Email marketing is more popular than ever. However, 2.4 million email sent globally every second are making marketer’s job a lot harder. It’s important to learn new strategies of email marketing and lead nurturing that converts leads into customers. We are excited to announce a cool strategy – Video (Visual marketing) integration in email campaigns.

Did You Hear About Visual Marketing!

You can’t miss visual marketing! Visuals are an exceptional way to educate, inform, and entertain prospects and customers. Power of visual is more greater than words! Types of visuals are:

• Infographics

• Videos

• Graphics (Photos, Memes)

• Presentations

• Podcast etc.

Keys to Visual Marketing Success

• Create a compelling story

• Choose the right type of content.

• Find the right partner

• Focus on great design and branding

• Promote your content strategically

(Source: Marketo)

Visuals have the power to attract people who wouldn’t take the time to read long copy.

Using tags with your visual content provides an excellent opportunity to be found through organic search.

It helps to get large number of audience through social media.

Here are some FACTS which reveals that visual marketing is very effective to increase traffic, social media presence, lead generation and customer acquisition.

• 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text.

• High quality infographics are read 30x more than text only blog post.

• Photos are liked 2x more than text updates on Facebook.

• Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more re-tweets.

• Images and photos are the most important tactic in optimizing social media posts.

• 93% of most engaging posts on Facebook include images as opposed to status updates, links etc.

• 70% of marketers plan to increase their use of original visual assets in 2015.

• 40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text.

• 94% more page visits are received by social posts with images than those without.

• 60% of consumers are more likely to click on a business whose images appear in search results.

• 12% average growth in traffic for businesses who market with infographics.

• 40% of people will respond better to visual info than plain text.

Video Integration With Your Email Campaign

People love watching videos. Videos are an easy and entertaining medium to deliver more information. Video has become an essential marketing tool. It’s very effective to use video in your email campaign. It will boost your leads, conversions, sales and keep your customers happy & engaged.

Related: How to Use Email Marketing For Max. Conversion : An Inbound Tactic

Here, we’ll discuss how can you improve the efficiency of your email marketing by using videos. Here are some stats which show why you should consider using video in emails:

• Video in Email Campaigns can increase Click-Through Rates by 65% and ROI by 20%.

• Marketers who integrate video in email generate 40% higher monthly revenues than those who don’t use.

• Marketers who use video in email have a 10% higher average order.

• 81% of marketers planning to use video in future email campaigns.

• 24% increased in conversion rates.

How to Use Video in Email?

There are 3 ways to include video in your email:

1. Video plays inside the email.

23% of marketers embed video player in email message.

Email clients that support video – iOS device, Apple Mail4, iCloud Mail, Thunderbird 13

Email clients that support video – Gmail, Yahoo

2. Using a GIFs.

27% of marketers use animated GIFs in email.

3. Using a static image with link to a page.

29% of smart marketers link to a video landing page.

21% of marketers link to a page on a video sharing network (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)

Which Method Should You Use?

We recommend you to use a static image or GIF with link to a video landing page.

Tip 1: Make a short length video relevant to your product or services. Take your time to create an interesting video.

Tip 2: Take a screenshot (image) of a scene from your video and place it within your email with a play button over top of it. Here’s an example:

Tip 3: Highlight value of video in email copy and use it as the primary visual element in your message.

Tip 4: You can also use GIFs instead of static image.

Tip 5: Place strong calls-to-action (CTA), such as “Watch Video Now” and link it to a landing page.

Tip 6: Using the word “Video” in an email subject line boost open rate by 19%.

Tip 7: Embed video to your dedicated landing page.

Tip 8: Place brand logo, contact information, forms, call-to-action and other data on landing page. Here’s an example:

Tip 9: Encourage video sharing.

Be a smart marketer and use the power of video and email together for best results.

You can also check out some bestsellers video types which can help you to create a right video here – How Videos Help Your Business : 12 Top Ideas.

The post How To Use The Power Of Video In Your Email Campaign appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Every marketing strategy has common objectives – Generate Quality lead and Max. Conversion. Inbound marketing is the most effective marketing method for achieving these objectives.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is all about attracting leads through valuable content, not interrupting them with direct sales pitch.

“These days, people want to learn before they buy, be educated instead of pitched.” — Brian Clark

54% more leads are generated by inbound tactics than traditional paid marketing.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.

By publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive. Now that’s marketing people can love. – Hubspot

Different inbound marketing channels:

• Content

• Social Media

• Email

• SEO

• Blog posts

• Landing page

• Call-to-actions

• Lead-capture-forms

• CRM

• Mobile

• PPC advertising

Identify your audience and identify their pains & problems, and come up with solutions.

To get more insight how this tactic can help you, I wanna tell you a story of a real estate owner – Abhishek B.

He was struggling to get qualified leads. His marketing strategies (traditional, because he was not awre about inbound) didn’t get proper results. Abhishek wasted a lot of money on old outbound method.

Then one of his friend suggest him to try inbound marketing for his business. Then he started using it. Firstly he started to identify pains & problems of his target audience. Now he came up with a problem solving and engaging content.

He started using social media channels to engage with target audience and followers. Social media is great place to know your audience and their problems. He regularly created useful and interesting content for their readers around business targeted keywords. These ways attracted people to his website and he got a fair traffic now.

Now he had to turn these visitors into leads. For this, he built attractive landing pages, sign up forms, lead capturing forms, product videos, proper call to actions and place these on right places on website. These variables helped him to get most interested and qualified leads.

Now he got number of leads, its time to nurture these leads. For lead nurturing, email newsletters are most effective method. He started to send newsletters for his subscribers regularly (1 or 2 per week) which contains most popular blog posts, announcement or event news, special offers etc. Email helped him to build a good relationship with his subscribers and leads. And he succeed to turn these leads into potential customers.

Now Abhishek has a number of potential and satisfied customers. With inbound marketing, he saved a lot of money and make a great revenue. Inbound marketing tactic is the best way to get new leads, lead nurturing and delight existing customers. Because satisfied customers are the best promoters of any business.

$20K is the average companies save per year by investing more in inbound marketing vs. Outbound. – Hubspot

Here is inbound marketing strategy:

1. Get found with useful content – Articles, blog, SEO, social media etc.

2. Attract mature leads to your website or people – Lead capturing forms, landing pages, CTAs etc.

3. Convert leads into potential customers – Email, CRM

4. Delight your customers – Newsletters, special offers, events etc.

Related: How to Generate Inbound Leads For Your Business

How to Optimize Your Email Marketing for Conversions

As we discussed above how inbound marketing can be very helpful for you. And email marketing is also one of the best channel of inbound marketing to nurture your leads.

9 out of 10 clients perceive email marketing as a channel of importance to great strategic importance for achieving business goals. – Emailmonday

If you’re not considering email in your inbound marketing strategy you’re missing a lot of opportunities. Email marketing is all about delivering right content to right people at right time.

Email is one of the highest channels for delivering ROI, according to 74% of companies. – Adestra

75.8% marketers said they were using more email than they were three years ago.

Here we’ll see how can you get conversions from your email marketing.

Email List

UNIVERSAL TRUTH: Email marketing is only as good as the quality of your recipient/subscriber’s list. It’s very simple – There is no email marketing without subscribers! You must grow and update your list regularly to get more out of it.

Marketing lists have a tendency to expire at a rate of about 25% a year.

So you have to revise your contact list regularly, because people change their id, People leave their companies, get married and change their names – life happens.

How to Grow Email List?

You should not buy a third party list and don’t interrupt people with irrelevant ads or marketing/promotional messages. Because it negetively affect your deliverability rate and you could get blacklisted or marked as Spam.

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.” — Seth Godin

Here are some white-hat ways to build a powerful email list.

1. Co-host a webinar or event with a niche company and collect email addresses through registration process.

2. Collect visitors emails and other information on landing page.

3. Add signup forms on your website and blog page.

4. Exit intent pop-up forms are one of the most effective way.

5. Use proper calls-to-action and link it to dedicated landing pages.

6. Collect emails in your physical store

7. Host a social media contest and collect email ids of participants.

8. Use twitter ad platform to get more subscribers.

9. Give your social followers reason to subscribe to your email list. Place a Call-to-action on your Facebook page to grow your email list. Turn followers into subscribers.

10. Make posts to available download and provide white-papers in order to get redears contact details.

To Get More Insight, Read This Post – 20 White-hat Tactics To Grow Email List Successfully

How To Know Your List is Good?

A bad email list can reduce your conversion rate. To know your list is good you have to ask some questions to yourself.

1. Do Subscribers with this list have a prior relationship with you?

If you send them regular newsletters and they take an action (open,click etc.), then you have a good list.

2. Do you have an opt-in list?

If you answer is yes, then it’s a good list.

3. Do you have separate unsubscribe list?

It’s a good list, if your answer is yes.

4. Did you purchase the list from third party?

It’s a black hat tactic. Never purchase a list from third party.

5. Have you emailed these contacts within last 12 months?

If there is some contacts you haven’t send email within last 12 months then remove them from your list or ask them for sign up again.

Engagement rates decrease as mailing size increases. Mailings sent to less than 50 people had open rates 34% higher than the industry benchmark. – Informz

List Segmentation

Segmentation is the powerful tactic to send relevant message and increase your conversions.

4 out of 10 subscribers mark email as Spam due to irrelevancy.

More than three-quarters (76%) of companies stated that they are doing basic segmentation, while an additional 15% are planning to implement this in the future. – Adestra

Segmentation is most important to send right message to right people at right place. irrelevant content sent to a poorly segmented list — and that results in low open/ click-through rates and lots of unsubscribes. There are different segmentation variables -

• Geography/Location segmentation

• Industry/Job segmentation

• Segmentaion based on Interests

• Segmentation based on past behaviour

• Brand advocates segmentation – frequent buyers, social media fans etc.

Use the data to segment your email list. It will reduce you unsubscribe rate.

37% of B2B marketers says, lack of user data is the major obstacle to effective segmentation. – B2B magazine

Tip: Top reasons for unsubscribe

• Too many emails

• irrelevant content

Email Integration With Other Marketing Channels

There are different inbound marketing channels – social media, SEO, content marketing, mobile marketing etc. Don’t look these tools as competitors, but use these as a friend for common business goals – Lead generation, get customers and drive conversions.

60% of marketers use conversion rates to evaluate email campaigns effectiveness. – Emailmonday

Be a smart marketer and use the power of these tools together for best results. Email is most powerful when it’s integrated with other marketing strategies.

More than five in every six companies (84%) see email as being fully integrated with other marketing channels within the next five years, with 76% believing all email communications will be completely personalised. – Adestra

You can Integrate email with social, search, mobile, videos & analytics.

Email and Social Media Integration

Study shows that email strategies that integrate social media into their sends lead to better.

results. Add social media buttons – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin etc. to your emails to extend the reach.

Why should you integrate email and social media?

• It extend reach of your emails.

• It allows you to connect with your audience.

• It gives an opportunity for list building.

• It allows subscribers to share emails with his friends or followers.

Emails with social sharing buttons increase click through rates by 158%.

Send targeted emails to subscribers who have mentioned you on social media. Run retargeting ads on Facebook and Twitter for people who click your emails.

Email & Search Integration

Many email platform like Sarv, enable you to view your email web version. It helps with SEO. Use your targeted keywords and ensure all images have alt tags.

Analytics Integration

It’s very easy to integrate analytics with your email campaign. You can track your email campaign with Google analytics.

How many people clicked through on your email?

How many people opened your campaign?

Mobile integration

91% of adults have their mobile phone. Mobile have changed the complete marketing landscape. More than 60% of emails are opened on a mobile device.

Make your emails mobile responsive.

• Test campaign to see how they look in different mobile devices.

• Make sure your CTA buttons & links are easy to click.

• Use alt tags for images.

• Optimize landing pages & forms for mobile.

More than three in every five companies (61%) are optimizing email for mobile devices; an increase of 144% in just two years. – Adestra

Email and Video Integration

People engage more with videos. Adding video to your email campaigns is easy, trackable, and engaging content that drives click throughs. Video increases click-through-rates by 65%.

Take your time to create one such video and integrate with your email to get regular click through.

Using the word “Video” in an email subject line boost open rate by 19%.

When marketers included a video in an email, the click-through rate increased by 200% – 300%.

What to Know About Sender Score and Server IP addresses?

A server IP address is a series of numbers that uniquely identify the server that’s sending your emails. You should check your IP reputation regularly. IPs use sender reputation to decide whether (or not) they will deliver your email to your subscribers.

An email’s deliverability depends largely on the reputation of the IP address that sends it. If your Sender Scores are lower, you may risk being filtered out by some inboxes.

There are two types of IPs:

1. Dedicated IP

2. Shared IP

Dedicated IP

Dedicated IP is best for companies that send a lot of email on a regular basis. Its an unique IP address which is completely dedicated to you and offers more control over the email deliverability.

You’re the sole influence on your sender reputation, it’s your responsibility to maintain IP reputation. For this you need to be confident that your email list is fully permission-based.

Shared IP

This is one IP address that share with multiple companies and send emails for them. It is much more affordable than dedicated IP. In shared IPs, the sender reputation is defined by the actions of all companies using the same IP.

You should ask your email service provider company about reputation of their shared IPs to make sure their emails have high deliverability rates.

You’ve got the insight about IPs, it’s time to know about sender score.

Sender Score

“The Sender Score is an indication of the trustworthiness of an email sender’s IP address and is used by email providers and filters to determine additional email filtering criteria. Just like a credit score is used by financial institutions to decide the terms of a loan, email providers use the Sender Score to determine the terms for filtering your emails.” - Sender Score

TIP: When you move to a new IP address, don’t send emails to your whole list all at once.

Conclusion

If you’re sitting around a meeting room with your management, trying to figure out how to catch mature leads and potential clients, drive sales, generate more conversions or just “stay top-of-mind” for your target audience, you can suggest there’s a solution that can help to solve all these problems at once: an email newsletter!

Email is still one of the best channels in order to generate return on marketing investment.

The top three metrics used to track email marketing success are click-through-rate – 47%, conversion rate – 43%, click-to-open rate – 38% – Pardot

RECOMMENDED: 5 Ingredients To Make Email Marketing Your ‘Cup Of Tea’

The post How to Use Email Marketing For Maximum Conversion: An Inbound Tactic appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Content marketing is a field of intelligence, creativity, and long-term connectivity. If you are writing something dedicatedly for your customers and something, which is valuable to them, then your personal connect will enrich your business.

Necessity is to focus on content that leads to

• Brand awareness

• Lead generation

• Vendor-Customer engagement

• Lead nurturing

• Direct sales

• Professional networking through social media channels.

Every business has its own unique or specific objectives and content marketing helps a lot, though slowly, to achieve these objectives.

These three bubbles contain three basic approaches necessary to be followed in every business or department. Now there are some key points, which I will mention in, this articles to focus on how to start the content marketing. What will be the necessary steps to be followed based on which we will get our results.

#1. Context Based Content

“What gets measured, gets managed”- Peter Drucker

Context basically refers to the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood. So, writing a content and marketing of this content based on our business nature, customer needs will help to build engagements and hence to nurture leads probably.

• Define the metrics of your content

• Measure your nature of business, products range, sufficient funds, market presence, growth phase (developing, developer), customer base

• Develop a unique & relevant idea

• Be SMART [Simple, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Time-bound]

#2. Build Realistic Plan

“Failing to plan is planning to fail”- Alan Lakein

Follow the above mentioned key points to make your content business oriented and successful. Try to find out

• Who are your target readers

• What kind of content do these readers like e.g., text articles, info graphics, research articles etc.

• Prepare a platform where your content is easily accessible from smartphones, laptop/desktop, iPad, newspapers etc.

• Try to serve a valuable and latest information to your readers

• Let your potential readers make your potential buyers.

#3. Real Execution of Plan Built

Build a plan to execute it, for this an organization needs an efficient & confident marketing team.

Planning and execution are two foundation pillars and if you execute the plan you have thought for then the results will be remarkable. Create a plan, which appears simple and involves multiple steps and person. Multiple brains will join and surely yield a beautiful thought & of-course the writing material.

To generate a creative content involve every single person of the team and take proper advices to include it if seems matching to the idea. This will make you generate a specific and unique content every time.

#4. Tools & Technology

“Content & technology are strange bedfellows. We are joined together. Sometimes we misunderstand each other. But isn’t that after all the definition of marriage?”- Howard Stringer

Use the tools and technology to make the content creation faster, easier & more effective. This is a boon to which yield best, fancy & beautiful results.

#5. Tracking & Reporting

Say the content is prepared and published. What now remains is the tracking and reporting of this published content.

#6. Analyze Results

Now based on the reports check the results & proceed with the plans(out of many) which is useful.

#7. Be Patient: You’ll Get Slow and Permanent Results

Content related marketing leads to slow and steady results, which though take time to be visible but are long term and permanent.

Also Read: 11 Great Content Marketing Tools for Marketers

Content marketing is one of the best marketing tool in order to acquire and retain customers.

Hope you like this post. Don’t forget to share your views in comment box below!

The post How to Create Content That Leads To Conversion [TIPS] appeared first on Sarv Blog.

In our previous articles, we’ve discussed how social media are great for business and how to make a Facebook business page – Tips to Make Compelling Facebook Business Page [CheckList].

But one question that we always get asked is how do you get more people to become a fan of your page? In order to get success on Facebook you need quality content and an engaged community. Both communities and content are key elements to build brand awareness, because without one there’s no one to read your content. To attract more people to your page, it’s important to post engaging, interesting and valuable content regularly on your page.

See this infographic below if you want to know how do you gain your first 1000 followers or fans on Facebook. It will surely help you!

If you don’t have facebook page, Create Now!

Want to see how Sarv uses Facebook? Like our Facebook Page Here

The post How to Get First 1000 Loyal Facebook Fans [Infographic] appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Website is a very effective medium to represent your business or blog online. Website is a way to reach potential customers. It is necessary for your website to be attractive so that it gets attention of users & search engines. Search engines make a website visible and gives it a global presence.

So, your site must be search engine friendly otherwise search engines could ignore your site. Google & other search engines- Yahoo, Bing appreciates SEO friendly sites. Below are some points for creating a search engine friendly site.

# URL Structure

• Website URL must be clear about what the page narrates, visitors will appreciate it.

• Website URL should be SEO friendly to rank well in search engines.

• URL should contain relevant keyword so both the search engines and visitors know exactly what your page is about.

• To separate words in URL, use hyphens rather than underscores

• For Example: A URL, such as, http://sarv.com/email-marketing/feature.php is a SEO friendly URL. But http://sarv.com/sns/?item5532 is not SEO friendly because it doesn’t help to determine what that page is about.

# Website Content

• Content on site is most important thing. You must provide high quality, informative & original content on your web pages.

• If your content contains useful information then it will attract many visitors & links to your site.

• You must need to watch out for duplicate content on your site. You must avoid it because search engines give penalty to your website.

• Long & unique content with images attracts search engines.

• Use inbound linking, as search engines follow hyperlinks for finding the new content.

# Index-able Content

• Firstly, you should know that search engine software could only read text.

• If your website contains flash, images, video etc. it may look good to the human eye but it is invisible to search spiders or crawlers.

• Crawlers can’t read these types of stuff. You should describe each image with “Alt” text.

• Search engine can’t see your image; they can only read “Alt” text & index it for your web page.

• If site includes video files, you should include text that describes your video.

# Properly-Optimized Images

• Don’t forget to optimize the images on website.

• Make sure that size of images should be minimum (30 to 100kb) to provide good user experience.

• Big images will make website load slowly & it will negatively affect user experience & search engine ranking.

• Include alt image text with all your site graphics.

# Title Tag

• Every web page of your site should contain a good & unique title tag that describe content on page for visitors & search engines.

• Title tag appears in title bar of browser window. The search engines use this tag to determine what information page contains.

• Title tag should contain the primary keyword of your website & length of this tag should not more than 70 characters.

• Make your title tag interesting for visitors so that they visit your site.

# Keywords

• Keywords are the other most important things. Keywords are combination of web phrases that are used to search.

• You must do research to find relevant keywords for your website.

• Google offers keyword tool to find out relevant keywords for your website.

• Make your keywords long tail (3 to 4 words), this makes competition less & you can attract more customers.

• Place Your Keywords in many Different Places- blog posts.

Also Read: #10 On-Page SEO Factors: What Everyone Ought To Know

# Responsive Design

• Website design should be responsive.

• Make sure visitors can easily access your website with any device- Desktop, Mobile devices, or Tablets etc.

• Google also give more credit to responsive websites.

• Responsive design is more important for user experience (UX) & SEO.

• A recent Google study revealed, “61% of mobile visitors will return to Google to find a site that is more easily readable.”

# Avoid Hidden Text

• Some sites contain hidden pages or doorway pages which are visible to the search crawler but not for the visitors. This is a black hat SEO technique.

• It is an illegal way for getting high rankings. If you are using this type of bad methods like doorway pages, unnatural links, low quality or duplicate content etc. then search engines will punish your website.

• So you should always use legal & white SEO techniques. This way will take some time but you will get permanent & good results.

# Proper Use of Sitemaps

• Be sure to include both an HTML sitemap for your website visitors, and an XML sitemap for the search engines.

• This will ensure your visitors can locate exactly what they’re looking for, as well as ensuring complete and efficient indexation by Google.

Final Words!

These are some tips to create search engine friendly websites. Make your website in a user friendly manner so that users & search engines can’t ignore your website. Once you’ve built your site, you must continue to follow SEO best practices in terms of content, link-building and social media.

If you use search engine friendly techniques then you will get page views & good rank in search engine result page (SERP). By following the above mentioned ways you will get a healthy website for your business.

Also Read: This is How Search Engine Work [Complete Process]

Don’t forget to share your thoughts!!

Source: TLD6.com

The post How to Make Search Engine Friendly Website [CheckList] appeared first on Sarv Blog.

It is no a easy process to earn the audience, subscribers. So, it is a big deal to keep them associated and let them grow your business. A challenge is always there for any content writer in an industry to keep the subscribers stick to them and force then to renew the service.

But how & what will be the tactics to follow to avoid losing the subscribers and keep them interested about the next plan?

# Treasure your customers

• Show your customers that they are important to you and your business needs them.

• Design a newsletter with content useful, informational and profitable to them.

• Regularly being in touch and ask them id there is any issue will help you gain the faith and step toward building a strong relationship.

• They will return again and being happy with the support spread a positive reference among its own audience.

• Call your customers and share valuable information with them.

• Try to keep them updated and then you may expect a good business.

  Welcome mail

Soon after a new sign-up is received send a welcome mail to your new subscriber. Inform them that you are aware of their subscription. You may introduce your company will logo, address etc. mentioned.

You may include the below list in your welcome mail

• Warm introduction

• Future plans and upgrades

• Brief view of policies and required associated links

• Personal signature

• Necessary links and deals

• Direct access details of the dashboard of service they’ve ordered.

  Thank you mail

• After receiving, confirming the order from the customer, send them the automated thank you mail.

• Try to keep the mail updated with a new content and format to keep the customers interested.

• Make it a regular process to keep your customers updated about your new deals and offers, if any.

• You may even prepare a video for your audience. Video is a good eye catcher and is viewed more than simple text.

• Keep preparing variable designs for different business products.

  Auto responders

• Create, set & forget.

• Prepare the auto responders ahead of time and manage the timetable to send them whenever required.

  Stretch your helping hand

• It is possible that your customers may use other services also only if they know you have them. So, prepare newsletters mentioning your new and existing services so that they may subscribe.

• Try to be helpful person instead of a sales person and ask them if they need any guidance to run the service.

  Feedback

• Let your subscribers rate you. This is necessary to further provide improved services in future.

• Prepare a simple form and send it to your users.

  Introduce your existing clients with a nurtured brand value with your logo mentioned

  Social Presence

• Social presence is a necessary tool and if you have a good social presence then inform this to your audience. You may earn their faith and loyalty.

• Mention the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. buttons in your newsletter so that your subscribers may follow you if they like you.

• Also, if you own a blog then prepare a newsletter informing about the blog so your customers may explore you more.

# Get Started. Hit the nail & fix the box!!

• Sending regular newsletters is a kind of phone call one make regularly to its relatives. This helps maintaining a good relationship. Newsletter is no different than these calls.

• Like your relatives, your customers will remember you and this regular approach will prove you better than your competitors.

# After sales follow-up

1. Set up your follow up timetable and fix the date and time you have committed to the client. Stick to your commitment and respond even if the solution is far away.

2. Always focus sending personalized emails. In your subscriber contact list do not forget to add another column of name and phone number and address if possible. Send mails addressing directly to the person receiving mail.

3. Once paid, it is not a good thing to forget the customers altogether. You’ll need them in future for renewing same service or to buy some other service. So, treat all your customers as your VIP customers and show your care.

4. Make this a habit to send regular reminders to your customers about any kind of upgrade, downtime, and server shifting process. This will let your customers be prepared for the situation and hence the loss will be low.

5. Survey is necessary for a company/business. Regular feedbacks will help you improve your services further and provide best to your users.

6. Keep sending the mails for renewal or new order and keep the content shot and sweet and emotional.

7. Call To Action is very important for your mails and is an option where users may check your services properly. So, mention CTA anywhere possible.

8. Stay cool and try to be a good listener.

What’s your favorite follow up tip?

Also Read: How Can You Make Email Practices Worth for All Your Subscribers?

The post How to Follow-up: Key Requirement to Upgrade Your Sales appeared first on Sarv Blog.

But million dollar question is, how can you create your business blog more interesting and engaging? How can you attract more people to your blog? If you are curious to know answers of these questions, give this article a view. This article contains some helpful tips which will surely help you.

Let’s start with some blogging tips.

Tip #1. Know Your Business Goals

• The hardest part of blogging is the beginning

• Find out what are your objectives for the blog

• Inform your readers about your business mission & values

• Educate customers or readers about your products or services

• Establish yourself as an expert in your industry

• Offer blog post on regular basis.

Tip #2. Know Your Audience

• Visitors can communicate with you directly through their comments.

• Visitors share their information to get some educational stuff like eBook, guide, webinar, white papers etc.

• This help you to learn about your audience.

           -Industry type

           -Business type

           -Revenue

           -Locations

           -Age range

           -Gender

           -Occupation

           -Education level

• Use this information to develop ideal content which can solve their queries

• Build your network. Create community & join community to share your content.

Tip #3. Create Content Strategy

• Don’t just plan to write- Create a strategy.

• Create content that serves both your business goals and your audience.

• Create a blog post with original content on regular basis.

• Never create a boring content. Follow RITE- Relevant, Interesting, Timely, and Entertaining.

• Tell people about your post with a great headline.

• Develop relationship with bloggers in your niche industry.

• Stay up to date about your industry and share updates, news etc, with your audience.

• Create different type of content:-

          – Blog Post

          – Videos

          – Tutorials

          – Product demo

          – Infographics etc.

• Choose the topics which are relevant to your expertise.

• Offer relevant content which is related to your title or topic. it is the most important practice you must follow.

• Find the best time to write.

Tip #4. Clean Design & Layout

• Make sure your blog is user friendly so people can engage with this.

• Provide subscribe option to blog, so visitors can subscribe & get new updates of your blog.

• Visitors or users can navigate to previous blog post.

• Blog must be easily accessible from website homepage.

• Blog must has search function. It allows users to search anything on your blog.

• Users can easily like & share posts on social media channels.

• Update your content regularly that makes it more engaging.

• Media can grab visitor’s attention easily. So add attractive media like images, video etc. Which should be relevant and related to content.

Tip #5. Some Other Best Practices

• Post must have a catchy title which can grab attention like “How to_____”, “Trends You Need to Know___”, “Top 10 Tips___”, “Most Effective Ways____” etc.

• Bullets points should be used to break large sections.

• There should be at least one visual or media in content which encourage people to click on your blog post.

• Adding a call to action can be a good way to engage readers.

• Post must focus on your targeted keywords. Select the long tail keywords.

• Title must contain targeted keyword.

• Blog post must include focused keyword at least a couple of times.

• Image or graphics must contain alt text.

• Links the post with other relevant pages & your previous blog posts.

• Ask for comments, questions and feedback.

• Ask your audience to share the post on social media channels like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter & Google plus.

• Share your blog post on social bookmarking sites :- StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Pinterest, Digg, Delicious etc.

Final Words !

So, now you have some best practices & if you follow these you can create more interesting and engaging blog.

A blog is far more personal and is an excellent way to give your company an unique edge & voice. It is an ideal way to ensure that your customers keep coming back to your site. Keep updating your blog and a little bit of patience will bring good results.

If there is anything you’d like to share about business blogging, Let us know!

The post How to Create a Successful Business Blog People Actually Read appeared first on Sarv Blog.

• Patience
• Creativity
• Potential

Starting fresh means you have to start from zero audience and build your contact list. This is no easy process and this requires a proper strategy to set it up. Your strategy should include as where to target and how to target an audience. What must be the steps to let the audience register with your company?

This is not a one-night process, this will consume time, manpower, and money and then if all goes right, you’ll get fruitful results.

Here is how we will start it.

• EASY SIGNUP

Now when you’ve finished creating your website, now the focus must be to grab the visitors and hence the subscribers. Create a sign-up form and insert a simple link on your website. Make it extra visible on the page so to grab the attention of the visitor.

Another approach would be to create a newsletter and share it on social media to drag the population. Place a sign up form link in this newsletter so that the interested ones may complete the signup process.

This will help you grow your subscriber list. While following the process patience is necessary and hence this will take a while to increase your subscriber list.

• OFFER SOMETHING VALUABLE & INTERESTING

Offer your subscribers or new visitors something valuable and interesting enough to be grabbed at the earliest. Name your offer and launch it weekly or every 2 weeks or as per the comfort of your business.

These offers, if valuable, will help you maintain the high open rate and develop the references to let new person join in.

• EXPLAIN YOUR STRATEGY

Creating and sending newsletters to the subscribers will help you know what your customers like the most in your company products. So, after a few number of campaign are sent, change your strategy and try to focus on your subscribers’ interest and serve them accordingly. This will hike your open and click through rate.

This fragmentation will also help you create the articles accordingly and share the posts.

Ones your subscriber list grow, fragment it according the interest of the clients. Target them with specific posts and articles with a topic of interest.

• USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Sharing news on social media implies to share it with millions on users on social media accounts, though it must be worth enough and with an interesting topic and content. If a few like your post then it will surely be shared and liked and this will give your more signups.

Share and likes received for particular post will help increase the page indexing and like this you will increase your presence online.

• MAINTAIN A GOOD SUPPORT DESK

Sarv maintain a dedicated support team for customers, who are phonic, live chat and ticket option. All these will make it easy for the clients to get the resolution at the earliest and finish the work as soon as possible.

Provide instant reply to your customers to build the trust and this will reflect the efficiency of the team too.

“You’ll grow if your clients grow. So, take good care of them.”

The post How to Grow Your Business: Some Key Features appeared first on Sarv Blog.

In today’s world, lead generation is an important strategy for modern marketers. Leads are very important for any business, without potential leads you can’t be successful. You must acquire leads & convert them into potential customers. Marketers use lead generation to build brand awareness, nurture customers & generate revenues. Some outbound strategies such as cold calling, direct mail, TV ads & expensive advertising are not generating qualified leads quickly.

“Inbound marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing”

In this article, we will discuss about how inbound marketing can generate qualified leads for your business.

What Is Lead?

Before knowing about inbound lead generation, we must know about what is a lead. A lead is a person who has indicated an interest in your company’s product or service. Some examples of lead are- You get a random call from a person for information about your service or product. Some people respond to a survey, people visit your store and submit their information on your lead capture form. 

What is Inbound Methodology?

With inbound lead generation, you attract a steady stream of potential customers to your website with interesting content and build their interest in your products and services over time. You need to focus on inbound methodology, it is a best way to convert strangers into customers & promoters of your business.

Related: How to Use Email Marketing For Maximum Conversion: An Inbound Tactic

First step, You have to work on unique ways which attract people to your business like unique & informative content, social media. Second step, convert visitors into leads through forms, call-to-action(CTA) & landing pages. Third step, turn these leads into customers through emails, work-flows. Forth step, delight your customers through smart content, events & turn them into promoters of your business. See This Visual.

Ways in Which Leads are Generated

A lead is generated through information collection. We know that a lead is a person who has indicated an interest in your services or products. Now let’s talk about the ways in which leads are generated.

Job Application: When an individual fills out a job application, they are willing to share a lot of personal information. Filling out the job application shows their interest in job. This person can be considered as a lead for company’s recruiting team.

Coupons: If you place out an online coupon on the Internet and people find it valuable, they will share their name & email address to get it. This information is enough for you to know that person has interest in your service & it allows you to continue the conversation through email.

Content: In order to understand the interest of a person in your service or product, you will need to collect more information. Enough information is very essential for a sales representative to understand the interest of person in your service.

Here is an example, how to collect enough information: Like if someone provide an online ebook for inbound marketing, but to download it, you need to fill a form & provide some information like- first name, last name, company name, job title, email id, phone number, website url & other.

Components of Lead Generations

Now lets understand the mechanics of lead generation. Here are some components:

1. Create Content

In order to convert leads faster, you should provide visitors with relevant content that they are more willing to exchange their contact information for on your website.

Here are 3 things to consider when creating content :

         a. Value:

Content should be valuable to your visitors & prospects. Content must solve the queries of your target audience.

          b. Relevant:

Create unique content & offer that are relevant to your target audiences.

          c. Unique:

Don’t offer content similar to your competitor. Be creative & offer unique.

2. Landing Page 

It is a web page where your visitors land after they click on your call-to-action. You need to make sure that you offering a relevant landing page to visitors. You can also provide video content on your landing page. Elements of landing pages:

         a. Headers:

-Keep headers simple.

-Include company name or logo

-Put contact information in header

        b. Headline

-Clear & strong headline

-Use words which grab visitors attention

        c. Copy

-Strong & clear copy about what you offer

-Keep copy to few short paragraphs or use some bullet points.

         d. Visual

-Always include an image

-Image must be relevant enough to understand what you offer

“Businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages got 7 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages.” (Hubspot)

Related: How To Create A Perfect Landing Page That Works

3. Lead Capture Form 

It is the most important element of landing page to collect contact information. Now collect information of visitors via lead capturing form which contains name, company name, email address, region, phone number & some additional information.

Use a call to action button like “Download Now” for ebooks or guides or “Book My Seat” for webinar. Once visitors fill their information, they should be redirected to a thank you page.

4. Offer 

If you are providing an offer on landing page which must have enough value, so visitors encourage to fill it out & provide personal information. Offers can include free trial or demo of your product. Offer should be designed to start a conversation.

5. Call-to-Action (CTA) 

Next step is creating the call-to-action to place on your website. CTA grabs visitors attention and takes visitors to the landing page. A Call-to-Action(CTA) can be an image, button, or message that calls visitors to take some action.

You need to make sure that your CTA must be action oriented & clear. You must place CTA everywhere: on website pages, in emails, in blog posts, content offers etc.

Related: What Is An Effective Call-to-Action (CTA)?

Conclusion

This is an overview of inbound lead generation. Inbound lead generation is one of the most effective ways to take leads and convert them into customers. Results of inbound marketing are measurable.

Sources:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/beginner-inbound-lead-generation-guide-ht

http://bitly.com/

The post How To Generate Inbound Leads For Your Business [Best Practices] appeared first on Sarv Blog.