish between them.

Naturally, the quality of leads is going to vary as they progress along your sales funnels. It’s important your marketing and sales teams are able to respond to these changes and deliver targeted messages, at each stage of the buying process, to nurture leads towards making the purchase.

Understanding lead value

You also need to consider how valuable each lead is expected to be to your business. A prospect who make a single low-value purchase is much less beneficial to you than someone who buys your most expensive product or a repeat customer who keeps coming back to complete more sales.

Once again, these different leads types are going to require different marketing approaches. However, it’s also a question of efficiency and deciding which leads to prioritise – especially if your sales team is swamped and needs to focus its attention on the most valuable leads.

In some cases, you might even decide certain leads simply aren’t worth pursuing. For example, you might be a digital agency that can only take on so many projects at a time and you need a system in place that accurately predicts the value of each lead so you can choose which projects to take on.

What is lead qualification?

Lead qualification is a method of measuring and/or predicting the quality and value of leads, based on the data you have about them and the way they interact with your brand.

Essentially, this starts with defining your criteria for qualifying leads, as well as your criteria for disqualifying them (this is just as important).

To create an integrated marketing and sales with lead qualification, you’ll need to understand the difference between marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs).

MQL: A marketing qualified lead is one that’s engaged with your brand through one of your inbound channels – your website, social media, PPC ad, etc. They’ve shown value as a lead (hence qualified) but they haven’t proven they’re sales ready yet.
SQL: Sales qualified leads have progressed further along the buying process and taken certain actions you’ve defined as making them sales-ready. This is where your sales team steps in to close the deal.

The criteria for MQLs and SQLs are very different. With marketing qualified leads, your primary goal is to determine which leads have genuine purchase intent because not everyone who downloads your eBook is planning to buy from you.

Once you’ve established purchase intent, you want to pinpoint where they are along the sales funnel and start your lead nurturing campaigns. Keep these leads engaged with your brand and guide them towards taking actions that turn them into SQLs.

Then it’s over to your sales processes to do the rest.

For a more comprehensive look at these two types of lead qualification, check out our guide on MQLs vs SQLs.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring allows you to assign a value to each lead, based on various criteria. These scores can change as leads progress along the buying process, making it easier for your marketing and sales teams to prioritise leads at each stage of the sales funnel

Here’s a handy video from HubSpot for more info.

There are two basic key types of lead scoring you need to know about: implicit leads scoring and explicit lead scoring.

Implicit lead scoring: Generally involves scoring leads based on user behaviours – the pages they visit on your site, actions they take and interests they show.
Explicit lead scoring: Matches prospects to your buyer profiles by comparing demographic data and other information you collect from users, normally through online forms.

Implicit lead scoring uses accessible data from user sessions without people actively handing over information. You’ll get this from your analytics tools, cookies, tracking URLs, events tracking and other tools.

Explicit lead scoring, on the other hand, uses data you collect from users, which requires them to engage with your brand more deeply. Explicit lead scoring is also generally more reliable than implicit – for example, getting users to confirm their location rather than using their IP address.

Why are lead qualification and scoring important?

Research has shown that companies with an effective lead qualifying and scoring process achieve a 70% increase in lead generation ROI.

A separate study from Gartner found 70% of leads are lost due to poor follow-ups from brands.

According to research by @Gartner, 70% of #leads are lost from poor follow-up. Don't let people slip through the cracks!

Thanks @abstraktmg for the cool #infographic! #leadgeneration #CRM #salestips #business #smallbusiness #biztips #sales #salestips #analytic #technology pic.twitter.com/G1LZou2ZtW

— Agile CRM (@agilecrm) May 6, 2018

If that’s not enough to confirm why lead qualification and scoring is so important, here are some bullet points to hammer home the message:

Lead Q&S helps you prioritise which leads are most valuable to your brand.
It also helps you increase the quality of less valuable leads by identifying what kind of marketing messages they respond to.
Lead Q&S unites the marketing and sales processes, showing each team when they need to step in.
The flip side of this is you stop wasting time, money and other resources on leads that have no sales potential.
This increases conversion rates, drives down your cost-per-sale, increases ROI and boosts just about every profit-related KPI across your sales and marketing strategies.
An advanced lead Q&S system allows you to deliver highly targeted messages to users progress through the buying process.
You can use this kind of system to test and optimise new messages, create a more efficient sales funnel and use your insights to convert more leads into customers.
With a mature lead Q&S system in place, you’ll eventually be able to predict the long-term potential value of leads, based on your historical data.

Essentially, it all comes down to creating a more efficient and profitable sales process at every stage of the consumer journey. In terms of maximising your marketing and sales ROI, lead qualification and scoring should be the first system you put in place.

Putting lead Q&S into action

Hopefully, you now understand the importance of lead qualification and scoring, understand what the two processes mean and have a hunger to implement them into your business.

Now, we need to turn our attention to putting lead Q&S into action.

Let’s start by looking at some of the basic principles of lead qualification and scoring.

Basic principles of lead qualification

In this section, we’re going to look at the following principles of lead qualification:

Organisation-level qualification
Opportunity-level qualification
Stakeholder-level qualification
The BANT, MEDDIC and CHAMP qualification frameworks
Disqualifying leads

This will give you a more in-depth understanding of what lead qualification involves at the practical level and enough theory to implement your own system.

So let’s crack on.

Organisation-level lead qualification

This is the most basic application of lead qualification, essentially telling you whether a lead is worth actively pursuing or not. At this stage, you’re simply checking whether a prospect matches the basic organisational (or personal for B2C) characteristics of your target customers.

The kind of questions you want to answer at this stage might include:

Is this prospect in a location you can sell to?
Are they in an industry you sell to?
Are your products relevant to their needs, services or customers?
What size is this company?
Do they match any of your buyer personas?

If a lead fails to qualify at the organisational level, you have a strong indication it’s not worth pursuing with at all. Move on and focus your efforts on prospects that have a genuine potential of buying from you in the near future or further down the road.

Opportunity-level lead qualification

Next, we have opportunity-level lead qualification and this is where you really start to assess the quality of your prospects.

Potential questions to answer here include:

What problem does this prospect have that you can solve?
What kind of budget do they have to work with?
How much profit are you going to get from solving this problem for them?
What’s it going to cost you to convert this lead into a customer?
What’s the potential lifetime customer value of this prospect?

By answering these questions, you’ll be able to prioritise which leads have the most potential and adapt your follow-up messages to suit.

Opportunity-level qualification will also improve your lead segmentation and nurturing efforts, which you can use to guide users along the path to purchase.

Stakeholder-level lead qualification

This is really important for B2B marketing because you need to know the leads you’re dealing with actually have the authority/ability to make the purchase. The last thing you want to do is spend valuable resources on nurturing a prospect who can’t influence buying decisions at their company.

Prospects who are decision-makers at their company are always the most valuable from a B2B perspective.

This doesn’t mean you should only target CEOs and other executives, though. Instead, you should identify which positions you expect to have power of influence when it comes to buying your products/services.

This depends on what you’re selling as much as who you’re targeting.

Questions to answer at this point can include:

Does this prospect make the purchase decision?
Can this prospect influence the purchase decision, even if the final call isn’t theirs?
What position does this prospect hold at the company?
Which department do they work in?
Does their department have its own budget and authority to make purchase decisions?
Who else makes the purchase decision, if not this prospect?

Prospects who pass all three levels of qualification should be picked up by your sales team.

Leads that don’t qualify at the stakeholder-level can still be valuable if they’ve qualified at previous levels. The key is to automate follow-ups and lead nurturing strategies for prospects that don’t qualify at this level or those you’re unable to collect the necessary information from.

You don’t really have anything to lose by keeping prospects on your automated marketing/sales processes but you do have a lot to gain by prioritising the leads you know have the ability to make the purchase.

The BANT qualification framework

BANT is one of the most widely-used frameworks for qualifying leads. Originally developed by IBM, the BANT framework comprises of four key attributes B2B leads should demonstrate in order to be qualified:

Budget: Can the prospect afford what you’re selling?
Authority: Does the prospect have authority to complete the purchase?
Need: Does the prospect have a genuine need/desire for what you’re selling?
Timeline: When is the prospect likely to buy?

This is a framework you’ll come across a lot when you’re looking into lead qualification and it’s important to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

First of all, BANT only really applies to the opportunity level and even here it has its limitations. For example, attributing purchase authority to a single prospect is short-sighted when research shows it takes an average of 5.4 people to make B2B buying decisions.

The timeline element can also be problematic in today’s marketing environment where we have the capabilities of nurturing leads over the course of months or even years.

Despite these shortcomings, BANT is a useful framework to understand and apply it to your opportunity-level qualification, as long as you don’t implement it too strictly.

Basic principles of lead scoring

In this section, we’re going to look at the following principles of lead scoring:

Implicit lead scoring
Explicit lead scoring
Demographic lead scoring
Organisational lead scoring
Behavioural lead scoring
Product/account lead scoring
Predictive lead scoring

Again, this will give you a more in-depth understanding of what the process involves, how it works alongside lead qualification and equip you with the knowledge you need to implement your first lead Q&S system.

Implicit lead scoring

As we mentioned earlier, implicit lead scoring is based on the user data accessible to you without prospects having to actively provide information. So this is where you’re going to use technologies like analytics, cookies, IP locations, URL tracking and everything else at your disposal to score leads using people’s online footprint.

The first thing you need to do is pinpoint which data enables you to measure and score purchase intent.

In most cases, implicit lead scoring revolves around online actions/behaviours, but this isn’t always the case (eg: IP location). So, aside from picking the right data points, you also need to understand what they represent.

For example:

A single visit to one of your product pages suggests potential interest.
Multiple visits to the same product page suggest a strong interest.
Searches including your brand’s name suggest people have heard about you elsewhere and wanted to find out more about you (maybe they saw your content on social media, your ad in Google Search or read about you in a blog post).
A user watching your product demo suggests they have a relatively strong interest in that product category.
A content download indicates an interest in the topic covered.

That’s just a few examples of multiple different actions that each represents a unique user intent. You’re not simply going to look at individual actions, though. You’re going to track user behaviour on your website and build a profile that allows you to score them as a lead based on multiple data points.

Here’s an example of an implicit lead scoring dataset from Marketo. This gives you an idea of what kind of data sets you want to be cross-referencing to calculate your implicit lead scores.

Explicit lead scoring

For explicit lead scoring, you need to get data from users – normally by encouraging them to fill out web forms. This kind of data is generally considered to be more robust than implicit data because analytics, cookies and URL tracking can run into problems, particularly when people move between devices.

That said, this principle relies on the assumption users fill out their details correctly and honestly.

Crucially, explicit lead scoring should give you access to more valuable data – things like user email addresses, job titles and other pieces of information you can’t get access through implicitly.

Here’s another example from Marketo to give you an idea of the kind of data points you might want to focus on.

Implicit lead scoring helps you score leads at the very early stages of the buying process but it’s explicit lead scoring that’s going to help you really pinpoint those most valuable leads at the latter stages of the sales funnel.

Demographic lead scoring

As you can probably guess, demographic lead scoring values prospects based on characteristics – their age, where they live, what they do for a living and anything else you identify as being important.

Essentially, this process measures how closely leads match your buyer personas.

You should have multiple buyer personas mapped out, which allows you to target them more effectively and deliver more relevant messages. Not all of these personas are going to be equally as valuable to your brand, specific products/services or individual marketing campaigns.

So you want to assign scores to these buyer personas and then match new leads to the most relevant persona.

Organisational lead scoring

For B2B brands, targeting individuals isn’t enough. You also need to target organisations (and individuals at specific types of organisation).

Marketing software providers, for example, have probably got one of the most diverse ranges of customers to work with. After all, every brand needs a solid marketing strategy and the right tools to implement it.

Even still, organisations in certain industries, of certain sizes and in certain locations (among other things) are going to be more profitable to you.

Certain industries tend to command more marketing budget than others and larger businesses generally have more to spend in this area, too. Likewise, brands in other industries might be deemed higher risk than others – for example, a payday loan company that’s often more likely to have their ads declined or end up on the wrong side of a search algorithm update.

We use Leadformly to pre-qualify our leads as they complete our web forms. With forms designed around the principle of conditional logic, we’re able to ask users relevant questions and their answers determine which questions they’ll be asked next.

This allows us to find out how much budget a prospect has to work with, what kind of service they need from us, how urgent their project is and all kinds of other questions. Above all, we can use this information to qualify leads and prioritise those that offer the most value to us. But we can also use this data to create relevant follow-up messages, based on their individual needs, which increases the likelihood of them turning into genuine customers.

Best of all, we can automate this so prospects get a response almost instantly, thus keeping them engaged.

Considering leads turn cold in roughly 24 hours, this automated lead qualification and response system is crucial for us.

Behavioural lead scoring

Now we’re getting to a more advanced type of lead scoring, where you assess the online behaviour of your prospects and use this to determine their value. This relies entirely on your ability to accurately and reliably track user actions as they interact with your brand across multiple sessions and devices.

However, you also need to understand what behavioural actions mean in terms of lead value.

For example, someone who looks at the same product page multiple times across different user sessions shows a stronger purchase intent than someone who only views this page once. Likewise, a user who compares multiple similar products and then reads one of your blogs on the best [product category] to buy in 2019 probably needs some help with making a purchase decision.

There are all kinds of subtle nuances you can take away from user actions and the precise meaning can vary a great deal once you start looking at combined actions.

With site tracking in ActiveCampaign, we can track user actions on our website and then automate our marketing responses.

During those early sessions, you’re going to rely on cookies and user IDs to track user behaviours. This will tell you which products/services each lead is interested in, how strong their interest is and how close they are to making the purchase.

As good as these technologies are now, cookies and tracking IDs aren’t 100% reliable and you’ll want to get your hands on prospects’ email addresses as soon as possible.

Product & account lead scoring

Product scoring is where you assign a score to specific products or services so the most profitable/worthwhile products or services are prioritised. So, when all else is equal, prospects who show an interest in the highest scoring products or services will have a higher overall lead score.

Product scoring should only ever be a factor that’s considered in the overall scoring of your leads, though. Don’t make the mistake of prioritising leads purely on the product or service they’re interested in – because there are other factors to consider.

For example, a customer who makes repeated low-value purchases might be more valuable to you than a customer who makes a one-off high-value purchase.

This brings us on to account scoring, where your aim is to assign a value to the long-term potential for each prospect. The most basic approach to this is to assign scores to existing customers, based on the products they’ve already bought.

The easiest example would be a customer who repeatedly buys the same product or spends a similar amount at regular intervals – eg: a software subscriber or a company that spends £10,000 per month on stock products from you.

This gives you a relatively accurate idea of the ongoing value this customer has for you.

However, you can use something called predictive lead scoring to calculate the long-term value of prospects before they even buy the first product. This technology relies on AI and machine learning to match user behaviours to future purchase decisions.

There’s an example of what predictive lead scoring looks like in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and it gives you a good idea of how the technology works. The great thing about predictive lead scoring is it’s able to calculate from a large number of interactions – far more than any human team of creatives will be capable of doing.

Of course, the question of reliability still hangs over this relatively new technology but things are advancing rapidly in this area. It won’t be long before rpedictive lead scoring is the norm for businesses of all sizes.

Make lead qualification & scoring priorities

Every efficient marketing strategy employs effective lead qualification and scoring – otherwise, you simply can’t distinguish between the prospects that matter most to your brand and the ones that are going to waste your marketing resources.

Prioritisation isn’t the only role lead qualification plays in your marketing strategy, though. The more accurately, you’re able to gauge the value and purchase intent of each prospect, the more relevant and effective your marketing messages are going to be to their needs as they change along the buying process.

The post The Complete Guide to Lead Qualification & Scoring appeared first on Venture Harbour.

What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) & Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

In sales and marketing, there’s endless talk about techniques for generating more leads – but what are you actually going to do with those leads once you’ve got them on board?

Leads don’t pay the bills, customers do.

To convert those prospects into profit (kind of the whole point), you need to know you’re generating leads from people who:

Match your buyer personasHave a genuine interest in what you’re sellingAre capable of making the purchase

What you don’t want to do is waste time and money on leads that don’t end up buying. Instead, you want to pinpoint the prospects that are most valuable to your brand and make these the priority of your marketing and sales strategies.

Google’s favourite explanation of lead qualification, courtesy of MyCustomer.com

This starts with lead qualification, which allows you prioritise your most important leads, filter out the ones you don’t need and then refine your lead generation strategies to improve the quality of your leads across the board.

There are two main types of lead qualification you need to know about:

MQL: Marketing qualified leadsSQL: Sales qualified leads

In this article, we’re going to look at both types of lead qualification in detail and how you can integrate them to drastically increase the number of leads you convert into paying customers.

What is lead qualification?

Before we take a closer look at MQL and SQL, let’s quickly explain what lead qualification is, in case you’re still new to the concept.

Lead qualification is a process that enables you to assess the quality of your leads. At its most basic, lead qualification will qualify or disqualify leads, based on the criteria you define, so you’re not wasting resources on prospects that don’t meet your requirements.

For example, if you’re only selling to people in your local area, your lead qualification system should aim to disqualify prospects who are living elsewhere. Likewise, if you’re only selling to people in your country, then you don’t want to waste resources on prospects who live overseas.

ActiveCampaign‘s lead scoring makes advanced lead qualification simple.

In reality, your lead qualification requirements are going to be far more complex than that.

You’ve got a number of buyer personas you want to target and lead qualification’s first job is to make sure you’re dealing with prospects that match those personas. At the very least, you want this kind of process in place during the lead generation stage of your marketing strategies and the early stages of your lead nurturing follow-up messages.

The sooner you can rule out disqualified leads, the more efficient your marketing and sales processes are going to be.

However, you can take lead qualification to a far more advanced level by using automation tools to qualify leads at each stage of your sales funnel. Prospects’ needs and expectations change as they progress along the purchase cycle. Which means the value of these leads for your brand can also change and your marketing/sales messages should adapt to that.

Lead segmentation allows you to reassess leads and adapt your messages as user needs change.

For more details on advanced lead qualification, check out our extensive guide to lead qualification and scoring.

For now, though, we’re going to focus our attention on marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads.

What are marketing qualified leads (MQLs)?

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) refer to leads that you’ve identified as being likely to convert into a customer. These leads only become MQLs when they pass your criteria for what you consider a valuable lead to look like.

But you need a system in place that can recognise this behaviour and distinguish between leads that do and don’t qualify.

For example, let’s imagine a web design software provider publishes a study on the latest industry trends as a lead generation strategy. This study is designed to generate leads from potential customers, not students looking to study web design at university or writers like myself looking for a web design study to quote from.

UXPin is targeting web designers with this guide, not students or writers.

So this agency is going to want an MQL process in place to prevent it spending money on ads for students and another one to stop its sales team wasting a phone call on me after I’ve downloaded their study for another purpose.

What are sales qualified leads (SQLs)?

Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are leads that your sales team (or sales processes) have identified as being more likely to convert into a customer. Once again, leads should only become SQLs if they meet your criteria and those that don’t should either be disqualified or placed on appropriate list for lower-quality leads.

You don’t necessarily need to discard leads that don’t qualify as SQLs.

You can automate marketing and sales processes to deal with lower-quality leads until they either convert or demonstrate characteristics that meet your SQL requirements.

Again, you find out more information about this by reading our lead qualification guide.

MQL vs SQL: What’s the difference?

In most cases, the key difference between MQLs and SQLs is that marketing qualified leads come at much earlier stages of the sales funnel.

Sales funnel visualisation by Samuel J Woods

Your MQL processes do most of their work during the lead generation and early lead nurturing stages. Essentially, these are preparing your leads so that – by the time they reach your sales team/processes – they’re already identified as highly likely to convert into customers.

Normally, SQL processes kick in at later stages of the sales funnel. There can be quite a lot of overlap here but, eventually, your SQL processes are going to take over and qualify your leads before your sales team/processes step in to guide them towards the purchase.

Sales qualified leads should be very close to pulling the tigger.

Or, more to the point, your sales team is only dealing with leads that are worth their time and effort.

Why are MQLs and SQLs important?

The main purpose of MQL and SQL systems is to make your marketing and sales processes more efficient. Lead generation and nurturing require a lot of time, money and effort – so you want to make sure you’re bringing in high-quality leads that are likely to buy from you.

At the same time, there’s a limit to how much you can automate on the sales side of things. Your sales team should only be spending time on leads that are almost guaranteed to turn into customers and the rest of their efforts should focus on encouraging existing customers to make further purchases.

This is what having the right MQL and SQL systems in place achieves.

That’s not all, though.

By placing a series of MQL and SQL systems across each stage of your sales funnel, you can turn lead qualification into an advanced lead nurturing strategy that delivers targeted messages to prospects based on how they interact with your brand.

By qualifying your leads and automating your follow-ups, you can guide users along your sales funnel.

This enables you to actively increase the quality of your leads, turn more MQLs into SQLs and, ultimately, convert more prospects into paying customers.

Using MQL & SQL to convert more leads into customers

The first MQL process we have in place on our website is our web forms. We use a tool called Leadformly to place multi-step forms on our site. These forms use a technique called conditional logic to extract relevant information from prospects as they sign up.

This automatically qualifies our leads on-site, filtering out the those that don’t meet our criteria. We’re also able to score the quality of these leads, based on the services they’re looking for, the size of their business and the budget they have to work with.

Essentially, the most profitable leads become our priority.

Our next MQL process happens through email marketing where we engage prospects to confirm what they need and check how serious they are about doing business. This process entirely automated and we qualify these leads once again, based on how prospects engage with our emails.

We use multiple email lists to send targeted messages to prospects, depending on how they interact with our emails, to increase engagement and incentive. Now, we’re increasing the quality of our leads and maximising the number of prospects who become potential customers.

Prospects only pass our next MQL system when they demonstrate behaviour that proves they’re ready to do business.

This is where our SQL systems take over and qualify leads for our sales team. Highly engaged prospects with the right kind of budget, project requirements and expected lifetime customer value top our list and this means our sales team always knows who to prioritise.

Almost everything that happens up until this point is automated so our sales team can focus everything on closing the deal.

As for leads that don’t pass the SQL filter, those that have potential to meet our requirements in the future are placed on marketing lists and targeted with messages designed to help them make the grade.

This means we’re constantly maximising the number of leads that turn into viable prospects for our sales team – and most of this process is automated. Our marketing team can focus its efforts on improving the messages we send out to leads and refining our automations.

Make more of your leads

All the metrics that matter most in marketing and sales – profit, ROI, ROAS, conversion rate, etc. – starts with generating the right kind of leads. Next, you need to filter out the prospects that don’t offer enough value and focus your attention on the leads that truly matter.

With a strong understanding of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs), you have the means to prioritise your prospects and adapt your marketing messages to convert more of them into customers.

The post What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) & Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)? appeared first on Venture Harbour.

10 Case Studies of Using Blogging for B2B Lead Generation

According to Content Marketing Institute, 89% of B2B marketers are engaged in content marketing. However, separate research from Backlinko suggests 94% of all blog posts published earn a grand total of zero backlinks.

Of course, backlinks aren’t the benchmark of B2B blogging success but you’ll do well to find a piece of content that generates leads without a healthy link profile.

Sadly, the post-it-and-they-will-come approach doesn’t cut it with B2B blogging. Generating leads from your content takes work and many marketers simply aren’t willing to put the effort in. The results are worth it, though, and to prove it we’ve got 10 B2B blogging case studies that’ll help you get there faster.

#1: ClearVoice: How We Rebooted Our B2B Blog From 3K to 50K+ Organic Monthly Pageviews (and Growing)

First up, we’ve got a case study from content marketing software provider, ClearVoice. As Director of Content Marketing, Justin McKinley, says in the write-up, this case study is all about “real numbers. Real strategies. Real timelines” and the results are there for everyone to see.

McKinley guides you through the entire process of how ClearVoice rebooted its blogging strategy and boosted organic traffic from 3K monthly page views to more than 50K and growing.

ClearVoice takes a relatively simple, but highly effective data-driven approach by running an in-depth content audit, focusing on six specific content audit points (CAPs) instead of simply looking at broad data.

This allowed the company to confirm the strong points of its previous content strategy and pinpoint the weak points, allowing it to put informed improvements into action. Essentially, its findings pointed to three core principles of content marketing: be more informative, be more original and be more consistent.

Instead of hacks, magic tricks or cheap gimmicks, ClearVoice rethought the fundamentals and put fixes in place where they were needed. The results speak for themselves.

#2: Buffer: How We Increased the Readership of Buffer’s Blog to Over 1.5 Million Visits

How We Increased the Readership of Buffer’s Blog to Over 1.5 Million Visits

As Buffer’s Alfred Lua says, “Every company is a media company these days,” and the software knows the same thing applies to itself. Buffer’s blog has been a crucial element of the company’s success it first launched in 2011 but it’s been “a long, challenging journey,” Lua admits.

In this case study, the Buffer growth editor shows you how the company increased its blog readership to over 1.5 million monthly visits by overcoming the same blogging challenges every modern B2B brand faces.

#3: Snack Nation: How this startup rocketed to #1 in Google

Next up we have a case study published as part of Backlinko’s definitive guide to white hat SEO. The guide features an in-depth case study showing how Snack Nation rocketed its way right to #1 in Google despite being in a niche that generates depressingly low search volumes.

Facing the prospect of only 10-100 monthly searches for its target keywords, Snack Nation had to find alternative search terms to bolster it SEO efforts and the startup did an excellent job by pinpointing other, relevant queries with much higher search volumes being used by its target audiences.

Even if your core search terms have higher search volumes than Snack Nation’s, this case study is an excellent example of how you can significantly increase your traffic and blogging leads by targeting the interests of your target audiences, rather than the most obvious keywords.

#4: Scoro: How We Went From 1.6K Monthly Blog Visitors to 31K in 20 Months

In this case study, marketer Karola Karlson explains how she and her team at Scroro grew organic visits to the startup’s blog from 1,615 monthly visits to 31,375 between September 2015 and March 2017.

Karlson gives a no-nonsense account of what worked and what didn’t, busting a few “best-practices” along the way – eg: guest blogging didn’t work for them at all.

Definitely worth a read.

#5: Crazy Egg Reveals Its B2B Blogging Secrets

The Crazy Egg Guide to B2B Blogging

Technically, this is more of a guide than a case study (as you can probably tell from the title), but Crazy Egg has packed so much data and actionable insights into this piece of content that it blows most case studies out of the water.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step run through of everything the company has learned about running its highly successful blog since 2006, this is it.

From blogging strategies and technical SEO to earning links and measuring results, Crazy Egg’s guide is the first place to start if you want the complete B2B blogging blueprint.

#6: Backlinko: How We Got Out Guest Posts Featured on HUGE Authority Sites

This “guide” is actually a collection of case studies from Backlinko, delving into the specific art of guest blogging in 2019.

While Karola Karlson isn’t a big advocate of guest blogging, Backlinko’s Brian Dean has enjoyed success with the strategy – albeit more from a branding perspective than a pure SEO tactic (precisely what Karlson suggests in her case study).

If you fancy some of that branding magic, Dean is ready to show you how to find the right target sites, reach out to them and get your content published in front of a much wider audience.

You’ll also find some useful insights in the comments section, too, so make sure you keep scrolling down after you’ve finished with the article itself.

#7: How Sumo’s Nat Eliason Grew A Website To 10K Visitors In A Month

Sumo.com is a pretty good source of case studies (which you’ll find in the “stories” section of its blog) and this offering comes from entrepreneur Nat Eliason.

He shows you (in plenty of detail) how he built an audience of 10,000 for a new blog within the first month – by only publishing a single blog post.

No email marketing, no paid advertising – this is is a pure-SEO case study that shows you the power of strategic, optimised B2B content.

This is the same strategy he used to generate more than 50,000 monthly visits for his personal blog. Eliason guides you through the entire process and you can apply this strategy to your entire content marketing efforts to build your own B2B audience quickly.

#8: Ahrefs: How We Earned 270 Backlinks From A Single Blog Post

Ahrefs has become one of the biggest authorities in search marketing over the past decade. The SEO software provider has even announced plans to create its own search engine to rival Google but, first, Head of Content Joshua Hardwick is going to show you a tried and tested strategy for significantly boosting organic traffic in this case study.

It’s called the “Middleman” method, which aims to get your most profitable pages ranking rather than simply having blog posts, free guides and informational pages taking the top spots in Google.

Hardwick’s study uses the case of HubSpot as an example, pointing out that 88% of the company’s top 50 most-linked pages are blog posts and free courses – not “money” pages that generate income.

This insightful case study shows you how to overcome this problem and get those profitable pages climbing up the SERPs.

#9: Backlinko: How We Grew Our Blog To 392K+ Monthly Visits

We’ve got another Backlinko case study for you here and this time Brain Dean is going to show you how the company built an audience of 392,441 visits per month (and growing).

This study aims to provide an 8-step content strategy that you can implement in 2019 to get similar results with your own B2B blog. There’s a lot of detail in there and Dean raises some really important points, such as how UX impacts the results of your content marketing efforts.

He also delves into data every step of the way to prove what’s getting results and where Backlinko needed to improve while implementing this strategy itself.

One to bookmark, for sure.

#10: Social Triggers: How This Blog Generated $2K & 800 Readers In One Day

Lastly, we’ve got this case study by Derek Halpern, published on the Social Triggers blog. He puts it quite bluntly: “It’s hard to get readers,” especially with all the “fluff marketing advice” that gets banded around these days.

To combat this, Halpern runs you through the drafting technique.

Essentially, the process involves getting press coverage from reporters and bloggers who have shown an interest in your competitors, indirect competitors or industry in general.

The case study features the story of Katrina Pardon, who used the drafting technique to generate $2,000 and more than 800 readers in just one day.

Her previous daily visits were sitting around the 20 mark – not a bad improvement.

Now, it’s time for your B2B blogging success story

After reading through these 10 B2B blogging case studies, you should have plenty of inspiration for your crafting your own success story. Be sure to get in touch with us if you try out any of these strategies and hopefully we’ll be featuring your case study in one of our articles in the near future.

The post 10 Case Studies of Using Blogging for B2B Lead Generation appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Zoho CRM Review: Where it shines (and where it’s quite overrated)

Zoho offers a comprehensive suite of business management tools to help you with everything from marketing and productivity to finance and HR.

In this review, we’re focusing our attention on Zoho’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform and comparing it to some of the best alternatives in the industry.

Ultimately, we decided this wasn’t the CRM for us but there was plenty to like about the platform while we were trialling it. Here’s the lowdown on where Zoho CRM shines and where it doesn’t.

Zoho pros & cons

To give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about in this review, here’s a quick look at the pros and cons we experienced while suing Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM pros



Solid email marketing & automation featuresIntegrates seamlessly with other Zoho productsForm builder app available (paid)Comprehensive reporting



Zoho CRM cons



Requires a lot of customisation to get startedLimited customer supportForms aren’t optimised for conversionsZoho offers a lot of features but the depth of their functionality proves limited as your demands increase

Features-wise, Zoho CRM stacks up well against the competition and it even beats some of the industry leaders in certain areas. For example, there’s a separate form builder and optimisation app, which is one of the best we’ve used.

Forms often get overlooked and it’s great to see Zoho recognise the important of them when it comes to lead generation and nurturing. The form app isn’t perfect (more on that later) but Zoho is doing a lot more for form building and optimisation than most CRM providers.

Like many CRM platforms, Zoho’s requires a lot of customisation to get started and this is where the company’s limited customer support can become an issue.

Overall, Zoho CRM is a capable platform that integrates perfectly into a much larger system of Zoho software. So let’s take a closer look at what the platform can do before we explain why we ended up going with a different CRM here at Venture Harbour.

How much does Zoho CRM cost?

You can try Zoho CRM for free by signing up to a 15-day trial without handing over any credit card details. If you decide this is the platform for you, there are four versions available:

Standard: £10/month (per user)Professional: £16/month (per user)Enterprise: £30/month (per user)Ultimate Edition: £85/month (per user)

All of those prices are based on paying annually, which means you’re essentially signing up to a 12-month subscription. Even still, those prices put Zoho’s CRM at the more competitive end of the market.

Keep in mind you’ll have to pay extra for any of the additional apps you decide to use (eg: the form builder) so this can quickly bump your monthly cost up.

The integrations are great but you have to pay for them.

What can you do with Zoho CRM?

Now that you have a better idea of how much Zoho CRM is going to cost you, let’s take a look at what you’re actually getting for your money.

Multichannel Sales CRM

Above all, Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management platform that help you manage sales prospects and customer across multichannel touch points – precisely what a CRM is supposed to do.

This starts with the platform’s email marketing features, allowing you to manage contacts, automate emails and track engagement (views, responses, etc.) and automate further responses. You can filter leads by engagement actions (sent, not sent, opened, not opened, etc.) and devise your follow-up strategies.

You also get Zoho’s drag-and-drop email builder to create new designs and templates, extensive email reporting and team collaboration tools.

Beyond email, Zoho equips you with tools for implementing live chat on your website, lead generation and management tools for social media and systems for managing phone calls.

Lead generation & management

Lead management is a crucial function of any CRM but Zoho also wants to help you generate more leads as well. There are three key areas the platform will help you achieve this: email signups on your website, live chat conversations and converting leads via social.

Zoho’s form builder helps you create forms without writing any code and place them on the most important parts of your website. The builder is intuitive and you can auto-assign leads to members of your team upon signup. The tools also allows you to collect user data and automate email responses based on the info users submit.

It’s a great tool but the platform doesn’t do much to help you create forms that are optimised for conversions. Zoho offers more than most of the CRM platforms we’ve used when it comes to form creation and optimisation but, ultimately, the pre-optimised multi-step forms we create using Leadformly convert a much higher percentage of users.

Aside from that, Zoho’s lead assignment, scoring and automation features are highly capable. There’s not a great deal to criticise in this department.

Marketing & Sales automation

Zoho CRM makes it easy to build sales automation workflows, allowing you to automatically send email responses to new leads, move prospects to different email lists based on their responses and move contacts along the sales journey.

The builder is simple and intuitive, making it ideal for teams that are new to CMRs and automation in general. The automation options available cover all of the essentials, too, but we started to find Zoho’s CRM too limited when we tried to create more advanced automations – for example, personalising page content for different users.

Analytics & Reporting

Zoho puts a heavy emphasis on Analytics and reporting, which is great to see from a provider targeting both small and large businesses. Too many CRM platforms fall short on the data side of things, forcing you to implement third-party solutions into the mix.

Zoho’s reporting isn’t the most extensive on the market but it does give you a solid overview of just about everything from sales records and business performance to KPIs and web form insights.

It’s a strong offering and you’ll get quite a lot out of Zoho’s reports until you start needing more advanced capabilities.

How does Zoho compare to the competition?

We’ve given you an overview of what you can do with Zoho CRM and what you can expect to pay for the platform but how does it compare to the competition? In this section, we’re going to look at how it stacks up against HubSpot and ActiveCampaign.

Zoho CRM vs HubSpot

While Zoho CRM targets small, medium and large businesses, HubSpot isn’t really suitable for smaller businesses. While HubSpot offers a free CRM platform, you don’t get access to the automation and lead management features you need to make a real impact upon your business.

You have to pay for these and HubSpot quickly becomes too expensive for smaller businesses.

HubSot’s CRM is a great tool but things get expensive once you start adding marketing and automation features.

Zoho is genuine value for money at the small business end of the spectrum but there is a caveat. HubSpot’s automation and marketing features are more advanced than Zoho’s – so, while you’re paying more for them, you can achieve a lot more with them.

With Zoho CRM, you might find your business outgrows the platform’s capabilities. Larger businesses or companies with demanding automation needs may find it simply doesn’t cut the grade to begin with.

Zoho CRM vs ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a more direct competitor for Zoho CRM, also catering for small businesses and enterprise brands alike. The crucial difference for us is that ActiveCampaign has the advanced automation capabilities we need and it doesn’t charge crazy prices for them.

The problem for us with Zoho CRM was that we quickly found its features just didn’t quite go far enough for us. ActiveCampaign gives us 90% of what we actually needed from an enterprise system like HubSpot at a fraction of the price.

gives us 90% of what we actually needed from an enterprise system like HubSpot at a fraction of the price.

A few integrations later and we matched HubSpot without paying those hefty prices.

Zoho CRM verdict

Zoho is a great CRM and marketing automation platform for small businesses. It’s affordable and covers all of the bases, making it a great place to start your CRM journey. Sure, there are a few features missing and some interface quirks, but this is something you’re going to experience with any CRM – none of them are perfect.

If your CRM and automation needs are relatively simple, Zoho CRM is a great platform.

Unfortunately, our automation needs were too much and we’re not convinced Zoho is going to cut it for larger businesses. Another problem is businesses that are aiming to scale quickly are going to find they outgrow Zoho CRM and this means you’re going to be on the hunt for another CRM.

This is a key reason we chose ActiveCampaign as our CRM and marketing automation suite. It’s similarly priced but it’s capable of growing alongside your business, offering advanced features at reasonable prices as the needs of your business increase.

The post Zoho CRM Review: Where it shines (and where it’s quite overrated) appeared first on Venture Harbour.

The Complete Guide to Lead Segmentation

If you want to convert leads into paying customers (which you do, of course), segmentation is one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy.

No matter what line of business you’re in, your target customers are going to be a diverse mix of people with different needs – and these are going to change as they move along the buying process and edge closer towards making a purchase.

To deliver messages to each of these prospects, addressing their unique needs at each stage of the sales journey, you need to segment your leads – both at the moment you capture them and on an ongoing basis as their relationship with your brand changes.

This is your complete guide to lead segmentation and we’re going to show you exactly how to maximise sales with this crucial marketing strategy.

What is lead segmentation?

Lead segmentation breaks your collection of leads into smaller lists, based on their actions, that you can use to send more convincing marketing messages.

For example, you might have one list for people who have previously visited your homepage only and another list for users who looked at specific product or services pages on your website.

This allows you to send different messages to these two types of user. The aim with former homepage visitors is to get them back on your site and re-engaged with your brand so you can find out more about what they’re looking for. As for people who have visited specific product or services pages, you already know what these users are interested in purchasing – so you can focus your messages around these products/services to increase your chances of getting the conversion.

Those are two of the most basic lead segments you’re likely to work with (this doesn’t mean they’re any less important, though) and we’re going to look at some more sophisticated examples throughout the rest of this guide.

In the meantime, here’s a quick list of some other lead segments to give you an idea of what’s to come:

Homepage visitorsProduct/service page visitorsRepeat visitorsEmail subscribersContent downloadersShopping cart abandonersExisting customers (single purchase)Repeat customersDemographics (age, gender, location, etc.)Known interestsLow-intent leadsHigh-intent leadsHot leads (engaged)Cold leads (unengaged)Conversion completedConversion uncompleted

The list can go on forever – it all comes down to the criteria you want to use to target your leads with unique messages.

Let’s say your company sells communications hardware and software for corporate business; things like phone systems and video conferencing setups. You know it can be hard for businesses to choose the right systems for their needs so you’ve created an eBook buying guide for people to download as a lead generation strategy.

Phone system guide for small businesses at UC Today .

Right off the bat, there are three obvious lead segments you’ll want to create here:

People who visit your eBook page but don’t download it.People who download your eBook but don’t convert.People who download your eBook and do convert (ie: buy one of your products).

For people on list #1, you’ll want to reach out to them with messages encouraging them to download your eBook guide – perhaps highlighting the challenges of choosing the right system.

People on list #2 did download your guide but, for whatever reason, didn’t go on to buy a system from your business. Perhaps you need more information about these businesses to make more relevant suggestions. Or maybe a discount offer will be enough to turn these readers into customers. The good news is you’ve got these users’ email addresses from the moment they download your eBook and this gives you a solid platform to find out more about these leads, try out different messages and segment further if needed.

As for list #3, well, this is where your eBook worked like a charm and people bought from you after reading through your guide. This doesn’t mean your job is done, though. You want to turn these customers into loyal, repeat buyers or brand advocates who recommend you to other businesses – perhaps both.

Why is lead segmentation important?

Without lead segmentation, you’re just sending the same generic messages to everyone. You’re not addressing specific needs, showing people which problems you’re going to solve for them or giving them any reason to believe they should buy from you instead of the countless other businesses offering a similar package.

As Venture Harbour CEO Marcus Taylor explains in another blog post, lead segmentation resulted in an 89% sales uplift & 58% increase in average order value for one of our other ventures, MusicLawContracts.com.

Think about it.

When someone’s in the market for a new car, they don’t just wake up one morning and say “I should probably buy myself a BMW X5”.

They turn to Google and start the long journey of trying to find the best possible car for their personal needs, within their budget (at least, this is how it normally starts).

So our future BMW X5 buyer is probably going to start with a Google search along the lines of “best family cars 2019” or “best cars for dog owners 2019”.

These initial searches already offer up a world of information about what these people are looking for and why. So car manufacturers, retailers, leasing firms and anyone else interested in selling to these types of people need to address the unique needs of each target audience.

The first stage of lead segmentation is targeting audiences, based on their unique needs, so you can bag them as leads to begin with. A company marketing BMW X5s needs to know what the key selling points of this particular vehicle are and what the people most likely to buy into them are going to search for using Google, which kind of content they’re going to click on in Facebook or which video ads are going to grab their attention on YouTube.

The second stage is creating segmented lists for each stage of your sales funnel. So, after you’ve generated a new lead, you can target it with messages designed to move it on to the next stage of the buying process. Then, you target them with messaging to move them on to the next stage after that – and so on – until the purchase is complete.

What tools do you need to segment your leads?

As with any kind of marketing strategy, you need the right tools to get the job done and the same thing goes for lead segmentation. The good news is there’s an excellent supply of tools available to help you segment and manage leads.

This is one area where marketing software has really excelled in recent years.

Here’s a quick look at what you’re going to need.

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform

The most important tool (aside from your website, perhaps) is a CRM platform that allows you to create and manage your segmented lists. With a CRM platform, you can also create profiles for individual leads (once you’ve got an ID) and customers, which means you can update their info as they progress along the buying process and you gain more data about them.

ActiveCampaign‘s automation features make complex lead segmentation easy to manage.

This is the platform that allows you to deploy targeted messages to each of your lists and then move contacts on to another list when they complete the desired action (one that reflects they’ve taken the next step towards a purchase).

Email marketing software

You’re also going to need a solid piece of email marketing software because this is how you’re going to reach the majority of people on your segmented lists. There are plenty of email marketing platforms out there but you’ll want to make sure you choose one that integrates with your CRM.

You’ll also want to make sure you have the right automation features within your CRM-email marketing combo, so you’re not manually sending mails or moving contacts onto other lists.

This is one of the key reasons we stuck with ActiveCampaign as our CRM – because it’s also a killer piece of email marketing and automation software. With ActiveCampaign, it’s not only our lead segmentation strategy that’s fully automated, but also the majority of our lead nurturing and sales processes, too.

High-converting web forms

Because lead segmentation relies so heavily on getting email addresses from users, you need to have a string collection of high-converting forms across your website.

We’ve spent a lot of time designing and optimising web forms over the years – so much so, we ended up building our own form builder and optimisation software.

With Leadformly, you can create high-converting web forms in minutes and optimise them for better results with the platform’s built-in form analytics tools.

Instead of the static web forms, most people are used to seeing, Leadformly focuses on creating multi-step forms that have resulted in increasing conversions by 300+% in tests.

This is important, of course, because you can’t segment leads you fail to capture. But there’s something else really important built into Leadformly that’s going to make a huge difference to the way you handle leads.

Leadformly uses something called conditional logic to only request relevant information from users, based on the details they provide along the way. Essentially, this removes optional form fields and irrelevant question – a very good thing for form conversion rates.

But it also allows you to segment leads on your website and gain valuable insights as soon as they hit the send button. This means you’re not sending out generic email responses for everyone who signs up. Instead, you can put new contacts on your segmented lists right away send out highly-relevant, engaging messages from the first interaction.

We’ll cover this in more detail later.

Lead segmentation: A step-by-step guide

Now that know what lead segmentation involves and the tools you’re going to need, let’s take a closer look at the process, step-by-step.

Here’s a quick summary of what we’re going to be covering in this section:

Audience researchSales funnelsChoosing your segmentsImplementing lead segmentation systemsAutomating lead segmentation

Step #4 is going to have multiple sections, covering various segmentation strategies – the kind basically every business wants to have implemented.

First, though, it’s all about audience research.

Step #1: Know your audiences

As mentioned earlier, the first stage of lead segmentation is actually securing those leads in the first place. You’re not just aiming for every possible lead you can capture, either; you’re looking to get highly-targeted, relevant leads that are likely to go all the way and buy from you.

This brings us back to the BMW X5 example from before. You need to know exactly what makes your target audiences tick, what they’re looking for from a brand like you and pinpoint highly specific needs.

Without this kind of knowledge, your segmented lists are going to be too generic and you’re going to leak all kinds of leads between different stages of your sales funnels.

Speaking of which.

Step #2: Know your sales funnels

The needs, expectations and actions of your leads are going to change as they move along the buying process. To address these changing needs, you’re going to create lists for each stage of your sales funnels and place contacts on them, based on their most recent actions (pages visits, content downloads, email signups, purchases, etc.).

The key thing is to understand what these actions say about people’s position along the buying process and what they need to take the next step.

Sales funnel visualisation, Source: Olivia Ross, Moz

For example, someone who downloads your guide to buying website hosting and visits multiple reviews for providers like Bluehost and WP Engine clearly shows a strong purchase intent but needs more help with making the right decision.

In this scenario, you can segment your leads when they download your guide using Leadformly to find out more about each lead’s requirements. This means you can create lists for small businesses, enterprise brands, WordPress websites, eCommerce sites, etc. and send them a personalised list of the best hosting providers for their needs – eg: best hosting providers for small business WordPress websites, best hosting providers for online-only retailers, etc.

Leadformly uses conditional logic to collect relevant info and segment leads as they sign up.

The further leads progress along your sales funnels, the more specific your content and messages should be to their individual needs.

Step #3: Pinpoint the segments that matter to you

There are thousands of different segments you can use to refine your marketing messages, target highly focused audiences and reach leads at different stages of the buying process.

In fact, one of the most challenging things about lead segmentation is pinpointing the segments that really matter to you. You want your strategy to be manageable and you also want your messages to be highly relevant so creating ineffective segments can be a major problem.

Broadly speaking, there are two main categories for lead segments: characteristic and behavioural.

Examples of characteristic segments

Characteristic segments describe key attributes of your target audiences in areas where you need to differentiate. The most straightforward example of this would be user location, if you need to target leads with different messages based on where they live.

Other examples of characteristic segments include:

Geographic: Location, country, language, etc.Demographic: Age, gender, nationality, etc.Sociographic: Marital status, children, Psychographic: Personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, etc.Professional: Occupation, income, education, etc.Corporate: Company size, industry, position at company, etc.

Essentially, characteristic segments allow you to create lists based on buyer personas. This is important from a targeting perspective, so you can reach tech startup CEOs in London, for example, with highly relevant messages.

However, to take your lead segmentation strategy to the next level and adapt your messaging, as leads progress through the buying process, you’ll need to target them based on behavioural actions.

Examples of behavioural segments

Behavioural segments define your leads based on the actions they take and this allows you to guide prospects along the entire path to purchase.

For example, someone who visits your homepage and another visitor who clicks through to one of your landing pages demonstrate different behavioural patterns.

In most cases, your homepage should appear in search results for relatively generic or branded searches. Whereas, PPC traffic will have typed in a targeted search term that normally indicates a higher level of purchase intent. Not only that, but they’ve engaged with your ad offer and clicked through to find out more about a specific product, service or offer.

Searches for specific products show higher purchase intent and while “near me” searches indicate even stronger interest.

Clearly, the second of these two leads demonstrates a higher value and offers a lot more clues as to what kind of subsequent messaging they might respond to.

Further down the sales funnel, someone downloading one of your eBook’s demonstrates significant engagement with your brand and proven they’re willing to fill out a form and hand over personal details for some helpful content.

Key behavioural segments may include:

Page visits: Homepage, landing pages, product/service pages, etc.Regular visitors: Regular blog readers, multiple visits to product/service pages, etc.Referral source: Traffic from organic search, paid search, social, email, etc.Referral message: What prompted users to click through from each source (special offer, new product launch, buyer’s guide, free download, etc.)?Email signups: Newsletter, eBook downloads, webinar signups, etc.Content categories: The topics regular blog readers show interest in, eBook topics, webinar subjects, page categories – any topical interest you can measure via page visits, downloads or other engagements.Keywords: The keywords users type into search engines before clicking on your ads (easiest with single keyword ad groups).Free trial/demo: People who want to try out your SaaS product/service.Purchases: First-time buyers, product/service category, amount spent, related products/services, etc.Multiple purchases: Repeat buyers, purchase history, product/service categories, customer value, etc.Customer experience: New customers, repeat customers, loyal customers, customer experience issues, etc.

Your ability to measure these actions will depend on the CRM and analytics set up you’ve got. Accurately tracking repeat visitors, for example, is relatively simple if you have user accounts that people stay signed into between visits.

Otherwise, you’ll want to make sure your CRM has some kind of site tracking feature that uses cookies to place an ID on visitors and allow you to track visit numbers – as well as the actions they take during sessions.

Site tracking in ActiveCampaign allows you to track page visits and actions users take on your site.

Once you’ve decided which actions you want to use to target users, you’ll want to assign a lead score to each behaviour. The easiest way to do this is to go back to your sales funnels and place each action at the most relevant stage of the buying process.

For example, a first-time visitor to your website will fit in the “awareness” category (or whatever you’re calling this stage of your funnel) whereas repeat visitors who keep reading blog posts in the same category or visit the same product/service page belong in the “interest” category.

Assigning actions to each stage of the sales funnel gives you the roadmap you need to guide users from one stage of the buying process to another.

Step #4: Implement your lead segmentation systems

Now you’re ready to implement your lead segmentation systems across your website, CRM and other channels. The process will vary for each of these and your ability to do so will also vary depending on the tools you have available.

The most reliable way to segment, track and engage users throughout the consumer journey is to get them onboard as an email contact. But getting email addresses takes a little work so we’ll start by looking at ways you can segment and target visitors before they sign up to anything.

Segment organic search traffic

To segment organic search traffic you’re going to need a CRM platform that allows you to place IDs on visitors. This enables you to distinguish between first-time visitors, repeat visitors and the actions users take across multiple sessions.

Site tracking in ActiveCampaign.

This gives you the tracking ability to create lists based on the URLs users visit and the number of times they visit each page. You can then create lists based on these URLs to assign contacts to actions and interests – eg: repeat visitors showing a strong interest in business automation or users repeatedly visiting one of your product/service pages.

Segment your paid advertising leads

Google Ads is a great tool for segmenting leads because you can target people at specific stages of the buying process, based on the keywords they type in.

You can also refine these segments further by using Google Ads’ targeting options to target users based on their location, demographic (age, gender, etc.), device type and various other factors.

This allows you to target specific audiences and essentially pre-segment your leads from Google Search but to turn your PPC traffic into leads you can actually nurture, you’ll need to use cookies to identify these users and then place them on remarketing lists.

Remarketing lists are where Google Ads really shines in terms of lead segmentation.

Remarketing in Google Ads allows you to target previous visitors with visual ads as they continue to browse the web. These are people who have shown an interest in your brand or products/services but didn’t convert right away – the vast majority of PPC traffic, in other words.

With remarketing lists, you can segment your PPC traffic in a similar way to ActiveCampaign. The easiest way to do this is by setting up URL-based conditions to place people on lists, allowing you to target people based on the pages they have visited (eg: form completion pages, blog pages, product pages, etc.).

To get the most out of remarketing lists, though, you’ll want to integrate with Google Analytics and create remarketing audiences based on user actions. This is where you can start targeting users with ads based on click events (button clicks, mostly) for items they’ve added to baskets. forms they’ve started filling out, items they haven’t added to their basket and all kinds of other actions that reveal a user’s purchase intent.

Crucially, you can also set up these events to automatically move prospects from one list to another once they take an action that demonstrates they’ve moved onto the next stags of the buying process.

Segment your email marketing contacts

As mentioned earlier, the most reliable way to segment and nurture leads long-term is through email marketing. Using cookies and tracking IDs is fine but the technology isn’t 100% reliable and the recent changes to consent under GDPR has made it a little trickier to use them.

Email marketing, on the other hand, gives you a direct line to individual leads so you can target them with personalised messages, based on their interactions with your brand.

You also get a wealth of automation features with modern email marketing software and this really takes your lead nurturing efforts to the next level.

So, first of all, make sure you have the right piece of email marketing software on your side. Take a look at our list of 10 best email marketing software and tools for some recommendtions.

The biggest challenge with email marketing is actually getting your hands on those email addresses to begin with – and this is why tracking IDs still have an important role to play.

How We Increased Signups by 543% for Fandistro Using Facebook Ads

In the meantime, you can learn plenty of lessons about getting email marketing leads from our article explaining how we increased signups by 543% for Fandistro by using Facebook Ads – one of the many channels you have available for building a valuable email marketing list.

Segment email leads on your website

Most brands leave it too late to start segmenting their email marketing leads. You’re not going to make the same mistake.

Earlier, we mentioned Leadformly as a tool to increase email signups and we also touched on using it to segment leads on your website. Using conditional logic, Leadformly allows you to collect information about users as they’re filling out your forms and you can forward this data to your CRM when they hit the send button.

This means you can place signups on segmented lists right away, based on the information they’ve submitted, and send out more relevant responses from the very first email.

So you’re no longer lumping everyone on the same list, sending out generic responses and then spending your first few email exchanges trying to get more details about prospects.

You can do all of this during the signup process with Leadformly and start sending out engaging email messages from the first interaction – no messing around. And, better yet, you can automate the entire process, drastically increasing the quality of leads by the time your sales team starts working with them.

Segment your blog traffic

We’ve already looked at how you can use your CRM to segment blog traffic by placing IDs on visitors and tracking the pages they visit. As mentioned earlier, though, cookies aren’t 100% reliable and it pays to get your hands on email addresses wherever possible.

A great strategy for this is to create email lead gen content for the key topics/categories on your blog. It could be in-depth guides, eBooks, webinars, free downloads or whatever you decide will generate the most interest from potential customers.

Create this kind of content for all of the key topics covered in your blog and then you can dynamically insert CTAs throughout your blog posts, using the category of each post as a variable.

Dynamic CTAs turn every blog post into a lead generation tool – all pre-segmented.

This means, every time you publish a new blog post, CTAs will be automatically added to the main body of content, matching the category you define before publishing. So every post covering social media marketing, for example, will show the CTA for your in-depth guide on getting better results from social marketing.

Crucially, every time a user downloads your email gen content via your blog post, you know these visitors have a strong interest in this topic and you can segment each lead accordingly.

Segment your customers

Research shows it costs five times more to attract a new customer than it does to get a second sale from an existing one. In other words, customer retention is far more cost-effective than customer acquisition.

More to the point, you’re never going to maximise your marketing ROI unless you’re able to get the most value out of every customer.

The first purchase is only the beginning and now your attention turns to increasing the customer lifetime value of each lead after the initial sale. This starts with lead segmentation and here are some crucial lists you’ll want to have in your customer retention strategy:

Single purchase: Product/service category.Multiple purchases: Product/service categories.Recommendations: For each product/service category, key combination of categories.Value: Value of first sale, total value of previous sales.Expected value: Estimated ongoing value of customer if purchases continue.Reviews: Customers who haven’t yet left a review.Cold customers: Those who haven’t made a purchase recently.Unengaged: Customers who are showing less engagement than usual via email, signing into their account less often, using your platform less frequently or show signs of engaging less with your brand.

Of course, there will be demographic factors (age, location, industry, etc.) you’ll also want to apply to your customer segmentations but our focus in this section is the idea of turning first-time buyers into repeat customers and then keeping them engaged on an ongoing basis.

#Step 5: Automate segmentation, list progression & messaging

Implementing all of the lead segmentation strategies we’ve covered in this guide and then managing them manually is basically impossible. At the very best it’s a highly-inefficient approach and the key to maximising your leag segmentation strategy is to automate as much of the process as possible.

Above all, you need to automate the process of moving leads from one list to another as their actions indicate their purchase intent changes along the buying process.

This allows you to automatically send relevant messages to leads and customers and deliver a more relevant, personal experience every step of the way. First-time visitors will be encouraged to come back to your site, users looking at specific product/service pages will be enticed with ads tempting them to complete the purchase and first-time customers will be encouraged to make the next purchase.

ActiveCampaign’s automation builder helps you create sophisticated marketing processes that guide users along the sales funnel.

By automating this process, you have the freedom to create complex lead segments and target very specific actions. For example, you can distinguish between users who have visited a product page one, those who have visited multiple times and those who have compared multiple similar product pages.

These are subtle but significant actions that tell you a lot about what each lead needs to take the next step towards buying. And an automated lead segmentation strategy means you can address these needs at every stage of the sales funnel.

When a user completes the next desired action, they’ll automatically be moved on to the next list and targeted with messages designed to move them on once more – all the way until the next purchase.

Conclusion: Segment your way to sales success

By segmenting your leads in the way we’ve described today, you’re going to increase the quality of your leads and start delivering more influential messages to them from the first interaction. The better equipped you are to identify how user needs change along the consumer journey, the more successful you’re going to be at guiding them towards the finishing line.

Lead segmentation gives you the practical system to reach users along the way and nurture them along the sales funnel. And with the automated approach we’ve shown you in this guide, you can set up a lead segmentation and nurturing strategy that takes leads all the way – to the first purchase and beyond.

The post The Complete Guide to Lead Segmentation appeared first on Venture Harbour.

SharpSpring Review: Where it shines (and where it’s quite overrated)

SharpSpring is a relatively new name in the marketing automation arena but it’s turned a few heads since hitting the market in 2014. The platform now has a reputation for being an affordable yet highly-capable option for businesses of all sizes.

Naturally, this caught our attention when we were looking to find the right CRM/marketing automation mix here are Venture Harbour. So we thought it might be helpful to share our experience of using SharpSpring to show you where it shines and where it could do better.

SharpSpring pros & cons

Before we get into any specifics, let’s start by quickly running through the pros and cons we experienced while using SharpSpring.

SharpSpring pros



Solid CRM and automation featuresUnlimited users on all plansCost-effective for larger teams



SharpSpring cons



Not particularly intuitive for non-marketersLanding page & email builders behind competitorsOccasional bugs and slowdownsFeatures fall short for advanced needs

SharpSpring is clearly trying to offer businesses of all sizes everything they could need from a CRM and marketing automation combo. The list of features is strong and the company is very transparent when it comes to pricing.

At a quick glance, SharpSpring probably looks quite expensive compared to lowest prices shown by its competitors. But all SharpSpring plans support unlimited users whereas most providers list their prices per user.

More on this later.

Essentially, SharpSpring is very cost-effective for larger teams and its feature set will be enough for many businesses – at least to begin with. However, we find its features start to fall short when you try to automate more advanced marketing strategies.

While we found the platform a bit too unintuitive and the occasional bugs/slowdowns frustrating, it was ultimately the fact that SharpSpring’s features weren’t comprehensive for us that made us look elsewhere.

It all comes down to what you need to accomplish with the platform.

How much does SharpSpring cost?

If you’re new to the CRM and marketing automation software game, then pricing can easily catch you out. Providers aren’t always transparent about what they charge but this isn’t a problem with SharpSpring.

The company’s pricing policy is simple and clearly stated on its website. Rather than paying the fee displayed per user, you get unlimited users on every plan and SharpSpring quickly becomes a cost-effective choice for large teams.

The downside of this is it ends up being on the expensive side for smaller teams looking to grow.

At least SharpSpring makes it clear how much you can expect to pay for the platform – something we don’t see enough in this industry.

You also get access to all of the features on every version of the platform. Pricing is purely based on how many contacts you need to manage.

What can you do with SharpSpring?

SharpSpring positions itself as an all-in-one marketing automation suite and it packs an extensive list of features to match. Here’s a quick look at what you’ve got to work with:

Marketing automationEmail marketingWeb formsVisitor IDsCRMLanding page builderBloggingSocial media marketingMulti-device trackingAnalytics & reporting

That pretty much covers all of the bases but let’s talk about how well the platform actually helps you automate key marketing strategies.

Marketing automation

Above all, SharpSpring is a marketing automation platform and its visual workflow builder allows you to create custom automations to guide contact along the buying process.

You can score new leads upon capture and assign them to workflows, based on your chosen conditions. You’ll then send out messages designed to nurture them along your sales funnels and each lead will be moved on to the next process after they complete the desired action.

When it works well, SharpSprings workflow builder is a pleasure to use but we found ourselves having to deal with some bugs and freezes that forced us to start again on occasions.

Behavioural email marketing automation

Email is always at the heart of any automated marketing strategy and SharpSpring equips you with all the essential tools. You get a library of email templates to work with, a drag-and-drop email builder for creating custom designs and content personalisation to make your messages more relevant.

Combine this with the automation builder and you can create email drip campaigns that send out emails to users based on their actions and guide them towards the purchase.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

SharpSpring’s built-in CRM allows you to manage contacts on an individual basis, reach out with personalised messages and automate workflows with them – all while keeping track of their progress along the sales cycle.

It’s a decent enough CRM offering the same features you’ll find on most platforms like this but a lack of intuitiveness means it takes that little bit longer to get things done. This only makes the occasional bugs and slowdowns more frustrating but SharpSpring isn’t the only platform we’ve used that suffered from this problem.

Analytics & reporting

In true SharpSpring fashion, you’ll find a lot of different analytics and reporting capabilities crammed into this platform. You get email analytics, campaign tracking, behaviour tracking, multiple device tracking, ROI reports, custom reports and all kinds of other insights.

Sadly, the familiar side-effect of this is that SharpSpring’s reports often don’t offer the depth we would normally expect from a CRM and marketing automation suite. Likewise, the platform doesn’t give you a lot of freedom to segment data, which can make it difficult to extract meaningful insights from its relatively basic data.

How does SharpSpring compare to the competition?

Now that you have a good idea of what to expect from SharpSpring it’s worth comparing the platform against a couple of its main competitors.

SharpSpring vs HubSpot

SharpSpring and HubSpot essentially offer the same thing in a combined sales and marketing automation suite. If you actually use both platforms, though, you get the impression they’re targeting different types of business.

HubSpot is incredibly intuitive and easy for pretty much anyone to pick up and use. It also becomes very expensive for large teams – far more expensive than SharpSpring, although you could argue that usability is all the more important for larger teams.

That’s up for you to decide.

For smaller teams, HubSpot will probably end up being the more cost-effective and intuitive approach.

SharpSpring, on the other hand, has been designed with agencies in mind that will use the platform to manage marketing campaigns for their clients. the company offers a dedicated Agency plan but the software has been built from the marketer’s perspective, not the average business owner.

SharpSpring vs ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign was the CRM/marketing automation platform we ended up settling with and it has a lot in common with SharpSpring. Its pricing policy is simply more balanced for smaller teams (pricing is based per user), meaning the platform remains cost-effective as your business grows.

It’s amazing how marketing automation providers forget the crucial fact that businesses want to use these platform to grow their business – kind of the whole point, isn’t it?

ActiveCampaign’s pricing policy was a big deal for us, especially after realising how expensive other providers can become as your business grows or automation needs become more advanced. Our demands are quite high on the automation front and ActiveCampaign doesn’t hold us to ransom on its more sophisticated features.

Crucially, the platform is both robust and usable, meaning we don’t get any of the glitches we’ve experienced elsewhere and new members can pick up the software quickly.

SharpSpring verdict

SharpSpring offers a lot for SMEs with relatively large marketing and sales teams. If you find platforms priced per user are becoming too expensive, you should definitely see if SharpSpring provides the features you need for a more reasonable price.

We’re pretty confident most SMEs can make genuine progress with SharpSpring and agencies will be able to manage multiple clients. However, companies with more advanced automation needs might find its features don’t go far enough.

The post SharpSpring Review: Where it shines (and where it’s quite overrated) appeared first on Venture Harbour.

5 Best Mass Email Senders for Bulk Email Blasts

With so many email marketing platforms on the market these days, picking the right one for your needs can be tricky. When it comes to sending emails in bulk, quantity is obviously going to be a key consideration. You want to be able to send as many emails as you need – without restrictions – for the lowest possible price.

That’s not the only thing you need to consider, though.

What makes a good mass email sender?

Simply blasting emails at everyone you can doesn’t count as a marketing strategy – or sound very legal, for that matter. You also need to think about how you’re going to track those emails, check how users engage with them and automate your follow up email, depending on how people respond (if at all).

Quantity isn’t the only consideration and this is something we’ll be looking at throughout this list of recommendations.

#1: SendBlaster

SendBlaster is a straightforward bulk email sender that allows you to create mails by editing templates from its library and then send them out to an unlimited number of contacts.

This is the key selling point of SendBlaster: you pay a one-off fee and you can send unlimited emails to an unlimited number of contacts.

Most reputable email marketing software providers charge you a monthly fee, depending on the number of contacts you want to send emails to.

There are other tools like SendBlaster that let you send unlimited emails but their reputation tends to be low and emails sent often end up in people’s junk folders.

SendBlaster is one of the few bulk senders in this category that has a strong reputation and avoids the spam algorithms of ISPs and major inbox platforms.

If you really need the power to send unlimited emails, this is one of the few platforms worth recommending.

There are a lot of downsides to using SendBlaster, though. The email templates aren’t all that inspiring, the builder isn’t up to much and you don’t get much of anything in terms of automation beyond bulk selling.

You do get reporting but it’s very basic and your integration options are basically non-existent. This is a shame because it would be great to be able to integrate with some more capable email marketing software.

#2: iContact

Much like BulkSender, iContact allows you to send unlimited emails to your contacts via its dedicated mass email sending feature. However, iContact charges you a monthly fee based on the number of contacts you’re sending to – so you can send an unlimited number of emails but the number of people you can send them to will be restricted, based on how much you’re paying.

This the standard payment model for email marketing software these days.

So how many people can you send emails to?

Well, prices start from just $14/mo for up to 500 contacts and go as high as $299/mo for 50,000 contacts. If that’s not enough for you, you can always get a custom price for up to 5 million+ contacts, which should be enough to cover the bulkiest of email lists.

This means iContact will cost you more than SendBlaster, sooner or later. But you get a lot more in terms of email marketing tools for your money, as well as integration with Infusionsoft, if you happen to be using it as your CRM.

Aside from mass email, you also get a much better email editor, A/B testing, automation features and a whole lot more.

SendBlaster gives you more bulk sending power for less but iContact gives you so much more in other areas and this will be a common theme throughout the rest of this article.

#3: SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a truly sophisticated piece of email marketing software offering one of the best email builders on the market. Aside from editing templates, you can create your own design from scratch, using its drag-and-drop builder.

SendinBlue’s pricing is unique, too. Instead of charging you based on the number of contacts you’re sending to, SendinBlue sets its prices based on the number of emails you’re sending.

So you can send up to 300 emails every day for free, 40,000 per month for £15/mo and 60,000 per month for £23/mo. SendinBlue Premium gives you 120,000 email per month for £39/mo or 350,000 per month for £102/mo.

Once again, custom pricing plans are available if you need to send higher volumes.

Those prices are incredibly competitive and you’re getting a lot of additional email marketing features in terms of automation, contact segmentation and reporting. SendinBlue also has some of the best transactional email features we’ve come across, which we’re still using today here at Venture Harbour.

SendinBlue isn’t only there to help you send emails, either; it’s packed full of features to help you generate more leads and increase your email marketing list. Its form builder aims to turn your website into a stronger lead gen tool and improve the results of your inbound marketing efforts.

This is also the first platform we’ve looked at that offers serious reporting tools – crucial for gauging the performance of your emails after they’re sent out and optimising campaign for better results.

SendinBlue still has its limitations, though.

While it offers some great automation and lead generation features, it doesn’t match the industry leaders on this front. For example, there’s no customer relationship management (CMS) platform included and its lead tracking capabilities aren’t as advanced as some of its competitors (most of which are more expensive, though).

#4: Mailchimp

Mailchimp has become one of the biggest names in email marketing over the years although it’s now trying to position itself as a comprehensive marketing platform.

For our purposes, though, we’re going to focus mostly on the email side of things in this article. And the first thing we should say about Mailchimp is it’s got the bets email builder in the industry right now.

You won’t find a more flexible yet easy-to-use builder on the market right now.

Simplicity is a key aspect of Mailchimp, too, and you’ll see this across the entire platform. It’s easy to pick up and start rolling with from the first day, but there’s still plenty of online documentation to guide you through the basics – all in conversational English; no jargon whatsoever.

As far as sending mass emails, Mailchimp starts off very reasonable on the pricing side of things. There are four main plans available, which give you the following:

Free: 2,000 contacts; 10,000 emails per month.Essentials ($9.99/mo): 50,000 contacts; 500,000 emails per month.Standard ($14.99/mo): 100,000 contacts; 1.2m emails per month.Premium ($299/mo): 200,000+ contacts; 3m+ emails per month.

So you can send up to 1.2 million emails to as many as 100,000 people for as little as $14 per month – not bad at all.

This is precisely why Mailchimp makes it onto this list.

The big problem with Mailchimp is the way it throttles features on the cheaper versions of its software, which make it difficult to get everything you need from an email marketing platform without paying up for pricier plans.

This isn’t to say Mailchimp’s more advanced features are particularly sophisticated either. There’s still a lot lacking in terms of automation, reporting and other key features for a platform that clearly wants you to pay premium prices.

Form a bulk email perspective, Mailchimp is an interesting option but it doesn’t go the distance when it comes to serious email marketing.

#5: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is unlike any of the other email platforms we’ve looked at in this list today. Now, we’re looking at some enterprise email marketing and automation software with extensive features to bring all of your marketing efforts together.

Sending bulk emails is just one of the many things you can achieve with ActiveCampaign. This platform is designed for businesses looking for an all-in-one CRM, email marketing and automation system.

You can send unlimited emails on every plan with pricing based on the number of contacts you need to manage and the number of user accounts you need. More expensive plans also get you access to more advanced features and dedicated support.

For 500 contacts, pricing starts as low as $9/mo for up to three users while the $49/mo version. At 10,000 contacts, ActiveCampaig remains highly competitive with prices ranging between $111/mo and $399/mo.

At $199/mo, ActiveCampaign’s Plus package covers you for 10,000 contacts, unlimited emails and up to 25 user accounts – plus a lot more marketing and automation features that you’ll get from most platforms in this price bracket.

As you can see, you’ll get more mass email power for your money from some of the other options we’ve looked at in this list but ActiveCampaign is the platform for businesses who want a complete email marketing, automation and CRM platform.

You won’t find better automation features, sales tracking, reporting or integrations from any of the other providers we’ve looked at and you’ll ultimately save yourself a lot of money on additional marketing software by getting everything from ActiveCampaign.

Which is the best bulk email sender?

Each of the bulk email senders we’ve looked at in this article have strengths in their own right. BulkSender gives you unlimited email sending power for a reasonable one-of fee but that’s pretty much all you’re getting for your money.

SendinBlue starts to show us what comprehensive email marketing software is capable of while keeping bulk email highly affordable. And then we have ActiveCampaign that offers less bulk, but more accuracy, with an enterprise marketing suite at reasonable prices.

The post 5 Best Mass Email Senders for Bulk Email Blasts appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Drip Review: Where it shines (and where it’s quite overrated)

Drip is the unmistakable CRM designed specifically for eCommerce brands, promising to help online retailers turn leads into paying customers.

The self-titled ECRM aims to help you guide prospective customers along the buying process and personalise the entire experience to maximise sales, repeat purchases and customer value.

There’s a lot to like about Drip, too, but there are a few areas where it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. So here’s our no-nonsense Drip review to tell you where the platform shines and where it doesn’t.

Drip pros & cons

Before we get into the specifics, let’s give you a quick idea of what to expect in this review by looking at the pros and cons we’ve experienced while using Drip.

Drip pros



Specialist eCommerce CRMStrong automation featuresSolid integrationsEasy-to-use



Drip cons



Kind of priceyEmail templates could be betterPlatform can be buggyLacks CRO featuresForm builder is limited

The key selling point of Drip is that it’s designed from the bottom up for eCommerce brands selling physical products online. The software integrates excellently with a number of eCommerce, including Shopify and you also get a bunch of pre-built automations that you can use right out of the box.

How much does Drip cost?

As you can see, Drip kicks off its pricing at $49/mo for the Basic version of its platform. This comes with a limit of 2,500 contacts, which is about right at this price range although it’s a touch lower than you get with some alternatives (such as ActiveCampaign, which gives you 2,500 contacts for $39/mo).

This is part of Drip’s revised pricing policy so keep this in mind when reading other reviews, which might be out of date. You used to only get 1,000 contacts for $49/mo on the basic version and this was a common complaint – so this is one area where Drip has improved in recent years.

The problem with Drip pricing (aside from being a touch more expensive than similar platforms to begin with) is prices increase steeply when your contact list grows. Keep this mind when you’re comparing Drip with alternative platforms and consider how you expect your online store to grow.

Drip will argue its specialist eCommerce features are worth the expense but only you can decide whether these features add enough value to your brand to justify the price tag.

What can you do with Drip?

When it comes down to it, Drip is a CRM platform and the feature list is going to look pretty familiar if you’ve already checked out alternative options. The difference is these features are designed specifically for eCommerce campaigns and this can make it easier to get your head around them if you’re new to using tools like this.

Marketing automation

First off, we’ve got marketing automation and Drip is a solid choice in this department. There’s a heavy emphasis on email marketing automation, which is normally where the focus should be for eCommerce brands.

Drip’s email builder will help you create designs quickly although it would be nice if the platform had a better range of templates on offer to speed the process up even further.

It’s a small gripe but one I have to mention.

It’s easy to forgive Drip, too, because it has plenty to offer when it comes to automation workflows. It comes with a bunch of pre-built automation workflows for you to use – all designed for real-world eCommerce functions like cart abandonment, customer win-back, Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals and so much more.

You can also build your own workflows using Drip’s builder and the platform’s excellent integration support gives you a huge amount of freedom to automate your own processes.

You can do all of this with most CRM platforms but the heavy eCommerce focus of Drip and its integrations make this an incredibly easy and powerful platform to pick up and use for eCommerce business owners who don’t have a great deal of experience with CRMs.

Personalisation

Another key function Drip aims to fill is personalisation, allowing you to create unique customer journeys. This is a crucial strategy for eCommerce brands to maximise sales and repeat purchases after the initial conversion.

To make this happen, you need a CRM platform that allows you to track contacts as they interact with your website in different ways. Drip makes this straightforward with its eCommerce-focused tracking system.

Again, you can do with most CRM platforms but Drip’s eCommerce focus makes it easier to get to grips with setting these processes up if you’re new to it all.

Multichannel marketing

Email and on-site interactions are two of the most important processes for eCommerce brands to manage but there are other channels you need to integrate into your sales/marketing strategy.

Social media is becoming increasingly important for retail brands as the likes of Facebook and Instagram make it easier for users to buy directly from retailers.

While Drip does offer social integrations and some Facebook advertising features, this isn’t one of the platform’s strongest areas.

Your paid search efforts will be helped by Drip’s website and landing page personalisation features, though. This helps you to create more relevant messages to user needs – something you can continue as they progress through the consumer journey on your site.

Finally, you also get text message functionality and the ability to send postcards to your contacts through the actual mail.

Analytics & reporting

To prove your CRM is having a positive impact on your marketing strategies and profit margins, you need reliable data. Drip’s analytics and reporting features aren’t the most extensive but they don’t need to be as comprehensive as platform’s like HubSpot because they’re laser-focused on eCommerce performance.

You get custom conversion tracking, detailed email reports, customer journey overviews, lead scores, customisable dashboards and plenty more – all built into the platform so you don’t need to set them up.

How does Drip compare to the competition?

Now that you have a good idea of what Drip can do, let’s see how it compares to some of its closest competitors. In this section, we’re going to weigh it in against ConvertKit and the CRM we ultimately ended up using, ActiveCampaign.

Drip vs ConvertKit

ConvertKit is one of the first CRM’s that comes up as a Drip rival but the two platforms are very different. ConvertKit isn’t designed for eCommerce brands (Drip is the only CRM that really pinpoints this niche) while ConvertKit is more geared towards businesses using content marketing as a lead generation strategy.

So, if your online store puts a heavy emphasis on blogging, buying guides, product reviews and other pieces of content people can engage with, ConvertKit could be worth looking at. However, you’ll have to sacrifice the eCommerce focus of Drip in exchange for ConvertKit’s content capabilities.

ConvertKit can match Drip when it comes to automation and tracking but you’ll need to set up the eCommerce workflows yourself.

The main benefit ConvertKit has over Drip is how its interface operates. It’s smooth, responsive and pretty much bug-free whereas Drip regularly runs into speed problems and bugs that get in the way of using it.

Drip vs ActiveCampaign

While Drip and ConvertKit carve specific niches for themselves (eCommerce and content marketing), ActiveCampaign aims to be the CRM for every kind of business. If anything, it’s slightly geared more towards B2B brands than B2C businesses but flexible enough to tailor for your needs.

As far as a CRM platform, ActiveCampaign covers more bases than Drip with extensive features for email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and reporting.

This is partly due to the fact that it caters for a wider range of businesses than Drip but a lot of these features are important for eCommerce brands, too – for example, the significantly better range of email templates and built-in CRO features.

ActiveCampaign is notably cheaper than Drip, too, and the price difference only increases for larger contact lists. This was a key reason we decided to stick with ActiveCampaign as we knew we’d be able to scale our business without being held ransom to higher CRM fees.

Essentially, you can do more for less with ActiveCampaign but it might take longer to set everything up and get used to the platform if you’ve never used a CRM before. Once again, ActiveCampaign’s interface is far more responsive and bug-free than Drip’s

Drip verdict

Drip is a highly-capable CRM and a great platform for eCommerce brands who are using this kind of platform for the first time. Everything is geared towards online retailers and this makes the features so much easier to get to grips with if you’ve never used a CRM before.

Sadly, this convenience can only last so long and the frustration of a sometimes-sluggish and often-buggy interface will last until Drip decides to address these issues (assuming it will).

The only other gripe I’ve got with Drip is the steep price increases for larger contact lists. This is a common problem with CRM platforms but I hope we’re going to see more providers like ActiveCampaign come in with more reasonably-priced options to drive down costs across the industry.

To sum up, Drip is a great option for eCommerce businesses looking to get their first CRM platform but I don’t think it quite does enough to establish itself a the CRM you’ll keep using for years to come.

The post Drip Review: Where it shines (and where it’s quite overrated) appeared first on Venture Harbour.