Work From Home, a practice that is currently adopted and implemented by so many organizations. To survive this pandemic, companies with no WFH policies have also accepted this norm. It doesn’t matter if you are a small business or big one with a better finance backup, everyone has accepted WFH as their new normal and new workstation.

WFH is the coin with pros and cons and no one knows what you are going to get. Sometimes it benefits the organization more than the employees or vise versa. According to new research, there are employees leaving jobs just because of a long commute. People don’t want to travel long. So some take it as an advantage and for some, it is a disadvantage.

Also, in this current situation of CoronaVirus (COVID-19) pandemic, everyone is instructed to stay at home to be safe. Work from home always worries employers that this luxury reduces the productivity of their employees. Well, these are some researches showing that remote workers are more productive than in-office workers.

According to a survey and LiveMint article “While the COVID-19 impact can be felt by organisations across sectors, 72 percent of the organisations stated that its impact will be felt beyond six months. Around 70 percent of the organisations believe that the single biggest concern for continued remote working is fall in productivity.”

Take a look at these facts:

• In-Office workers take 18 minutes of breaks while remote workers take 22 minutes.
• On average remote workers work 1.4 more days in a month and 16.8 more days in a year.
• If we exclude lunch, break time, and others, remote workers stay still for only 27 minutes while in-office workers stay ideal for 37 minutes.

But yes, while working from home you also become your own worst enemy. You are free to be yourself, no one is peeping over you, no coworkers to distract you, and most of all, you can wear pyjamas while working.

So, how can you keep your productivity unaffected while working from home?

Get An Early Head Start:

Jumping into your work as soon as you wake up is the best way to start your work from home. Go through all the work and to-do list you are going to cover today. I know moving from your pillow to laptop is kind of a battle but you have to win this one now.

Make a Workstation:

Being ready mentally and physically are totally two different things. You wake up, take a shower, and change clothes to prepare you only physically. Your mind still knows you are in your comfort zone, so it is still not ready to work.

Setup a different area. Try to be on a chair and table. Your bed is not that ideal for working. Make yourself a coffee before starting working. Wear decent clothes, at least on top, so are always prepared for meetings.

Work Structure is Important:

Before starting work, make a flow of every work you are going to do. Keep some spare time in check so if some sudden work comes up, you can handle it. Try to take the help of an online calendar or to-do list to keep things in check and sorted manner.

Your Phone is Your Enemy:

When you are at home, your phone is the first and most frequent thing you will use to pass time. While working you have to keep it down. If you are an android user, digital well being (for android P and Q only and on selected devices) help you to stay in focus.

Setup Focus Mode in your phone and select those apps you use the most to pass time like social media, messaging apps, news apps, or others. Until you are in focus mode, the phone will keep those apps shut even if you try to open them. Some smartphones and chrome browsers allow you to set up a work profile. It will limit the app or change the environment of the phone and browser to let you focus on your work.

Not Ready For Early Meetings:

Try to schedule all your meetings and call in the afternoon if you do not feel awake in the morning. Do small tasks in the morning like a warm-up exercise. Note the average time you are ready to focus fully on work. Now schedule a call and meeting at that time. This will help you be more productive in meetings.

Music is Your Best Escape:

While working from home, if it is hard for you to concentrate on your work try to listen to music. A diverse playlist will help you to keep your mind focused on the task in hand. Video game soundtrack or harmony instrumentals are best for this. No lyrics to focus on, just adrenaline-filled music to motivate you.

Last Words:

In the end, it doesn’t even matter where you are working from, the main thing right now is that you stay inside. We all are currently facing a pandemic situation and we as a community have to stand together and stand smart in this situation. So please stay at home, work hard, and productively. So corona can not affect you or your work in any way.

Stay Safe, Stay Healthy

The post Is WFH A Productive Practice Or Not? appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Visual graphics whether video or images, both are very essential when it comes to engagement. Both are able to generate a big amount of engagement in comparison to standard text posts. When it comes to social media marketing you can really rely on these two. But one thing that bothers marketers is which one to use to gain more attention.

Well, both come with their own advantages and disadvantages. But you can choose one without testing them out in the practical world. You can not just read some research report and thing that the same will work for you. TBH, it does not work like this. Social media experience is different for everyone. A strategy that works for someone, might not work for you. This experience changes with respect to the company, the audience, and the objective of the company.

Let’s dive deep now to understand how strong these two are in catching the eyes.

Images on Social Media

Photography, it is one kind of social post that was brought to life by Instagram. Instagram promoted photography with its editing and photography tools and features. When Simon Rogers was at Twitter, he did research on approx 2 million accounts. He found out that adding an image to a tweet increases its retweets by 35%. This research is quite old but this much big data is still helpful.

On Facebook, an image increases engagement by 2.5 times compared to posts without images. Most of the time social media is used on mobile phones. This means screens are vertical and content also needs to be the same.

One downside about an image is, sometimes it needs explanation. When you go a little creative, it becomes hard for some users to understand it. For that, you need help from a caption or text on the image. As this text content is introduced, the engagement goes down. Images need to be made carefully with a perfect balance between text and visualization.

Videos on Social Media

What I just told you about as a con for images is pros for videos. When you want to explain something to your audience, videos are the best option out there. No need to write big captions, all you need is an attractive yet simple video. As videos come with an option to add sound to it, explaining and engaging becomes easy.

Facebook also prefer videos that can be understood easily. Research from Facebook shows that 47% of the value in a video campaign is delivered in the first 3 seconds. Third-quarter is delivered in the first 10 seconds.

That means you need to grab the eyes of your audiences in the first 10 seconds. Try to put interesting content in that first section of the video. Also, try to introduce your brand in the early part so audiences get introduced to it. The boost a video makes for you is 28% in comparison to the posts without videos.

But one problem is that not everyone likes to watch videos. People usually use social media to pass the time like while using public transport, waiting for someone somewhere, break time at the workplace or else. So when it comes to a video, they usually scroll it because they don’t have earphones or not at the right place to play a video.

Also, The cost of making a video is higher than creating a simple image. A user spends at least 5 sec on a post. In this time period, you can explain a lot by video than an image. Still at the end choice is yours as you also have to take the measure of the budget too. You can use both kinds of content in a time interval. Try to learn how this is working for you and apply that knowledge to your campaign.

All the best.

The post Video vs Image: A Battle of Engagement appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Social Media is a vast platform used by businesses to explore their expertise to the world. These social media platforms used widely, because of its consistent growth in the marketplace. Here, you can convert leads, make the brand image and recognize as the brand. Only You need a perfect marketing strategy and the art of storytelling to attract your audiences.

Using social platforms without a strategy and smart goals is a big task. So, before landing on this area make sure, you have some good strategies to stand up in the crowd and have enough confidence to beat your competitors. Here I am sharing 3 basic tips of social media marketing to set up the initial assets for your business as a brand online.

1. Choose the right platforms for promoting your business

The number of social platforms is increasing day by day, and it creates confusion that what should be best for your business. You cannot use all the social media platforms for promoting your business because it wastes lots of time of yours and even not gives you the fruitful results too. You need to choose the right platforms for your branding by doing some research. Like, are the users you want to target using that social media platform? Or you can reach out to the people who give you the conversions or not?

Now, the thing is from where you can research social media platform so that you can decide which is best for your business. Let me resolve your issue with some mind-boggling statistics of leading social media platforms:

Statistics of Facebook:

Facebook is the leading platform for all type of business promotions, with the incredible number of users. Here the stats of Facebook which will help you decide your strategy of branding:

Image Source: SproutSocial

Learn More: Build a Happy Relationship With Customers to Enhance Your Business

Statistics of Twitter:

In my opinion, Twitter is specially made for the businesses and enterprises for B2B conversions. You can use twitter to maintain your professionalism in front of the users. See the statistics of Twitter to decide the best:

Image Source: SproutSocial

Statistics of LinkedIn:

You can find the connections here which help you to generate leads in your business. The stats of the LinkedIn are good and growing faster with time. Have a look at the statistics of the LinkedIn here:

Image Source: SproutSocial

Learn More: Email Marketing Support SEO Social Media

Statistics of Instagram:

Instagram users are growing faster, and the platform is establishing a level for businesses. See the Instagram insights and decide the platform works for your industry or not:

Image Source: SproutSocial

Note: These platforms also give a section of bio/profile to deliberate your business in few words. Don’t waste that section by inserting something which not define your expertise in the industry. Fill that section with some interesting highlights about your business products or services.

2. Post actively on your chosen platforms for engagement:

Now, if you have the platforms which can generate leads for you, so you can’t be reckless in posting on that. The inactive platforms will make a negative impact on your potential customers.
You have to blend your innovation power and creativity in your posts, to engage the users with you. The human touch is required in posts for making it more attractive.

Note down some points to keep your social accounts active:

• Post on the platforms when most of the users are online and able to see your post. You can grab that data from the insights of the social media platforms where you can see the most engageable days & time and more.
• Pick some random topics which are relevant to your industry to post and make a time-frame of posting them on your chosen platforms.
• Frequent posting on your business account will reflect your post on the NewsFeed of the visitors and users.
• Plan to run the series of some particular topics you choose to post which will keep consistency in your posts.

These points will help you to strategize your social media activities and assist in establishing a good brand image online.

Learn More: How Social Media Has Changed Our Habits

3. Influencers help you to lead on social media:

Connecting with the influencers will help you to gain more engagements which eventually convert into leads. The big brands like Amazon, Flipkart don’t need to make more efforts for getting millions of followers because they are the well-known brands, but in the stat of a startup or SMEs, you need to influence the visitors or users to make a relationship with your business.

Influence marketing is an excellent choice in that situation. The influencers will give set up a platform for your business where you can analyze your efforts of marketing and can improve them fast.

Now, you are thinking how to decide the influencer for your business branding. Right…??

The qualities of the influencer will help you are:

• Activeness: The influencer must be active on blogs and social media platforms and publish the fresh and unique content on a daily basis to look useful.
• Expertise in the area of work: Make sure he/she must be an expert in his/her work area and able to deliver the natural results of its expertise to you.
• Power of choosing right: The influencer has the potential of selecting the right way to earn the engagement instead of following other influencers strategy.

You must check these qualities in the influencers to get the fast results.

Maintaining a good reputation on social media is also a big task for the business, but your consistent efforts will make that task more manageable for you. Keep consistency, give the instant response on the customer’s actions and offering the best & exclusive deals will never let you down in your industry standard.

Take the initial steps of growing your business online reputation and rule your industry. Stay connected with us!

Want more social media tips? Check out ❝Use Social Media For Knowledge Sharing In 2018❞

The post 3 Basic Tips to Master the Art of Using Social Media Platforms appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Are you thinking launching your business in 2016? Social media can be very helpful in order to grow your business. We have already introduced some great social media tools to you. Again, we come up with some amazing social media tools for startups.

Take a look at these tools which will help you to grow your small business or start-up in 2016. Enjoy!

1. AgoraPulse

Social Media management software for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

2. Brand24

Social media monitoring & analytics tool

3. Bundlepost

Social Media Curation and Content Marketing Tool

4. Edgar

The Social Media Queue That Fills Itself

5. Feedly

A single place to organize, read, and share all the content that matters to you

6. NUVI

Real-time Social Intelligence

7. Nuzzel

News from Friends and Influencers

8. Openr

Drive Traffic From The Content You Share

9. Sendible

Powerful Social Media Management Software

10. Socedo

Automated Social Media Lead Generation

11. Social Clout

Social Media Monitoring Tool, Analytics Software, Lead Generation Solution

See This Infographic -

Don’t forget to share which one is your favorite? If you want to suggest any tool to add in this list, please do drop in comment section below!

Recommended: 12 Coolest New Tools For Startups & Entrepreneurs [Infographic]

The post [Infographic] 11 Stunning Social Media Tools For Startups To Use In 2016 appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Can you sum up your daily activities? If you’re a normal marketer like other marketers, you must have noticed that most of your time are spent over Social Media for making Social Media ads, commenting on the post and creating a brand image of your company over Social media, Right?

That’s really great that you’re adding luster to your social media.

Now take a step back and think once for time spent for your Email Marketing and strategies of growing your email list, creating good mail content, analytics for your email open rates.

After this small session of thinking if you find yourself to be more engaged in Social Media and somehow avoiding the Email Marketing. So, this can be proved a harsh break down for your business.

But this can’t be said as your mistake because with growing followers of social media, it’s too hard to decide where we have to land.

Facebook with 1 billion active users and Twitter with 255 million users, it’s not fair to blame you to divert your mind towards Social media. But the statistic is the reason which will cause atrophy for your business. Then I have some numbers and statics to guide you.

The Total number of email accounts over the whole world was 3.9 Billion in 2013 and assumed to be 4.9 billion in 2017.

“So, we can say that even if Facebook and Twitter accounts are combined yet you will find 3X more email accounts.”

Marketing is not only about how many users you have but how many organic reach do you have by your users.

So, if you talk about organic reach then I hope it would good for you to know that the organic reach by which I mean the no. of users who actually check out your posts are 6%. On the other hand, email marketing, in general, has 20- 30 % open rates

“So, we can say that if you are sending some message then it has 5X more chances to be seen in you email rather than on Facebook.”

If we talk about the click through rate of Twitter which is 0.5% and compare it to email open rate which is generally found to be 3%.

“We can conclude that Something on your Email has 6X more chances to get opened rather than Twitter.”

What Should I Prefer Now?

If you are now thinking that what you have to do next, completely leave up the social media and start looking ahead for email marketing?

Getting confused between these two strategies is quite normal as Social Media Is popular but Emails are effective, Social Medias are an easy strategy but emails are successful.

So, Emails and Social Media can be said as the same coin of two different faces.

We’re not saying that you have to completely blow off your social media marketing, in fact, Social Media can be the best way to enhance your email marketing,

You can use Social Media to create your brand image and to boost up our email list and this will give you a bang in your email marketing.

We can guide you how to do that, but before going through it, you have to make clear in your mind that Social media is not the only and best marketing strategy.

Email marketing is old but you can yourself make it fancy by your creative ideas.

Go creative with your emails and share with us your unique creative ideas to get success over emails.

Read More: Sprout your Email List Via Pinterest

The post Email Or Social Media? What You prefer? What should you Prefer? appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Did you try to search the word – Digital Marketing on Twitter?— Do It Now, and you’ll get millions of results. There are a lot of people discussing about it. But the question is how do you know who to listen to?

You just need to be following the right people if you want to get interesting & useful information constantly.

In Alphabetic order, here are 30 digital marketing influencers to follow on Twitter – Follow these Experts and enjoy their expertise and advice!

1. Aleyda Solis (@aleyda)

Bio: International SEO Consultant & Keynote Speaker. @Orainti Founder. @sengineland Columnist. @Moz & @stateofdigital Blogger. Digital nomad. Building @Remotersnet.

2. Ann Smarty (@seosmarty)

Bio: Brand manager @NinjasMarketing | Founder http://MyBlogU.com & http://ViralContentBuzz.com +If all you need is SEO, follow @annsmarty [I tweet a lot!]

3. Avinash Kaushik (@avinash)

Bio: Author, Web Analytics 2.0 & Web Analytics: An Hour A Day | Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google | Co-Founder, Market Motive

4. Brian Clark (@brianclark)

Bio: CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of http://copyblogger.com , host of http://unemployable.com , curator of http://further.net

5. Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan)

Bio: Founding Editor, @MarketingLand & @SEngineLand, covering Google, Facebook, Twitter, SEO, SEM & all things digital marketing, search marketing and search.

6. Darren Rowse (@problogger)

Bio: Speaker, Author, Blogger, Podcaster & Founder of @ProBlogger, @ProbloggerEvent & @DigitalPS. Husband to @Stylensh. Blogger/Ambassador for @WorldVisionAus

7. Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh)

Bio: Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and startup blogger at http://OnStartups.com

8. Donald Miller (@donaldmiller)

Bio: I help people clarify their marketing message to grow their business at http://www.storybrand.com Husband to @queenboots

9. Duane Forrester (@DuaneForrester)

Bio: VP, Organic Search Optimization @BruceClayInc. Ran SEO @MSN & Bing Webmaster Tools. Author: How To Make Money With Your Blog & Turn Clicks Into Customers. #TAMO

10. Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

Bio: Family 1st! but after that, Businessman. CEO of @vaynermedia. Host of #AskGaryVee show and a dude who Loves the Hustle, the @NYJets .. snapchat – garyvee

11. Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki)

Bio: Mantra: I empower people. Chief evangelist of @Canva. Author of thirteen books. Former chief evangelist of Apple.

12. Hiten Shah (@hnshah)

Bio: Started two SaaS companies, @CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics with @NeilPatel. One is self-funded & the other is venture backed. I enjoy helping others think.

13. Jay Baer (@jaybaer)

Bio: The most re-tweeted person in the world among digital marketers. Author, speaker, podcaster, investor. President of @Convince. http://jaybaer.com

14. Jeff Bullas (@jeffbullas)

Bio: #1 Content Marketing Influencer,Social Media Marketing Strategist & Speaker,Forbes Top 10 Social Media Influencer,#1 Global Business Blog.

15. Jon Morrow (@JonMorrow)

Bio: CEO of Boost Blog Traffic, Former Editor at Copyblogger

16. Kevan Lee (@kevanlee)

Bio: Content Crafter at @buffer. Tweeting about my writing process and my favorite Internet things. Live simply, give generously.

17. Kim Garst (@kimgarst)

Bio: Social Selling Strategist, First Lady of Periscope, Best Selling Author, Speaker, Forbes Top 10 SM Influencer. Loves God, family & hockey!

18. Kristi Hines (@kikolani)

Bio: Freelance writer, content marketer, and business blogger. HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certified. Learn more at http://kristihines.com

19. Larry Kim (@larrykim)

Bio: Founder @WordStream. Top Columnist @Inc Magazine. ❤️ Entrepreneurship, Start-Ups, Adwords, Facebook advertising.

20. Matt Heinz (@HeinzMarketing)

Bio: B2B demand generation, pipeline management, sales enablement, content strategy, inside sales effectiveness, marketing technology, driving revenue & results.

21. Mari Smith (@MariSmith)

Bio: Social Media Thought Leader | Top Facebook Marketing Expert | Globe-trotting Speaker | Author | ‘Mari like Ferrari’ | http://marismith.com/smmw16

22. Mark Schaefer (@markwschaefer)

Bio: Chieftain of the blog {grow} & social media bouncer. Consultant, educator, author of five best-selling books including Social Media Explained & The Content Code

23. Neil Patel (@neilpatel)

Bio: Entrepreneur, investor & influencer. Columnist for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post & more. Founded KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, QuickSprout & Hellobar.

24. Noah Kagan (@noahkagan)

Bio: The founder of Appsumo and OKDork, Kagan is constantly sharing great pieces of content and bits of information via his Twitter feed.

25. Pam Moore (@PamMktgNut)

Bio: 50% mktg 50% geek CEO @MktgNutz @SocialZoomFactr #entrepreneur #socbiz consultant #speaker ~love God Friends Beach & Life! Forbes TOP 10 #SocialMedia Influencer

26. Perry Marshall (@PerryMarshall)

Bio: World’s #1 Expert on Sales Growth through 80/20 Leverage. Bestselling Author on Google & Facebook ads.

27. Rand Fishkin (@randfish)

Bio: Moz founder, author, blogger, husband to @everywhereist, tiny Techstars investor, & feminist. I tweet 30-40X/week about marketing, SEO, technology, & startups.

28. Ryan Deiss (@ryandeiss)

Bio: Husband to Emily. Father to Jonathan, Joyce, Ruth and Timothy. Also founder of @digitalmktr http://DigitalMarketer.com and http://NativeCommerce.com

29. Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog)

Bio: Author, blogger, a lifetime of projects. This is a retweet of my blog.

30. Shelly Kramer (@ShellyKramer)

Bio: Digital marketing brand strategist, information junkie with a penchant for quick wit. Partial to Milk Duds. And #beer.

Recommended: Follow 15 Blogs That’ll Help You Acquire More Conversion

If you have any suggestions to add to this list, please mention in comment section below.

The post 30 Influencers You Should Follow On Twitter (If You Like Digital Marketing) appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Email Marketing is the best technique to communicate with your customers. It’s the most formal and professional  appearing way to approach them. Email marketing found to be the most useful  marketing slant to induce more number of leads.

In a whole, Email Marketing is like God For Marketers and specially for E commerce marketers.

But what if you don’t have subscriber for those Emails.

Tell me who is going to read all  those stuff and all those content which you have created.

Over an all, the main power of your Email Marketing exists in building your Email List. If you don’t have your own created Email List, sorry to say but you stand no where in the marketing platform.

If you’re planning to move your business ahead and that too with Email Marketing, then your initiation should be very appropriate and should start from sprouting up Email list.

If you’re thinking “what’s so whooping in building email list?” Then let me make you aware of Can-spam, after all we are not in the era of buying and purchasing email lists any more.

It’s now all have to be done by you to appeal your customer and attract them to join you. Social Media is becoming the major source to draw out the subscribers. Facebook and LinkedIn have always been the major fountain to grab the subscribers.

But have you ever thought what seems to be the most compelling stuff for your mind. It’s Images, pictures. A Human brain can understand through picture 500 X faster.

The faster people will understand it, the faster they will get into it.

We have such a Pictorial Social Media Guide for you by which you can grow your email list and can run out your business all through an Email .

#Pinterest : The all new step to sprout your Email List

There is nothing like Social Media V/s Email Marketing, when you’ll start blending the both you’ll start enjoying the best result in your marketing.

If you’re a marketer and that too an E commerce marketer and somehow avoiding Pinterest then you’re making loss of your own.

The popularity of Pinterest specifically among 30+ year old group customers with a median income of $50K per year makes it a more perfect platform for business people to concentrate on growing mailing list.

#Step I:

First of all you have to do is to create an eye catching picture, including offers  so that you can attract your audience. Now you must be thinking what kind of offer I am talking about, don’t worry it could be anything like:

#  Coupon codes

# Guidelines

# Video Series

# check lists

# Webinars

Or anything your company deals with and trust me you won’t need to do any Photoshop and even don’t need any designer to make it out, there are some simple and cinch tools which will help in resulting it out for you like

# Canva

# Pixabay

# PicMonkey

For Videos you can check out

# ScreenFlow

# Camtasia

While uploading your pin be sure about in which board you’re uploading it.

#Step II:

Now you’re in for the second step, what you have to do next is to create a land page that you’ll send to your customer when they will check out your visual pin and will click on the link provided there. I would like to  suggest you to use the same graphic in your landing page which you have used in your original pin.

I have some suggestions for tools which you can use to create attractive landing pages:

# LeadPages

# Lander

# Click funnels

# Unbounce

Even if you’re not a tech freak  trust me you’re not going to face any problem in using these tools.

It will work for you as Bonus if you include a message like- “Don’t worry! We don’t spam and your information will remain confidential.”

This will take your customers into the comfort zone and it’s always good to make your customers rely on you.

Step III:

Now you have an attractive graphic and a cool landing page which is integrated with your email marketing software. But wait there are some small points left yet to make this mission accomplished.

Once you have uploaded your pin, go back to it and edit it to insert the URL of your landing page, otherwise your all efforts will goes in vain and the URL won’t redirect your visitors anywhere.

That’s it you’re all done!

Now the excited visitors will start becoming your subscribers. No Purchasing, no stealing only attracting. They by themselves starts chaining them to you mailing list.

Keep in your Mind!!

Pinterest is not only about posting Photos, sometimes it’s about acquiring knowledge, finding new stuff, and yes sometimes it’s an eye candy. This technique will help you grabbing mailing list of not only visitors but some really talented and talent loving people,

And  this is not for the last time, you can do it with every promotional campaign of yours. If you want people to check your pins and go further relying on you and giving their credential than you have to maintain yourself in Pinterest very well.

I would suggest to maintain at least 5 boards, Six would be great each containing at least 10 pins. This will increase your followers and hence your visitors and ultimately will grow your mailing list. We have also guided you about how to grab and grow your mailing list through other Social media like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook, Google+ and this time we want you to go for your Pinterest.

If you have also some creative ideas of growing your mailing list through Social Platform. Go ahead and share with us, we would love to hear from you!!

The post Sprout your Email List Via Pinterest appeared first on Sarv Blog.

We live in the “Age of Customers” – According to Forrester research.

Meet today’s buyer – Digital Buyer. Thanks to Smartphones, Social Media & Web, these channels provide instant information to customers.

Consumers can access detailed information, pricing, and reviews about services/products anytime anywhere – Just need finger/thumb with a Smartphone.

And, social media provides a great platform to check any business social activity and it give consumers a way to compare.

It’s time to through out old style of marketing because traditional & old marketing mediums are becoming less effective as buyers get more smart & tech-savvy.

Today’s buyers are not average, they’re wise to the ways of marketing. As a buyer, i believe company should inform & entertain me, but never irritate me. It’s very simple, if they don’t keep communications engaging, I’ll opt out.

I am self-directed (like digital buyers) to make purchase decisions. I never interact any brand directly. Firstly I find the information which i am looking for in the digital channel that is most convenient for me at the time (Whether i’m in front of my laptop at home/work or in lines at Pizz Hut on my mobile). I check brand website, social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram), content/blog etc. before making a decision.

So moral of the story is, By the time a buyer comes to you, he’s probably already made his purchasing decision, so don’t be just a typical sales girl/man; be a smart advisor or counsellor.

Happy customers delivers a big and predictable — return on investment: Happy customers, on average, tell 9 people about their experiences. – Sarv Blog

If you want to win them, you must be obsessed with them, understand their needs and entertain each and every customer individually and personally.

It’s a challenging as well as an exciting to be a marketer. Because in present advertising model, you must be dynamic, don’t put the static information to buyer (more precisely digital buyer).

But question still remains, how to entertain & engage with buyers?

Your answer is right here – Personalized, Relevant, Engaging Email!

Email is Not Dead!

(Image Credit: Make a Meme)

Perhaps you’ve heard somewhere from someone that, “Email is no more alive, it’s dead!” Many marketing pandits (or intellectuals) claiming that email is dead.

In 2009, The Wall Street Journal published an article – The End of Email Era. According this article, “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.”

In fact, if you Google “Email is Dead,” you’ll get over 24,40,00,000 results. This is the huge number in comparison searches bring up only 1,33,00,000 results for “blogging is dead,” 10,30,00,000 for “social media is dead,” and 8,12,00,000 for “Michael Jackson is dead.” Are you serious?? ( Current data at the time we’re writing this article on 12^th March, 2016)

But truth is opposite the data – Email is still Alive & Well, surprisingly it matters more today than ever before.

There are many channels available – Traditional channels like T.V., Radio, Newspaper & news channels such social media, mobile etc. But email still is the most direct & popular way to engage with consumers. Because we’re addicted to email.

Let me ask you some questions:

1. How many times a day do you check your email?

2. Have you checked your email while reading this article?

91% of consumers reported checking their email at least once a day.

These statistics will give you full insight:

There are nearly 4.1 billion email accounts worldwide by year end 2015, with that number expected to increase to 4.9 billion by the end of 2017.

Email is expected to grow to $12 billion by 2016 and email traffic is estimated to grow to over 192 billion emails sent per day by 2016.

(Read Full Email & Internet Industry Analysis Report)

A recent study concluded that email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. – McKinsey & Company

When asked which medium consumers would like to receive updates from, 90% preferred an email newsletter, while only 10% chose Facebook. - Nielsen Norman Group

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My point is, email is not dead, it’s alive & still doing well. As a marketer, it’s still your number one marketing tool for reaching targeted audience quickly.

Read Following Statements:

“I would recommend that anyone who thinks they need to prove the value of email in a world where Facebook is one of, if not the biggest sender of email in the world, to stop sending email for a whole month and see if they keep their job.” – Dela Quist, Email Marketing Leader, CEO of Alchemy Worx (Visit Here)

“Email is the most influential & powerful marketing channels out there.” - Neil Patel, Co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics, WSJ calls him a top influencer on the web (Visit Here)

“Email remains an immensely credible and profitable channel, with an immense reach to boot. To not have it as an active part of your marketing portfolio is sub-optimal. Email = totally worth dating, engaging, marrying and having babies with.” - Avinash Kaushik, Author, Digital Marketing Evangelist (Visit Here)

But it’s facing some challenges.

#1. People don’t want to be your marketing target. Sales pitches, advertisements, and other interruptions irritate them.

Digital Consumers have their own definition of spam emails. If they don’ like your message, they will make sure they don’t see it again.

Whether you agree or not but most of marketing emails irritate your subscribers (Let’s face it) .

There are many tools or software available out there to help them to filter unwanted emails.

I got a email so many times which said: “Are you ready to buy? Hi, are you ready to buy? Just for you buy today!” This guy was irritating me so much, i marked as spam!

Don’t be that guy.

#2. There are so many marketing channels available for consumer to find more relevant and personalized content such as: email, mobile, social, display advertising.

So through out the old email marketing strategy & tools (which is only designed for email), it’s must for you to do customer-focused marketing (customers should be center of all your marketing, because customer is KING).

So be smart marketer & integrate email with other marketing channels. All you need to do is engaging email marketing.

What is Engaging Email Marketing?

Let’s consider: you have got 10 email in a day, 5 from your friends, family or colleagues & 5 from some businesses.

You most probably pay the most attention (& quickly respond) to the messages from people with whom you have a genuine & trusted relationships.

Perhaps now you’re thinking, relationship between a business & a customer is never same as relationship between friends/family, It’s TRUE!

But as a marketers we can narrow the gap (but you can’t send something like – Hey John, what’s up dude!) Build a natural & trusted relationship with your customers.

If you want to connect with them, you have to work hard to engage them (there are no short cuts). In order to be truly effective, email marketing must become more trusted, more relevant, more conversational, and more strategic.

It’s not so simple, but it’s not a rocket-science as well. You have to work hard to connect & engage with them.

Be More relevant, conversational (non-marketing pitch), and strategic.

Remember that the best campaigns aren’t about you or what you want subscribers to do. They’re about your subscribers and what they want.”

- Matt Blumberg, Chairman & CEO of Return Path

In Next Article, we’ll Discuss Some Important Key Attribute of Engaging Email.

If You Like This Article, Go Ahead & Tweet.

@sarvofficial just published #Email in the age of digital buyers goo.gl/2z0pS9 @neilpatel @avinash @DelaQuist #emailmarketing

The post Make Your Email More Engaging In The Age of Digital Buyers! appeared first on Sarv Blog.

Hi Digital Marketers! You all are stars.. You know why because your hands are full with all the new and cool ways to approach your audience.

Link Your Subscribers To Social Media

Yes I understand personal and professional relations are really very different! But trust me I can give you 3 instant reasons that will make you to agree with my point that you should start linking up your subscribers to the Social Media.

Identity: It’ll put a face and a name and will give you an identity of your email subscribers.

Requirements: It’ll guide you about the likes and dislikes, needs and requirements of your subscribers.

Conversation: If you publish some interesting contents then you might earn some new followers and you may get into conversation with them.

I hope you there won’t be any Digital Marketer who doesn’t want to make it successful.

Linking Your subscribers To Twitter

This can be a good start up . You can link your yahoo and Gmail contact to your Twitter account.

All you have to do is open your company’s Twitter A/c. On the left side look for an option that says People you may know or Find Friends.

From here, you may connect your personal or professional email account. Twitter will then  check those emails IDs in their user database and will show the profile of your contacts . What’s next is – Follow them!

This will works more efficiently if you are using Google Apps for your Business because you  can easily sync all of your professional contacts or can say your subscribers with your business Twitter account.

To make your work easier you can upload a CSV of your contacts from your email, the process is quite simple.

1. Export a CSV from your email provider.
2. If you created any ad of your company to enhance your business (See Here). Now, go to ads.twitter.com => “Tools”  => “Audience Manager”.
3. Now you have to create a new audience list by first giving a name to the audience, then choose the type of data you are going to upload.
4. Now waiting for what? Upload your list.

Twitter will take few hours to process the list. Once it’s done, you can use your Twitter ads to target your audience generated by you only. This is an amazing way to promote offers, content, and downloads.

Link Your Subscribers To LinkedIn

The best way to represent your company professionally and grow your network is LinkedIn.  LinkedIn allows you get connected with your contacts of your personal email or even you can upload a list of your contacts.

All you have to do is.

1. Open your LinkedIn, go to “Connections” => “Add Connections”.
2. Click on Import File.

LinkedIn will then upload the file, then show you a list of contacts. You can connect with all of them at once or even you can pick and choose some particular one who you want to connect with. Once you are done and get connected, you may invite these people to your groups or can indulge them to follow your company.

Link Your Subscribers To Google +

1. Open your Google+, Click on“Home” => “People”.
2. Click on Connect Services => Open address Book
3. Upload your file and you are ready to go

You can check out whom you know and can share your daily updates and this can attract your contact or your subscribers  towards your services.

Link Your Subscribers To Facebook

You can definitely import your contact list to your Facebook, but I don’t recommend doing this personally. Because it’s common for people to go through Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ for making professional network but that doesn’t stands so well for Facebook.

Although, you can create  “Custom Audience” and can run targeted ads. You can use make these ads to get more “Likes” on your Facebook Profile or can even use them as a part of  re-targeting campaign.

1. To get started visit the Ads Manager => Audiences
2. Click on the green button on the right side of the page that says “Create Audience” => “Custom Audience”.
3. Now choose customer list => Upload. Then, upload the CSV of email provider you use.

From here, you can create an ad. Creating Facebook Ads is a deep topic itself, so without walking deep on that here, I can recommend you to check out Noah Kagan’s post What I learned spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads.

These all Social Media maybe act as just a chill pill but remember a lot of people visit here to get their chill pill and if your content your ad is an interesting one then you have a high probability to attract your subscribers and increase your subscriber’s list.

Recommended : Email vs Social Media: Which One Is Your Priority [Infographic]

The post How To Link Social Media With Email To Get More Exposure appeared first on Sarv Blog.

New Year has arrived, with lots of new challenges and strategies. You must have taken some new year resolutions, definitely I can’t help you learn french nor I can let you finally join the gym. But if you want to raise your Business in 2016. I have 6 tips which can let you refresh your Business in this new year with Email Marketing.

1. Cast Your Sight For 2015

Sometimes, it’s good to look at past to enhance your future. If you want to overcome all your gaps in your marketing strategies, you have to first look up to your past, which idea proved best for you and which was the worst.

All you have to do is to take a cappuccino and a morning to comb all email 2015 strategic reports. Subject lines worked the most, the open rates of your subject line, which type content generated most clicks?

Exploring 2015 statistics will give you two stuff -

1. What you have to achieve in 2016.
2. Strategy for how to achieve it.

Set your benchmarks. Be clear about yourself how achievement looks like. 20% increase in subscribers. 10% increase in click rates of your emails. That’s your call.

2. Segmentation The Best Of 2016

Not segmented yet?? start segmenting your emails in this new year. Remember your mail box, the mails that are in unread box was not seen of your interest right? Sending the same email again in 2016 know as Batch and Blast  email are going to be less and more less effective.

Start a new campaign to know what your customers want in this new year or start segmenting your subscribers based on what you already know about them. Grab the data from your website in which they have answered your questions to get registered themselves. Most simple, you can track the behavior of your customers toward your emails or newsletters or website content by tracking their interaction for these.

Apart from this, if you want more clicks then you have to serve efficient content which will save your customer’s time. Their mailbox is already getting flooded with unread mails. Give them a reason to make you their priority.

3. Start Implementing Mobile Devices

More than half of emails get opened in mobile devices. 64% of decision makers read their emails via mobile devices. 48% of emails are opened on a mobile devices. Statistics is enough to describe how people are including their cell phones in their business.

After all, nobody would like to open his laptop every time to check their email if he can do the same by just scrolling his thumb. These percentage are getting grow in 2016. if your email design is not optimized to display properly on mobile devices then sorry to say, but you are going to receive a huge chuck from your customers.

4. Matchup Email & Social Media

Emails and Social Media are two different faces and always remains in conflict. But beyond this conflict you can take use of Social Media to increase your Email list.

Using only just Social Media to promote your marketing is definitely not a smart idea but using Social Media to enhance your Email Marketing will work smartly to increase your subscribers, your email list, your clicks and what not.

For matching up your email and social media you not need to become a digital marketing champion. These five steps are enough to increase your subscribers.

1. Promote your Social Channels and let people join you Newsletters.
2. Make a touch with your customers through by sharing your ideas through Social Media
3. Let them follow you by providing small icons below your content.
4. Use your Facebook Post’s fan to grow your subscriber list.
5. Facebook isn’t the only social giant. Create Twitter campaigns and add you promoters.

Related : Email Vs Social Media : Which One is Your Priority [Infographic]

5. Keep In Touch With Your Customers Without Any Efforts

How great you’ll feel when you will find that after making purchase you got a Thanks Mail. So do your customers. But hiring people just to say thanks doesn’t sounds as a smart marketer.

Be smart and start using email software to send pre designed emails in response to certain activities of your customers. In 2016 automation software is going to get smarter and marketers are going to get more innovative. So you have to start the race of getting more innovative and attractive mail for your customers.

Related: Amazing Statistics To Improve Your Customer Service : Make Customers Feel Great

6.  Keep Eyes On your Reviews

Start a new year with a new habit. The worst thing about improvement is it rarely just happens. So, in this new year make a monthly or quarterly review system whatever suits you the best. Regularly checking your email progress, their clicks rate will definitely help you in making some new strategies and will help you in your marketing improvement.

Wrapping this up!!

• Review your 2015 email marketing statistics that what worked? What didn’t? And decide your goals for 2016 Email Marketing.
• Look for all new ways to segment your email subscribers.
• Make your emails accessible by everyone by optimising it on mobile devices as well.
• Use your Social Media Channels to enhance your Email Marketing.
• Keep automation touch with your customers to let them feel that they are special for you.
• Set up weekly Monthly or Quarterly meetings to check your email marketing progress.

The post 6 Magical Tips To Improve Your Email Marketing In 2016 appeared first on Sarv Blog.