Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 15

Introducing the WordPress Content Personalization Plugin

Remember those choose your own adventure books?

Well, imagine applying the ‘choose your own adventure’ concept to website content. You ask a question to your visitors, and the content on the rest of the page becomes personalised based on their answer.

Increasing Engagement by 88%

It began with a simple hypothesis: Does asking questions and personalizing content based on the answers have a commercial benefit?

In January 2018, we ran the experiment on an article on email marketing software. We asked visitors two questions while they were reading the content: How many contacts do they have? What type of business are you?

Based on the answers to these questions we personalised a number of content blocks (particularly in the first 200-300 words) so that readers would feel as though the content they were reading was highly personalised to them.

The Results

Within 7 days we saw a sharp increase in engagement:

37.59% increase in average time on page
12.9% reduction in bounce rate

In addition to this, we saw an 88% increase in people clicking through to an email marketing tool, almost doubling the affiliate revenue generated from the content.

While it’s difficult to directly attribute content personalisation to an increase in organic search traffic, we did also see a sharp increase in rankings (resulting in a 53% increase in search traffic) within 3-4 weeks of adding this content personlisation. As this was one of the only changes we had made to this post in a long time, it’s possible that the improved engagement metrics were a contributing factor to increase rankings.

We had expected a slight increase in engagement but were surprised by just how much this seemed to improve a wide range of metrics.

So, we built a free WordPress personlisation plugin

Twice a year, the entire Venture Harbour team goes on a retreat to teach each other new skills, solve interesting problems, and build new products.

After a morning experimenting with content personalisation platforms, we realised that most content personalisation tools suck. Between GDPR limitations, annoying flicker effects and clunky user interfaces, we felt as though most of these tools had sold the sizzle well… but no sausage.

There was also no tool that simply allowed us to personalise content based on the answer to a question, without having to configure JavaScript variables, custom attributes and blah.

So, in an afternoon during our retreat, the team built one!

The WordPress Content Personalization Plugin allows bloggers & content marketers to easily add simple multi-select questions into posts & pages and then dynamically personalise content blocks based on the answers.

While most content personalisation tools focus on personalising content based on set data points like device or location, this plugin is designed to do one thing (and do it well): Personalise content based on the answer to a question.

How can you use content personalisation?

There are countless ways to use the WordPress Content Personalisation Plugin to boost engagement. To illustrate a few ways of using, what better way to do so than by using a personalised content block!

Are you a...?

Affiliate marketer
Blogger / content marketer
B2B Marketer
Publisher

Rather than showing the same content (and recommendations) to all visitors, you can display different recommendations to different visitor personas, boosting your affiliate sales.When you write for everyone, you write for noone. Make your top-performing content more relevant by asking your visitors a question that helps you segment them into different buckets: Perhaps experience level, job role, or budget.Improve lead generation conversion rates by personalising CTAs, client testimonials, headlines, and landing page copy based on the answer to a question (either on the landing page, or a question asked on a previous page).Tailor ads, related posts, and article content based on the answers to a question to maximise revenue, pages viewed per visitors, and overall content engagement.

What are the benefits of content personalisation?

Increase relevance – When relevance improves, conversion rates typically improve with it. This is as true for improving webinar registration conversion rates, as it is for boosting eCommerce product page sales.
Improve engagement – The more relevant your content is, the more time people will spend engaging with your content and your brand. As we saw in the example above, even just asking one or two questions can have a dramatic impact on the likelihood of someone staying on your website.
Improve tracking – We didn’t see this one coming. By personalising our content, it became easier to add more granular tracking links in our content – making it easier to see which types of visitors were driving conversions, and exactly where people were coming from.

If you’d like to beta test the plugin and increase the relevance of your messaging and content, you can try it out for free here.

When you get some awesome results, let us know as we’d love to showcase them.

Finally, kudos to Ben Christine, Andrew Hudson, Rajinder Tanda and Ryosei for creating this plugin.

The post Introducing the WordPress Content Personalization Plugin appeared first on Venture Harbour.

10 Free Landing Page Templates Designed for Conversions

Landing pages are one of the most important selling tools on your website, allowing you to direct users to a targeted selling point that addresses their specific needs. Unlike a homepage, that aims to capture a concise roundup of everything your brand has to offer, it’s landing pages that capture leads with a higher purchase intent – in other words, users who are ready to convert.

Every advertising campaign you run should lead to a landing page that’s designed to convert. Likewise, organic searches that highlight a specific purchase intent should lead to optimised landing pages or product/service pages.

Landing page design is an art in itself but you don’t need to pay through the roof to convert users. Here, we’ve got 10 of the very best free landing page templates from around the web for a range of different business types and conversion goals.

#1: Hestia

First, we’ve got Hestia, which is brought to you by the guys over at Justfreethemes.com and this is actually a multi-purpose WordPress theme – so you can build an entire website for free with this one. With Hestia, you can create product/service pages and landing pages in no time using any of the major drag-and-drop page builder plugins.

If you want an all-in-one theme for building a complete site and adding fully-optimised landing pages, check out Hestia – you’ll be amazed this theme is completely free.

#2: Shapely

Shapely is another free multi-purpose WordPress theme, this time from the Colorlib collection, and it’s tailored more toward B2B and service-orientated businesses. It’s a sleek design with minimal layouts that put the emphasis on visuals and it comes with a dedicated “one-page” layout which is ideal for landing pages and single page websites.

While this theme is stylistically geared towards B2B and service businesses, it integrates with WooCommerce, allowing you to sell products and digital downloads directly from your landing page.

#3: Camp Land

Camp Land is a product landing page template from Leadpages so, while the template itself is free, you’ll need to be a Leadpages customer to use it. If you’re building landing pages to sell products, Leadpages is a solid option as it integrates with Stripe and a range of ecommerce platforms – plus there’s an entire library of product landing pages for you to choose from.

With Leadpages, the emphasis is all about maximising conversions and every template comes with dedicated space for a value proposition headline and tools to create a sense of urgency, scarcity and other forms of incentive to make your CTAs irresistible.

#4: Dinomuz

Dinomuz is a bold and bright landing page template from Colorlib, built on the Bootstrap framework. Behind the eye-catching colours everything is pure minimalism with plenty of whitespace, elegant font choices and subtle colour contrast that guides users’ eyes to the most important parts of your landing page.

Craft a convincing message and you really can just slot your content into this template and hit the publish button, knowing your offer is going to be presented in a way that’s beautifully presented and effortlessly readable.

Even if you’ve got zero design skills, you won’t go wrong with this template if you know how to craft a compelling offer.

#5: Freddo

Freddo is another multipurpose WordPress theme from Justfreethemes.com but this one is designed to help you create one-page websites without using page builders or external plugins. You simply build everything from within the theme itself and publish your landing page or one-page site when you’re good to go – no fuss.

Freddo is fully compatible with WooCommerce, allowing you to create product landing pages or simple ecommerce stores. You can also create a blog page to improve your search ranking, generate leads and promote your product/services.

#6: eCourse / Online Training Landing Page

This one is an e-course/online training landing page template from Leadpages – so, once again, you’ll need to be signed up to Laedpages to access it. If promoting online learning material is central to your business or marketing goals, then it’s a small price to pay for access to Leadpages templates optimised specifically for e-courses and online training.

You can easily upload your introductory video directly into the template, create your headlines and use the two-step CTA design to turn visitors into viewers (and, more importantly, subscribers).

#7: MobApp

If you’re looking for a free landing page template for your mobile app release, take a look at MobApp from Colorlib. It packs all the sleek design elements people have come to expect from Apple page designs and the App Store. With no distractions, your mobile app takes the centre stage in this design and you have a number of CTA and subscription options to work with – great if your app includes a monthly paid option.

You can also add testimonials, FAQ and other page features shown to increase engagement and increase conversions in countless of A/B tests.

#8: Orfeo

Orfeo is a multipurpose WordPress theme from Justfreethemes.com for small businesses and online stores. It’s designed to act as a landing page template or single page theme although you can add more pages to create a more complex site structure if you prefer. The ecommerce integrations mean you can easily create pages and product sections to sell items or digital downloads without using a dedicated page builder.

#9: VarelaCode

VerelaCode is a double opt-in landing page template from Leadpages that you can show to people after they’ve decided to opt-in to your email list. This allows you to explain to them exactly what they need to do next in order to confirm their details and be sure they get all the bonuses you’ve promised in return for their email address.

This reduces the number of incorrect emails addresses being added to your list and the number of failed completions, which is important for any email marketing strategy.

Again, this template is free but you’ll need to be a Leadpages customer to access it. What you get in return is a library of landing page templates designed with specific conversion goals in mind.

#10: BBS

BBS is a landing page template that you can also use for single-page websites and startup ventures. This free template looks everything like a premium design and it gives you a platform to quickly build landing pages that capture attention and give you the best chance of converting users with highly-crafted messages.

Nobody will think you’ve used a free template to promote your product or service with this template and this is precisely what we’re going for in this article.

Free doesn’t need to look cheap

Landing page design is serious business and maximising conversion is a long-term objective. However, getting a landing page up and running quickly – one that gets enough results – is important for hitting those early business targets. There’s plenty of time to refine your pages and increase conversions over time but these free landing page templates will get you off to a running start – without cheapening your brand image.

The post 10 Free Landing Page Templates Designed for Conversions appeared first on Venture Harbour.

How Fast do Marketing Leads Turn Cold? (and How to Stop It Happening)

How long does it take your business to respond to fresh marketing leads? If you’re like most businesses today, it’s too long – as shown by research from Harvard Business Review that shows the majority of brands are leaving it too long to respond to leads.

Not only that, but it turns out leads turn cold much sooner than you might think, which means there’s a high chance you’re failing to convert a significant portion of the leads you generate because you don’t respond quickly enough.

Here’s how to stop this from happening.

First, the what does the HBR study say?

You can read the study yourself by heading directly to Harvard Business Review but it’s a brief article and we’re going to cover all the key points here anyway. As we already know, “companies are making big investments in order to obtain customer queries from the internet” but the study reveals most businesses are failing to make the most of this investment.

Nonetheless, our research indicates that many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads. We audited 2,241 U.S. companies, measuring how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. Although 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours. – Harvard Business Review

Source: Harvard Business Review

Okay, so 24 hours doesn’t sound like a particularly long time to respond to a new lead but HBR has previously found in a separate study that brands who respond to leads within the first couple of hours are more than 60 times as likely to qualify them as potential customers than those who wait 24 hours or longer.

These results are especially shocking given how quickly online leads go cold—a phenomenon we explored in a separate study, which involved 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the U.S. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer. – Harvard Business Review

That’s an incredible statistic and it highlights one of the biggest barriers to sales that no amount of conversion rate optimisation or investment in the latest marketing trends are going to fix.

If you want to turn your existing volume of leads into more sales without paying more for advertising and other strategies, start by responding to leads faster – it’s as simple as that.

Or is it?

The problem with responding to leads is that it takes a lot of time and resources to handle high volumes. Unless, of course, you have a solid automation system that handles these early interactions on your behalf.

That’s right – the key to turning a high volume of leads into a high volume of paying customers is automation.

How to keep leads hot with automation

The HBR study hits a chord with us here at Venture Harbour because we’ve seen first-hand the kind of damage not responding to leads quickly enough can have on your marketing results.

Or, more to the point, we’ve seen the positive impact automation has had on our clients’ (and our own) results by keeping leads hot after the first interaction.

We now have a fully automated lead generation and response system that generates those early conversions, qualifies them directly on our website and then organises them into lists on our chosen CRM platform – all without us doing anything.

This has completely bypassed the problem outlined in the HBR study and our sales team has a much larger volume of qualified leads to work with. Not only that, our automated segmentation means we’re able to nurture leads to a more advanced stage of the buying cycle, which means it’s significantly easier for our sales team to close the deal (at a much higher volume than we could have even handled before).

This is how we did it.

Qualify leads on your website using Leadformly

Leadformly is a web form design and optimisation tool that helps you maximise conversion on your website. The platform revolves around the principle of multi-step forms, which we have found increase conversions by up to 300% – so we’re already generating a higher volume fo leads before we even get started with automation.

That’s not all Leadformly does for us, though.

With its conditional logic features we can use Leadformly to qualify our leads into different types of potential customers, at various stages of the consumer journey.

By asking users questions about their needs, you’re instantly generating a higher quality of leads and you’re also able to learn more about each user. For example, you can distinguish potential customers who need a new website from those who need a mobile app and those with a minimal budget to work with from those who are willing to spend serious money.

This is crucial because not all leads are the same and responding to them all with the same message is going to have limited results. You can do better than this by qualifying your leads – on our website – with Leadformly and then sending this data to your CRM platform.

Automate your responses with ActiveCampaign

Leadyformly qualifies our leads for us on our website by asking relevant questions and then sends this data to ActiveCampaign, which them automatically places each lead on different contact lists, based on their responses. This allows us to create different response messages to each type of lead that addresses the needs of each user.

Likewise, we can create messages that prioritise the leads we know are most valuable to our business.

Now, we have full control over how we respond to a wide range of different lead types and we can automate all of this to ensure every lead is responded to within minutes, not hours. Suddenly, the response problem HBR has highlighted in its studies have disappeared. Not only are we responding to leads almost instantly, we’re responding with relevant messages based on the information we have from Leadformly – instead of the generic responses people are used to receiving from many brands.

Moving beyond this, we can also use ActiveCampaign to create a series of additional responses based on how users react to our initial email – all of which is automated once again.

With this kind of setup we’re able to keep all of our leads hot beyond the initial conversion and respond with messages that address their specific needs. Leadformly helped us increase our conversion rates, qualify our leads on-site and send this crucial to ActiveCampaign, which then segments our leads into different lists and automates our responses with highly relevant messages.

Now we’re generating leads automatically and responding to them instantly with messages that bring them closer to doing business with us – and you can do the same with this kind of automated system.

Don’t let those leads turn cold

When HBR first published these studies, we didn’t have the same kind of automation tools that are readily available now. For businesses today, there’s no reasons for leads to be left waiting and you can guarantee people are happy to turn to a rival brands that address their needs faster.

Of course, speed alone isn’t going to turn conversions into customers but the system we’ve outlined in this article doesn’t just let you respond to leads instantly; it allows you to craft targeted messages that address their needs and draw them closer to the sale.

The post How Fast do Marketing Leads Turn Cold? (and How to Stop It Happening) appeared first on Venture Harbour.

SendinBlue Review: Our Experience After 3 Years

After using SendinBlue for three years, we’re pretty confident that we know what it does well and where it could improve. So, if you’re in the market for a piece of < ahref="https://www.ventureharbour.com/email-... marketing software, this is the review for you.

When we wrote our original guide on the best transactional email tools back in 2014, we weren’t aware of SendinBlue. After receiving numerous recommendations in the comments and in our inbox, we decided to test it out on what was our latest venture at the time – Leadformly.

In this review, we’re not only going to look at the platform’s key features, but also help you understand how well SendinBlue meets your email marketing needs.

SendinBlue overview and pricing

As you can see, SendinBlue offers a free package that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day for an unlimited number of contacts and you can remove this daily limit for as little as £5/month. If you’ve been looking at other email marketing platforms already, you’ll know this puts SendinBlue at the most affordable end of the spectrum and you’ll be happy to hear its pricing is far more transparent than many other providers.

While plenty of email marketing platforms offer cheap starting packages, they tend to get more expensive as you scale up. SendinBlue is one of the few providers that’s consistently priced as your business scales and we’d love to see more companies take a similar approach – even if their starting prices were slightly higher.

While the free version of SendinBlue is the only package with a daily sending limit, the Lite version also includes a SendinBlue logo in your emails. To remove this, you’ll need to pay up for the Essential package at £23/mo or higher.

It’s also worth noting there are two versions of the premium package: one for 120,000 emails per month (£39/mo) and another for 350,000 per month (£102/mo).

If you’re sending more than 350,000 emails per month, SendinBlue provides you with a free dedicated IP address for everything you send using the platform.

In terms of contact management, there are no limitations regardless of which version you sign up for. SendinBlue has also expanded into marketing automation over the past few years and you get unlimited automation workflows for up to 2,000 contacts using the Free, Lite and Essential version of the platform. On the Premium and Enterprise versions, you get unlimited workflows for all of your contacts – no matter how many you have.

While you do get real-time reporting on the Free and Lite versions of SendinBlue, this doesn’t include location or device reports, heatmaps or open and click stats. The full suite of reports are available across the Essential, Premium and Enterprise versions of the platform.

The only limitation on support and integrations is that Enterprise customers get a dedicated account manager, as you would expect. Every SendinBlue gets full access to the API and plugins, documentation and the company’s excellent customer support team.

Check out other reviews for SendinBlue and you’ll see existing customers constantly praise its support team.

SendinBlue’s Email Designer

With SendinBlue, you get 200+ responsive email templates tow with with, allowing you to quickly create campaigns, customise your content and get them sent out. However, you also get a drag-and-drop email designer so you can create your own custom designs from scratch.

You can upload and customise templates or create your own layouts by dragging elements like headers, text boxes and logos from the menu. It’s a quick and easy tool to get to grips with and you’ll be building custom email designs in no time – without writing a single line of code.

In truth, SendinBlue’s email designer isn’t quite as good as MailChimp‘s email builder (which is still the best on the market) but it’s no slouch.

Contact Management

SendinBlue’s contact management features are available on every version of the platform and this is a major plus for email marketers at every level. You can search, segment, categorise and create lists that update automatically based on your chosen criteria.

This is crucial for an effective email marketing strategy and SendinBlue offers a lot more in this regard than many of its more expensive alternatives. Combined with its automation features, which are also available to all users (although limited to a certain number of contacts on some packages), SendinBlue’s contact management means you can target people on your email lists with personalised messages as their consumer needs change.

This is precisely what you want to be doing in email marketing.

Campaign Reports

Reporting is the main area where SendinBlue differentiates its Free and Lite packages from the more expensive versions. You get basic real-time reporting across all versions of the platform but Essential, Premium and Enterprise users also get the following reporting features:

Geography and device reports
Heatmaps
Advanced open and click reports

If SendinBlue is your only email marketing platform (we also use ActiveCampaign) then it’s worth investing in these additional reporting tools. The heatmaps will give you a better idea of how effective your email designs are proving to be and the open and click reports tell you how compelling your email headlines and content are.

Marketing Automation

Unlike MailChimp, SendinBlue offers email automation features across all versions of its platform. The only thing is Free, Lite and Essential users are limited to using these automation features on a maximum of 2,000 contacts.

Whether this is a problem for you depends entirely on how many people you have on your email lists.

SendinBlue’s automation features are a lot more extensive than MailChimp’s too, allowing you to send a range of response email to various different actions and events.

You can also create custom automation using automation builder. For example, you can send an email to first-time buyers with a coupon to encourage a second purchase while adding repeat buyers to another email marketing list to target them with loyalty messages.

SendinBlue has worked hard on automation over the past few years and it’s a decent marketing automation tool in its own regard at this stage. Without these features it would be difficult to recommend SendinBlue as a standalone email solution but we’re confident this platform now offers enough for many businesses (I’ll explain this in more detail at the end of the review).

Transactional Messaging

This is the feature that makes SendinBlue a key part of our email marketing strategy. While we rely on ActiveCampaign for automation and contact management, SendinBlue’s transactional email features are incredible.

This is important if you need to send order confirmations, payment receipts, password resets and other transactional emails that keep your customers involved with your brand.

This is one area a lot of email marketers (and email marketing platforms) overlook. Thankfully, SendinBlue takes this part of the customer journey very seriously and it offers dedicated transactional email templates, delivery features and reports for this specifically.

This means we’re able to automate transactional emails for a wide range of customer actions (purchases, receipts, subscriptions, signups, sign in detail losses, unsubscriptions and a whole lot more). We also get reports to tell us how many of these are landing in people’s inboxes (not their junk folder), how often they’re being opened and when people have given us an invalid email address.

For us, this is the feature that sets SendinBlue apart from other email marketing platforms and this is precisely why we’ve been using it happily for the past three years.

Deliverability

There’s nothing worse than investing the time and resources to build an email list, create your campaign and then realise only 50% of people are actually receiving your emails. Making sure your emails end up in recipients’ inbox – not their spam folder – is a challenge every email marketer faces.

SendinBlue is well aware of this and its platform is optimised to help you get the highest possible delivery rates.

There are a number of reasons people might not see your emails:

They request to stop receiving emails from you
You have a high level of hard bounces (emails sent to invalid addresses)
Your emails are being marked as spam
Your domain name and/or IP address has a poor reputation
Your contact is receiving too many emails and yours are being lost in the mix

To help you maximise deliverability, SendinBlue comes with a number of built-in features. First of all, email addresses that trigger a hard bounce are automatically blacklisted to prevent you from sending further emails to them. You can also sort your contacts based on whether or not they have opened your email within the past 6-12 months and target them with a campaign to re-engage or remove them from campaigns.

SendinBlue’s shared and dedicated IP addresses are a big help with this too. Enterprise users get a free dedicated IP as part of the package but you can always buy one separately, regardless of which SendinBlue version you’re using.

There are plenty of other features working under the hood to help you maximise deliverability, many of which are automated for you. SendinBlue also provides a lot of documentation and best practices on deliverability and other topics to help you get the best results from email marketing.

SendinBlue verdict

There are two key things that have kept us using SendinBlue for the past three years: transactional emails and deliverability. Of all the email marketing platforms we’ve used, SendinBlue is noticeably ahead of the competition with these two feature sets and you definitely want these in your email marketing strategy.

So why don’t we use SendinBlue as our only email platform?

Well, a key reason is that SendinBlue didn’t have the automation features we needed when we first looked at it. We also wanted more on the CRM side of things and this is where ActiveCampaign really proves its worth as an enterprise email, CRM and marketing automation suite.

Here’s a look at the feature differences to give you a better idea of what ActiveCampaign has to offer:

SendinBlue has made a lot of progress over the past few years though and it’s a much more convincing email marketing platform with the automation features it’s developed over this time. For a lot of brands, SendinBlue is going to be enough and, at this price point, you won’t find a much better deal elsewhere. As far as we’re concerned, SendinBlue blows MailChimp out of the water as an email platform, except for the fact >MailChimp has one of the best email builders we’ve used.

Good designers will create great emails on either platform, though, while the email and automation features on SendinBlue will take you much further.

If you’re a small or medium size enterprise, you definitely want to give SendinBlue a try – you probably won’t find a better email marketing tool at this price point. For enterprise brands or businesses that need more extensive CRM and automation features, SendinBlue might not quite offer enough (as was the case for us) but we’re still using this tool for its excellent transactional emails and deliverability features.

The post SendinBlue Review: Our Experience After 3 Years appeared first on Venture Harbour.

10 PPC Tools That’ll Increase Your Quality Score

Quality Score is one of the most important elements in your Google Ads strategy. They help Google determine how relevant your ads are to user queries, where to place your ad on the results page (as well as which page) and how much you need to bid to win the auction.

In other words, high Quality Scores mean you can pay less for your ads to show in the top ad positions and even beat competitors with larger advertising budgets.

Yes, Quality Scores are that important and today we’ve got 10 PPC tools that are going to help you get the best performance from your ads and drive down your expenses with higher Quality Scores.

What is Quality Score and why is it important?

Google needs to know it’s delivering the most relevant ads to user search queries so it can generate the highest number of clicks – after all, this is where the search giant makes 90% of its money.

To do this, it needs a quality measurement system that’s independent from the amount you bid on keywords, otherwise the highest bidder would simply win regardless of how good their ads are. This measurement system is Quality Score and it’s calculated by the following criteria:

Expected click-through rate
Ad relevance
Landing page experience

While Google’s priority is to maximise revenue via ad clicks, people will only continue to click their ads if they deliver what they’re looking for and brands come good on their promise once users land on their website. This is why Quality Score is so important to Google (and you) and this is why simply bidding more on a keyword is going to buy you PPC success.

In fact, high Quality Scores mean you can spend less than your direct rivals and get better results.

In terms of improving your scores, you already know how Google calculates them, which means you know what it takes to get better results:

Increase your click-through rates
Make your ads more relevant
Improve your landing page experience

So now we know what you need to do, let’s take a look at the tools that are going to help you make it happen.

The best Quality Score tools available right now

If you’re looking for a dedicated Quality Score tool, these are the best options you’ve got available right now.

Google Ads

Your first option is completely free and you’ll find it in your Google Ads (formerly AdWords) account. You can check your Quality Scores for each keyword to get an overview of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person who sees your ad.

You can also get estimated scores for landing page experience, expected CTR and ad relevance to get a better idea of how Google is calculating your Quality Scores.

Finally, you can segment data to check your Quality Score history and look at the historical performance of your landing page experience, expected CTR and ad relevance scores as well.

This is all the information you need to improve your Quality Scores and boost your PPC results.

Adwords Performance Grader by WordStream

WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader is another free tool at your disposal and it includes a Quality Score report, providing the same current and historical related to Quality Scores that you’ll find in your Google Ads account.

It also compares your Quality Score performance against industry benchmarks, which tells you how you’re stacking up against the competition.

Aside from benchmarks, you don’t get anything you can’t find in Google Ads but you might want to try out the paid version of WordStream Advisor for additional features that’ll help you improve your Quality Score. The platform’s recommendations are great if you’re not fluent in PPC and you may well find things like adding negative keywords and campaign management easier in WordStream than Google Ads.

Whether this is enough to justify the cost of WordStream is up to you but it costs nothing to try out the free trial.

Tenscores

Unlike Google Ads or WordStream, Tenscore is a true Quality Score tool and nothing else. With the tools we’ve looked at so far you only get Quality Score data at the keyword level but Tenscore also provides data at the account, campaign and ad group level.

This is a far more intuitive way to have access to your data because you’re managing your account at campaign and ad group levels, making it much easier to gauge performance and spot issues.

Tenscore also offers recommendations on how to improve poor Quality Scores, highlight ad groups with issues and send you email notifications if there’s a sudden drop in performance. You can also apply these recommendations within a few clicks via the Tenscore dashboard without needing to log in to Google Ads.

Adalysis

Adalysis’ Quality Score tool also provides data at the account, campaign and ad group level for faster insights. It doesn’t offer recommendations, instead letting you interpret the data for yourself and make your own choices. This will appeal to some advertisers more than others so it’s simply a case of experience and personal preference.

Compared to Tenscore, the data available is essentially the same and both platforms rank your QualityScore in order of priority (those which need your attention most). The Tenscore interface is little easier on the eye and it also shows how your Quality Scores are affecting ad spend and budget.

For less experienced advertisers, Tenscore is probably the better option but this decision becomes a little more difficult if you’re confident with making data-driven decisions.

Other tools to improve your Quality Scores

While dedicated Quality Score tools can help you identify performance issues, there’s a limit to how much they can actually improve your Quality Scores. We know that click-through rates, ad relevance and landing page experience are the key components of your Quality Scores so we also need to talk about tools that are going to help you improve these three factors.

Ad variations in Google Ads

To maximise your CTRs you need to create compelling ads and one of the best features in Google ads to help you do this is ad variations. This allows you to test multiple versions of the same ad to determine which one performs most effectively. You can use this feature to test entirely different ad variations or refine core elements such as your headlines, descriptions and key selling points.

Landing page builder

As we’ve already explained, landing page experience is a crucial part of your Quality Scores but to is the relevance to your ads. If users hit the back button as soon as the page loads, this tells Google there’s either something wrong with the UX of your page (eg: slow loading times) or your landing page doesn’t match the offer that encouraged users to click in the first place.

To create relevant landing pages, you need to create one for every key message in your advertising strategy and make sure the messages between ads and pages match.

This is why you need a landing page builder that allows you to create new pages quickly and effectively. You also need a builder that priorities speed, performance and other UX essentials. Finally, you want to be able to easily test variations so you can pinpoint issues if your landing page experience scores are low.

Unbounce, Instapage and Leadpages are all quality builders and there are plenty of other options for you to check out.

Speed optimisation tools

Google has made a big deal about loading times over the past few years so you can guarantee this is a key factor in how it gauges landing page experience (Google mentions it twice out of five guidelines on improving landing page experience).

It’s also one of the few metrics that directly correlates with poor performance. For example, we tend to think of high bounce rates as a bad thing but what is users are simply converting on the spot without visiting a second page?

Google can’t assume high bounce rates by themselves are a signal of poor performance. The same thing goes for time spent on our site, the number of pages visited and various other metrics.

Poor loading times are never a good thing for landing page experience, though. So make sure you have a speed optimisation tool like GTmetrix or Google’s own PageSpeed Insights to help you keep those loading times to a minimum.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Something else we know Google measures for every page is “mobile-friendliness” and this has been a core part of its search algorithm since 2015. The truth is Google’s requirements for a mobile-friendly page are very modest and your users are going to be far more demanding than the search giant.

In terms of your Quality Score, though, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will give you all the info and feedback you need to make sure mobile optimisation isn’t holding back your landing page experience score.

Content personalisation

As Google injects more AI and machine learning into its advertising platform we get features like Dynamic Search Ads that adapt ad content to better match users’ queries and search intent. This is great news when it comes to ad relevance, on the search side of things, but not so much on the landing page side of your ads.

If Google is changing your ad copy to suit user needs, what about the content on your landing pages that no longer matches the exact same keywords or selling points?

This is where content personalisation is becoming so important, allowing you to adapt the content of your landing pages to match user search terms. Various CRO and personalisation platforms like VWO allow you to add query parameters that adapt your landing pages to suit user search terms.

This allows you to use features like Dynamic Search Ads to make your ads more relevant to a wider audience while keeping your landing pages equally relevant to a wider range of search terms.

Win-win.

Google Ads’ Search terms report

The Search terms report in Google Ads is one of the most powerful tools you find on the platform, helping you measure the performance of your keywords, spot new opportunities and discover negative keywords make sure your ads only show for the most relevant searches.

Essentially, the tool tells what people are typing in before they see your ads. This shows you the entire query, not only the keywords you’ve selected and you can use this to improve your keyword strategy in a number of ways:

Discover new search terms
Check you’re using the right keyword match types settings
Discover new long-tail keywords
Discover new negative keywords
See which keywords are generating the most traffic

All of these will increase the relevance of your keywords, refine the audience who sees your ads and help you create more relevant ad messages – all very good news for your Quality Score.

Make Quality Score a priority

Aside from driving down the cost of your keywords, striving for better Quality Scores is going to improve your all-round PPC performance across the board. Better ads are going to generate more clicks and more relevant ads are going to generate traffic from people who are more likely to buy from you. Likewise, better landing page experiences are going to increase your conversion rates and turn more traffic into paying customers, which is why you’re going to all this trouble in the first place.

The post 10 PPC Tools That’ll Increase Your Quality Score appeared first on Venture Harbour.

10 Advanced Remarketing Techniques to Increase Conversions

The great thing about PPC advertising is you only pay when a user clicks on your ad, as opposed to traditional advertising models where you pay for people just to see your ads. The downside is you still pay for traffic that doesn’t buy first time around and this is the case with the vast majority of people who come to your site.

Not exactly what you would call an efficient advertising model.

Unless you master remarketing, of course, which allows you to reach out to previous visitors and give them extra incentive to buy. With these advanced remarketing techniques, you’ll not only increase conversions from your PPC traffic but also improve your email marketing results, reduce cart abandonment rates and increase customer retention.

#1: Segment your audiences

Source: Google Support

The first thing you need to know about advanced remarketing is how to segment your audiences. Instead of targeting every visitor with the same ad you’re going to create highly targeted campaigns based on the actions they take on your site and the interests these confirm.

For example, here are four different types of visitors you’ll commonly get:

U-turners: People who leave your site within seconds (without viewing a second page).
Scrollers: Visitors who spend a good amount of time on our landing page before leaving.
Browsers: Users who visit multiple pages, spending minutes on your site.
Clickers: People click one of your CTAs but don’t make the final conversion.
Quitters: Users who start the conversion process (eg: filling out your form) but quit before converting.

Each of these users demonstrates a different level of purchase intent and you’ll want to target them with different ads accordingly. In the case of U-turners, you might choose to ignore this audience altogether or bid low on a generic campaign simply reminding them of the offer in your ad.

Note: If you have a large volume of U-turners, you might need to look at the relevance of your ad and performance of your landing page/website.

In the case of Scrollers, they appear to have shown genuine interest in your product or service while Browsers appear to want to know more about your brand. People who click on one of your CTAs are showing serious interest in one of your offers and Quitters are very close to making the final purchase.

For Clickers and Quitters, your ads should focus specifically on the product or service they demonstrated a clear interest in buying – perhaps with a discount offer or some kind of incentive to take the plunge. For users who have shown less purchase intent, you might need to take a less aggressive approach with your messaging and focus on broader messages (eg: ads featuring a range of products or case studies highlighting what you’ve done for your existing customers).

#2: Track beyond the landing page

While you can create a number of basic remarketing audiences based on the action people take on your landing page, there’s a limit to how much you can do. To really make the most of your remarketing efforts, you’re going to need to track users beyond the landing page to determine which pages they visit.

Eg: Landing page > product page > product category page > another product page > checkout page > quit session

This tells you a lot about a visitor’s interests: the product category they’re interested in, specific products they’re interested in and the item they almost bought. When someone shows a clear interest in a product, you don’t want to target them with ads featuring your brand logo. You want to target them with ads featuring the product they’re interested in and make it too tempting to resist.

#3: Create campaigns for cart abandonment

If you’re selling products online, cart abandonment is going to be one of biggest burdens to your marketing efforts. The good news is you can use remarketing to drastically reduce your cart abandonment rates and you can use this same technique to increase conversions even if you’re not an ecommerce brand.

This technique combines tracking page visits, as we mentioned in the previous technique, and tracking events in Google Analytics. By tracking page visits, you can identify users who make it as far as the checkout but never reach the confirmation page.

Better yet, you can use events tracking in Google Analytics to track which products people add to their carts. Which means you can now create remarketing campaigns for people with the specific products they wanted to buy. You can simply remind them their products are still waiting for them or target them with some kind of offer to sweeten the deal.

If you’re not an ecommerce brand, you can still use this technique to reach people who quit halfway through signing up for your webinar, filling out a quote or various other types of conversion.

#4: Create campaigns for existing customers

With so much emphasis put on generating new leads and converting them into customers, it’s easy to forget about the most important people to your brand: your existing customers.

According to Forrester Research, it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep your existing ones and you’ve already access to all the data you need to turn them into repeat buyers – so why let it go to waste?

It doesn’t matter what line of business you’re in, there are plenty of opportunities to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers:

 

Cross-selling: Related products relevant to a customer’s first purchase.
Upselling: Upgrading from the free version to a paid version of your software platform.
Renewing: Contractual or subscription-based products/services when the initial contract period is up.
Rebuying: Purchasing the same product or service again at the end of its lifecycle – eg: a new phone or website redesign.
Reinviting: Reaching out to previous customers who have left or stopped buying from you.
Loyalty campaigns: Reaching out to customers with rewards to build stronger relationships.

 

Email marketing is the most obvious strategy to reach out to your existing customers but remarketing is the ideal reinforcement. While people need to open and read your emails, they’ll see your remarketing ads as they browse the web, making this the perfect strategy to compliment your email customer retention efforts.

#5: Remarketing lists for search ads

RLSAs allow you to target people on your remarketing lists with regular search ads.

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) allow you to target previous visitors with regular search ads when they go back to Google and continue searching. Unlike remarketing on the Display Network with visual ads, RLSA ads are regular search ads that only show for people on your remarketing lists when they use Google Search.

There are two basic strategies you can use these for:

You can increase your bids on the same ads and keywords to increase the chance of people seeing your ad again.
Or you can select new keywords and create new ads to target these users as they continue their search.

This allows you to make sure your ad is seen again by people who go back to Google and type your keywords while you can also use RLSAs to anticipate what searches users will type in next and target them with different ads. Likewise, you can anticipate what your existing customers are going to search for after buying from you and target them with ads for related products, much like we covered in the previous point.

#6: Drive email signups from your remarketing traffic

You can also use remarketing to enhance your content marketing efforts and drive email signups. Promoting your blog content on social media is the ideal place to start this strategy although you can do the same with Google Ads if you choose the right keywords.

Essentially, you’re targeting consumer needs with your blog content, webinar sessions, free downloads and whatever else your content marketing strategy involves. Then you’re going to create remarketing lists for these people to promote related content that addresses their needs in more detail, answers their next questions or provides even more value.

Now your ads aren’t simply generating traffic from users who’ll read one blog and never pay attention to you again. You’re capturing that initial interest and using remarketing to keep addressing their needs and establish your brand as a resource people want to keep in contact with.

#7: Target similar audiences

Source: Facebook Business

Google and Facebook both have some impressive remarketing features to help you reach new audiences. Instead of targeting your previous visitors and customers you can use Google’s Similar Audiences and Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to reach new users that demonstrate the same kind of online behaviour as people on your remarketing lists.

For example, Google’s Similar Audiences will analyse the search behaviour of people on your remarketing lists to see what they searched for before they were placed on your lists. So let’s say someone bought running shoes from you, Google will show search ads to people displaying a similar purchase intent – eg: searching “best exercises for losing weight” > “treadmills vs running outside” > “lightweight shoes for running”.

You also have Customer Match in Google Ads, which allows you to use your data to reach existing customers across Search, YouTube and Gmail – as well as new users who show similar online behaviours to them. This is a powerful feature but it relies on you providing Google with your customers’ email addresses, meaning this is one of the few Google Ads features where GDPR compliance is your responsibility, not Google’s.

Keep this in mind.

#8: Use dynamic remarketing

Dynamic remarketing makes it easier to target users who have looked at specific products or service son your website. Instead of creating visual ads for all of your products and services pages, you can submit a feed to Google and let the search giant create responsive ads for you and deliver them to audiences who have previously shown an interest in the same products/services.

Google also uses machine learning and something called dynamic prospecting to reach new users with these ads – another powerful tool for expanding your reach via remarketing.

#9: Guide users along the buying process

The vast majority of purchases follow a complex journey of interactions with brands and the best advertisers create campaigns that guide users along this journey while keeping their brand in pole position to get the sale.

We’ve looked at various ways you can track user behaviour and target them with different ads, based on their position along the buying process and how their needs change along the way. Now it’s time to combine these techniques into a single remarketing strategy that guides users along the buying process, each step of the way.

To do this, you’ll want to create action-based rules that move users from one remarketing list to another. So once a user starts looking at specific products, they’re automatically shown ads for this product and if they later abandon their cart, they’ll automatically see your remarketing campaigns for cart abandonment.

You can automate this entire process with campaigns targeting highly specific user actions on your site, creating a synchronised remarketing strategy that guides users along every stage of the buying process

#10: Bid more on high-intent audiences

The final thing to keep in mind when you’re running a system of advanced remarketing strategies is to vary your bids. You want to make sure the majority of your budget is spent on users who are most likely to convert and this generally means people closer to making the purchase – eg: shopping cart abandoners.

However, you also want to keep the widest possible audience of potential customers engaged with your brand (keep in mind you’ve already paid for this traffic) and maximise the number of users you ultimately convert.

This is something of a balancing act and you’ll want to test different bidding strategies over time but start by bidding more on the high-intent audiences and refine from there.

Maximise conversions with remarketing

While it takes a bit of time and effort to move beyond the basics of remarketing, it’s one of the most worthwhile investment you’ll make in PPC advertising. As soon as you pay for traffic, every user who doesn’t convert hits you in the pocket and dents your advertising performance.

Remarketing is there to help you maximise your conversion rates, get the best return on your ad spend and create an advertising strategy that guides users, from the early stages of the consumer journey, all the way to the finishing line.

The post 10 Advanced Remarketing Techniques to Increase Conversions appeared first on Venture Harbour.

5 Steps to Create GDPR Compliant Forms

Designing GDPR compliant forms is one of the biggest challenges marketers have faced in 2018. Aside from the regulations being frustratingly vague, they seem to go against every form design best practice in the UX designer’s handbook.

Thankfully, we realised a long time ago that best practices aren’t all they’re cracked up to be and we’ve been innovating our own solutions to user problems – including the challenge of designing GDPR compliant forms that still hit conversion targets.

Follow the steps in this guide and you won’t be worried about GDPR killing your conversion rates – in fact, you’ll probably find your forms are performing better than ever.

A quick disclaimer: One of the biggest complaints against GDPR is that the guidelines are too vague. Everything you read in this article is our professional interpretation, not guidance or legal advice.

Step #1: Know your form goals

The first thing you need to know about creating GDPR compliant forms is that your requirements are going to vary from one form to another. It all comes down to what data you’re collecting and what you plan to do with it.

For starters, GDPR only applies to personal information that can be used to identify a person and this certainly includes email addresses, which must be the most common pieces of data requested from users.

So, in most cases where you ask users for an email address, GDPR consent guidelines are going to apply to your form – but even this isn’t clear-cut

Let’s imagine a simple contact form, for example. People are making the choice to get in touch with you and this means they expect you to use their email address to reply to their message.

In this case, GDPR consent guidelines don’t apply.

However, as soon as you set up an email marketing strategy that uses this address to contact users in the future, you trigger both GDPR compliance guidelines and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) – yikes!

This leaves you with two options: get consent on the contact form itself or request it in your email response and bin their contact details if they don’t opt-in.

This gives you an idea of how complex GDPR can be, considering we’re only talking about a simple contact form at this point. The good news (kind of) is that most forms you design are going to require GDPR compliant consent and data handling for EU residents.

Step #2: Increase incentive and trust

No matter how well you design your GDPR-compliant forms, there’s going to be added friction. The idea that friction is always bad for conversions is the biggest misconception about conversion rate optimisation but there are two legitimate concerns about designing forms for GDPR:

Requesting consent emphasises the fact you’re going to use people’s data, which they might not have even thought about previously.
GDPR’s consent guidelines can add a lot of extra steps if you’re collecting a lot of data.

We’ll look at how to reduce friction when designing your consent request shortly but there’s something else you’ll want to do first. When fiction is inevitable, you can counteract it by increasing two things: incentive and trust.

Studies show people are happy to hand over data to brands they trust so start by improving the wider design of your site and content messages to make people feel more confident about getting personal with your brand.

The next thing you want to increase is incentive. The more reason you give people to complete your forms, the less significant friction is going to be for them. Look at every page containing a web form on your site and identify ways to increase incentive, create more compelling CTAs and make it harder for people to resist your offer.

Build incentive and trust around your web forms and added friction doesn’t need to have a negative impact on your conversion rates.

Step #3: Get consent

Once you know you need to get consent for your form, you have the challenge of designing a consent system that makes you GDPR compliant without causing too much damage to your conversion rates.

Your first task is to make sure you’re compliant; this is your priority. So let’s start by looking at what your requirements are:

 

Consent needs to be freely given.
Consent needs to be specific, per purpose.
Consent needs to be informed.
Consent needs to be an unambiguous indication.
Consent is an act: it needs to be given by a statement or by a clear act.
Consent needs to be distinguishable from other matters.
The request for consent needs to be in clear and plain language, intelligible and easily accessible

 

If you’re thinking that list doesn’t clear much up, you’re right. Here’s a more practical translation:

 

Consent options should be unchecked by default.
You should tell users precisely how you’re going to use their data.
You should explain separately each way you plan to use their data.
You should allow users to opt in/out of each way you plan to use their data.
You need to explain clearly how you plan to use their data.
It needs to be obvious that users are opted out by default.
It needs to be clear when users have opted in and the required action should be obvious.
Opting in should be easily distinguishable from other actions.
Users shouldn’t be prevented from taking the desired action because they choose not to opt in.
You need to state how long you intend to use their data for.

 

Beyond the initial consent process, you’re also required to inform users of any changes you make to how you handle their data in the future. There should also be an easy way for users to opt out at any point in the future. Moreover, they should have the ability to request you delete all of their personal data at any time of their choice (and you’re obliged to do so).

As you can see, that’s quite an extensive list of requirements – especially if you’re collecting a lot of data and using it in multiple ways. So how can you design a consent process that doesn’t get int he way of your data ambitions?

Create multistep forms

We’ve had great success with using multi-step designs to simplify complex forms and maximise conversions. Instead of slapping users with a page full of form fields, break your design into multiple sections for them to work through.

We use Leadformly to create multi-step forms using conditional logic, which asks questions based on the answers users have already given. This means users only see the fields they really need to fill out, making your forms appear shorter than they are.

Make consent options visual

Engagement is important when you’re trying to minimise the negative impact of friction so forget the usual HTML tickboxes. Create a visual consent process that shows you’re a top brand (trust) and makes it easier for users to provide consent.

Leadformly gives us three visual options for getting consent.

First, we have image selectors and we’ve found this to be particularly effective across desktop and mobile devices. If you only want to ask one question, this is a great approach to take.

If you want to give users multiple options to opt in/out of, Leadformly’s toggle selectors are the way to go. Again, these work really well across desktop and touchscreen devices while giving you the flexibility to request consent to multiple data uses.

Finally, you’ve got the more traditional checkbox, which can no longer be ticked by default. This feature has been removed in Leadformly as opting users in by default violates GDPR regulations.

Use progress bars

As we’ve mentioned before, progress bars make it difficult for users to quit your once they’ve completed more than half of it. This is due to something known as loss aversion where people feel like they’ve wasted their time if they don’t carry on and reach the finishing line.

Essentially, the more of your forms users complete, the higher their incentive to complete it becomes and you can use this to counter the added friction of requesting consent. Save your consent process for the last stage of your forms and it’s going to be difficult for users to decline by this point.

Step #4: Keep on top of security

Beyond getting consent from users when necessary, your other big GDPR requirement is handling their data in a secure way. You need to make sure you have the right security processes in place to prevent data leakages and a process for handling any data issues.

This includes notifying users of any security threats/breaches and how they’re affected.

This starts with encrypting your forms (as well as your site) and deleting data as soon as it’s no longer needed. You also need to take necessary steps away from your forms to ensure this data is as secure as possible: making sure your databases are protected, choosing a secure web hosting provider, etc.

Step #5: Track performance every step of the way

Being GDPR-compliant is your initial priority but you need to keep track of performance to make sure your forms are still hitting targets. The good thing about GDPR is it’s forcing everyone to take a good, hard look at their form designs and think about ways to design consent requests that don’t hurt conversions.

This new emphasis on form design means a lot of brands will probably experience much better performance after GDPR because they have no choice but to scrutinise their form designs and monitor performance.

Make the most of GDPR

There were a lot of doomsday predictions during the build-up to GDPR but it doesn’t need to have a negative impact on your business. In fact, it could have a very positive impact if you use it as an opportunity to improve the performance of your forms and increase important factors like incentive and trust elsewhere on your site.

Don’t look at GDPR as a conversion killer; look at it as an opportunity to improve the performance of your website and build stronger relationships with your customers.

The post 5 Steps to Create GDPR Compliant Forms appeared first on Venture Harbour.

50 Marketing AI & Machine Learning Statistics

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are dominating the tech scene right now and you only have to look at how much the likes of Google and Amazon are investing in these technologies to see how big a role they’re going to play in our future lives – both professionally and personally.

However, there’s always a lot of hype surrounding emerging technologies (if you can still call these emerging) and it’s sometimes difficult to know where we really stand. So here are 50 marketing AI and machine learning stats to give you an idea of where the industry is, in plain numbers.

#1: By 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human

Source: Gartner

#2: 61% of marketers say artificial intelligence is the most important aspect of their data strategy

Source: MeMSQL

#3: 80% of business and tech leaders say AI already boosts productivity

Source: Narrative Science

#4: Current AI technology can boost business productivity by up to 40%

Source: Accenture

#5: 97% of mobile users are using AI-powered voice assistants

According to Creative Strategies, only 2% of iPhone users have never used Siri and just 4% of Android users have never used Google Assistant.

#6: Smart speakers are the world’s fastest-growing technology segment

Research from shows that the US, China and South Korea are the top three markets welcoming AI-powered devices into their homes.

#7: The Washington Post’s AI writer (Heliograf) wrote more than 850 stories during the Rio Olympics and the 2016 US presidential election

Source: The Washington Post

#8: Machine learning is better than humans at lip reading (in controlled environments)

This is one of many situations where machine learning is beating humans at complex tasks (statbot.co) but these tests are normally in highly controlled environments that favour machine learning.

#9: When AI is present, 49% of consumers are willing to shop more frequently while 34% will spend more money

Source: PointSource

#10: Large businesses with more than 100,000 employees are most likely to have an AI strategy – but only 50% of them currently have one

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review

#11: Netflix saved $1 billion in 2017 by using machine learning to make personalised recommendations

Netflix has reduced the number of people switching to rivals by improving the quality of its recommendations, according to Statwolf.

#12: 83% of early AI adopters have already achieved substantial (30%) or moderate (53%) economic benefits

Source: Deloitte

#13: By 2020, 30% of companies worldwide will be using AI in at least one of their sales processes

Source: Gartner

#14: By 2020, AI will eliminate 1.8 million jobs and create 2.3 million

As Gartner points out, AI technology is going to create more jobs than it eliminates and make them easier.

#15: Marketers waste 5 hours and 36 minutes trying to improve their data processes (and fail)

Research from Callcredit shows that 96% of senior marketers waste an average of five hours and 36 minutes every week trying to improve their data analysis processes.

#16: 41% of consumers believe AI will improve their lives

Source: Strategy Analysis

#17: AI will boost profitability by 38% and generate $14 trillion of additional revenue by 2035

Source: Accenture

#18: 20% of the C-Suite is already using machine learning

Source: McKinsey

#19: The three most in-demand skills on Monster.com are machine learning (ML), deep learning and natural language processing (NLP)

Source: Towards Data Science

#20: By 2020, 57% of buyers will depend on companies knowing what they want before the first interaction.

According to Salesforce’s 2016 Connected Customer report, companies will need accurate prediction models to anticipate the needs of buyers – or risk losing them to another brand.

#21: 72% of business leaders say AI can enable humans to concentrate on more meaningful work

Source: PWC

#22: Business execs are turning to AI to cut out repetitive tasks such as paperwork (82%), scheduling (79%) and timesheets (78%)

Source: PWC

#23: Execs expect AI personal assistants (31%) and data analysis (29%) to make the biggest impact on their businesses

Source: PWC

#24: 61% of companies with an innovation strategy are using AI to identify new opportunities

Source: Narrative Science

#25: 44% of consumers don’t even realise they’re already using AI platforms

According to Pega, only 33% of consumers think they’re using AI-powered technology while 77% are already using AI platforms.

#26: 43% of millennials would pay a premium for a hybrid human-bot customer service channel

Source: PWC

#27: Amazon reduced ‘click to ship’ time to 15 minutes

With machine learning, Amazon has reduced the time between users clicking the buy button and their items being shipped to just 15 minutes on average – a 225% reduction, according to Wolfstat.

#28: By 2020, 90% of cars will be connected to the internet

This compares to just 10% in 2012 (LinkLabs), revealing a new marketing channel where consumers can be reached while they’re on the road.

#29: 44% of organisations fear they’ll lose out to startups if they’re too slow to implement AI

Source: Microsoft

#30: By 2019, 40% of digital transformation initiatives – and 100% of IoT initiatives – will be supported by AI capabilities

Source: IDC FutureScapes 2017

#31: By 2020, insights-driven businesses will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less-informed peers

Source: Forrester Predictions 2017: Artificial Intelligence will Drive the Insights Revolution

#32: There’s been a 14X increase in active AI startups since 2000

Source: Stanford University

#33: 84% of enterprises believe investing in AI will lead to greater competitive advantages

Source: Statista

#34: 87% of current AI adopters said they were using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and for improving e-mail marketing

According to Statista, 61% of companies using AI are already using the technology – or plan to use it – for sales forecasting.

#35: Investment in AI will increase more than 300% over the next year

Source: Forrester

#36: 80% of businesses plan to adopt AI as a customer service solution by 2020

Source: Oracle

#37: 67% of people already expect to see/use messaging apps when talking to a business

Source: Chatbots Magazine

#38: 40% of adults now use voice search at least once per day

Source: Location World

#39: 30% of market-leading companies could have their revenues syphoned off by AI

Source: Gartner

#40: AI technologies will be in almost every new software product by 2020

Source: Gartner

#41: Only 17% of email marketers planning for AI

This is despite more than half of email marketers planning to innovative with automation, according to Econsultancy.

#42: By 2020, 20% of workforces will be dedicated to neural network processing

Source: Gartner

#43: 4 billion devices will carry AI-powered voice assistants this year

This number will reach 7 billion by 2020, according to IHS Markit, which shows where the latest emerging consumer market lies.

#44: AI could prevent 86% of cyber attacks and security threats

Source: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

#45: By 2019, startups will overtake Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft in driving the AI economy with disruptive business solutions

Source: Gartner

#46: 45% of end users prefer chatbots as the primary mode of communication for customer service inquiries

This is according to Grand View Research, which tells us we can’t give up on chatbots despite their stuttering start to “life”.

#47: 33% of consumers like using chatbots vs 19% who don’t and 48% who are indifferent

Source: LivePerson, BI Intelligence

#48: 75% of executives say AI will be “actively implemented” in companies within the next three years

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit

#49: Business execs expect to spend 300% more on cognitive computing in 2018, compared to 2016

Source: Forrester

#50: Only 20% of executives feel their data science teams are ready for AI, while 19% have no data science team at all

Source: SAS

What does all this mean for AI and machine learning?

Machine learning is here and it’s here to stay – there’s no question about this. As for AI, things are a little more complex as the technology has a lot of growing up to do. Tech companies are going to be selling AI features aggressively over the next decade (and beyond) but they’re not all going to be that intelligent.

Marketers need to keep in mind that the current breed of AI is essentially machine learning and automation combined with the goal of discovering and implementing insights that human teams aren’t capable of doing as quickly or on such a large scale.

Using the technology for this purpose is already a requirement for companies that want to make the most of data, create efficient workflows and boost productivity. What AI isn’t ready to do yet (and may never be) is make highly creative decisions or anticipate complex emotional responses.

This is where AI is going to create more jobs that it steals by handling more of the menial repetitive tasks that dominate marketers’ workloads, allowing us all to spend more time on the creative decisions that truly make an impact.

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MailChimp Review: Why are Marketers Moving to Other Tools Instead?

MailChimp is one of the biggest success stories in marketing software startups, currently ranking at 9th in the Forbes Cloud 100. Millions of people and businesses are now using the platform to send over a billion emails every day and MailChimp is the first name that comes to mind when many people think about email marketing.

There’s one problem, though: the majority of marketers we connect with either don’t use MailChimp or they’ve moved on to other tools.

We also tried MailChimp here at Venture Harbour but ultimately went with another option (ActiveCampaign) for a more comprehensive email marketing and CRM solution. Here’s what we learned from trying out MailChimp for ourselves and the pros/cons you’ll want to consider if you’re looking for an email marketing platform.

MailChimp overview & pricing

MailChimp offers three different versions of its platform: Forever Free, Growing Business and Pro. Each version comes with additional features and higher allowances for contacts and the number of emails you can send.

Here’s what the feature lists look like:

In terms of “The Basics”, the key difference is how many contacts and emails you can send per month.

On the publishing and automation side of things, there’s no difference between the three versions of MailChimp and it’s good to see these features are accessible to all users.

We start to see more differences with targeting options and analytics/testing. The lack of targeting and segmentation options on the free version are especially significant as not being able to set delivery times and adapt for time zones is a big miss.

That said, the feature offering across each version of MailChimp is pretty generous and you don’t get penalised a great deal by going with a free or cheaper option – at least not in terms of features.

What I don’t like is the way MailChimp chooses to break down and present its pricing. For example, paying $10 per month gets you unlimited emails, but only for 0-500 subscribers whereas the free version gives you 2,000 subscribers (although you’re limited to 12,000 emails). So, if you’ve been marketing to more than 500 subscribers using the free version of MailChimp, you’re going to have to pay extra to keep sending them emails on one of the paid versions.

Email marketing features

Now that you’ve got an idea of what the different MailChimp packages have to offer, let’s take a closer look at its most important features.

MailChimp’s form builder

Before you can create an email marketing campaign in MailChimp, you’re going to need a list of subscribers and this means getting signups from your website. MailChimp comes with a built-in form builder to get you started and this is a crucial tool for any email marketing platform.

To be honest, the builder is pretty average and the interface isn’t as intuitive as other parts of the MailChimp experience. It’ll do the job in terms of helping you to easily create and embed web forms on your site but you don’t get anything sophisticated in terms of design options.

If you’re serious about form design and performance, you’ll be better off with a dedicated form design tool like Leadformly.

MailChimp campaigns

Once you’ve got yourself an email marketing list to work with you can start creating your first campaign in MailChimp. There are four types of campaign you can create:

Regular: Create custom HTML email campaigns, customise your content and choose whether to send them immediately or schedule for later.
Automated: Create campaigns with basic automation features, depending on which version of MailChimp you’re using.
Plain-text: Send text-only emails without any images or formatting.
A/B testing: Send more than one version of the same campaign to see which one gets the best results.

If you’re only going to use MailChimp as a basic tool for sending simple email marketing campaigns when the regular campaign type does a decent job. Just keep in mind that this really is a basic option without any real automation or targeting options.

If this is all you need, MailChimp is decent enough option.

If you’re interested in automating your email marketing strategy, things are very different. We’ll look at MailChimp’s automation features in the next section but (spoiler alert) the quick answer is they’re nothing to get excited about.

Facebook Ad Campaigns

To help you reach a wider audience and build a larger email list, MailChimp also comes with a Facebook Ad Campaigns feature. This helps you create and purchase an ad for Facebook and Instagram to promote your email offer – all of which you can do without leaving your MailChimp account.

Once again, we’re not going to get a sophisticated Facebook marketing strategy by using this feature but it’s a nice addition for smaller businesses who want to expand their audience but aren’t quite ready to manage their own Facebook advertising account yet.

Landing pages

MailChimp also comes with a built-in landing page builder and you can create as many as you want, regardless if which version you’re using. There are two types of landing page templates: one for building your email lists and another for promoting products.

The default template for signup pages (above) comes with a logo placeholder and a hero section style layout for you to customise.

The default product page template is a little more complex with another logo placeholder and hero-style design above a CTA section and space for you to add some product listings.

All in all, it’s very basic stuff and you’ll probably want to use a dedicated landing page builder like Unbounce or Instapage if you’re serious about maximising conversions and building your email list.

Email templates

In terms of email templates, you can either choose from MailChimp’s predesigned layouts and customise them yourself or start with one of its “themes,” which are essentially fully designed emails where you simply need to add your own content.

You can also code your own templates from scratch, which gives you a whole bunch of added flexibility. It’s certainly a welcome feature although it seems a little beyond the scope of MailChimp’s limitations elsewhere.

As far as email templates go, MailChimp’s offering is up there with the best tools on the market and this is one of the platform’s biggest strengths.

Email designer

Even better than MailChimp’s templates is the drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design campaigns on the fly. It’s intuitive, flexible, runs smoothly in the browser and gives you all the WYSIWYG customisation you need to build engaging email designs.

This is MailChimp’s standout feature and it’s the best email builder we’ve used.

Automation features

This is where MailChimp has really fallen behind the competition over the years. Email marketing without automation is like trying to build cars without a factory: it’s possible to (slowly) build one yourself but you’re never going to produce an entire line of vehicles at scale and sell them to the masses.

It’s not that MailChimp doesn’t offer any email automation at all – it does, but it’s very basic.

Let’s start with what you can do using MailChimp’s automation features.

Autoresponses

You can setup autoresponses and reach out to new contacts as soon as they sign up and schedule emails for a set time after (eg: 1 day after they join your list). You can also set up a series for things like users’ birthdays or festive messages during the holiday season.

Google remarketing ads

MailChimp will automatically create Google remarketing ads for your campaigns to target users as they continue to browse the web. The idea is to bring back visitors who didn’t buy the first time around and give them an extra incentive to make the purchase.

Recover abandoned carts

This is probably MailChimp’s most impressive automation feature, sending out email reminders to customers who’ve abandoned their cart and encouraging them to complete the purchase.

Feedback

MailChimp also includes some basic feedback automations, allowing you to reach out to customers after they’ve bought from you. You can send quick surveys, ask them to leave a review or offer helpful advice and set the time period you want these emails to be sent out (eg: 15 days after the purchase).

Personalised product recommendations

Another handy automation feature for e-commerce brands is personalised product recommendations. You design the email and MailChimp will automatically create a list of recommendations based on your customers’ purchase history.

It’s not the most advanced algorithm powering this feature, though, so you’ll need to have a decent number of customers making multiple purchases or products that are quite obviously related.

What you can’t do with MailChimp automation

While MailChimp does offer some useful automation features, it falls seriously short on the ones that matters most to email marketers – like segmentation. You do get basic segmentation options across every version of the platform and you can also pay up to get advanced segmentation” via the Pro plugin.

Unfortunately, these still aren’t advanced enough for a serious brand with email marketing at the centre of its business.

Sooner or later, you’re going to want to create segments for users who opened one email but didn’t open another one. Or users who opened both and clicked on a certain element in the second. These are fairly basic segments that you can’t do with MailChimp and this was a deal breaker us right away.

As for automating segmentation? Forget it. Looking to build custom automations? Not going to happen.

If you want to do email marketing at scale these are essential features and MailChimp is far behind the likes of ActiveCampaign that make advanced automation and segmentation a breeze.

MailChimp verdict

If you only need to fire out the occasional round of emails, MailChimp is a good option. It’s mostly a very intuitive platform and the drag-and-drop email builder in particular is a joy to work with. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer the kind of advanced segmentation and automation features you’re going to need if you want to do email marketing at scale.

For us, email marketing is at the centre of our business and MailChimp doesn’t come close to offering the features we need. After trying multiple software options, we settled on ActiveCampaign, which does 90% of our email marketing, and SendineBlue, which we use for transactional emails.

With ActiveCampaign’s tagging feature, you get complete freedom over list segmentation and its drag-and-drop automation builder means you can create just about any process you can think of. Another crucial factor for us was ActiveCampaign’s CRM features which help us manage sales funnels and customer journeys beyond email marketing – both before and after the initial conversion.

This is the key thing about MailChimp. It’s a capable platform for sending out the occasional newsletter or follow-up email but doesn’t do much for integrating a sophisticated email marketing strategy into your wider sales process – which is kind of the whole point for corporate brands.

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9 Best Form Builders for Marketers in 2018

Forms are one of the most important elements of your website and wider marketing strategy. Just about every product purchase, email signup, customer query and every valuable interaction with your target audience takes place over a form of some kind.

Poor form design is going to kill your lead gen strategy and seriously hurt your conversion rates.

Unfortunately, good form design is something of an art while measuring form performance is very much a science. Painstakingly coding and optimising forms, one line at a time, used to be the only option – but today there are plenty of form builder tools promising to help you create high-performance forms almost instantly.

Here’s a look at the best of them in 2018.

#1: JotForm

JotForm is an easy-to-use form builder that helps you create sleek forms for a variety of purposes. This tool has improved a lot over the years and its newer form templates (they’ve got more than 10,000 now) are definitely the best of the bunch.

The platform’s user interface has improved a lot, too, and it won’t be long before you’re putting forms together in minutes, once you get a feel for how things work.

Speed isn’t really the aim with JotForm, though. Almost everything is customisable and to get the best out of this platform you’ll want a solid understanding of form design and the time to customise its themes to suit your needs.

If too much choice is going to slow you down, you might want to look elsewhere.

#2: Leadformly

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got Leadformly – a form builder that takes out the guesswork and does the thinking for you. Leadformly’s templates have been specifically engineered to generate leads right out of the box with a numer of multistep formats that use conditional logic to adapt questions to the responses of users.

This means you can ask all the questions you need to score your leads effectively without users having to fill out a huge form. They simply never see the questions they don’t need to fill out.

With Leadformly, the focus is on performance and it’s clear the tool doesn’t want you wasting time with customising minor details. You simply build your form, embed it one your page and start converting leads. Once your form is live, Leadformly’s built-in form analytics tool measures your performance and helps you refine your form for better performance over time.

If you want the fastest route to hight-converting web forms, check out Leadformly.

#3: Typeform

Typeform tries to do something a little different with form design. It also takes the multistep and conditional logic approach but creates a more conversational format that works particularly well for quizzes and surveys.

The Typeform concept is to “turn data collection into an experience” and its forms are certainly visually engaging. You’ll need to sign up to the pro version to get the best of its conditional logic, though. More importantly, Typeform doesn’t offer anything in terms of form analytics beyond a very basic “reports” panel. So you’ll need to set up something more sophisticated in Google Analytics or another third-party platform for detailed insights.

#4: Paperform

Paperform is a more traditional form builder but it aims to find that sweet spot between speed and customisability. Its user interface is sleek and Paperform has done a decent job of making extensive opitons easy to navigate. The dowside of extensive options is you have to spend time going through them all – only you can decide if this is a productivity issue for you.

There’s also a Paperform Agency version if you want to use this tool for your customers but it’s disappointing to see no form analytics or optimisation features, once again.

#5: Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is one of the most popular form builders for WordPress and it packs a lot of options and features into its plugin. Considering its interface is limited to the confines of the WordPress dashboard, the devs behind Ninja Forms have done really well to keep things so intuitive – especially considering the number of settings and options you have to work with.

The plugin integrates with a healthy selection of email marketing tools, too, including MailChimp and GetResponse but there are big names such as ActiveCampaign missing, which will rule this out for many.

#6: Google Forms

Google Forms is a free tool you can use to quickly create basic forms and surveys. You won’t find a faster way to create web forms and, once you’re done, ou can embed them on web pages or direct people to your hosted forms via links.

What you can’t do is create anything more than basic forms – eg: payment forms. These aren’t really designed for lead generation or converting customers so you’ll need to look elsewhere if you want anything more sophisticated than a basic contact form.

It’s free, afterall.

#7: FormSite

FormSite is great if you want to publish results from the data you collect via forms, surveys and quizzes. While you can use the platform to create lead gen forms the designs feel a little dated and there’s nothing in the way of reports or analytics to get excited about.

As a market research or publishing tool, things are very different. The ability to publish the results from your surveys using graphs and tables is a great content marketing feature and this is the biggest strength of FormSite for us.

So, if you’re looking to run market research campaigns and publish results for people to access and download online, FormSite is definitely a tool to look at.

#8: FormGet

FormGet is a powerful builder that helps you build a wide range of forms, from the most basic designs to more complex versions using conditional logic, notifications and a range of other features.

Visually speaking, FormGet’s forms are the most attractive but the performance under the hood is impressive – as long as you know how to use it.

We’re glad to say FormGet comes with built-in form analytics with every version of its software (an essential feature in our minds) although it’s not particularly extensive – for example, it doesn’t tell you which fields users are abandoning. It does integrate nicely with Google Analytics but this still requires you to set up events tracking and other measures we’d like to see as standard with a form builder.

#9: FormAssembly

FormAssembly focuses on secure data collection and intelligent design for lengthy forms and surveys. You probably won’t be using this to create contact forms or email signups but FormAssembly excels at application forms, surveys and feedback forms.

With its dynamic form settings, you can make it easier for users to fill out complex forms, using conditional logic. You can also create order and payment forms, include file attachments and set up auto-responders to reach out to people once they’ve completed your forms.

If your forms are painfully long and too large to embed on a webpage, FormAssembly could be the tool to help.

What’s the best form builder of 2018?

This really depends on the kind of forms you want to build. If you’re looking for lead gen forms that get the best performance, start with Leadformly – you’ll quickly realise how indispensable detailed form analytics is.

On the other hand, if you’re more interested in publishing reports, FormSite acts as a great survey builder and tool for publishing your results. Likewise, FormAssembly could be the choice for you if your forms and surveys are too long even for multistep designs.

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