Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 8

10 Best Remote Work Tools for Distributed Teams

Remote working is on the rise and ONS data suggests 50% of the UK workforce is set to work remotely by 2020. For many people, this means working for their company from the comfort of their own home, rather than travelling to the office. However, remote working also opens up the possibility of creating collaborative teams made up of people from around the world, which brings a number of potential benefits:

Wages and services are often cheaper in other countries.
Better talent is often available in other countries, too.
Your business becomes more attractive to top talent.
Having team members spread out across time zones can give your business a 24/7 presence.
Gain cultural insights and different perspectives.
Expand your business presence and make connections in other markets.

There are plenty of other potential benefits, too, but you get the idea. And there are also challenges that come with being part of and/or managing a distributed team. So, in this article, we’ve got 10 of the best remote work tools for distributed teams to overcome those challenges and enjoy more of the benefits.

Top 10 remote tools for distributed teams

In this article, we’re looking specifically at the best tools for distributed remote teams. Just to be clear, this means team members are scattered across locations, possibly in different countries and time zones across the world. This comes with a number of unique challenges compared to managing (or being part of) a remote team working in the same area or country:

Time zones
Language barriers
Cultural differences
Religious holidays, annual events, etc.
Varied workplace cultures
Differences in minimum/acceptable wages
Differences in workers rights
Technological differences (internet speed, coverage, access to websites, etc.)

Aside from these unique challenges, you also have all the regular struggles associated with remote working to overcome:

The recommendations I’m making in this article are aimed at solving the unique problems distributed teams face as well as the regular challenges of remote working for teams and individuals. Here at Venture Harbour, we have remote team members in the UK and countries all over the world so we’ve had to overcome all of these challenges – and this why I’m confident in making these recommendations.

Note: I’m one of these remote workers and I spend the vast majority of my time outside of the UK, where I was born.

Now that I’ve clarified exactly what we’ll be looking at in this article, here’s a quick summary of the 10 remote work tools for distributed teams that we’ll be talking about and which problem(s) they’ll solve:

Serene: To cut out distractions, stay focused on the task at hand and get things done faster.
Status Hero: Allow every team member to see what each other are currently working on to avoid interruptions and timewasting.
Toggl: A time tracking tool for individuals and teams.
Slack: A team communication tool to make individual and collaboration work easier.
monday: A project management tool for team managers and individual team members to complete tasks and entire projects faster. 
Google Drive: Free file creation, sharing and collaboration for basic document types (text files, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.)
InVision: A collaborative design prototype tool to turn concepts into reality faster.
Spark: A distraction-free, collaborative email experience to keep teams focused and help them complete tasks quicker.
Doodle: Team scheduling for meetings, video calls and joint sessions without the hassle.
Zoom: Video conferencing, the way it should be for distributed teams.

With these tools on your side, team members can achieve higher productivity – both while working individually and collaborating with other team members. Crucially, these tools also help team and project managers to keep everyone on the right track and make sure targets are getting hit.

So let’s take a closer look at each of these tools.

#1: Serene (Mac)

Free

Serene is a free productivity tool for remote workers and teams. The app helps individual team workers maximise efficiency by focusing on one goal per day rather than dividing their attention. Numerous studies show that multitasking kills productivity and this is the key design principle behind Serene. The app’s tagline says it all: “Multi-tasking is a myth. Single-tasking is a superpower.”

Key features




Website blocker: Block websites that distract you, such as social media and news websites.
App blocker: You can also block apps that take your attention away from work – social apps, your email app and anything else getting in the way.
Distraction-free sessions: Work in 20-60 minute sessions with regular breaks to maximise productivity.
Session timer: Shows you how much time you have left to complete tasks, giving you a motivation boost towards the end of each session.
To-do lists: Manage tasks and make sure everything gets done by the right team member.
Day planner: Define your goal for the day, set your tasks and get stuff done.
Focus music: Play background music to help you keep your focus.
Phone silencer: Automatically put your phone on silent mobile while working to avoid unnecessary distractions.

To maximise productivity, Serene asks team members to define a single goal at the beginning of each day, which can be broken up into multiple tasks/sessions that will realise the day’s objective.

Users work in short sessions (20-60 minutes), which have been found to maximise efficiency and concentration with regular breaks between each session. While team members are working on a task, Serene blocks distracting websites and apps and shows users how much time they have left to complete the task at hand.

By keeping team members focused on individual tasks and blocking out distractions, Serene helps everyone on your team maximise productivity. Tasks are completed faster, goals are achieved sooner and team members can enjoy more of the benefits remote working has to offer.

Serene is still in the beta but you can request an invitation to try it out here.

#2: Status Hero (Windows, Mac, web app)



Prices start from $3/month per user

If you’ve ever managed or worked as part of a remote team, you’ll understand the importance of statuses. Allowing team members to set statuses like “available,” “busy,” “away” and “unavailable” is crucial. Otherwise, you can team members interrupting each others’ workflow and notifications constantly popping up at inconvenient moments.

This is the basic, yet invaluable role of statuses on collaboration software and Status Hero turns this concept into a major productivity tool.

Key features




Availability statuses: Users can set their availability status for every other team member and manager to see.
Check-ins: Users provide a quick description of what they’re up to so nobody needs to ask what they’re currently working on.
Time zones: Status Hero detects user time zones (these can also be user-defined) to help team members collaborate in different geographical locations.
Blockers: Team members can state any issues getting in the way of completing tasks.
Project management: Managers and team members can see how many goals are completed and how many targets are being blocked, in real-time.
Multiple teams: You can divide teams into multiple groups, assign projects to different teams and switch between them on the fly.
Mood tracking: Get a better sense of the emotional state of team members.
Observer mode: For managers and stakeholders to view progress without interrupting team members’ workflows. 

The best way I can describe Status Hero is that it takes the friction out of remote working and collaboration. When everyone knows what each other is working on, there are no more interruptions when important tasks are being completed. Collaboration is crucial for hitting team goals but the simple act of sending a message at the wrong time can cause major productivity problems.

According to a study from the University of California, it takes an average of 23 minutes and fifteen seconds to recover from a distraction. Multiple studies have offered up similar numbers, which tells you how costly it can be when a remote worker is interrupted by multiple emails and messages throughout the day.

Status Hero eliminates this productivity killer while also allowing team and project managers to keep track of progress without interrupting it.

#3: Toggl (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox)



Premium version $18/mo per user

Toggl is a time tracking app that runs in the background while users work on tasks. Essentially, it’s designed to accurately track how long it takes to complete tasks and this was originally intended for freelancers to make sure they were invoicing accurately and getting paid fairly.

Now, Toggl is a productivity app designed for teams and individual members to maximise productivity. Above all, its data visualisations help you compare profits against time spent on tasks and labour costs so you can see which projects and clients are most profitable.

Key features




Time tracking: See how much time you (or others) are taking to get things done.
Boost profits: Check you’re charging enough for the time it takes to complete projects.
Reports: See how productive you’re being and how profitable your time with Toggl reports.
Cross-platform: Toggl’s wonderfully designed apps work across just about every operating system and online so you can access it wherever you need, whenever you need it.

You can also see how much time team members are spending on individual tasks to monitor productivity and see if anyone’s taking on too much/too little work.

On the face of things, Toggl is about a simple as it gets in terms of productivity software but it can be an invaluable tool for making sure tasks are being completed quickly enough and that projects are generating enough revenue for the time (and other resources) being spent on them.

#4: Slack (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & web)
Free version, paid options start from £5.25/mo per user

Slack is the communication tool that brings remote teams together. The platform organises conversations into channels, which team members can join and leave, as needed, so nobody receives messages or notifications irrelevant to them. Conversations can also be had in threads, which keep messages outside of the main channel so chats don’t get in the way of main topics and projects.

Key features




Instant messaging: Live communication between every team member for seamless collaboration.
Statuses: Users can set availability statuses to focus on individual tasks as needed.
File sharing: Drag-and-drop file sharing for PDFs, images, videos and other common files types.
Voice & video calls: Voice and video calls directly from within Slack.
Screen sharing: Allows team members to show their work to others in real-time for stronger collaboration.

There are tonnes of productivity tools on the market and many of the offer more ambitious sets of features than Slack. However, Slack combines the basic communication essentials into a single, easy-to-use platform in a way no software has really managed to match since it was first released in 2013.

#5: monday (iOS, Android, web app)



Prices start from £15/month for 2 users, £34/month for 5 users

Again, there are plenty of project management tools designed for digital teams these days but monday offers a more advanced set of features than some of the better-known alternatives like Trello.

A lot of project management tools essentially redesign the to-do list concept or create “Kanban” boards but the likes of monday and Asana have built fully-featured management platforms design for team leaders and members alike.

Key features

Project management: monday is an advanced project management that helps large teams and individual team members hit more ambitious targets.
Task management: Extensive task management tools that treat each task as building blocks to project goals.
Views: Multiple views allow you to check project overviews, timelines, individual workflows, checklists and reports.
Track progress: Track tasks, update statuses, receive notifications when deadlines are looming and reassign/prioritise tasks with ease.
Weekly task loads: Team members can work on multiple projects without getting lost by using monday’s weekly overview.
File sharing: Upload and share files so everyone has access to the resources they need via the same dashboard.

Tasks can be created and assigned to team members, which start off with a default status of “Not started”. Team members can update statuses to “Working on it,” “Stuck” and “Done” as they progress their way through tasks, which all members and managers can see.

Team managers can assign tasks to members based on their workload, location, experience, native language and the rating of previous tasks completed. I’ve used monday on a lot of projects with different clients and I can tell you these capabilities are useful on a daily basis for distributed remote workers and team managers who need to make sure everyone is working in sync.

#6: Google Drive (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & web)



Free

I probably don’t need to say a great deal about Google Drive; it’s that cloud alternative to Microsoft Office that simply works much better for remote and collaborative teams than the MS alternative suite of tools.

Key features




Documents: Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations and all of the essential docs we take for granted these days – for free.
Cloud storage: The cloud element of Google Drive is what makes it so useful for remote teams, allowing them to create, upload, share and collaborate on files.
Collaboration: Real-time collaboration on Google Docs files works without any real lag getting in the way and this is where it really outshines Microsoft Drive.

Sure, Microsoft Office’s suite of looks like Word and Excel are somewhat better in terms of features but Google Drive is far more capable as a cloud storage and collaboration tool. I constantly have problems with Drive crashing, Word freezing (on Mac) and lag getting in the way of real-time collaboration within files.

I’ve experienced none of these problems with Google Drive and I consider these deal-breakers as part of a distributed remote team.

#7: InVision (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)



Free version available, Team version starts from $99/mo

I hesitated for a moment about including InVision in this article, as I want to stick to tools that every distributed remote team can make use of. I don’t want to get too niche in this article and list tools that are only relevant to certain teams but the truth is every business needs to take design seriously.

Whether you’re redesigning your website, building a mobile app, developing your own software or creating a presentation with more flare than the average Powerpoint effort, InVision is the collaborative tool that helps design team get out of the concept stage faster.

Key features




Prototyping: Create interactive prototypes complete with working links, animations and effects so developers, clients and team members can see what the final product will look and feel like.
Collaboration: From idea creation to file sharing and working on design files, InVision provides the collaborative tools remote designers need.
Messaging: Team members can work on projects, exchange ideas and provide feedback on the work of others.
Design management: Team leaders can manage projects and ongoing design processes.
Integrated development: InVision creates a seamless design and development process where both teams can work together and collaborate as projects pass from one stage to the other.

For digital agencies like us, InVision is a vital tool for helping our design team work together. It’s also used by some of the most prominent tech firms, media organisations, startups and online brands. Above all, it’s the collaborative design tools created by remote designers for remote designers and this is why it deserves a place on this list.

#8: Spark (Mac, iOS, Android)



Free version, $6.39/mo (per user) for Premium

Spark is an intelligent email client that stops inboxes from being a productivity killer. Better yet, it turns them into an asset for distributed remote teams. Spark’s Smart Inbox automatically categorises your emails from every account and allows you to prioritise the emails that matter most while filtering out the ones that don’t.

Key features

Smart inbox: Clean up your inbox, find any email with “Smart Search” and snooze emails that don’t need your attention right now.
Smart notifications: Only receive notifications for the emails that really matter.
Assign emails: Assign emails to team members so the right person is always managing tasks.
Team email: Private team comments, shared drafts, template replies and instant chat for collaborative teams.
Send emails later: Schedule emails to send them when people are most likely to read them.
Reminders: Get reminders to follow up on important emails at the right time.

You can also snooze emails for later, assign emails to team members, chat with team members, share drafts, set reminders for follow-ups and schedule emails to send them later.

With Spark, remote team members can also work on the same email at the same time. Much like Google Drive, text is created and edited in real-time while members can communicate via instant messaging to perfect important emails.

This means there are no more emails to clients, saying “I’ve CC’d James and he’ll explain that technical issue we talked about earlier”. All the key details can be included in emails by the right person without any confusion or inaccuracy.

#9: Doodle (Web app)



Team packages start at €12.50/mo for 5 users

Doodle is a collaborative scheduling app that makes it easy to arrange meetings without the email back-and-forths. It doesn’t matter how large your team is, how many time zones they’re spread across or how many teams your workforce comprises of – Doodle makes meetings happen.

This is so important for remote teams distributed across different time zones.

Key features

Team scheduling: Arrange meetings, video calls and collaborative sessions without the email back-and-forths.
Availability: Team members can set their hours of availability, which automatically adapts for time zones.
Reminders: Set reminders so team members are always ready for meetings.
Personal events: Keep private meetings, events and tasks hidden from team members so people only see the tasks they need to.

Basically, users set their availability times, which are available for other team members to see, and meetings can be scheduled based on everyone’s availability times. Users simply confirm they can attend and the meeting goes ahead. Team members will also be sent automatic reminders before meetings so nothing gets forgotten.

#10: Zoom (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & web)



Free version available, paid versions from £11.99/mo per host

Zoom is a suite of video conferencing and communication tools designed for remote teams, virtual businesses conferences, webinars and other corporate purposes. We use Zoom for our virtual meetings, which we can use to run video and voice calls, but it’s capable of much more than this.

Key features




Video meetings: Remote teams can run video meetings and one-to-one video calls.
Voice calls: You can also run group or one-to-one voice calls when face-to-face meetings aren’t necessary.
Webinars: You can also use Zoom to host webinars.
Messaging: Team members can send messages using Zoom.
File sharing: Share files during and outside of video/voice chats for collaboration between members.

Zoom is a feature-rich communication tool for remote teams and its pricing is very reasonable. For group calls, you’ll need to pay for one of its plans, which start from £11.99/mo but this fee is paid per host rather than per user. A host is someone who invites people team members to join meetings but up to 100 participants can join before a host needs to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

How far will your distributed team go?

Productivity tools are important for every business but they’re, quite literally, the only connection distributed teams have to rely on – so you better make sure you choose the right ones. All of the tools we’ve looked at in this article serve different purposes but each one of them is crucial for establishing a collaborative workflow and maximising productivity.

I can confidently recommend all ten of the tools in this list as a starter kit for distributed teams to hit targets, no matter how far spread out team members might be.

The post 10 Best Remote Work Tools for Distributed Teams appeared first on Venture Harbour.

12 Remote Working Best Practices We Discovered (The Hard Way)

Remote working has transformed the way we build businesses and careers. Studies show that remote workers are happier in their jobs and life in general, which keeps them working in the same position for longer while maintaining a healthier work-life balance.

For businesses, remote working makes it easier to recruit and retain top talent from around the world while keeping their organisation lean and flexible enough to adapt to changing demands. This has been instrumental in the rise of startup culture and businesses adapting to digital technologies.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of hype surrounding remote working these days but it’s important to understand the challenges it comes with. There’s no such thing as a perfect working model and, despite the benefits to businesses and employees, there are some downsides that need to be mitigated in order to maximise those benefits.

According to Buffer’s 2019 State of Remote Report, the biggest challenge remote workers have is switching off after work (22%) while loneliness (19%) is an issue that can’t be ignored. Remote workers also admit that collaborating and communicating with team members can be a challenge (17%) and distractions at home (10%) can get in the way of productivity, which is an obvious concern to businesses and employees alike.

As a remote member of the Venture Harbour team myself, I can attest to these challenges (among others) and how we’ve overcome them within our team. Remote working is crucial to our business model and maximising productivity – both collectively and individually – has been a key priority for us.

In this article, we’re looking at 12 remote working best practices that we’ve discovered the hard way over the past eight years.

#1: Stop multitasking – it doesn’t work

The biggest lesson we’ve learned in our pursuit of ultimate productivity is this: multitasking simply doesn’t work. This isn’t only based on our own experience here at Venture Harbour, either; this is backed by a whole bunch of science.

Let’s be clear about this, the human brain isn’t designed for multitasking.

“For nearly all people, in nearly all situations, multitasking is impossible. When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once – but instead, individual actions in rapid succession.” – Cleveland Clinic academic centre

Likewise, constantly switching between one task and another, significantly reduces our effectiveness of both tasks. This is obviously bad news for productivity but a string of studies have revealed some more sinister side-effects of forcing our brains to handle more than one task at a time.

The full cost of multitasking

A series of studies looking into how the human brain copes with handling multiple tasks at the same time or constantly switching between tasks reveal some important findings.

The full cost of multitasking includes a number of immediate and long-term consequences:

Reduces productivity by up to 40%
Lowers the quality of your work
Leads to compromises, mistakes and shortcuts
Reduces your IQ
Damages your brain

Neuroscientists have found that overloading the brain with multiple tasks declines IQ scores to a similar extent to that expected of smoking marijuana or staying up all night. Meanwhile, ongoing multitasking has been linked to the development of “grey matter” in the brain during a study on people using their smartphones while watching another media device.

The science makes for some pretty stark reading – not only in terms of productivity but also the long-term health of remote workers.

Breaking the habit

Despite knowing the fact that multitasking doesn’t work and actually kills productivity, breaking the habit is surprisingly difficult. It’s always tempting to think we can get more done by doing two things at the same time while the constant barrage of email notifications and other distractions only make focusing on a single task more difficult.

Modern life programmes us to do multiple things at the same time while simultaneously failing to prioritise busyness over productivity.

It turns out I wasn’t the only member of our team who found it difficult to kick the multitasking habit, even after learning how counterproductive it really is. So we started looking for practical solutions that would help us focus on single tasks – and this led us to Serene.

Serene is a productivity app that encourages team members to define a single goal for each day, which can comprise of multiple tasks they’ll deal with, one at a time. This allows our entire team to shift its daily mentality to achieving one thing every day and maximising productivity on achieving each goal.

On a personal basis, setting out my daily workload in this way helps me stay focused on single tasks but it also removes the pressure I used to feel to handle multiple tasks at once. Now, our entire team has the shared mentality that multitasking is bad for us. We no longer expect this from each other and we also no longer feel pressured to take on more than one task at any time.

Our entire business culture has changed and this is crucial for maximising productivity.

#2: Work in distraction-free bursts

Another reason that multitasking is so tempting is that it can be difficult to focus on the same task for extended periods of time. Multitasking offers a kind of break from the task we’re doing but it’s a false positive in terms of productivity.

To get the full benefits from single-tasking and remote productivity, we needed a way to improve our individual focus on each task.

The Pomodoro Technique

Luckily, there are already tried and tested working models that are proven to enhance focus and productivity at the same time. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management strategy first developed in the 1980s and it’s become a favourite among productivity advocates in recent years.

Essentially, the technique encourages people to work in 25-minute bursts, separated by short breaks. Studies have shown the human brain can only focus on single tasks for roughly 20 minutes (sometimes less) before cognitive effectiveness starts to deteriorate – and this is a key principle of the Pomodoro Technique.

The Pomodoro Technique strongly inspired the design of Serene, which allows you to create working sessions of 20-60 munites with regular breaks. Aside from making it easier to focus on tasks, I naturally find my energy levels remain high throughout these sessions as I’m working to the clock in smaller intervals.

Essentially, I’m hitting half a dozen targets throughout the day instead of aiming to complete a full to-do list by the end of the day.

Personally, I now break each hour into two 25-minute bursts with a five-minute break at the end of each burst. This allows me to structure the day into hour intervals and take slightly longer breaks after each two-hour interval.

Blocking out the distractions

Another telling insight from scientific studies is that it takes us an average of 23 minutes to refocus after becoming distracted (PDF). That’s a pretty shocking statistic by anyone’s standards but you can see how the idea of working in 25-minute bursts falls apart once you get distracted by email notifications or messages from other team members.

To combat this, we had to come up with a way to block out these distractions and this went on to become one of the most important features of Serene.

Serene blocks websites and apps that get in the way of your workflow so that you’re never distracted during your sessions. You can forget about those pesky email notifications, messages from your team members or the temptation of a quick Twitter browse.

Welcome to truly distraction-free work sessions.

#3: Create a dedicated workspace

For a lot of remote workers, their home becomes the office and staying focused in a house full of distractions is difficult. The couch is temptingly comfortable, the cupboards are filled with snacks and there’s always a household task that’ll only take a minute to quickly do (and then take 23 minutes to refocus from).

I have to hold mt hands up and say I’m a sucker for home distractions.

For years, my preferred solution was to work in cafes and this is still my go-to option when I’m travelling. You can’t really create an office in a hotel room (toilets don’t count) but, if you’re working from home, you absolutely do need to create a dedicated working space.

Ideally, this wants to be a separate office room where you can close the door and shut out the rest of the world. You’ll want to keep your home office minimal in terms of design and make sure you keep it tidy – a clear working space keeps a clear mind.

Everything you need should be within touching distance and everything you don’t should be in another room.

Also, I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to have a comfortable chair that helps you maintain a healthy posture. I also like a desk with a raised section or shelf that I can place my laptop on and work standing up for alternating 25-minute blasts.

There are all kinds of office design principles you can use to boost productivity, too. Career coach and startup strategist, Heather Rees, covers these design tricks (and more) that increase productivity in her article for Lifehack.org:

Lighting: Particularly, maximising natural light and replicating it as much as you can with your artificial lighting.
Chair and table: Invest in a decent chair or pillows and make sure your table is at the right height for you.
Clutter: Like I said earlier, keep that home office clean.
Colour: Choose colours associated with action and productivity, such as blue and orange.
Temperature: Relatively warm but comfortable temperatures have been found to improve productivity.
Room scent: Pine scents have been found to increase alertness while cinnamon improves focus, lavender helps combat stress and peppermint lifts your mood.
Noise level: Most styles of music reduce productivity but focus music or natural sounds (rainforest, ocean waves, etc.) have been found to have a positive impact.
Air quality: Open up those windows and let some fresh air in, get an air filter and fill your room with plants.
Refreshment: Make sure you have enough water to hand and minimise your number of trips to the kitchen for drinks and snacks (save this for break times).
Plants: Aside from improving air quality plants have been found to lift moods and boost productivity in a variety of studies.

Obviously, the ideal home office is a subjective thing and it’s up to you to decide whether plants and air filters help you get more done (or feel better while doing it). For me, now that I’ve started travelling less and working from home more, my priority was to create a minimal working space with no distractions.

I can always go to a cafe when I feel the need to be in a more public setting.

#4: Switch off after working hours

One of the biggest problems with remote working is that life becomes work. The divide between the two disappears and this, for me, is the biggest challenge of being a remote worker. I’m not alone, either, because this tops the list of remote workers’ struggles in Buffer’s 2019 State of Remote Report.

A 2017 report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that almost a third of all UK workers feel that having remote access to the work means they’re unable to switch off in their personal time.

Clearly, this is a contradiction of the improved work-life balance remote working is supposed to achieve, which negatively impacts many of the other benefits it should come with.

Businesses need to allow their remote workers to genuinely switch off once their working hours are done and employees need to need to allow themselves to do the same – another pressure we often fall victim to.

#5: Make available hours visible to everyone

To make sure everyone gets the chance to switch off, we share our default working hours with each other so everyone knows when they’re able to contact each other. I say default working hours because these can vary but most of us find we’re more productive when we try to stick to a fairly regular working routine.

Generally speaking, the more consistent we are with working hours, the less work tends to eat into our free time.

We also integrate Serene with Slack to constantly update our status so team members can see when we’re focused on a task and we’re not to be disturbed. Finally, we can also manually set our availability statuses, allowing everyone to collaborate without getting in each other’s way.

#6: Make current tasks visible to everyone

Making our work hours and availability statuses visible to everyone prevents unnecessary distractions/interruptions, but it doesn’t provide any kind of context about what team members are actually doing while they’re busy.

This can be problematic from a project management perspective because you need to know people are working on the right task and keeping on track. The thing is, you want to know this without having to pester them every five minutes, asking them what they’re doing and whether they’ve finished X, Z or Y.

We use StatusHero to keep everyone informed of what we’re doing so team managers can get a better idea of progress without interrupting people’s workflow. This also allows other team members to see what each other are working on, which also reduces interruptions on collaborative tasks.

Team members can also post blockers getting in the way of tasks, helping you to address the biggest barriers to progress on your project goals.

#7: Choose the right collaboration tools

This one is so important for remote workers and finding the right collaboration tools for your entire team requires some consideration. It took us years of trials and experimentation to find the right mix of tools for our team and our needs have changed over this time as well – as will yours.

We’ve already looked at how tools like Serene, Slack and StatusHero help our remote team maximise productivity and you’ll find plenty of other examples in our article, 53 Business Automation Tools That Skyrocketed Our Growth by 330%.

Also, be sure to take a look at our in-depth article on the 10 best productivity apps for teams.

#8: Choose the right project management tools

Having a remote team can make it more challenging to manage tasks and track progress. This is where you need the right project management tools on your side to ensure everyone is on track with the broader objectives. Once again, Slack is a fine choice for this while Trello and monday are also strong options for an all-in-one project management and collaboration solution.

It’s also important to bring the team together (even if only digitally) to discuss progress, obstacles and ideas. Above all, this keeps people accountable for their goals and provides a constant reminder that their individual tasks are part of a team effort.

We hold traction meetings every Monday on Zoom for everyone to discuss how they’re getting on and raise any problems they might have.

Without these meetings, we’ve found that deadlines are met less frequently and simple issues getting in the way of productivity were never raised to the right people. It seems our weekly traction meetings provide just the right amount of motivational pressure for people hit targets without them overmanaged.

They also demonstrate how hitting these targets (or not) impacts other team members.

#9: Respect cultural differences, not just time zones

This one is so important if you have a team of remote workers spread out around the world. While there are plenty of tools that can help your team collaborate across different time zones, you can’t rely on technology for everything. Managers and team members alike need to have a genuine, human understanding of the cultural differences that make up a global group of remote workers.

Some aspects of this are easier than others and there are always going to be misunderstandings when you bring culturally diverse people together. However, it’s imperative you’re able to create a business culture of understanding between your team members.

Here are some key areas to consider:

Holidays: Not everybody celebrates Christmas and there are plenty of religious events around the world unique to other cultures that may, among other things, require certain team members to take time off.
Language: Language proficiency is obviously a factor and there are distinct differences between languages irrespective of fluency that can lead to misunderstandings.
Openness: Some cultures promote openness as a positive virtue while others encourage people to keep certain thoughts (particularly negative ones) to themselves.
Agreeability: Likewise, in some cultures, there can be a reluctance to say “no,” refuse or say that something can’t be done. I’ve personally seen this in many Asian countries where people can feel compelled to take on tasks they’re not fully comfortable with or don’t have the time to take on.
Hierarchy: This is a fundamental principle in many cultures and simply being older can give someone authority in many societies.
Work ethic: The expectations placed on people in the workplace can vary a lot, too.
Workers rights: The level of workers rights in cultures has a large impact on how people conduct themselves in the workplace – for example, how many breaks a person might expect to take during the day or how many hours they want (or feel compelled) to work.
Bereavement: The practice and duration of funerals can vary a lot, as well as the wider cultural process of bereavement.
Individualism: It’s also really important to understand that someone’s cultural background doesn’t define who they are. People are still individuals and some of us a more “British” or whatever else than others. The aim is to understand cultural differences, not pigeonhole people with cultural labels.

I think the easiest place to start with this is holidays because it provides a quantifiable, visual (at least in calendars) pathway into cultural understanding within teams. Remote workers can see certain team members have days off for public holidays, religious events or other reasons.

Take the next step, though, and encourage team members to understand more about these events. Ramadan is a great example of this, where practising Muslims fast during daylight hours for a month – something that can obviously impact a person’s mood or efficiency. There are plenty of Muslim athletes who continue to perform at the highest level during Ramadan but it’s important to understand how difficult it can be to maintain performance.

Above all, team managers need to understand the differences that come with cultural variety and respect those differences. Most of the challenges that arise from cultural differences can be resolved or mitigated with communication and it’s also worth recognising the benefit of having alternative perspectives when it comes to making creative decisions.

#10: Create guidelines for every team member

Remote working comes with a lot of added freedoms but flexibility isn’t always a good thing. There are certain tasks that need to be completed to specific requirements, within specific timeframes. For example, your blog posts might need to be published to Twitter at certain times of the day and there are certain things those posts should/shouldn’t include.

Likewise, you don’t want your social team putting out an image or status update that damages your online image. Or someone to accidentally email the wrong invoice to a client who can now see how much you’re charging someone else for similar services.

Having the freedom to work anywhere is great but there are some tasks that probably shouldn’t be done on public WiFi in a cafe. Remote teams need guidelines, too.

Should your team really be working on that in a cafe?

Guidelines are there to help your team members complete tasks properly and avoid simple, but costly mistakes. They also provide a reference for complex tasks that people can go back to for reminders and make it easier for other team members to take on new tasks.

Guidelines are about support as much as they are regulation.

#11: Get things started in the office

While some of our team members are spread out across the world, whenever possible, we try to get new staff members working in our office for the first two weeks at Venture Harbour. This allows us to start the working relationship in-person and provide a greater level of training and support as new team members get used to their roles.

We have a specific way of working here at Venture Harbour and this isn’t something you can communicate effectively through emails. It’s also very important to us that remote working doesn’t remove the human element of being a part of our team.

For our overseas team members, we rely on video calls and group voice calls to try and provide a similar kind of introduction for new recruits. But it’s always a smoother process when we’re able to get people into our offices for their first two weeks with us.

#12: Bring the team together

As we can see from Buffer’s 2019 State of Remote Report, loneliness is the second biggest struggle participants said they experience while working remotely. There are a lot of things we can do to make sure this isn’t a problem for our team members:

Make sure people have enough free time to build and nurture relationships outside of work.
Build working relationships within the team.
Use collaboration tools that put faces to names.
Create group chats for non-work-related discussions.
Congratulate people on their birthdays, important events, etc.
Get the team together regularly.

Here at Venture Harbour, we get the whole team together once a month for a casual meetup. We use this as more of a social/team-building exercise but it also gives everyone a chance to discuss things face-to-face and raise any issues or suggestions to the group.

We also get to laugh at how different everyone sounds in real life, compared to video/voice calls.

Twice a year, we whisk the entire team away for a 3-4 day retreat to an epic AirBnB location to develop new ventures, explore new technologies, teach each other skills… and have a lot fun.

Want to be a part of the next one?

10 Best Productivity Tools for Teams

With 70% of people globally working remotely at least once per week, the composition of creative teams is changing drastically. While the benefits of remote working are well documented – both for businesses and team members – there are a number of productivity issues that can get in the way of collaborative teams maximising progress.

Maximising productivity is a priority for every team (remote or not) and we’re lucky to have a wealth of software tools that can transform the way we get things done together. In this article, we’re looking at the 10 best productivity tools for teams and how to choose the right ones for the unique needs of your crew of creatives.

Top 10 productivity apps for teams

The tools we’re looking at in this article are specifically geared towards collaborative teams. Many of them have packages (with limited features) for individuals but their premium options are all designed to help team members achieve more together. I’ve specifically chosen productivity tools that address the needs of remote teams with members in various time zones, as this tends to be the most demanding situation for tools of this kind.

All of the tools in this list are going to help such teams boost productivity, no matter how much time or distance might separate them. Likewise, all of the tools we’re looking at today help individual team members maximise productivity, but also do the same for teams and make it easier for team leaders to manage projects.

Here are the team productivity apps we’ll be looking at in this article and a quick summary of what they’ll help you do:

Serene: Cut out distractions, stay focused on the task at hand and get things done faster.
RescueTime: See which apps you’re wasting time on and block access to them.  
Toggl: Time tasks, get things done faster, track team productivity and make sure you’re charging enough for the time it takes to complete projects.
Trello: A simple task management tool that makes projects easier for remote teams to complete.
monday: A more advanced (and expensive) task management tool for managing larger teams and more complex projects.
Process.st: A simple checklist tool for non-tech teams.
Spark: A distraction-free, collaborative email experience to keep teams focused and help them complete tasks quicker.
Airtable: Imagine spreadsheet project management on steroids but with an interface so intuitive anyone can use it.
Doodle: Team scheduling for meetings, video calls and joint sessions without the hassle.
Zapier: Make your favourite apps more powerful and automate repetitive tasks to save time.

That should tell you everything you need to know about what’s coming up in this article so let’s get started with our first and favourite productivity tool for teams.

#1: Serene (Mac)

Free

Serene is a free app for MacOS designed for remote workers and teams. You define a single goal for each day, which can be broken down into multiple tasks, and block out distractions. Numerous studies show that multitasking kills productivity and Seren gives you all the tools you need to stay on track with the task at hand.

As the team behind Serene says, “Multi-tasking is a myth. Single-tasking is a superpower.”

Key features




Website blocker: Block websites that distract you, such as social media and news websites.
App blocker: You can also block apps that take your attention away from work – social apps, your email app and anything else getting in the way.
Distraction-free sessions: Work in 20-60 minute sessions with regular breaks to maximise productivity.
Session timer: Shows you how much time you have left to complete tasks, giving you a motivation boost towards the end of each session.
To-do lists: Manage tasks and make sure everything gets done by the right team member.
Day planner: Define your goal for the day, set your tasks and get stuff done.
Focus music: Play background music to help you keep your focus.
Phone silencer: Automatically put your phone on silent mobile while working to avoid unnecessary distractions.

Once you set your goal for the day, you create your lists of sessions to get there and choose how long to set for each session. Then you click “Go Serene” and the app will start your sessions while automatically blocking distractions while each session runs.

There’s also a browser extension that blocks distracting websites and displays a reminder of what you should be doing if you try to access them.

Serene is a relatively new app (still in the beta stage) but you can request an invitation to try it out here.

#2: RescueTime (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)



Team version from $6/mo per user

While Seren aims to keep you focused on single tasks and daily goals, RescueTime helps you keep track of what you’re getting up to throughout the day. The tool will show you which apps you’re wasting time with and which tasks are killing your productivity.

Key features




Activity tracking: See how much time you’re spending in apps/on websites to measure productivity.
Website and app blocking: Block out the apps and website stealing your attention so you can get more done.
Daily schedule: Create daily task lists and manage your workload.
Goals: Set productivity targets and use RescueTime’s reporting to see how well you’re doing.
Alarms: Set alarms to warn you once you’ve spent more than your allotted time using an app/site.

You can also block distracting websites and apps using RescueTime and the team plan also includes in-depth reports to keep track of productivity. The only problem is you have to be careful about getting bogged down in reports and settings, which can eat back into your productivity.

The other thing I will say is this: if you’re really honest with yourself, you probably know which apps and websites you’re wasting time on. That said, if you’re managing a team it can be useful to show members exactly how much time they’re spending on sites/apps that get in the way of their workflow.

#3: Toggl (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox)



Premium version $18/mo per user

Toggl is a time tracking app that runs in the background to track how long you’re spending on tasks. The tool was originally designed to help freelancers keep track of how much time they were really spending on projects to make sure they invoice correctly and hit their profit targets.

However, the app has expanded into a tool for collaborative teams over the years. Its data visualisations help you compare profits against time spent on tasks and labour costs so you can see which projects and clients are most profitable.

Key features




Time tracking: See how much time you (or others) are taking to get things done.
Boost profits: Check you’re charging enough for the time it takes to complete projects.
Reports: See how productive you’re being and how profitable your time with Toggl reports.
Cross-platform: Toggl’s wonderfully designed apps work across just about every operating system and online so you can access it wherever you need, whenever you need it.

You can also see how much time team members are spending on individual tasks to monitor productivity and see if anyone’s taking on too much/too little work.

Toggl offers excellent cross-platform support meaning team members on every device/OS can access and use the app. It’s a relatively straightforward app without any real learning curve and its excellent interface means team members can either download the app or log in to the website and start Toggling.

#4: Trello (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & web)
Free version, Business Class version $9.99/mo per user

Trello is a simple, easy-to-use project management app for collaborative teams. The platform is based on the Kanban board philosophy, a visual layout that originates from Japan, which you can see below.

Essentially, tasks are added and organised on “to-do,” “going” and “done” satuses, which helps teams keep track of progress. Tasks can be grouped into boards (the entire view above) and cards, which can contain multiple tasks in themselves. Individual tasks can be assigned to groups or team members with deadlines and checklists.

Key features

Project management: Trello is a simple, easy-to-use project management app for collaborative teams.
To-do lists: Create to-do lists, add due dates, assign them to people and manage tasks as they’re completed.
Trello boards: Dashboards where you can create and manage lists of cards containing tasks and to-do lists.
Work with anyone: Invite anyone from around the world to help you make things happen.
Instant messaging: Talk to team members in real-time to discuss tasks.

Trello’s instant messaging makes it easy for teams to communicate and collaborate from anywhere and team members can join for free, although they’ll be limited to one board. Prices remain affordable on every paid package, though.

#5: monday (iOS, Android, web app)



Prices start from £15/month for 2 users, £34/month for 5 users

If your project management needs are too demanding to Trello, then monday.com is the first alternative you want to look at. Essentially, it’s a slightly more expensive, complex and powerful version of Trello, which is better suited to larger teams, more complex projects or teams juggling multiple projects at any one time.

While Trello is based around the Kaban board interface, monday allows you to manage projects using multiple views, including the popular Kaban dashboard. Once again, you can create tasks, group them, assign them and add due dates. Team members can then update the status of tasks with labels such as “to do,” “working on it,” “stuck” and “done”.

Key features




Project management: monday is a more advanced project management that helps large teams and individual team members complete tasks on time.
Views: Multiple views allow you to check project overviews, timelines, individual workflows, checklists and reports.
Track progress: Track tasks, update statuses, receive notifications when deadlines are looming and reassign/prioritise tasks with ease.
Weekly task loads: Team members can work on multiple projects without getting lost by using monday’s weekly overview.
File sharing: Upload and share files so everyone has access to the resources they need via the same dashboard.

The Chart View and Timeline View options in monday, give you an overall picture of how projects are progressing, the timeline for tasks/projects and how your teams are aligning with deadlines – both for individual tasks and entire projects. These views offer great data visualisations, making it easy to manage projects, tasks and team members alike.

#6: Process.st (Web app)



14-day trial, $12.50/mo for Business and $25/mo for Business Pro

A common trait with team productivity tools is they’re often designed for technical teams used to dealing with advanced software platforms. This can make it difficult for non-technical teams to find tools that are designed with them in mind.

Process.st is one of those tools, making task management itself easier to manage for teams that don’t necessarily have the same IT skills as designers and developers. The platform is essentially an advanced checklist tool that allows you to create tasks and assign them to team members.

The idea is to make repetitive tasks easier for team members to complete (to instructions) and for new team members to take on tasks from others with less time spent on training.

You’ll find a library of templates for all kinds of processes like content promotion, social media image design, creating an invoice and fire inspections. You can edit these templates to include your own instructions and add, remove or edit individual tasks on each checklist.

For example, you can create a process for uploading content to social media with instructions for suitable content, image sizes, best times to upload, restrictions and whatever else your team members need to complete every time they do this task.

Key features

Collaborative checklists: Create checklists for teams, assign tasks and track progress.
Schedules: Create daily, weekly and monthly workflows and automate repeated checklists.
Upload files: Add images, videos and text files to better communicate ideas between team members.
Conditional logic: Create dynamic checklists using if/then logic to adapt to your team’s needs and project demands.

Process.st means your team members will be able to complete every step of tasks by following instructions and checking them off their list as they go. This results in higher productivity rates, fewer mistakes and less time spent on creating documentation and training new team members.

This can be crucial if you have remote team members that can’t be trained in person.

#7: Spark (Mac, iOS, Android)



Free version, $6.39/mo (per user) for Premium

Spark is an intelligent email client that prevents your inbox from being a productivity killer and turns it into an asset. Its Smart Inbox automatically categorises your emails from every account assigned to it, allowing you to filter out the emails that don’t don’t matter and prioritise the ones that do.

You can also snooze specific emails for later, assign emails to team members, chat with team members, share drafts, set reminders for follow-ups and schedule emails to send them later.

Key features

Smart inbox: Clean up your inbox, find any email with “Smart Search” and snooze emails that don’t need your attention right now.
Smart notifications: Only receive notifications for the emails that really matter.
Assign emails: Assign emails to team members so the right person is always managing tasks.
Team email: Private team comments, shared drafts, template replies and instant chat for collaborative teams.
Send emails later: Schedule emails to send them when people are most likely to read them.
Reminders: Get reminders to follow up on important emails at the right time.

With Spark, multiple team members can even work on the same email at the same time while communicating via instant messaging on the platform. This means there are no more emails to clients, saying “I’ve CC’d James and he’ll explain that technical issue we talked about earlier”.

All the key details can be included in emails by the right person without any confusion or inaccuracy.

#8: Airtable (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)



Free version, $10/mo for Plus, $20/mo for Pro

We’re lucky to have so many productivity tools available to us today but this hasn’t always been the case. Back in the day (I’m just about old enough to remember), Microsoft Excel was the make-shift project management tool of choice. And, while it may not be the most intuitive tool for this purpose, Excel is surprisingly capable.

Airtable is built around the spreadsheet format and this is great news if your team is used to managing projects on tools like Excel. The platform will be familiar to anyone with Excel experience (or similar spreadsheet apps) but the functionality is much for newcomers to adopt without learning the formulas and functions.

Airtable’s interface operates like a spreadsheet but it’s far more intuitive and includes all kinds of functionality that’s either not available in Excel or difficult to achieve. With Airtable, you can create and assign tasks, set statuses, add attachments and include notes – all within a few clicks.

Key features

Project management: Airtable turns spreadsheets into a fully-featured project management tool.
Dynamic fields: Turn fields into checkboxes or add links, attachments, text notes to fields.
Views: Manage projects in multiple views – grid, gallery, calendar and Kanban.
Team collaboration: Team members can interact with projects, update task statuses, add messages and prioritise their workflows.

Airtable also includes instant messaging for seamless collaboration and its cross-platform support makes this accessible to every team member, no matter where they are or which OS they’re using.

#9: Doodle (Web app)



Team packages start at €12.50/mo for 5 users

Communication is crucial for collaborative projects and this becomes increasingly challenging as the number of remote workers on your team increases. While instant messaging is great when everyone is available, organising meetings, chats, video calls and group work sessions at a time that suits everyone can be difficult – especially if you’ve got remote workers in different time zones.

Luckily, Doodle’s got you covered with its collaborative scheduling app that makes it easy to arrange meetings with the ongoing email back-and-forths. It doesn’t matter how large your team is, how many time zones they’re spread across or how many teams your workforce comprises of – Doodle makes meetings happen.

Key features

Team scheduling: Arrange meetings, video calls and collaborative sessions without the email back-and-forths.
Availability: Team members can set their hours of availability, which automatically adapts for time zones.
Reminders: Set reminders so team members are always ready for meetings.
Personal events: Keep private meetings, events and tasks hidden from team members so people only see the tasks they need to.

Essentially, users set their availability times, which are available for other team members to see, and meetings can be scheduled based on everyone’s availability times. Users simply confirm they can attend and the meeting goes ahead. Team members will also be sent automatic reminders before meetings so nothing gets forgotten.

Another key feature of Doodle is that user can integrate it with their own calendar apps but everying remains private. The only data visible to other users is availability times and details related to scheduled meetings – nothing else.

#10: Zapier (Windows, mac, iOS, Android & web)



Free for 100 tasks/month, $19.99/month for 750 tasks, team package for 50,000 tasks, $299/month

Zapier is a simple automation tool that can save teams huge amounts of time on repetitive tasks and switching between different apps. Essentially, Zapier sends data between apps like Trello and Gmail so emails are automatically sent out when anything changes in Trello. Or, you can link Doodle with Airtable so that records in Airtable are automatically updated as soon as a Doodle meeting closes.

There are thousands of existing automations already available on Zapier that you can use to handle repetitive tasks between different apps – and you can also create your own. Add all these automations together and your team is collectively going to spend a lot less time on menial tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks and get things done much faster.

Key features

Integrate apps: Link your favourite apps so they can share data, allowing you to spend less time switching between apps.
Automate tasks: Automate repetitive tasks between apps.
Zaps: Browse Zapier’s library of pre-built automation workflows for your favourite apps.
Custom automations: Build your own automations if you can’t find them in Zapier’s library of “Zaps”.

Zapier is a very gentle introduction into business automation but it can make a real impact on the day-to-day tasks that often slow down collaborative teams.

How to choose the right productivity tools for your team

All of the apps we’ve looked at in this article can transform the way teams work but which tools are the best ones for your team. To help you make this decision, let’s compare our 10 apps, based on the features they offer and value for money.

This will hopefully tell you which combination of apps are going to help you get more done – individually and collectively.

Best apps for productivity features

While I recommend you thoroughly look at the full feature list for these tools before you pay for anything (there are plenty of free options in here, though), here’s a quick summary of the key features we’ve talked about in this article.

Tool
Project management
Task management
Block distractions
Time tracking
Automate tasks
Reports




Serene
Strong
Extensive
✔
✔
✔
 


RescueTime
Solid
Extensive
✔
✔
 
✔


Toggl
Basic
Solid
 
✔
 
✔


Trello
Solid
Extensive
 
 
 
✔


monday
Extensive
Extensive
 
 
 
✔


Process.st
Solid
Solid
 
 
 
 


Spark
 
 
 
 
✔
 


Airtable
Extensive
Extensive
 
 
 
 


Doodle
 
 
 
 
✔
 


Zapier
 
 
 
 
✔
 

We haven’t’ looked at ten versions of the same tool in this article; we’ve looked at a collection of tools that each brings different features and benefits to team workflows. For example, if you’re looking to block out distractions, Seren and RescueTime are the tools for you whereas Zapier is the king of automation in this pack.

Most of the tools we’ve looked at (seven out of 10) offer project and task management features for teams. In most cases, you’re going to get extensive offerings for this but Process.st and Toggle aren’t quite as kitted out in this regard. Meanwhile, Spark, Doodle and Zapier simply aren’t designed for this and their strengths lie elsewhere.

The two head-to-head scenarios here are Serene vs RescueTime and Trello vs monday. In the case of Serene, it simply offers the more distraction-free experience whereas RescueTime’s interface is nowhere near as intuitive and the extensive reports (while useful) get in the way of the distraction-free philosophy.

Not to mention Serene is free.

Trello is a great tool for basic project management and its biggest strength is arguably how easy it is to use. However, its rival monday offers more in terms of project management features and views for extracting insights at every stage of projects. You do have to pay more for the privilege of monday’s stronger features, though.

Best value for money

Pricing is always important when it comes to software because monthly fees can quickly stack up when you’ve got half a dozen other tools to pay for. This is especially important for teams, too, as you’re generally paying for software on a per-user basis.

You also need to consider what you’re getting in return for your money and the great things about productivity is these tools should pay for themselves by empowering your team to do more – at least, that’s the theory.

With this mind, here’s a quick comparison of how these tools compare in terms of pricing, the features you get for your money and how much they’ll boost your productivity.

Free apps instantly get 10/10 score for cost while small one-off payments will get 9/10. Monthly costs are then rated down from 8/10 based on the monthly cost per user, for teams.

Tool
Productivity
Features
Cost
Overall




Serene
9/10
8/10
Free
 9.3/10


RescueTime
8/10
8/10
$6/mo
 8/10


Toggl
8/10
6/10
$18/mo
 6.8/10


Trello
9/10
8/10
$9.99/mo
 8/10


monday
9/10
9/10
$15/mo*
 8/10


Process.st
5/10
6/10
$12.50/mo
5.6/10


Spark
6/10
7/10
$6.39/mo
 7/10


Airtable
7/10
7/10
$10/mo
 7/10


Doodle
9/10
8/10
$12.50/mo
 7.6/10


Zapier
9/10
7/10
$299**
 8/10

There are a couple of things to note in that table above. While most platforms base pricing per user, monday clusters pricing for groups of two users, five users, 1o users and brackets all the way up to 200+ users. So the real price per user depends on which version you sign up for and which user band you’re signed up to.

On the Standard plan, you’re looking at roughly $15 per user.

Zapier pricing ins’t based on a per-user structure and the team version starts at $299/month. That said, individual team members can sign up for free or plans starting from $19.99 per month.

All things considered, Serene comes out on top with its excellent productivity rating and set of features alone. Let’s not forget the fact this tool is entirely free, which is pretty much unheard of for software platforms of this calibre.

How productive could your team become?

Every team is different but I’m confident this list of productivity tools will make a significant impact on how much your team can get done – no matter how large, diverse or remote it may be. Whether you need to block distractions, collaborate on projects, automate repetitive tasks or bring your team members together for meetings without hassle, you should find the right set of tools for your team in this top 10.

The post 10 Best Productivity Tools for Teams appeared first on Venture Harbour.

HubSpot Review: Is It the Best All-in-One CRM & Marketing Platform?

HubSpot is one of the leading names in marketing software, offering a full suite of tools designed to help businesses grow. While the likes of Salesforce and Infusionsoft target enterprise businesses, HubSpot offers packages for businesses of all sizes and there’s even a free version of each tool that allows businesses to get a feel for what the paid versions have to offer.

We spent a lot of time working with HubSpot while we were searching for an all-in-one CRM and marketing platform. It’s an impressive system, for sure, but it’s certainly not perfect and this review is going to assess the pros and cons of using HubSpot as an all-in-one CRM and marketing platform.

HubSpot pros & cons

First, let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of using HubSpot, as a summary of the key points we’re going to be looking at in this review.

HubSpot pros

Comprehensive, all-in-one CRM, marketing, sales and automation platform
All the tools you need in one place
High-quality tools across the board
Easy to use
Extensive training material

HubSpot cons

It would be good to have more customisation
Automation isn’t as strong as some other options
Price jumps on higher-tier packages can be quite large

HubSpot deserves its reputation as one of the best marketing software platforms on the market. It’s not the one we ended up using here at Venture Harbour (more on that later) but that doesn’t change the fact that HubSpot is a great option for many businesses.

The platform’s biggest asset is the software itself. The quality of HubSpot’s tools is excellent and this remains consistent across the entire platform. Usability is another major strength and I could go as far to say this is the best marketing platform in terms of UX, which is particularly impressive considering how many tools and features are available.

The entry prices for HubSpot are highly-affordable, too, making this a genuine option for smaller businesses looking to grow. You will have to pay for this growth, though, because prices do increase as your customer base grows and you sign up to higher-tier packages – and the jumps can significant.

How much does HubSpot cost?

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how much you can expect to pay for HubSpot. At a glance, the company’s pricing policy looks quite confusing but it’s more straightforward than it first appears.

HubSpot breaks its platform into five key products:

A free CRM
Marketing Hub
Sales Hub
Service Hub
HubSpot CMS

You only sign up to the products you need, which means you can get the free CRM and the Marketing Hub, if that’s all you need. This means you only pay for what you need but this structure is also a key part of HubSpot’s infrastructure that makes it easier to use than many platforms that try to cram everything into a single interface.

For each HubSpot product, there are three different packages: Starter, Professional and Enterprise.

Prices for each of these packages are based on the number of contacts you have on the system. These start at a minimum of 1,000 contacts and here’s a quick table looking at the minimum monthly fees for each product and plan, based on 1,000 contacts.

Marketing Hub
Sales Hub
Service Hub
HubSpot CMS




Starter
£42/mo
£42/mo
£42/mo
£245/mo


Professional
£655/mo
£410/mo
£330/mo
–


Enterprise
£2,624/mo
£990/mo
£990/mo
–

HubSpot fees are paid on an annual contract basis and it’s important to understand this pricing model because your bill will automatically increase if your number of contacts exceeds the price point you’re paying at.

It’s worth keeping in mind that a platform like HubSpot is designed to help your business grow, which means your contact lists will grow and your software fees will increase – the important thing is how much extra profit and ROI you’re achieving along the way with the growth made possible with a platform like HubSpot.

What can you do with HubSpot?

Now that you know what you can expect to pay for HubSpot, let’s take a look at what you’re getting for your money.

Free CRM

HubSpot offers a free customer relationship management (CRM) tool that any businesses can sign up to. In reality, the free version of HubSpot’s CRM isn’t going to help serious businesses manage leads and customers to the extent they need. Essentially, this is a lead generation strategy by the company and it seems to work very well (you would hope so from a company in this business).

Some of the limitations of HubSpot’s free CRM include:

Only view contact website activity for the last 7 days
Limited to 5 snippets, templates, Documents
Limited to 1 Meeting scheduling link with no customization or embedding
No automated features

To unlock the full potential of HubSpot’s CRM, you’re going to need to sign up to one of its paid products to unlock more advanced features. This is similar to how Zoho uses its free CRM to get people on board and the reality is you have to pay for a decent CRM from any provider.

Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub provides a suite of tools to help you attract more visitors to your website, convert more traffic into leads, nurture those leads into paying customers and look after them beyond the initial purchase.

Here’s a quick summary of what you can do:

Drag-and-drop website builder: Create web pages, blog posts, landing pages, and email templates without writing any code. Edit your content and modifying your designs in a matter of clicks. And create new pages in no time – all of which are responsive for multiple devices.
Get your content in front of the right people: Create and manage your content strategy, easily publish blog posts without endless formatting. Get real-time SEO suggestions, and publish to social media at the best times to reach your target followers and influencers. Deliver relevant content, images, headlines, and CTAs based on user behaviours.
Maximise traffic:  Design compelling calls-to-action and personalise messages based on location, traffic source, device, persona, and more.
Convert visitors into qualified leads: Build high-converting landing pages and run A/B tests to improve results over time.
Live Chat: Turn idle traffic into leads and answer key questions with live chat.
Convert leads into customers: Personalise the consumer journey to turn more leads into paying customers and automate your email marketing strategy to guide leads along the buying process.
Track and report business growth: Connect with HubSpot CRM or Salesforce to automatically record every interaction with customers. Use this data to confidently report on how each marketing campaign contributes to sales.

With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, managing your website is about as easy as you could ever hope and you also have a suite of tools to improve your SEO, content marketing, social media and paid advertising strategies.

Sales Hub

With the Sales Hub, you’re going to empower your sales team close more deals, look after customers more effectively and manage your pipelines to increase sales and speed up the entire process (meaning fewer potential customers slip away).

Here are the key roles this product is going to play:

Reach out to leads and customers on a personal basis: Automate personalised emails and give your sales team a constant view of where prospects are along the purchase path to better understand their needs.
Email template builder: HubSpot’s excellent email builder allows you to create templates and cut out the repetitive work (ie: waste time) when creating email marketing campaigns.
Knowledgable sales team: Your sale steam is the instant prospects open an email, click a link, or open an attachment – so they can react to prospects at the crucial moment and prioritise leads.
Sales automation:  Lead actions are automatically logged so you don’t need to manually update statuses. You can also automate tasks like lead rotation, task creation, and assigning leads.
Automated tracking: Sync with HubSpot CRM to track deals won, lost, and in progress, and to see which reps are your best performers (and why).

With the Sales Hub, your sales team spends less time on repetitive data entry so they can focus on what matters most: closing deals.

Service Hub

The Service Hub is there to help you look after customers and turn them into repeat buyers. The product focuses on the post-sale experience to maximise customer value, transaction volumes and marketing ROI:

Help desk: A place for customers to come when they run into problems and a system for your technical or sales team to deal with them effectively, track the progress of cases and address issues in a timely fashion.
Team email: This makes it easy for your teams to collaborate when dealing with customer issues and track progress so issued are never left unresolved and the next steps are carried out by the relevant team member.
Knowledge base: Create an online library of documentation, guides and educational content to help your customers enjoy the best experience from your products/services.
Live chat & bots: Automate the first stage of customer service with live chat and chatbots.
Customer feedback: Tools to reach out to customers for feedback, showing them how important their opinions are to your businesses while giving you invaluable insights into how your business can improve.

With these three products combined (as well as HubSpot’s CRM), you should have all the tools you need to grow your business.

HubSpot verdict

HubSpot offers some of the most extensive marketing tools available in a single platform while managing to deliver one of the best user experiences around. That’s a real achievement and the quality of the tools and features across each product is genuinely impressive.

The only real area it left us wanting was in the marketing automation department, as this is really important to us here at Venture Harbour. HubSpot does provide a solid set of automation features across its paid platforms but we needed more than it could deliver and this was the key reason we ended up using ActiveCampaign as our all-in-one CRM and marketing software platform.

It just excels at automation.

This doesn’t take anything away from HubSpot, though – as long as you understand the pricing model so you’re not surprised when next year’s bill lands in your inbox.

Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer free trials and it costs nothing to try them out for yourself. This should tell you everything you need to know about the two platforms and what you need from an all-in-one CRM and marketing suite.

The post HubSpot Review: Is It the Best All-in-One CRM & Marketing Platform? appeared first on Venture Harbour.

B2C Hyper-Personalisation Examples B2B Should Learn From

According to findings from Ascend2, 62% of marketing professionals see hyper-personalisation as a crucial strategy but only 9% have successfully implemented it. While this comes from a relatively narrow focus group, it’s backed up by the fact that very few of our interactions with brands are personalised at all – let alone enough to get the “hyper” prefix.

Hyper-personalisation is happening, though, and its B2C brands that are pushing the innovation in this department. However B2B marketers should be paying attention here because there’s a genuine risk of being left behind in one of the most important marketing developments in recent years – one that could realise all the promises we’ve been hearing about big data for the past decade.

What is hyper-personalisation?

Hyper-personalisation uses artificial intelligence and big data to create highly-personalised experiences for users. While regular personalisation uses static data to insert users’ names into emails or change landing page content, hyper-personalisation compares your owned data with masses of third-party data to make calculations.

Essentially, AI algorithms compare your users/leads with other online who show the same interests and behaviours. When the right match is made, these algorithms can look at the future actions other users took to predict what your user will react to certain messages.

Source: Ascend2

This means you’re able to address user needs with a relatively small amount of data. Better yet, you can address their needs before they even know what they are. This is where the leading B2C brands are leading the way with hyper-personalisation and it’s time for B2B marketers to catch up.

As you’ll see from the examples we’re looking at in this article, hyper-personalisation doesn’t end with the first sale. In fact, this marketing strategy really comes to life once you’ve got customers on board with the first purchase – especially if you have an account-based business structure.

I’ll explain all of this in more detail later. For now, just remember that hyper-personalisation uses AI and big data to enhance your lead generation efforts and it has even more to offer in terms of customers retention and maximising customers value.

What can B2B businesses do with hyper-personalisation?

You only have to look at what today’s most innovative eCommerce brands are doing with hyper-personalisation to see what B2B businesses can achieve with the technology. For some reason, hyper-personalisation hasn’t really broken out of the online retail sector yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Here are some practical examples of what hyper-personalisation can do for B2B businesses:

Deliver ultra-relevant offers: First of all, hyper-personalisation allows you to target users with ultra-relevant messages and offers. For example, you can compare customers’ shopping habits with millions of other consumers to make more accurate product recommendations or analyse pre-purchase behaviour to target some users with money-off promotions and others with bulk-purchase discounts.
Connect with users at every stage of the buying process: By comparing your data with thousands or millions of other users, you can assess how accurate your sales funnels are and pinpoint potential leaks that your own data isn’t comprehensive enough to reveal. With these insights, you can then create highly-relevant messages and automate their delivery to users at each stage of the buying process.
Predict user actions: By analysing user actions at a mass scale, AI algorithms can predict future actions of other users. Essentially, a certain pattern of actions will point towards a future action – eg: when a user looks at a certain combination of product pages, they typically end up buying this product. So, if that’s not the most profitable product they could be buying, what messages can you target them with to upsell them before they even make the purchase?
Create 100% personalised customer experiences: Hyper-personalisation isn’t just a marketing strategy; it’s a business philosophy and most of the examples we’ll be looking at later have built hyper-personalised products/services from the ground up – and to great effect.
Maximise customer retention and lifetime value: This is where hyper-personalisation generally has the most impact. By creating highly-personal experiences for individual customers, you’re going get better results from cross-selling and upselling campaigns, resulting in ongoing purchases and increased customer value.
Build brand loyalty: the more personal your customer experience becomes, the stronger your relationship with each of them will be. Address their concerns on an individual basis and they’re going to feel so valued that it’s difficult to imagine doing business elsewhere. What you’re also going to do is increase each customer’s investment in your brand (money, time, data, etc.), which effectively locks them into doing business with you (and not running off to your competitors).

Those are the key use cases of hyper-personalisation we’re looking at in this article and the best way to explain these in more depth is by looking at examples.

Examples of hyper-personalisation in action

There are a number of B2C businesses – particularly in the eCommerce sector – that are showing that hyper-personalisation can achieve. These principles shouldn’t be restricted to consumer-orientated business, though. B2B brands have just as much to gain from hyper-personalisation (and gain from these examples).

#1: Product recommendations

The most common example of hyper-personalisation is product recommendations – the kind of thing you see on Amazon.

These are delivered by AI recommendation engines that analyse mass consumer data to spot purchase trends and offer recommendations based on what people with similar interests have bought.

It’s basically an AI upgrade to related products, except the recommendations are based on human interests rather than simply prompting people to buy similar products.

You’ll also find similar engines used on platforms like Netflix and Spotify as they offer content recommendations to users.

Why does this work?

Instead of simply making recommendations to users based on their own purchase history, artificial intelligence compares their histories to millions of other buyers to find more advanced purchase habits.

Above all, this means more accurate recommendations. But the other key thing is you can use these engines to target customers, even when their purchase history is relatively short, which would otherwise make it impossible to target them with relevant recommendations.

What can B2B brands learn from this?

B2B eCommerce brands can basically copy and paste this strategy into their own sales process. However, service-orientated business can take the same approach to target customers with additional service recommendations, as long as the relevant third-party data is accessible.

#2: User account customisation

Spotify’s music recommends are designed to keep users engaged with the platform and consuming content but this isn’t the only way it uses hyper-personalisation. In fact, I would argue the streaming app’s most effective use of the technology lies in the extensive user account customisation that’s made possible.

Spotify encourages users to create their own playlists, essentially building an entire library of music on their account. Over the past ten years or so, I’ve gradually created hundreds of playlists with thousands of tracks assigned to my account – I couldn’t even guess what the actual numbers would be.

Why does this matter?

Because I can’t image the prospect of ditching Spotify and recreating those playlists on another platform (or losing them altogether). I’ve invested way too much time into Spotify and, as a result, I’m locked into paying for a premium account – quite happily, too.

Another form of hyper-personalisation that achieves this is cross-platform syncing. The best example I can think of is Google where all of my online activity synced between Chrome on different devices, allowing me to access everything I need at any time, on any device.

Sure, I want to punch myself for giving Google all that data but it’s just too damn useful for me to consider switching synchronisation off, let alone switch to another browser.

Why does this work?

The more users customise a piece of software, the more personal the experience becomes – an experience that’s difficult to find or recreate elsewhere.

The other key factor here is the amlint of time it can take for users to build their own personalised experience. Ideally, this will happened gradually over time so customisation doesn’t get in the way of actually using a platform. However, this time all adds up and a few minutes each day eventually becomes hours (or even days’) worth of customisation that nobody is going to want to lose or repeat elsewhere.

What can B2B brands learn from this?

Any B2B software provider can take notes from the likes of Spotify. The key thing is to make customisation an intuitive part of using the software. Far too many software companies implement customisation in a way that prevents customers from being able to use their platform before things are set up.

Design an experience that encourages gradual customisation and you’ll lock users into your platform for the long haul.

#3: Building personalised customer experiences from the ground up

Some of the most impressive examples of hyper-personalisation are from brands that turn it into a business model.

Instead of using personalisation as a marketing strategy, StitchFix is hyper-personalisation. The entire premise of the startup is to provide customers with their own personalise stylist who helps them choose the perfect wardrobe for them.

Users provide relevant data about themselves – sizes, style preferences, favourite colours, etc. – and StitchFix analyses this data against the clothing patterns of consumers with similar tastes.

That’s not all, though.

StitchFix also has a team of more than a thousand human personal stylists who assess user profiles and provide expert stylist recommendations. Users then recieve their recommendations in the post to try for themselves and they only buy what they like.

Humans and machines, working together in harmony.

As a result, StitchFix delivers a truly personalised customer experience from the very first interaction – and the service only improves as it learns more about individual users.

Why does this work?

StitchFix’s is built from the ground up to deliver personalised experiences that solve some of the most common problems with buying clothes online: size inconsistencies, not being able to try clothes on, items not matching together, etc.

Every customer experience is unique and the quality of recommendations improves over time, as the platform learns more about each customer (data investment), which makes it increasingly difficult for them to abandon it.

What can B2B brands learn from this?

There are plenty of B2B services that could adopt a similar approach to StitchFix. For example, business automation is a tricky concept for companies to adopt and the ideal solution is different for every business.

AI recommendations combined with human expert advice could really help businness choose which tasks to automate and the best tools for each of them.

Likewise, B2B retailers in a wide range of niches could create a similar platform for the companies and individuals who have to make complex purchase choices. Especially if these retailers have an extensive range of stock to browse and choose from or purchase decisions need to consider a complex range of factors (licensing, specs, regulations, etc.).

#4: Solve personal problems

Care/of essentially uses the same business model as StitchFix but, rather than offering up fashion advice, it aims to solve a far more personal problem.

The homepage leads with the following message on its hero section:

Take care of your energy, diet, stress, sleep… life

All users need to do is take a quick quiz and Care/of creates a plan of vitamins and supplements designed to help them feel better and boost their everyday health.

This plan changes as people progress through their initial course and their health reaches certain landmarks – all of which is logged in the mobile app. Users recieve new recommendations as their journey progresses and everything is 100% personalised to their unique needs.

Why does this work?

There’s nothing more personal than our own health and Care/of responds to this by creating a 100% personalised and private experience that aims to improve health through preventative measures.

The companies policy of transparency and independent research is also really important here.

We’ll show you the research and be transparent about how established it is. We don’t pretend all supplements have equal levels of scientific evidence or traditional history — because that isn’t the truth. But we will always show our work and tailor our guidance to you as an individual.

It’s not the vitamins and suppliments that peplle are really buying into here. It’s the combined piece of mind and trust thay they’re getting a service which has a genuinely positive impact on their lives, based on their unique health requirements.

That’s what makes this service so personal.

What can B2B brands learn from this?

Businesses don’t have personal problems per se but there’s definitely such a thing as thing business health.

Financial advice, insurance, legal aid, security, marketing and all kinds of other things are essential for maintaining a healthy business and finding the right combination of these individual businesses is much like compiling the perfect vitamin and suppliments plan for people.

Take an insurance firm that offers business protection, for example. Companies need a wide range of cover for public liability, workplace injuries, property, business interruptions and any number of other policies.

The type of business, size of business, locations, regions of operation, number of employees, risk assessment, possibility of public injury and all kinds of other factors determine the combination of insurance required and this could change as businesses grow, evolve, rebrand or relevant regulations change.

B2B services that need to provide tailored packages like this can learn a lot from the Care/of approach to hyper-personalisation.

#5: Make personal stories part of your brand

Back in 2015, easyJet embarked on a hyper-personalised marketing campaign to celebrate its 20th anniversary. In a year when the likes of eBay and FT.com were also marking their 2oth birthday’s, easyJet’s campaign stood out above them all because it put its customers at the heart of its own celebrations.

The multi-channel campaign was centred around TV and social media ads featuring images from easyJet customers on their travels over the previous 20 years. The company later printed these images onto the side of one of its planes and compiled curated “top 20” lists and travel guides from its customers.

A lot have brands have tried to make the most of user-generated personalisation in recent years and many have failed spectacularly. However, easyJet nailed this with its anniversary campaign by aligning its business journey with the best and most memorable moments its customers have enjoyed from its services.

This campaign wasn’t really about easyJet; it was about its customers and this is what the end consumer wants to see from hyper-personalisation.

Why does this work?

Holidays are pretty personal to begin with and we tend to heavily invest ourselves in our memories of past trips and future travel plans. There’s a real strength in the idealistic escapism we associate with travel and easyJet played a major role in making these memories possible for so many people.

The airline was among the pioneers of low-budget flights across Europe, which opened up the travel industry to people who never would have been able to afford such trips – or as many of these trips in their lifetime.

While there are plenty of holes to poke in the customer service delivered by low-budget airlines, without the likes of easyJet many of people’s most precious life memories simply never would have happened – and that’s a powerful message for a company like easyJet to have on its side.

Today, we take the ease of travel for granted but easyJet’s personalised campaign reminds its customers (and everyone else that sees these ads) that their favourite holidays may not have been possible without the company – and it does this by putting them at the centre of the campaign itself.

What can B2B brands learn from this?

The real purpose of easyJet’s campaign was showcasing what the company has done for its customers – not collectively, but on an individual basis. Any B2B brand can take notes from this campaign although easyJet had a golden resource that many businesses don’t have such easy access to.

The key to this campaign was the holiday photos easyJet customers had taken on their travels. Those precious memories, once-in-a-lifetime experiences and idyllic places we all dream of going back to one day. The best part of easyJet is people naturally take these photos when they travel – the content was there, ready and waiting for it.

Your typical B2B brand probably isn’t going to be in the same position where such emotive images and experiences associated with their brand are naturally captured by customers.

If you’ve got them, great – use them.

Otherwise, you can create an environment where landmarks are celebrated. For example, think of a business management software platform that helps business owners set goals and achieve them. Each of those achieved goas is a landmark that can be celebrated with badges, points, scores and other measurements that are displayed in the software platform, constantly reminding users of the progress they’ve made with this piece of software.

This progress can be compiled into monthly and yearly email campaigns, showing users what they’ve achieved during these timeframes. Much like the ease of modern travel, it’s easy to take for granted how much we’ve used a software platform over the years and how much we’ve really done with it.

These campaigns show users the real value of a service and what they wouldn’t have managed to achieve without it. Psychology tells us people the loss of something they already own more than gaining something of the same value that they don’t own (loss aversion).

Campaigns like this are incredibly powerful when it comes to customer retention. And, just like easyJet did, you can compile multiple customer stories into a branding campaign and reach out to new audiences while putting your existing customers in the spotlight.

Time for B2B brands to get hyper-personal

As you can see from the examples we’ve looked at in this article, hyper-personalisation can bring brands and prospects/customers together in genuinely meaningful ways. While its B2C retailers who are driving the innovation in this area, businesses of all kinds have a lot to gain from building these kinds of relationships and it’s time for B2B brands to start implementing hyper-personalisation as a key marketing strategy.

The post B2C Hyper-Personalisation Examples B2B Should Learn From appeared first on Venture Harbour.

7 Marketing Personalisation Fails (and How to Get It Right)

Personalisation has become one of the biggest marketing trends in the industry in recent years. You’ll hear countless marketers talking about personalisation as an essential strategy for every brand and all kinds of marketing tools offering a wide range of personalisation features for email, landing pages, website copy and newer marketing channels, such as chatbots.

The statistics are heavily in favour of marketing personalisation, too. HubSpot research shows that personalised CTAs achieve 202% higher conversion rates, for example, and there’s no shortage of similarly impressive stats.

Personalisation done right is one of the most powerful strategies marketers have available and the latest technologies in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence are making new things possible ever year.

However, personalisation done wrong is one of the worst ways to alienate your target audiences (precisely the opposite of what this strategy tries to achieve) and these seven fails show just how bad rogue personalisation can be.

#1: The “Hey {firstname}” fail

This is one of the most common marketing personalisation fails you can make. Most marketers start their personalisation efforts with email and addressing people by their first names is email personalisation 101.

It’s really simple to implement, too.

All you have to do is collect people’s first names when they sign up and automatically insert these into the emails they receive.

Source: Customer.io

The problem happens when people don’t provide their first name while signing up and you don’t have a back-up phrase to insert in its place (like the image above).

How to get it right

Source: Campaign Monitor

Make sure you have a fallback phrase (like the image above) so that you can still deliver a relevant message to people who don’t provide their first names.

#2: The insensitive message fail

Once you get past rookie mistakes like the first name fail, things can actually get even messier if you start delivering irrelevant messages to people – or worse, messages that are a little too relevant.

Creepy marketing: My dad is in assisted living. Today, he received a Christmas basket from the local mortuary.

— Kim Possible (@kimlockhartga) December 23, 2016

In the worst cases, you can end up sending insensitive messages to people and this is hardly going to help in terms of building a relationship with prospects, let alone encourage them to buy from you.

How to get it right

Be careful with campaigns related to health, mortality, finances or anything else that could target unfortunate life conditions.

For example, people searching on health websites for content related to specific illnesses might not appreciate receiving emails mentioning those conditions, unless they’ve specifically signed up to receive email content related to that illness.

#3: The excessive remarketing fail

Remarketing is one of the most effective ways to chase up lost leads from paid traffic and feature like Customer Match in Google Ads allow you to turn your email lists into new retargeting audiences.

Why is remarketing so important? Well, because users who see relevant remarketing ads are 70% more likely to convert.

However, like all good marketing strategies, overdoing it with the remarketing can cause more harm than good.

*searches for something on @amazonIN *
*opens instagram*
*Creepy Amazon ad pops up with the same product I looked for*
Damn Amazon.

— Sahil Shah (@SahilBulla) October 2, 2016

How to get it right

Wait 24 hrs before you start targeting users with remarketing ads – perhaps longer. Nobody wants to be bombarded with ads as soon as they leave your site – especially when they open up an entirely different app.

#4: The congratulatory fail

Sometimes, you can have the best intentions in the world and end up knee-deep in a PR mess. Sadly, this is always a risk when you automate something like marketing personalisation without the proper safeguards in place.

Life issues such as infertility are a daily struggle for many people and you don’t want to contribute to this. Building relationships is about showing you understand your target audiences and adding value to their lives, not twisting the knife.

How to get it right

Don’t create personalisation campaigns unless you have the required data to deliver messages accurately. How do you know that person has just had a child? If the answer is you don’t, then don’t create a campaign sending out congratulatory messages.

#5: The user-generated content fail

Most of the headline-grabbing personalisation fails we’ve seen over the past few years have been from brands reaching out for user-generated content. Sounds great, unless you allow people to upload anything they like without any verification process to block offensive content.

Remember that Walker’s campaign asking users to upload selfies, which was hijacked by people sending in pictures of convicted killers and sex offenders? Needless to say, having your brand associated with people like Harold Shipman isn’t a great look and people are pretty quick to point out such blunders, which quickly go viral.

As PR disasters go, this is majestic. Take a bow, @walkers_crisps https://t.co/8qIDSBe2pB

— Richie (@thecaspiansea) May 25, 2017

Aside from the obvious PR disaster, personalisation fails like this tell the world you’re a brand that doesn’t understand the core basics of this technology and probably shouldn’t be trusted with personal data.

How to get it right

When you allow people to submit their own content, have clear policies in place and a system that’s able to filter out unsuitable content. If you don’t have the necessary team or algorithms in place to detect content that’s vulgar, racist or offensive in some way, you shouldn’t be running campaigns that allow people to upload content without restrictions.

#6: The real-world context fail

Marketing automation is a wonderful thing and personalisation at scale wouldn’t be possible without it. However, most personalisation fails result from using rigid automation workflows that can’t deal with certain variables – such as users not providing their first name or sending insensitive offers to people afflicted by certain life struggles.

Another variable you have to deal with is real-world events like natural disasters, conflicts, political issues and even terrorist attacks.

Adidas fell the wrong side of such a variable when it sent out messages to its running shoe customers as part of a Boston Marathon campaign. Congratulating runners for surviving arduous marathons normally wouldn’t be a problem but considering the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, this is one event where such messages really aren’t going to evoke the desired emotions.

How to get it right

Consider real-world events when you’re creating campaigns and have an editorial process in place. Instead of thinking along the lines of “Congrats, you survived the [location] Marathon,” assess every possible version of this message and make sure there are no undesired interpretations.

Alternatively, you could create an algorithm to automatically search for any real-world events associated to every message variant and trigger a red flag for anything that needs attention. For example, an algorithm that inputs each message into Google and looks for trigger words in the SERPs that could be related to real-world tragedies or other events you don’t want to reference.

#7: The not personalising fail

Considering the personalisation fails we’ve looked at so far in this article, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s not worth the risk. However, personalisation done the right way is worthy of all the impressive stats we’re used to seeing.

For example, Monetate’s EQ4 2018 Quarterly Report, which analysed more than a million sessions across the globe, finds that when customers were targeted with three personalised pages conversion rates doubled, going from 1.7% to 3.4% (compared to consumers who only see two pages) and when they’re exposed to 10 personalised page views, conversion rates jump up to 31.6%.

More importantly, consumers want personalisation with 80% of shoppers saying they are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalised experiences.

In fact, the worst personalisation fail you can make is failing to personalise altogether.

How to get it right

Create a personalisation strategy that improves the customer experience across the entire buying process, over multiple sessions. Understand that the consumer journey doesn’t end with the first purchase and create personalised campaigns that entice your customers to keep engaging with your brand and continue buying from you as their needs change.

Avoid personalisation fails by having the right safeguards in place (as we’ve looked at in this article) and make sure you have the right marketing expertise on board to help you prevent issues from happening. Personalisation relies heavily on automation and you need data experts who understand what kind of variables to protect against.

Finally, if the worst happens, admit to your mistakes and be honest with people about the challenges of delivering personalised experiences effectively.

Personalisation is only going to get better

Research from SalesForce finds that 57% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalised offers or discounts. In the same study, 52% of consumers said they would share personal data in exchange for product recommendations, and 53% would do the same for personalised shopping experiences.

People want personalised experiences and the technology at our disposal to deliver them is only going to improve with time. Personalisation fails can hurt your brand image but the companies that are really going to miss out are the ones that fail to deliver personalisation at all.

Mistakes will happen but it’s the processes you have in place to avoid them and how you deal with them that really matters.

The post 7 Marketing Personalisation Fails (and How to Get It Right) appeared first on Venture Harbour.

50+ Tools To Help You Nail Email Marketing in 2019

According to GetResponse’s 2018 Email Marketing Benchmarks report, email marketers in the UK achieve an average open rate of 18.39%, lower than the 22.15% global average and way behind the global leaders Germany with a massive 40.67% open rate.

Europe has the highest performance out of all regions in the study, too, which makes the UK benchmarks even more disappointing. Perhaps Europe will be glad to see us out of the EU so we can stop dragging down its averages.

Clearly, the UK needs to up its email marketing game and this starts with having the right tools to hand. So, in this article, we’ve got 50+ tools that will help you nail email marketing in 2019 and beat those dismal benchmarks.

What are we looking at in this list?

In this article, I’ve broken down our recommended tools into seven different sections. Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come and you can click on the bold text in this list to skip to the relevant section:

Design tools : Tools that will help you design better email faster.
Graphics/visual resources : Tools and resources for visual content to use in your emails.
Tools to grow your email list : Tools and techniques for getting more people on your email list.
Lead segmentation tools : To create segmented email lists and send more relevant, engaging emails to every respondent.
Lead nurturing tools : These will help you turn more email responders into paying customers.
Email testing tools : Test email performance and improve results.
Customer retention tools : Turn first-time buyers into repeat customers with these retention tools.

Now, the thing with email marketing software is most platforms try to provide every tool you need – and some do a better job than others. The problem is, most lists like this simply reel off all the email software tools by name, but this doesn’t really help you because most of them try/claim to do the same thing.

There’s no point me listing HubSpot and MailChimp as essential email marketing tools when they play the same role (although I would argue HubSpot plays it much better).

Instead, I’m going to list very specific email marketing tools that you need to maximise results and many of these are features that come as standard with the leading software providers like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign – others not so much.

This way, you’ll end up with a clear idea of which specific tools you need and what they actually achieve. Ultimately, this will help you choose the right email marketing software for you, based on the features you need.

You can check out our top ten email marketing platforms for 2019 for a look at some of the best options on the market right now.

Email marketing design tools

Designing emails that encourage people to take action is a challenge for every business but the quality of design tools has increased a lot in recent years, which at least takes out some of the leg work in producing emails on an ongoing basis.

#1: Email templates

First up, you’re going to need a good selection of email templates to cut out the repetitive design work. You don’t want to repeat the same basic layout settings and templates with specific features – such as a product feed, for example – can save you a lot of work.

If you use email marketing software like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse, you’ll get a bunch of templates included but you can also find third-party templates from other sources – like the email templates for ActiveCampaign we found at Envato Elements (above).

#2: Email builder

Email templates can cut out a lot of repeated work but they’ll only get you so far. To customise templates or build your own emails from scratch, you either need to wield some HTML and CSS code or get yourself an email builder that lets you create emails visually – no code required.

Again, most email marketing platforms come with their own email builder and some are better than others. Likewise, personal taste comes into things as well, so go ahead and try a few out. We use ActiveCampaign, which comes with one of the best drag-and-drop email builders we used while testing out different platforms.

#3: Really Good Emails

Templates are a good source of inspiration for email designs but you have to filter through a lot of not-so-great templates in the process. So it helps to have a collection of really great designs at hand and this is where Really Good Emails is a great resource.

You can browse emails by category – industry, engagement, cart abandonment, etc. – and get a list of quality email designs to draw inspiration from.

#4: InVision

InVision is a product design platform that you can use to prototype apps, websites and digital products. However, it’s also really useful for designing email processes. For example, you can design the entire signup process for your website, including the email users receive and what happens after they click through via your email.

#5: Email preview tool

Before any email campaign goes live, you need to check how they’re going to appear across every platform: desktop, mobile, different browsers, different email clients, in notifications, etc.

This is another feature you should find in your email marketing platform of choice but there are standalone testing tools that also include this feature. We’ve stuck with using ActiveCampaign’s built-in preview tool (above) but I have to give a shout out to Litmus for its excellent email testing tools.

Graphics/visual tools for email marketing

With the design tools listed above, you should have everything you need to create email templates, layouts and get inspiration for those moments when you’re out of ideas. However, you’ll still need to create visual content to enhance your copy: images, videos, icons, graphs, etc.

So here’s a bunch of tools that will give you the visuals you need to create engaging emails.

#6: Photo editor

First up, you’re going to need some photo editing tools. For basic needs (like overlaying text on images) Canva, is a great option (and free) but you’ll want something more advanced like Photoshop for editing product images, model portraits, location shots, etc.

#7: Free image sources

While it’s best to take original images whenever possible, there are times where you can’t get the shot you need. Luckily, there are some sources where you can get images that are free to use for commercial purposes (make sure you’re familiar with image use and copyright laws), such as Pixabay and IM Free.

#8: Placeit

Placeit is an online tool that allows you to place logos, graphics and other visuals on top of stock images. For example, you can take screenshots of your website, app or software platform and place them on images of laptops, smartphones and other devices.

#9: Envato Elements

I mentioned Envato Elements before when talking about email templates but you can also get stock video, images, graphics and all kinds of other visuals for your emails and website.

It’s not a free resource, though. You pay a monthly fee rather than paying per download so you want to make sure you’re using it enough to justify the cost.

#10: Graphs & data visualisation

Google Charts is great for creating data visualisations for emails, blog posts and web pages. Best of all, it’s completely free although you might prefer the look of the visualisations you can create on paid options, such as Infogram.

#11: BombBomb

BombBomb helps you record videos, using your webcam or the front-facing camera on your laptop, tablet or phone, and embed them in your emails.

The idea is to show your face and create a more personal touch in your email marketing efforts and it’s an incredibly simple/cost-effective way to add video to your email strategy. I’m not saying this is the only kind of video content you should be including (product images, software tutorials, etc.) but it’s a good way to put a human face on your brand where suitable.

Tools for growing your email list

Now that we’ve got your sorted with the tools you need to create epic emails, it’s time to start thinking about how to get people signing up to your email marketing lists. This is the largest section of this article and I’ll be running through a number of tools and tool-related strategies that will help you bulk out those email lists.

PS: Buying email lists does not feature in this article or any legitimate email marketing strategy.

#12: Form builder

To sign up for your email list, people need to fill out a form and the average conversion rates for web forms are pretty abysmal (generally 2% and 5%, depending on where you get your data from.

That’s simply not good enough.

We spent a number of years optimising our web forms and testing new variations until we stumbled across a multi-step format that had an instant impact. We then implemented multi-step designs on our own websites (as well as our clients) and refined the format.

It wasn’t long before we started seeing 300% increases in conversion rates after implementing multi-step forms on lead gen pages and we’ve reached increases as high as 743% after optimising these forms further.

The results were so consistently impressive that we built our own multi-step form builder, called Leadformly, to make building new forms a breeze. Simply choose a template, customise or start from scratch with the drag-and-drop builder and embed your form on any page – no coding required.

#13: Form optimisation

Leadformly is designed to give you high-converting web forms from the day you embed them on your pages but – just like any lead gen tool – you’re only going to maximise conversion rates (email signups, in this case) if you optimise your forms to improve performance.

This is why we built advanced form analytics and optimisation tools into Leadformly, allowing you to pinpoint where users are running into any problems with your forms and test solutions.

#14: Landing page builder

In a lot of cases, your email lists forms are going to appear on landing pages (and, if they don’t, they should). This is one of many reasons why you’re going to need a decent landing page builder on your side. There are plenty of good options on the market these days, but I tend to recommend Unbounce – mostly because its drag-and-drop landing page builder functions better than the alternatives I’ve tried.

However, Unbounce comes with some other features built-in that are going to help your email marketing and lead generation efforts in general.

#15: A/B testing

To convince people to sign up to your email lists, you need pages and content that inspire them to take action. Finding the right message can be difficult and, once again, this is something that requires optimisation. Which means you need some solid A/B testing tools on your side, so you can experiment with messages and determine which versions make the most impact.

If you’re using Unbounce, the good news is you get A/ testing features included, which allows you to test any page you create using the tool. However, you’re also going to want to test other pages that include email signup CTAs and there are plenty of tools you can use to achieve this, such as Optimizely and VWO.

If you need help with choosing a specific tool, take a look at our article covering the 10 best A/B testing tools in 2019.

#16: Heatmaps

A/B testing is a great way to improve parts of your pages but how do you know what to test? If users aren’t scrolling far enough down your pages to see your email signup forms, it doesn’t really matter how well you optimise them.

Heatmaps allow you to see what users are getting up to on your web pages and discover what might be getting in the way of them converting. For example, you can see which elements people are clicking, how far they’re scrolling down your pages and how they’re engaging with the most important elements on your page.

Hotjar is one of the most popular tools providing heatmap features and it also comes with some other tools we’ll be looking at later in this article.

#17: Paid advertising

Your email lists are never going to grow if you’re not bringing in enough traffic to achieve growth. Paid advertising gives you a controlled stream of traffic and allows you to target audiences that demonstrate a proven interest in your offer. This can make all the difference when it comes to convincing people to sign up to your email lists.

Google Ads is the undisputed king of paid search but Microsoft Advertising (including Bing Ads) is a channel you don’t want to ignore. Social advertising brings in a different kind of audience and, arguably, greater tools to engage with them before they sign up to your email lists. Facebook Ads leads this department in terms of numbers (users and revenue) but it all comes down to which kind of audiences you want to attract.

For example, LinkedIn Ads and Twitter Ads have more B2B clout, whereas Instagram is heavily geared towards B2C audiences. Facebook is actually very handy at both and its targeting options give you a lot of control over who sees your ads.

For tips on choosing the right paid advertising platforms and other tools to maximise your PPC efforts, check out our 50+ tools to help you nail PPC in 2019 article.

#18: Customer Match, Lookalike Audiences

Google Ads and Facebook Ads both have very similar features that allow you to submit lists of emails and the platforms will then find new leads for your that show similar online behaviours as the people on your lists. Google Ads’ Customer Match and Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences essentially find new prospects for you and allow you to target them with visual ads on each platforms’ display network.

#19: Exit-intent popups

Exit-intent popups are a great way to hit users with an email signup prompt, just as they’re about to leave your website. One of the crucial roles email marketing plays is giving you a channel to nurture leads that aren’t ready to buy yet and exit-intent popups give you one last chance to get desktop users on board, instead of letting them walk away.

There’s more good news for Unbounce users here, as the platform allows you to create, test and optimise popups, which you can add to any page of your site – not only the landing pages you create in Unbounce. Unbounce’s drag-and-drop popup builder makes it a breeze to create and add new popups while the platforms A/B testing features allow you to test new messages calling upon users to sign up.

#20: RafflePress

RafflePress is a WordPress plugin that aims to help you increase your email marketing list by running contests and giveaways on your website. You can promote these contests on social media and encourage users to share your contests with their online friends once they sign up.

If you’re looking to run contests as a lead generation strategy, this is the first WordPress plugin you’ll want to check out.

#21: Automated webinars

When 91% of business professionals say they prefer webinars over all other forms of content, you know this is an essential strategy for B2B marketers. The trouble is, running webinar strategies is tough if you have to hold live events on a regular basis.

Well, the good news is you don’t need to run regular live events.

Webinar marketing has proven to be one of our most successful lead generation strategies here at Venture Harbour and we’ve automated the entire process. This automated strategy is constantly generating leads for us, growing our email marketing list and even nurturing leads without any manual input.

You can find out exactly how we do this by reading our guide to evergreen automated webinar marketing. We use ActiveCampaign, Leadformly and a platform called EverWebinar to pull it off – and the results have been nothing short of incredible.

Email segmentation tools

Now, that you’re bringing in email signups like a champion, you need the right tools to organise all of those leads and target them with relevant messages. These are the tools you need to make it happen.

#22: Lead qualification

The first step of lead segmentation is filtering out the leads that don’t meet your criteria.

Let’s imagine your business operates in the UK but you get people in other English-speaking territories downloading your content.

You don’t want to spend time and resources on nurturing these leads if they have no potential to become customers.

A more complex scenario would be qualifying leads in the UK – perhaps by age, gender, job title, company or various other criteria.

If your campaign is targeting decision-makers at companies in the renewable energy sector, for example, lead segmentation allows you to filter out the irrelevant leads.

#23: Lead scoring

While lead qualification gives the “yes” or “no” vote to prospects, lead scoring literally grades the quality of leads with a numerical score.

This means you can prioritise the most valuable leads and target lower-scoring leads with campaigns designed to increase their scores and bring them closer to the sale.

For a closer look at lead qualification and scoring, take a look at our in-depth guide.

#24: On-page segmentation

Email segmentation should start as soon as users sign up, otherwise you’re going to be placing prospects on generic lists and sending out irrelevant, non-engaging emails.

We use Leadformly to collect relevant info from users as they sign up and feed this data into ActiveCampaign, which places them on the appropriate list and automatically sends out the relevant emails.

#25: Site tracking

Segmenting leads by demographics data helps you target the right kind of audience but you can take things even further by targeting users based on the actions they take on your website – the pages they visit, elements they click, forms they start filling out but fail to complete, etc.

You can do this in Google Analytics but you’ll need to be comfortable enough with GA to set tracking up. Website tracking is a little easier to set up on HubSpot but ActiveCampaign’s built-in site tracking features are about as easy as it gets.

#26: Tagging

A crucial feature for lead segmentation is tagging. This allows you to create and place multiple tags on prospects, giving you full control over which segmented lists apply to them.

With tagging, you can also combine and overlap segments to create highly-focused campaigns.

#27: List management

When you’re dealing with multiple lists for each marketing strategy, the list management features available in your marketing software are crucial.

You need to be able to create, edit, duplicate and delete lists easily – all of these actions should be no more than a couple of clicks away (you definitely want to have to confirm before deleting anything, though).

You also want to be able to assign prospects to lists without restriction.

#28: Automatic list assignment

List assignment is crucial for guiding users along the buying process, which involves moving them on from one list to the next. While you should have complete freedom to manually assign prospects to lists when necessary, this is something that wants to be automated 90% of the time.

This is where email automation really comes into the fold and this is a crucial tool you should expect to find in your choice of software. Ideally, you want a collection of prebuilt automation workflows that assign users to lists, based on the actions they take (both on-site actions and email engagement) but you also want the ability to build your own automated workflows easily.

Lead nurturing tools

As mentioned in the previous section, most of your email marketing efforts revolve around nurturing leads along the buying process. This isn’t something you can do at scale manually so, in this section, we’re going to be talking about a number of automation tools/strategies.

#29: CRM

The first tool you need for nurturing leads is a solid customer relationship management (CMS) system. This will help you bridge your marketing and sales departments, providing your sales team with all the information they need to jump in at the vital moment and close deals or address potential problems.

HubSpot offers a great CMS for free but you have to pay separately to add email automation, marketing and various other sales tools into the mix. Salesforce calls itself the world’s number one CRM platform and you can read our review to see whether we think this is a valid claim.

All I will suggest is that you look for an all-in-one CRM, email marketing and marketing automation platform because you need all three of these fully-integrated to get the best from your email marketing strategy.

#30: Automatically assign leads to sales reps

One of the most fundamental tools of any CRM platform is being able to automatically assign leads to members of your sales team. Make sure this is a standard feature of whichever CRM tool you choose.

#31: Auto email responses

As we’ve discussed on this blog before, research from Harvard Business Review reveals that leads turn cold unless you respond to them within 24 hours. In fact, the quality of leads starts decreasing in value after the first hour and this explains why automatic email responses are so important.

#32: Drip campaigns

Drip campaigns are a type of email automation that sends out a series of emails to prospects over a specified period of time. For example, you might create a campaign that sends a confirmation email as soon as a purchase is made and then follow up a week later asking for feedback. This campaign could reach out again with recommended products after another two weeks and then a special discount for placing another offer after the third month.

Drip campaigns are a great way to keep prospects engaged with your brand and nurture customers after the initial sale (repeat buyers is always the target remember).

#33: Automated workflows

Now we’re starting to get into the more advanced side of email automation and this is where things really start to come to life. With automated workflows, you can send out reminders to people who abandon their shopping cart, reach out to prospects who haven’t engaged with recent emails, score lead quality based on user actions and so much more.

The important thing is to have an automation builder that makes it easy to create and edit workflows, as and when you need. This the right builder on your site, the only real limits to your email automation efforts are data access and creativity.

#34: Email personalisation

As many as 96% of marketers (Evergage) say personalisation can build stronger relationships with customers. Email marketing captures the data you need to create personalised experiences that genuinely add value to the customer journey and you want tools to help you make the most of this.

ActiveCampaign has Personalization Tags, HubSpot has Personalization Tokens and Campaign Monitor has its own version of tags that allow you to automatically address people by name and personalise messages, based on user data.

This is an essential tool in 2019.

#35: Multi-channel integration

With consumer journeys more complex now than ever before, multi-channel marketing is becoming a basic requirement. Bringin all of these touchpoints together into a cohesive lead nurturing strategy remains one of the biggest challenges in marketing.

This is one area where the leading email service providers and marketing automation platforms are innovating. For example, last year, ActiveCampaign rolled out its Conversations platform, which helps turn website visits into CMS contacts, capture leads via live chat and turn every marketing channel into an email lead gen strategy.

#36: Transactional emails

Sooner or later, your marketing efforts need to bring in some money and this is where transactional emails come into the mix. Whether it’s order confirmations, invoices, payment requests, subscription renewals or any other kind of transaction emails, this is one of the most important tools in your stack.

We use SendinBlue specifically for its transactional emails as it offers extensive support for different types of transactions, as well as crucial real-time performance insights to help you manage your payments. SendinBlue’s transactional email features alone are enough to keep us using the platform as a key part of our email marketing strategy.

#37: Dynamic content

We’ve already looked at email personalisation tools but there also plenty of other resources that can be personalised to increase email engagement even further. For example, with Google Ads, you can use dynamic keyword insertion to make your ads include the keywords users types as they search, which should increase click-through rates to your landing pages.

Next up, you can use Unbounce’s Dynamic Text Replacement to match the messages on your landing pages to the text in your ads, reducing the total number of landing pages you need to create while increasing the relevance and (hopefully) conversions/email signups.

And, to wrap things up, you can use dynamic content in ActiveCampaign to match the content in your emails to user interests and actions. Combine tools like this and you’ve got a lot of power to personalise your messages and maximise relevance.

Campaign performance & testing

At this stage, we’ve looked at all the tools you need to create epic email campaigns but even the best strategies still have room for improvement. To find out where these opportunities are, you need a solid set of performance tracking and testing tools.

#38: Email analytics

Make sure your email marketing platform has the analytics and reporting features you need or integration with third-party tools.

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#39: Email A/B testing

We mentioned web and landing page A/B testing as a means of increasing email signups earlier but you’re also going to need a tool for testing email campaigns, too. This should be a standard feature in your email marketing software platform – otherwise, you’ll need to get a third-party option

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#40: Google Analytics

No matter how good your email marketing platform is at site tracking and reporting, Google Analytics will add something to your reporting.

For example, you can use GA to link email and organic search data to your PPC campaigns for a complete overview of the three strategies working together.

Another key function of Google Analytics is URL tracking, which helps you see what journey users take after clicking through from your emails.

Make sure your email marketing platform has dedicated GA integration.

#41: Page speed tool

Your landing pages aren’t going to get email signups and users aren’t going to convert after clicking through from your emails if your pages are loading too slowly.

Loading times matter, so get yourself some speed testing tools. Google’s free page speed tool is a decent place to start.

#42: Litmus

I mentioned Litmus earlier and there are a lot of reasons to like this piece of email marketing software.

It’s not an all-in-one email marketing, CRM and marketing automation platform like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot but it excels at email design, testing and reporting.

#43: Customer lifetime value calculation

You can do this manually but artificial intelligence is now making it possible to predict the lifetime value of new leads/customers earlier and make the big spenders a priority sooner.

You can check out some Google documentation on building your own AI algorithm for predicting customer lifetime value but there are plenty of predictive analytics tools hitting the market now that include this as a feature, such as Klaviyo.

Predictive analytics is still a relatively new technology that hasn’t really broken into small business software but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes as widespread as tools like email marketing automation.

#44: Subject line tester

A decent subject line tester can point out opportunities you wouldn’t normally see and save you from overlooking some glaring mistakes.

There are plenty of tools you can choose from – take a look at this list of recommendations from HubSpotif you need some help choosing.

Customer retention tools

The long-term goal of every email marketing strategy is to turn customers into repeat buyers, brand advocates, positive reviews and maximising the lifetime customer value of each lead.

#45: Chatbots / live chat

ChatBot.com is one of many chatbot and live chat providers changing the way brands provide customer service.

Chatbots and live chat widgets provide an automated first line of customer service, giving people and instant response to their problem and questions. Even if your bot isn’t able to solve an issue during the first session, it provides that crucial instant response and can point users to relevant information until your customer service team is able to respond.

#46: Automatic ticketing, responses

As soon as a customer issue is reported (whether via chatbots, email or any other channel), it’s crucial that you’re able to automatically create tickets so no problems are left unresolved. You also need to send out automatic email responses to tell people their ticket has been raised and that their issue will be dealt with as quickly as possible.

When customers run into problems, you need to respond instantly and solve their problem as quickly and effectively as possible.

#47: Customer feedback

Feedback is critical for improving the customer experience – both positive and negative responses. Hotjar has some great customer feedback features to get valuable insights into what people enjoy about buying from your brand and what could be improved.

#48: Customer review notifications

While customer feedback is for your internal use, public online review platforms like Google Reviews and Trustpilot are visible for the world to see – and a crucial factor in generating new leads, as well as a key indicator of your ability to turn customers into repeat buyers.

Again, you need to respond to reviews quickly and this starts with getting notifications from your chosen platforms. Google Review notifications and Trustpilot notifications are easy to set up but keep in mind that people will be able to see if you’re sending generic, automatic responses on these platforms.

#49: Zendesk

Zendesk is a complete customer service platform designed to help you support the people most important to your business. You can implement chatbots/live chat, create knowledge centres, integrate phone and email support and coordinate all of your customer service efforts in a single place.

#50: Lifetime cycle emails

The journey customers take between purchases is often long and complex. Other times, this journey can be much shorter (eg: buying an accessory for a primary purchase) and you need to understand these journeys if you want to ensure your customers continue to buy from you.

Lifetime cycle emails should keep people engaged between purchases and make sure your business is there when the time comes to buy again. Take a look at this ActiveCampaign article on customer lifetime cycle emails for practical examples you can implement into your email marketing strategy.

Take your email marketing efforts to the next level

With this comprehensive list of email marketing tools and strategies, you should have plenty of inspiration to create and manage better campaigns at every stage of the consumer journey. If you think we’ve missed any tools/tips in this article, give us your suggestions in the comments section below.

The post 50+ Tools To Help You Nail Email Marketing in 2019 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Email Marketing: How to Maximise Deliverability & Engagement

Achieving high deliverability and engagement rates is one of the biggest email marketing challenges you face. It doesn’t matter how great your campaigns are if nobody gets to see them or engage with them. If you want to maximise your email marketing returns, you need to start by maximising deliverability and engagement.

In this article, we’re going to look at why both of these performance indicators are so important and step-by-step strategies to get the best out of them.

What do deliverability & engagement mean in email marketing?

Let’s start by quickly explaining what deliverability and engagement are in email marketing and why they’re both important.

What is email deliverability & why is it important?

Email deliverability refers to the percentage of your emails that arrive in your recipients’ inboxes. There are many reasons why your emails might not end up where you intend them to:

Your email ends up in their spam folder
Their email address is no longer in use
Users mistyped their email address while signing up
Users deliberately gave an incorrect email address

Obviously, low deliverability rates mean a large chunk of your email recipients aren’t getting to see your emails. People can’t open emails they never see and they certainly can’t complete the next conversion goal you’re targeting – none of which is good for performance.

The biggest deliverability problem is ending up in users’ spam folders because this happens when internet service providers (ISPs) consider yo or your email untrustworthy.

If this is happening a lot, you’ve got yourself a deliverability problem that’s going to require a bit of work to fix.

What is email engagement & why is it important?

Email engagement refers to how/if recipients interact with the emails you send them. Assuming your emails actually land in users’ inboxes, open rates are the first indication of email engagement and then you’re going to start looking at click-through rates as an indicator that people are interacting with your email content.

Ultimately, the most important engagement metric is conversion rates (after the initial click through to your site) but you’ll learn a lot about email engagement by using heatmaps to see what users are doing after they open your mails – a crucial tactic for optimising your way to increased engagement.

Why are looking at deliverability and engagement in this article?

It’s important to understand that ISPs look at engagement factors when they’re assessing the trustworthiness of your emails. Essentially, if you’ve got a history of low email engagement, this means your future emails are more likely to end up in the spam folder, reducing deliverability even further.

This results in a boomerang negative effect because reduced deliverability then means fewer recipients are able to engage with your emails, which goes on to cause even more damage to deliverability – and so on.

This is why it’s important to optimise for both deliverability and engagement.

How to maximise email deliverability

Deliverability is all about getting your email into users’ inboxes, not their spam folders. Hopefully, it goes without saying that you should avoid email spam tactics, such as cold emailing and buying email lists. But there’s a lot more you can do to maximise email deliverability.

Optimise your subject lines for deliverability

The first thing you want to master is creating email subject lines that avoid spam filters and convince people to open your emails. Here are some key things to avoid:

Using spam trigger words
Using all caps
Overusing exclamation points
Deceptive subject lines
Using “Re:” or “Fwd:”
Overly long subject lines
Keyword stuffing

HubSpot has this useful list of spam trigger words to avoid in your subject lines, which is a handy resource to get familiar with. Aside from that, make sure your subject lines are honest, relevant to the content in your emails and avoid the common spam triggers.

Avoid spam triggers in your email content

There are also a number of spam triggers you want to avoid in the main body of your email content as well:

Content doesn’t match your subject line
Using attachments
High image-to-text ratio
Excessive use of font, font styles and colour variations
Lack of business/contact details (business name, address, phone number, etc.)
No unsubscribe link
Poor HTML markup

Thankfully, with so many email design tools available these days, you have access to all kinds of email templates that offer practical examples of what your own emails should look like.

Above all, avoiding deceptive tactics and following email design best practices should have you covered. However, it’s a good idea to create an in-house style guide of dos and don’ts for everyone involved in your email marketing strategy.

Use quality email marketing software

Quality email marketing software will help you create emails and campaigns that land in users’ inboxes. You want a platform that comes with plenty of email templates, a solid email builder and a good set of email automation features will help you achieve the highest deliverability and other KPIs.

It’s also important to go with a reputable email marketing platform because ISPs pick up on this, which can trigger those pesky spam filters. We use ActiveCampaign for its excellent email automation features and you can find out more about the top 10 email marketing platforms in our guide.

On a related note, you may experience a drop in deliverability if you change to a new email marketing provider, so it’s worth trying to choose the right tool from day one.

Build up your IP reputation

Internet service providers (ISPs) look at the IP of every incoming email to assess how trustworthy they are. This process considers your historical performance as an email sender, which means you can be published for past mistakes. It also means you can build up your IP reputation over time and gradually increase deliverability by following best practices.

Start by checking your sending reputation by using tools like Google’s Postmaster Tools, TrustedSource.org or Sender Score and follow the other steps we’re looking at in this article to improve your reputation.

Use a double opt-in system

A double opt-in system sends an email to subscribers, asking them to confirm their email address and this can help deliverability in a number of ways. First of all, it confirms you’ve got a real email address from users, rather than a fake or deceptive address that would otherwise hurt your deliverability efforts.

Double opt-in also increase your engagement prospects (which, in turn, boosts deliverability) because it requires people to confirm their interest and desire to engage with your brand. Your email lists will be shorter than they could be by using a single opt-in system but they’ll be filled with more valuable leads.

Crucially, double opt-ins are compliant with European anti-spam laws and the CAN-SPAM Act in the US.

Make unsubscribing easy

GDPR requires you to implement an easy unsubscribe option on your emails and ISPs also want to see an unsubscribe link in your mails. Also, for the sake of your users, it’s important to have an accessible unsubscribe button. While it might be tempting to try and hide these buttons or place tiny unsubscribe links at the bottom of your emails, it’s actually beneficial to make them more prominent.

It’s much better to have people unsubscribing from your email lists than them flagging your emails as spam.

The key thing is to determine why people unsubscribe (usually irrelevant or unengaging email content) and improve your campaigns to reduce unsubscribes rates further down the line.

Be consistent with your sender info

This one is relatively simple: be honest, accurate and consistent with your sender information. This not only helps ISPs confirm your ID and verify your trustworthiness, but also builds trust with your recipients.

Create an exclusion list

An exclusion list is a segmented email list where you can place inactive recipients so you don’t keep sending them emails. If you keep sending emails to these people and they continue to ignore them, you’re going to hurt your engage and deliverability performance – a nasty catch-22 to get involved in.

So, create an exclusion list and place inactive users here. You can send a low volume of re-engagement emails to try and get them back on board if you want, but you don’t want to be sending these people emails at the same rate as your engaged recipients.

Maximise email engagement

Although this section is geared towards deliverability, I’ve mentioned engagement a few times and this is because the two intrinsically linked. People can’t engage with emails they never see and ISPs look at email engagement as a warning sign that your emails could be spam.

So low engagement rates hurt deliverability and poor deliverability hurts engagement. Which leads us nicely into our next section of this article.

How to maximise email engagement

With email deliverability covered, it’s time to look at maximising engagement. Not only is this an important factor in deliverability, it’s also crucial if you’re going to get profitable results from your email marketing results.

Optimise for open rates – a crucial KPI

The most important engagement for ISPs is open rates and these are pretty damn important for your campaigns too. People aren’t going to see your messages if they don’t open your email to begin with and low open rates are going to hurt your deliverability prospects.

Low open rates normally mean one of two things: the content in your emails isn’t of interest to recipients or your subject lines aren’t compelling them to open – perhaps both.

There are four things you need to cover here:

Email content: Your email content needs to relevant, useful and valuable enough for recipients to want to open and engage with.
Targeting: Different recipients have different interests and you need to be able to target them with content that captures their unique interests.
Subject lines: Your subject lines need to convince recipients that your emails are worth opening.
Preheader text: This is the snippet of text users see in preview boxes and notifications, which has a major influence on open rates.

Optimising for open rates should naturally cover a lot of the email marketing essentials and things will get easier as time goes by. Once recipients know that you’re a reliable source of quality email content, they’ll continue to open with little resistance – as long as you can maintain your reputation.

Segment your campaigns

In terms of targeting, segmenting your campaigns is vital for maximising open rates and other engagement KPIs – not to mention conversions and everything else that matters in email marketing.

As soon as prospects sign up to your lead generation strategies, they should be placed on a relevant segmented list and moved along as you gain more information about their needs and purchase interests.

Generally speaking, the more relevant you can be with your segmented campaigns, the stringer your engagement metrics will be.

Create automated workflows

Your prospects’ interests change over time and great email marketing strategies react to user actions that indicate these changes in interests. For example, one of your leads might start filling out one of your web forms but fail to complete it, which prevents them from that next conversion goal.

Or, one of your existing customers might start looking at another product page repeatedly and reading blog content associated with it, suggesting they’re interested in making an additional purchase.

By creating automated email workflows, you can send relevant emails to these users when they complete actions that confirm their interest, rather than just sending them out to broad audiences and hoping for the best.

This form of behavioural targeting will really help you maximise engagement and conversions. For more ideas on what kind of email marketing workflow s you could implement, take a look at our list of 30+ automation workflows that you can use right now.

Create highly-engaging emails

We recently published an article looking at 11 secrets of designing emails that convert and all of the principles we covered in that article will help you design highly-engaging emails:

Compelling messages
Strong layouts
High-converting CTAs
Deliverability
Design and email marketing tools
Maximising incentive

Take a look at that article and bookmark it for later reference when creating new email marketing campaigns.

Use personalisation to boost relevance

Personalisation is a powerful tool for maximising both deliverability and engagement. High-end email marketing platforms like ActiveCampaign allow you to personalise subject lines, preheader text, email content and website messages after users click through to your website.

Test out different applications of personalisation to find the right balance between maximum engagement and being too personal.

Maximising deliverability and engagement makes all the difference

By maximising deliverability and engagement in your email marketing campaigns, you’re giving your content the best chance of encouraging recipients to take the next step along the customer journey. These two KPIs are directly linked but optimising for them will also take care of most of your other email marketing priorities by default – eg: segmenting campaigns, optimising your content, etc.

Great email marketing strategies start with maximising deliverability and engagement and getting on top of these two performance essentials will transform the results you get.

The post Email Marketing: How to Maximise Deliverability & Engagement appeared first on Venture Harbour.

30+ Marketing Automation Workflows You Can Implement Right Now

One of the biggest challenges with automating a business is knowing which tasks to actually automate. Choosing individual tasks is one thing (eg: automating invoices) but creating full workflows that drive an entire marketing strategy is a completely different ball game.

For example, instead of simply automating invoices, you might create a workflow that automatically creates and sends invoices, records payments, chases up late payments and assigns statues to clients/customers (paid, late, on-time payment percentage, etc.)

These are the kind of workflows you should be aiming to create and, in this article, I’ve got 30+ more automation workflow ideas you can implement today.

What are we looking at in this article?

As this is a relatively long article, I’m breaking things up into four different categories:

Lead generation : Workflows to handle new leads more effectively.
Lead nurturing : Automatically guide leads along the buying process.
Engagement : Workflows to keep leads and customers engaged, re-engage cold leads and keep them on track for the next purchase.
Customer retention : Turn customers into repeat buyers with these automation workflows.

You can click on the bold text above to jump ahead to each section of the article, which should make this a useful resource to come back to later. However, I recommend starting from the beginning the first time around because these are automation workflows every kind if business stands to benefit from.

What are automated workflows?

Automated workflows are programmatic functions that react to user actions on your website or interactions with your email campaigns. When users complete a “trigger” action (eg: signing up to your newsletter or completing a purchase), you decide which email response should be sent for each action and automatically send them out.

The first benefit of automated workflows is they save you a huge amount of time in repeated manual work. However, the bigger (and more challenging) aim with automated workflows is creating a network of automation that guides leads across the entire buying process.

To do this, you’ll want a decent automation builder that allows you to create custom workflows. We use ActiveCampaign because its drag-and-drop builder gives us complete freedom to automate and it also comes with a library of pre-built workflows that you can download and use.

There are plenty of other automation platforms that offer similar things to ActiveCampaign and you can find our top picks in this 7 best marketing automation tools in 2019 article. All I will say, though, is that ActiveCampaign’s automation builder and email automation features were the key reason we still use it today – they’re hard to beat.

Lead generation workflows

An automated business is going to generate a significantly larger volume of leads and it’s important to have the right workflows in place that will allow you to handle higher volumes without building a much larger (expensive) sales team.

#1:  Email lists

The first workflow you’re going to want to create is one that places new email subscribers on a list of some kind. People who sign up to your newsletter should be placed on a separate list to those who request a quote or make a purchase, for example.

You may even want to take things further and place email subscribers on different lists, depending on the kind of content they engaged with when they signed up. Or customers on different lists, based on the value of their purchase.

#2: Welcome process

Once leads are placed on the relevant list, the next task in your workflow should be to send out a welcome message, “thank you” message or whatever’s most relevant to the list they’re placed on.

#3: Content downloads

Content downloads aren’t simply designed to get users’ email addresses. Your aim is to capture leads with a specific interest in various content topics and they should be placed on the relevant list for each topical interest when they sign up. This allows you to send more relevant follow-up emails and offers that are more likely to attract commercial interest.

For example, a software company might create content specifically for people in different industries/career types (marketing, creatives, accounting, legal, etc.), enabling them to highlight the benefits of their platform to the specific needs of each niche.

#4: Webinar signups

Webinars are by far the most effective form of B2B marketing content but a lot of businesses find webinar strategies too complex or demanding to run. Luckily, this is something you can almost entirely automate. This remains one of our most effective lead generation workflows and you can find out exactly how to do it by reading our guide to automated evergreen webinars.

#5: Quotes & proposals

I mentioned automated invoices during the introduction of this article (a highly recommended workflow) but quotes and proposals are even more of a drag on resources. At least invoices are for work you’re getting paid for –  the majority of quotes and proposals don’t even generate customers.

Luckily, you don’t need to waste any more time or resources on creating quotes and proposals manually with our fully-automated process (also highly recommended).

Lead nurturing workflows

Lead generation brings in the prospects but email subscribers don’t turn themselves into paying customers. You need to guide them along the buying process, allowing you to turn moderate interest into string purchase intent.

#6: Assign leads to sales reps

One of the most important functions of marketing automation is to let technology nurture your leads as far as possible along the buying process, so your sales team only need to get involved when they’re really needed.

Automatically assigning leads to sales reps means no potential customers get overlooked but you want to build a workflow that notifies them when leads complete an action that requires their intervention – otherwise, constantly checking upon lead statuses will be a full-time job in itself.

#7: Lead qualification

Some leads simply aren’t worth following up and you’ll often find certain campaigns generate leads that would be better placed on other workflows. Lead qualification allows you to check prospects meet your requirements (anything from location and job title to company size and budget).

You can ditch the leads that aren’t worth your time and place less relevant ones onto more suitable workflows.

#8: Lead segmentation

Once you’ve filtered out the leads that aren’t valuable to your business, you need to know they’re placed on the most relevant list segments. These lists are your most powerful tool in terms of delivering relevant messages to each lead as they progress along the buying process.

To place leads on the most relevant list, you need access to the right kind of data: mostly interest and behavioural data. When a lead shows repeated interest in the same product or service, for example, they should be targeted with messages relevant to that interests and related products/services.

Find out more about lead segmentation in our in-depth guide or this ActiveCampaign page.

#9: Lead scoring

Lead scoring applies a numerical value to leads, based on the information you gather about them. This allows you to gauge how far along the buying process leads are, prioritise the most valuable prospects and target them with messages to guide them further along.

What you want to do is create lead scoring automation workflows that update these scores as users complete leads signifying their purchase intent increases. To find out more about this, take a look at our guide to lead qualification and lead scoring.

#10: Auto-respond to each segment

With your segmented lists planned out, you want a workflow that automatically delivers the right message to respondents on every list. With ActiveCampaign, you can create Auto Responder campaigns for this but you can also build larger workflows that automate responses based on further actions along the buying process.

#11: Applying tags, assigning to list segments

You don’t want to be assigning leads to segmented lists manually – this is something that should happen automatically. Your workflows should be placing prospects on relevant lists when they sign up and automatically moving them on to other lists when their position along the consumer journey changes.

Tagging is another really important feature in email marketing software, allowing you to add multiple characteristics on each prospect – eg: “first-time buyer,” “repeat buyer,” “review submitted,” “unresolved ticket,” etc.

Again you want to be placing and removing these tags automatically so relevant messages are always being sent to each prospect.

#12: Interest targeting

Moving beyond demographic targeting (age, gender, job title, etc.), automated workflows allow you to tap into interest targeting. You can place users on lists when they download your content, visit the same page multiple times, engage with email topics and demonstrate specific interests in certain aspects of your brand.

#13: Behavioural targeting

Next, you want to create workflows incorporating behavioural targeting and this is where you target users with messages based on the actions they actually take on your website (or with email campaigns).

For example, you might target users who follow a specific URL path on your website, Or you could create a workflow that responds differently depending on whether people open a specific email or not. Likewise, you might create workflows for actions users don’t take, such as repeat customers who haven’t made a purchase recently.

Engagement workflows

With customer journeys becoming longer and more complex every year, you need to work harder than ever to keep leads and customer engagement along the path to the next purchase. So let’s look at some workflow ideas to stop people getting lost between the crucial moments.

#14: On-boarding drip campaigns

On-boarding drip campaigns start as soon as a user signs up (whether a newsletter, download or purchase) and periodically send out emails at specific intervals to keep them engaged.

This will include your welcome emails, order confirmations and instant responses but drip campaigns can run for months, sending out emails at key moments to keep prospects engaged. Your task is to determine which messages will keep users interested and when to send them.

#15: Newsletters

Yes, newsletters are one of the most trusted email lead generation strategies but they should also be designed to keep them engaged on an ongoing basis. The best newsletters keep people opening emails, clicking through to websites and engaging with content. The worst have people hitting the unsubscribe button before you’ve even collected enough data to find out why.

Instead of sending out the same newsletter content to everyone, create workflows that send relevant content based on segmented lists and tags. Taking this further, create workflows that adapt your messaging, depending on how prospects engage (or don’t) with your email content.

#16: Reminder emails

There are all kinds of reminder emails you should be sending out automatically: appointments, webinars, payments, subscription renewals, email confirmations and a whole bunch of other actions. Sending reminders ahead of deadlines is crucial, of course, but your workflows should also target users who don’t complete desired actions on-time and give them the opportunity to do so at a later date.

#17: Birthdays, special events

Personalised messages are a great way to keep prospects engaged. Sending birthday messages to customers has become a modern classic in email marketing and a good opportunity to give them a special gift for the occasion.

There are other special events you can use to keep customers engaged. For example, you might create anniversary campaigns for long-term customers who do business with you year after year. Or there may be other personal events that are relevant to the relationship between you and your customers, such as they’ve just changed their job status on your software platform and you want to congratulate them on the new position.

#18: Seasonal messages/offers

The challenge with personalisation is maximising relevance without becoming creepy but you don’t need to worry about this with seasonal messages and offers. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that seasonal events can vary for different people.

August isn’t summertime in every part of the world and not everyone celebrates Christmas, even in traditionally Christain territories. So try to get relevant data from your prospects wherever possible and don’t neglect target audiences by making unnecessary assumptions.

#19: Rewards

The best way to keep people engaging with your brand is to reward them for their ongoing interest. This is relatively easy for software providers who can digitally reward users with freebies, tokens and other incentives to keep them using and subscribing.

RunKeeper is a classic example that rewards people for using its application and gamifies the experience with achievements. This can be a little more challenging if you’re not in the software industry but businesses in every industry can take a similar approach.

Reward customers for their purchases, online engagement and reach out to those who drop-off with incentives to get involved again.

#20: Beta invites

Software companies can make their customers feel like a valued part of their product by inviting them to join beta testing programmes. Once again, though, this tactic isn’t only something software companies can use to keep their customers engaged.

Retailers can invite customers to try out new products while service-orientated businesses can request customer feedback to help refine the services they provide. This not only keeps customers engaged but reminds them that you’re constantly becoming a better business to work with.

#21: Cart abandonments

This is a classic eCommerce workflow that sends out reminders to users who have filled their shopping basket with products and failed to complete the purchase. Clearly, these people have shown interest in specific purchases but – for whatever reason – haven’t quite gone the distance.

Your aim is try and find out why. Did they try to make a payment and failed or did they abandon their cart when they saw there’s no free delivery option? These details allow you to try and actually solve the problems preventing people from making the purchase, rather than simply reminding them that they didn’t cough up.

#22: Form abandonments

The exact same thing applies to form abandonment but pinpointing why people fail to fill out a form can be more challenging. First of all, you’re going to need a form analytics tool, which allows you to see which fields are causing users problems. Next, you want to create a workflow that reaches out to form abandoners with suitable follow-up messages and, then, optimise your forms to remove these completion barriers.

#23: Re-engagement emails

When people stop engaging with your brand, sometimes you simply have to reach out and remind them that it’s been a while.

Grammarly does this for users who stop using its tool after a while but, once again, it’s important that you try to identify why people have stopped engaging with your brand. Is it because they’re simply not interest and not the valuable lead you hoped they were? If so, then you might be better off focusing your efforts elsewhere.

More importantly, when these are users who genuinely do have interest in what you’re doing, but something is getting in the way (accessibility, OS support, irrelevant messaging, etc.), then you want to know what the problem is.

Customer retention workflows

Now, we come to the big aim of all email marketing strategies: to turn customers into repeat buyers. Modern brands invest a lot in generating and closing new leads but the value of loyal customers is something you can’t afford to underestimate.

#24: Upselling/cross-selling

For new customers making their first purchase, you want some workflows in place that will encourage them to make further purchases in the future. You probably don’t want to bombard people with messages asking them to open their wallets right away but some upselling/cross-selling drip campaigns are a great way to tempt new customers over the following weeks, months and even years.

The key thing is to make your campaigns relevant to the purchases customers have already made and target them with additional products/services that are going to enhance the experience of their previous purchases.

#25: Customer life cycle messages

Your customers’ needs are going to change periodically after they make the first purchase and understanding how their interests evolve over time is crucial for both customer retention and maximising the value of each individual customer.

For example, smartphone users initially want to get the best out of their new devices but the time to upgrade inevitably comes. Likewise, a business signed up to a software platform should outgrow the version they originally signed up to and need to upgrade to a more advanced plan.

Today’s sales funnels aren’t linear; they’re cyclical, as illustrated in the diagram above. That comes from an ActiveCampaign article looking at customer lifecycles and you’ll find 25 different campaign ideas that will help you build automation workflows to target customers with relevant messages and offers as their needs

#26: Customer service auto-responses

When your customers get in touch with a technical issue or service complaint, you don’t want to leave them waiting for a reply. People are generally quick to forget about problems if you offer a fast, effective solution and they’re going to feel reassured as an ongoing customer if they know you’re there when they need them.

You need to reply to these issues instantly, though, regardless of which platform users choose to get in contact (chatbot, live chat, web forms, social media, etc.)

I mentioned Zendesk earlier as a comprehensive customer service platform and one of its best features is autoresponses, which can be sent out to users across each of these channels. Best of all, you can integrate Zendesk with ActiveCampaign, which then gives you the power to create automated workflows for each customer service channel and bring everything together.

You can add IDs to each customer and place tags on them for each status (“unresolved,” “being resolved,” “resolved,” etc.) and automate responses where necessary. This means you to chase up tickets when customers don’t respond, send links to relevant content while issues are being resolved and request feedback when issues are fixed, for example.

#27: Feedback requests

I mentioned feedback requests in the previous section and this is crucially important for customer service. You want to know that you’re dealing with issues in the best possible way and keeping customers happy, even when they run into any problems.

You’ll often get practical suggestions for how to improve your products and services by asking people the right questions.

This process should be entirely automated with feedback requests being triggered once issues are tagged as resolved and you can also automate follow-up messages, based on the kind of feedback you receive.

#28: Customer reviews

With 93% of online buyers saying their purchase decisions are influenced by online reviews, every brand needs to do what they can to build an online profile of positive reviews on third-party platforms like Google Reviews and Trustpilot.

Again, this should be an automated process, triggered when customers make a purchase – although you’ll want to delay feedback requirest being sent out for a few days, a week or even a few months. It all depends on how long customers need to get a positive experience from your brand and you might need to experiment with the timing on this one.

You’ll also want to work some kind of notification system into your workflow that alerts your sales team when a review has been left on a third-party platform, so you can reply to them quickly and resolve any issues they may have experienced.

Always remember that future potential customers are looking out for these issues and how you deal with them.

#29: Customer referrals

Once your customers are at a point where they’ll be happy to recommend you to other people, this is when it’s time to hit them with a referral campaign. A common mistake brands make is targeting all of their customers with referral messages but you’re never going to get the best results by sending these out to every customer.

You want to nurture customers to a point where they’re satisfied enough with your brand that they’re most likely to make the recommendation to others.

Aside from increasing the number of referrals, this should mean people need less incentive to recommend you, reducing the effective cost of each referral. To pull this off, you’re going to need an automated workflow that scores customer satisfaction throughout the lifecycle and sends relevant messages at the decisive moment.

For example, customers who have never raised a support ticket but regularly buy from you are probably more likely to make the recommendation. Likewise, customers who have used your support team on multiple occasions and always been satisfied might be equally happy to recommend you.

The opposite is probably true for people with ongoing customer support issues.

#30: Relevant special offers

This is an essential element of any customer lifecycle marketing strategy. Your customers are a diverse bunch of people with changing needs as their relationship with your brand evolves over time.

You need to be sending relevant messages to them at every step of the way.

Turning customers into repeat buyers will require different types of messages and offers, based on their individual needs and expectations. Every interaction they have with your brand after the initial purchase is giving you additional clues about what’s going to inspire future buying decisions – the emails they read/don’t read, the content they engage with, which knowledge base pages they visit, etc.

Your automated workflows need to use these interactions as triggers to constantly send out the most relevant messages and offers.

Automate, one step at a time

Hopefully, this article has given you plenty of ideas about specific automation workflows you can implement to make your marketing strategies more effective and scalable. The great thing about automation is that you can take things as quickly or slowly as you need, introducing workflows one step at a time until you’re ready to take a deeper dive into automation.

The post 30+ Marketing Automation Workflows You Can Implement Right Now appeared first on Venture Harbour.

9 Simple CRO Fixes That Yield Big Results

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is an essential marketing strategy but knowing what to test can be a real nightmare – especially if you’re only just getting started with CRO. Choose the wrong tests and you’re going to waste valuable time, budget and other resources that have no positive impact on your business.

Keep this up and conversion optimisation soon becomes expensive.

Knowing what to test is crucial and understanding which elements of your pages have the most impact on conversion rates is the key to profitable optimisation. To help you get started, here are nine simple CRO fixes that yield big results – insights that took us years to discover for ourselves.

#1: Reduce loading times

If you’re looking to make an instant impact on conversions, the first place to start is loading times. You can’t convert visitors if they click back to search because your pages are taking too long to load. A tell-tale sign that your pages are taking too long to load is a combination of high bounce rates and users only staying on your page for a matter of seconds.

Google’s free page speed tool measures your loading times and offers advice on how to speed things up.

Run your pages through a free page speed test and compare this to the average time spent on each page. If there’s not a great deal of difference between those two numbers, there’s a good chance loading times are getting in the way of your conversion rates.

#2: Use single-column layouts

This is a general design principle you should apply to every page on your website. Your homepage, product/service pages, landing pages, web forms and even your email designs should focus on single column layouts.

By this, I mean full-width divs stacked vertically on top of each other. This makes it easier to prioritise messages, make your content more scannable and create layouts that point user attention to the most important elements of your page.

Set this as your template for every new page and you’ll be able to create high-converting resources in no time. All that’s left is to determine the right message to put across.

Tip: Single-column layouts also make responsive design a breeze but there are parts of your page (service sections, product feeds, etc.), where you might want to triple up into three columns for desktops and larger displays.

#3: The magic number technique

Three really is the magic number when it comes to grouping pieces of information together.

Why is that?

Well, it turns out the human brain is only really capable of remembering three or four pieces of new information at any one time – any more than that and the details start to get a little fuzzy and some might disappear altogether.

Next, we also have a psychological phenomenon, known as the serial position effect, where people naturally interpret the first and last piece of info on a list as being the most important.

There’s also the rule of three in writing and the rule of odds in design – a whole bunch of reasons why you should be grouping pieces of info into sets of threes.

The trick is to lead with the most important point and end with the second most important point (serial position effect) because these will have the most impact and be more memorable.

#4: the inverted pyramid

We’ve looked at the inverted pyramid in previous articles and this is one of the most important design principles in CRO.

This technique vertically stacks content with centre-aligned text, which gradually decreases in width. This creates an inverted pyramid or, in other words, an arrow pointing directly to your CTA button.

Again, make this template the default starting place for your CTA designs and all you really need to worry about is crafting the right message for your CTA copy.

#5: Use multi-step forms

Of all the CRO tests we’ve run here at Venture Harbour, this is the one that has yielded the biggest returns on a consistent basis.

We’re talking about increasing conversions by 300%-743% for ourselves and our clients.

Like many companies, we weren’t too impressed with our firm conversion rates (or our clients’ either). So we decided to do something about it and went back to the drawing board with form design.

We soon realised shorter forms don’t always increase conversions and third-party tests confirmed our own findings. We also determined shorter forms reduce the quality of conversions and the relevance of marketing messages you’re able to send.

What we needed was a way to make longer forms more user-friendly and the answer lied in multi-step form designs.

This breakthrough allowed us to achieve so much more with web forms:

Form length becomes irrelevant (to a large extent).
You can ask more questions, get more data.
This allows you to segment and prioritise form leads.
You can also send more relevant follow-up messages.
By using conditional logic, multi-step forms only ask relevant questions based on the info users provide as they complete your forms.

The results were so effective that we took these findings and engineered our own form builder tool, called Leadformly – so you can turn years of CRO testing and insight into higher conversion rates.

#6: Remove navigation from landing pages

This one couldn’t be more simple but it makes a massive impact on your landing page designs. If you’re not doing so already, get rid of those navigation menus on your landing pages.

Zoho used to feature complex navigation menus on its landing pages.

Landing pages are designed to achieve highly specific conversion goals and all navigation menus do is allow users to stay off course. So get rid of those things and make sure visitors are staying focused on the key message of your landing pages.

Zoho has ditched the nav menus in recent landing pages to keep users locked into the conversion process.

You can always test a subtle navigation menu in your footer of you want to give users an escape route but it probably won’t do much for your conversion rates.

#7: Place your CTA button further down the page

This might sound counterintuitive and it certainly goes against the old philosophy of placing CTA buttons above the fold. But ask yourself how many users are going to land on your page, see that CTA button in the hero section and convert on the spot without needing any more convincing whatsoever.

Try placing your CTA button further down the page and put your effort into creating page copy that actually encourages people to convert.

By all means, keep a CTA button in the hero section if you can’t bear to let go of it, but I recommend repeating that CTA further down the page to give your landing page content a chance to make an impact, rather than simply filling up the page.

#8: Put a different CTA at the bottom of your pages

The majority of visitors who reach the bottom of your web pages aren’t going to buy into the offer of your main CTA. No need to worry, though, because you’re going to place another CTA at the bottom of your pages with an entirely different offer.

This CTA isn’t competing with the main offer of your page. Instead, you’re going to ask users to complete a much softer conversion, like downloading some free content or signing up for a webinar – something encouraging them to hand over their email address.

Capture these leads with a softer conversion and you’ve got everything you need to nurture them along the buying process.

#9: Try exit-intent popups

If that CTA at the bottom of your pages doesn’t do the trick, there’s still one last throw of the dice. Exit-intent popups give you the chance to prompt users with a final CTA that only triggers of they look like they’re about to leave your site.

Now, by this stage, they haven’t bought into your main offer and they haven’t taken the bait with your secondary conversion goal either. Clearly, conversion intent is very low for these visitors and you’re about to interrupt the user experience by making it harder to leave your site – so you really need to get this one right.

Instead of asking users to do something for you, offer them something that’s really difficult to turn up. It could be a money-off coupon for a future purchase, a free month trial of your premium software package or access to an online tool that’ll keep them engaged with your primary conversion goal.

Small changes, big returns

By testing the minor changes we’ve looked at in this article, you should be able to make a serious impact on your conversion rates and this will get you off to a great start with CRO.

By the time you’re done with these, you’ll not only have higher conversion rates, but you’ll also be a lot more comfortable with running tests and yielding positive results. And, more importantly, you’ll have enough experience and user data to see what needs testing next.

The post 9 Simple CRO Fixes That Yield Big Results appeared first on Venture Harbour.