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What’s the Right E-Commerce Software for You?There are two worlds in e-commerce software: hosted and self-hosted. With hosted platforms, like Shopify and BigCommerce, you’ll get ready-to-go drag-and-drop templates, but you’ll give up some customization ability and pay a subscription fee. For most merchants, Shopify and BigCommerce are going to be in a dead heat. Both companies offer products that provide the same thing: an all-in-one hosted e-commerce solution for online businesses. They both do it well and they both start with similar price points. If you’re trying to decide between Shopify and BigCommerce, we recommend comparing both during their free trial periods and see which one is a better fit for your business. Both offer a couple of weeks to set up and explore your store, no credit card required. It’s also possible to build a store with Squarespace or Wix site, monetize your existing site, or even build a non-store site and then convert it to a credit-card accepting store later on. This is a good option if you’re already using Squarespace or Wix, if not sure how much of your sales you’ll run through your site, or are just in the ideation phase. Wix will let you build you’re whole site for free; you’ll only need an e-commerce subscription when you’re ready to take that first credit card transaction. You can get up to 21 days free with Squarespace if you ask to extend the two-week free trial an extra week. Want more customization power, or not ready to pony up a monthly fee? You want self-hosted software like Magento or WooCommerce — you’ll be nearly limitless in what you can do, and there are plenty of pre-made plugins you can pay for and install to avoid coding every little thing (think abandoned cart e-mails or related products carousels). If you go this route, we recommend brushing up on the best practices for running a successful e-commerce site, making a list of all the features you want and tallying up the add-on fees you’ll be paying before you commit to building your store. The Top 6 E-Commerce PlatformsShopify
Shopify is one of the most recognizable out-of-the-box solutions for small business owners — by some measures, it’s the second most popular e-commerce platform in the world after WooCommerce, and continues to grow like crazy. We think it’s a good fit for e-commerce sites that don’t have a lot of in-house technical support and don’t crave a ton of complex customizations. Shopify is a full-blown hosted e-commerce platform, which means that it takes care of everything you need to run an online business, from a website to website hosting to inventory management to accepting credit card information. It also offers point-of-sale hardware, and integrates into online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. Shopify’s core product comes in a few different plans for different prices, ranging from $29/month to $299/month. More robust functionality (and more perks, like better credit card rates, more user accounts, and advanced reporting) come with the higher price tag. If you already have a website and are interested in adding some shoppable products and a shopping cart, we recommend skipping down to where we discuss Shopify Lite. Full-blown Shopify is probably more than you need. Shopify makes it pretty straightforward for a small business to get up and running — like a lot of hosted e-commerce platforms (including BigCommerce), you have a 14-day free trial where you can actually build your entire store and try out the features and functionality without ever entering a credit card number. Shopify is template-based, which means you choose the basic look and layout of your store from 10 free or 57 for-purchase themes, and customize from there. Shopify claims that its templates are fully customizable, and it does give its merchants full access to the HTML and CSS of their stores, but heads-up: Shopify uses a Liquid setup, which will have a little bit of a learning curve for those who are more used to PHP. Because it’s such a force in the industry, Shopify integrates with pretty much every other app, SaaS, and technology out there, be it live order tracking, automated up-selling bots, or finding dropship products to sell. Shopify has its own app store a la Apple and Google with built-for-Shopify (and often built-by-Shopify) technology that you can plug and play to make your store do everything you want. This is a double-edged sword for some merchants, who find that Shopify relies so much on third-party integrations that some of its built-in technology is lacking. A good rule of thumb: Make a list of all the functionality you want for your site and see if you’re satisfied with what you get for free during your 14-day trial. If not, explore what add-ons and plugins are available (there are over 2,400 in the Shopify app store) and see how much they’ll add to your bottom line. Speaking of bottom lines: You’re going to have to do a lot of math to see which payment gateway makes the most sense for your business no matter which e-commerce platform you choose. But one of Shopify’s biggest standouts is that it’s built its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments. While you still can integrate with over 100 others (in fact, you’ll have to if you have customers outside of the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore), Shopify Payments potentially eliminates one more integration you’d have to do to get up and running. At 2.9% + $0.30, Shopify Payments’ rates are right in line with other leading payment gateways, including PayPal, stripe, and Authorize.net, but it does tack on an extra 2% transaction fee for any payment that isn’t processed through Shopify Payments. Check to make sure you qualify to sign up for Shopify Payments in its Terms of Service, then get out your calculators. Remember, accepting multiple payment options is one of the 11 best ways to boost online sales. Outside of its core e-commerce hosting, Shopify offers a supercharged and highly customizable ShopifyPlus plan for high-volume merchants and enterprise businesses, and Shopify Lite, which is essentially just Shopify’s payment processing functionality. The Lite plan might be interesting to very small businesses just entering e-commerce. It acts a lot like PayPal: you can pop a Shopify Buy Button into your WordPress or Squarespace site, swipe credit cards with its app, and sell on Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Shopify Lite is $9/month. Frontend features
Backend features
Customer support, training, and resources
BigCommerce
Like Shopify, BigCommerce’s core product is available at a few different functionality tiers, ranging from $30/month to $250/month; also like Shopify, higher tiers are more robust, including features like abandoned cart saver, product filtering, and customer loyalty programs. Unlike Shopify, though, BigCommerce has a sales cap on each of its plans. If you’re bringing in more than $50k/year, for example, you’ll no longer qualify for the Standard plan, and be automatically upgraded to Plus ($80/month with a sales cap of $150k per year). Once you’re inside the product, you’ll see both are built to act similarly. BigCommerce is also theme-based, with 7 free mobile-friendly templates (plus 119 for purchase) for you to install and customize, be it through a drag-and-drop site editor or from the ground-up using the theme’s framework. Shopify and BigCommerce are so comparable we recommend comparing both during their free trial periods and see which one is a better fit for your business. BigCommerce offers 15 days to set up and explore your store, no credit card required. One difference you’ll definitely notice is how many native features BigCommerce has installed right out of the box. It offers an outstanding number of technical integrations and marketing features that Shopify might only be able to provide if you buy and install a plugin or extension (for example, single-page checkout). For some, BigCommerce’s roster of pre-installed features is going to be annoying — kind of like how annoying it was for people who didn’t like U2 having its most recent album auto-downloaded on their iPhones. BigCommerce customers might roll their eyes as they scroll by an option to add gift wrapping already built into their control panel. But those who aren’t overwhelmed by the options may find that they don’t need to pay extra for the functionality they do want. We recommend making a list of the features your business needs requires and testing if you like how they perform during your free trial, and check out what’s available in BigCommerce’s app store. That store isn’t as massive as Shopify’s (600+ add-ons and integrations compared to 2,500+) but there’s a lot to choose from. You also have access to BigCommerce’s flexible API if you need to make a custom integration BigCommerce doesn’t have its own payment processing technology, which means you’ll have to integrate with a payment gateway before you start taking orders. It gives you over 60 to choose from, including all the big hitters: Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Skrill. Like Shopify, the higher tier your plan, the lower your rates. Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t charge a transaction fee to work with these processors, so you’ll save a little there. In addition to its core e-comm platforms, BigCommerce is also available at the enterprise level and with products tailored to B2B wholesalers. In summer 2018, BigCommerce also announced its new Commerce-as-a-Service solution, which is geared to service content-first small businesses who already have an established web presence — namely, a WordPress website. Through an integrated plugin, WordPress users (and businesses using other content management software) will be able to work in their CMS while “centrally managing catalog, customer and order data through BigCommerce.” Prior, customers would have to port their entire websites over and rebuild it on BigCommerce’s hosted platform, or opt for a self-hosted solution like WooCommerce or Magento. Commerce-as-a-Service is really new to BigCommerce — there’s no pricing and interested customers need to request a demo — but we’re excited to see where this technology goes. It could be an exciting bridge between the robust functionality of a hosted e-commerce platform and the hands-on DIY integrations of self-hosted solutions. Frontend features
Backend features
Customer support, training, and resources
Wix
You might know Wix as a drag-and-drop website builder, but it’s also a drag-and-drop e-commerce shop builder, too. And the process is just as simple: create an account, choose your template (there are 60 e-commerce templates to choose from), load your inventory and product pages, set up payment information, and start selling. You can even get started picking your template, designing your store, and trying out the store manager where you’ll track orders, manage inventory, and send out customer newsletters with coupon codes or sales — all for free. Signing up is a simple a logging in with your Google or Facebook account. It’s not until you want to accept payments that you’ll need to upgrade your account to a business / e-commerce account. Wix Business plans range from $20 to $35 per month — but they’re billed in full yearly subscriptions at the time of purchase, so really you’ll be laying out $240 to $420. You’ll get 14-days to test drive the plan. All business plans allow you to accept online payments without paying commissions, and get unlimited bandwidth (so any number of customers can visit your store). The more expensive plans grant you more storage, up to 100,000 emails a month and higher-priority support response. You’ll also get 30G of Google Drive and email storage, so once you connect your domain you can use Gmail as your email at your unique address. With a business plan, you can take credit cards, PayPal, offline payments, and don’t have to pay any commissions to Wix. Not all businesses are the same, so neither are the Wix templates. Any Wix template can run a store, if you add the “Wix Stores” app, or you can get a head-start with a pre-made stores template. To do that, you’ll first choose your business-type. Run a bookings-based business? You’ll start with a Wix Bookings template. Your customers will get auto-email reminders about the event. Sell sessions individually or as part of a membership plan. If you accept offline payments, it’s as simple as checking the “mark as fully paid” box on the bookings dashboard. There’s even a bookings template for restaurants. We like that it’s super fluid to make sales and note when you’re busy: simply block off time you’re not available in your Wix schedule on the mobile app; sync your Wix Bookings with you Google calendar automatically. Customers can also book directly from their mobile phones, too — by creating a club and inviting your customers to it, they can chat you, book a service, RSVP to an event, or start a discussion from the app. We haven’t seen anything like the Wix Music page includes a customizable music player and a way to sell your music directly from your page, without paying any commissions. Your reporting will include most-played, most-shared, most-purchased, and most-downloaded songs. There’s also a pre-made template for ticketed events businesses. You can set the ticket price, manage the RSVP list, invite and add guests, and edit details. From there, it’s all the drag-and-drop joy Wix is known for. You’ll want to design a “storefront” or homepage, product pages for each of the items you sell with images and product information. Want the menu in a different place, in a different font, with other elements? Drag it, change it, save it. If you’ve ever felt templates to be limiting — I can change that but only in those 3 predetermined ways?! — then you’ll love the new Wix Code. It’s a hybrid platform, with all of the ease of a drag-and-drop and the control of your own customization and scripting with a built-in database, JavaScript backend and integrated development environment. Simply turn on the Wix Code editor and you’re in. (We should note: it’s in beta.) We like the clean lines and look of the Wix templates, the drag-and-drop ease of it all, and the head start the pre-made stores give you. Unlike self-hosted e-commerce plans, which require upgrades to access features like coupon codes, everything’s included with a Wix e-commerce plan. Frontend features
Courses and training videosSquarespace
Squarespace is best known as a website builder, but its e-commerce solution is one of the most popular in the world. In large part that’s because e-commerce functionality is built straight into nearly all of its plans: Even if you start with just a basic website, you can sell products. That grow-into-it flexibility makes it an interesting option for businesses who aren’t quite sure of their future plans. With a platform like Shopify, you’re e-commerce or nothing. A business without a thriving online store would be never choose Shopify. But that makes choosing the right Squarespace plan a little bit more complicated. It splits up its products into Websites (with Personal and Business plans) and Online Stores (with Basic and Advanced plans). You can make transactions on both the Online Store plans, as well as the Business Website plan. A good rule of thumb: if you’re primarily selling product through your site, definitely opt for an Online Store plan. If you’re website is primarily content, and you happen to sell a few things, a Business Website plan might be plenty. All plans come with a 14-day free trial to test out the features and functionality, with the option to request an additional trial week if necessary. The Business Website plan has pared-down functionality — the reporting isn’t as robust; there are no customer accounts; there are fewer inventory, order, and tax features — plus it tacks on a 3% transaction fee to all purchases. But it’s also only $18/month, which is one of the cheapest hosted options available. Both of Squarespace’s Online Store plans comes with the full toolkit you’d expect from an e-commerce platform. Basic starts at $26/month, billed annually (or $30/month if you want to pay month-to-month), and Advanced ratchets up to $40/month billed annually (or $46/month-to-month). The Advanced plan gets you more — flexible discounts, gift cards, abandoned cart recover, access to the API. If you do go with a Squarespace web store, it’s going to be beautiful. That’s not to say you can’t have a beautiful store with any other e-commerce platform, but with Squarespace, it’s basically a guarantee. They’re all built for mobile and aesthetically modern, albeit lots are heavy on imagery — you’re definitely going to want to have killer photography. It has over 20 template “families” to choose from (each family may have a few variations, but the same underlying structure), which can then be customized with Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor or by tinkering with the HTML and CSS. You can choose any, but some are better suited for web stores than websites, with features such as Quick View and Image Zoom, and advanced Product Page functionality. The best news: they’re all free. With a lot of other e-commerce platforms, the really covetable templates come with a price tag. With Squarespace, what you get is what you get. Unlike pretty much every other e-commerce platform, it doesn’t integrate with endless apps and extensions. It comes with about 70 of the most popular and most useful built right in, and provides setup support, troubleshooting, and general questions for all of them. But there’s no app store or marketplace like you see with lots of other platforms. You can install third-party customization, but those will required some sort of code injection or “Code Block” — no one-click install. It’s really important to test out the functionality of your Squarespace site during your free trial and see if you like what you’re getting. If not, another platform with more integration capabilities might be a better option. Squarespace also doesn’t give you options with who you use to process payments. With Squarespace, you’re locked into Stripe and/or PayPal (there’s also options for Apple Pay and Venmo). This won’t be a problem if you’re store services customers in certain areas, but Stripe doesn’t support all countries -- only 26. If that’s the case, PayPal will be your only option (which means your customers must have a PayPal account to make a purchase). Frontend features
Backend features
Customer support, training, and resources
Magento
Magento is open-source self-hosted software — you can change anything in the code that you need to, and you’ll need a web host of your own. There are quite a few pricing options: the community edition is totally free to download. WE recommend starting here for most small business owners choosing Magento. Depending on the host you choose, you’ll pay between $4 and $100 a month for hosting. (Want help picking out a web host? See our web host review here.) Unlike Shopify, you have full control over your shop — “how you deliver your customer experience” — without any limitations. That’s why for large-scale stores in need of the ability to create complex customizations without limit, Magento beats Shopify handedly. (In 2016, 202 Magento customers were in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 list, compared to 12 Shopify customers — and 42 merchants in the Internet Retailer B2B E-Commerce 300.) Magento held the top spot on that list. Impressive, but if you’re you’re starting a small, simple shop, you’ll still likely be happier with Shopify or another hosted, out-of-the-box and less custom pick. Magento claims its stores grow faster than Shopify stores — 3x on average. Magento cites the ability to build fully custom experiences as the reason for this difference. They say these stores stand out more. We’re not so sure: it might be a chicken-or-the-egg question: Magento is more customizable, so larger stores that know they’re going to be growing may sign up with Magento at a higher rate. With a higher percentage of these high-growth stores, all Magento stores have a higher growth rate. We do love that Magento loves high-performance and letting you do what you want to do. With Magento, you have the option to build your own site from the ground up, or use Magento’s drag-and-drop visual editor. If you’ve used Mailchimp or Squarespace, you’ll find Magento’s super familiar and intuitive. If you’re not a coder, or don’t have one on your team, the 5,000 extensions and add-ons are very important — using them you can still customize what you want to. Want to add an abandoned cart recovery to your site? There’s a pre-built one for $39. Custom coupon error codes? User logins with permission sets? There are pre-built ones waiting for you. Custom doesn’t need to be impossible even if you’re not a developer. Frontend features
What’s in a name?Magento recently changed some of its product names. Here’s a before/after:
Courses and training videos
Magento enterprise licensesMagento Open Source is free. Magento Commerce — an “all-in-one cloud solution that delivers the power of Magento at affordable prices for Small Business” — is not. Prices are relative to your gross sales revenue. But it’ll cost you ~$20,000 for up to $1M in annual revenue. Sell more, pay more. Though Magento is really open that their prices are negotiable — so schedule a demo and get negotiating! To get a sense of where Magento’s pricing stake points are here are quotes Portland-based creative agency Graybox got from Magento in 2017:
There’s no limit on store count, country count, language, or currency on your license. You can manage multiple stores, transact in multiple countries, in multiple languages and currencies, and use worldwide shipping all on your one subscription (instance). Go big, go global, launch more stores! WooCommerce
WooCommerce brags that it has 53,216,823 downloads, and as such is the most popular eCommerce platform for building an online store (stats from Builtwith). It’s a lot like the 100 Billion hamburgers McDonald’s has served. It doesn’t mean it’s the best hamburger, but they sure do sell well, so there’s something good enough about it. They power 30% of online stores — the most of any e-commerce software. The catch? If you want to do more advanced or powerful things in your store, like run a recommendation engine or sell recurring subscriptions, you’ll need to pay for extensions. Some extensions are free, but many aren’t, they’re $29, $79, sometimes $199 for a one-site subscription. When its integrated so well into a platform you’re probably already using, well, it’s no wonder that 53 million people have used it. WooCommerce runs on any self-hosted WordPress.org site. You’ll need a theme. That’s the beautiful outer layer of your website. (If you’re already running a WordPress site, then installing Woo is as simple as activating any other plugin. You know the drill.) WooCommerce has a free template called Storefront, which prioritizes speed, uptime, and theme/plugin simplicity. It’s the “official” theme, and it’s purposefully clean and simple. It is built and maintained by WooCommerce core developers, and promises “water-tight” integration between the theme, WooCommerce, and any extensions or plugins you add. (WooCommerce.com is running on a $39 Storefront child theme, which gives the Storefront theme a new look.) There are also plenty of templates for sale that aren’t created by WooCommerce or WordPress. You’ll be able to sell physical and digital goods, instant downloads, or affiliate goods in online marketplaces. It also accounts for product variations and configurations. Shipping, including drop-shipping, “is highly configurable.” Want to calculate shipping prices per customer? Want to limit shipments to specific countries? Offer free shipping? It’s all possible. If you upgrade, using any of the 300+ premium extensions, you can add on bookings, repeating subscriptions, and memberships. There are hundreds of extensions in the WooCommerce official marketplace. Popular ones include Stripe, PayPal, USPS, Amazon Payments, Authorize.Net, ShipStation, and MailChimp. For example, want to add reviews to your Storefront site? There’s a $19 extension for that. Want a pricing comparison table to show the difference between your Bronze, Silver, and Gold Memberships? There’s a $19 extension and you’ll get access to a shortcode generator to copy and paste into your layout how you’d like. Notable extensions
At WooCommerce, the customer service team is manned by “Happiness Engineers.” These very same team behind WordPress.com, Simplenote, Jetpack, and Longreads. The motto? “We believe in making the web a better place.” They work remotely from 69 countries, speak 84 languages, and strive to live by the Automattic Creed, which includes the line, “I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.” That customer loyalty and product-first mindset permeates the entire company. In fact, the first three weeks of any employees time are spend in customer service, and one week a year “forevermore” after that. Why? “We believe an early and ongoing connection with the people who use our products is irreplaceable.” To get in touch with this support squad, the first stop is documentation. You’ll find extremely detailed step-by-step instructions, how tos, and ways to fix common issues like blurry images. Need more help than that? Woo also has a help desk where you can submit a ticket or start a live chat. There’s no phone, Facebook, or Twitter support. Frontend features
Courses and training videos
Recap: The Best E-Commerce SoftwareMake a list of all the features you want, decide how much hands-on customization you’re after, and give your first pick a spin. All of our top picks have at least 14 day trial periods for you to get your store up and test the software:
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There are tons of web hosts out there though — literally hundreds of them. So while we think our top picks are excellent options, we’ll walk you through how to find the best web hosting service for your website, using our six hosts as examples.
Our 3 Favorite Web Hosting ProvidersSiteGround
SiteGround is a hugely well-regarded web host, with a rabid fan base and glowing reviews — something especially noticeable in an industry full of fed-up (and vocal) customers. Along with DreamHost and Bluehost, SiteGround is one of WordPress’s three recommended web hosts. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, managed WordPress hosting is built into all of its shared hosting plans — something InMotion considers an upgrade. If your site uses WordPress, this is absolutely a perk: automatic updates, streamlined security, and expert technical support that are all just part of the package. SiteGround is widely considered to be a technology leader, particularly in the shared hosting space where all hosts are duking it out for business. Its servers are ultra fast and extra secure, and SiteGround is constantly deploying new updates and technology to keep them that way. While all its shared hosting plans are powerful, SiteGround is especially well-known for its highest-tier shared plan, GoGeek, which is suped up with tools developers will find especially useful, including a staging server and Git repo creation. Lots of small business and personal websites will probably find this overkill, but if your needs are more complex than the basics, SiteGround has a lot to love. That said, once you blow through SiteGround’s introductory pricing (you choose contracts for one, two, or three years) your plan’s price triples: its lowest tier of shared hosting jumps from $4/month to $12 and its highest tier jumps from $12/month to $26. That doesn’t feel great. It also has the shortest trial period of all our top picks: only 30 days. In addition to shared hosting, SiteGround offers upgrades to cloud hosting and dedicated servers. InMotion Hosting
InMotion may not look flashy, but it’s a solid web host with truly excellent technology, a wide assortment of plans, and a legion of longtime customers. Its massive self-help knowledge base is the industry standard, and customer support is among the best. Don’t believe it? Try for yourself. InMotion’s 90-day free trial period for shared hosting is one of the longest around, second only to DreamHost’s 97-day trial. There’s not a lot of hierarchy in InMotion’s plans. Upgrading from its lowest-tier shared plan, Launch, to Power or to Pro doesn’t unlock access to lots more slick tools or free add-ons. Upgrading is simply designed to accommodate websites that require more oomph — not to upsell. It’s a straightforward approach we like, especially for small businesses and websites that aren’t overly complex. InMotion is one of the only web hosts that doesn’t offer some sort of special introductory pricing. With shared hosting starting at $6–$7/month, it’s a slightly higher price point to start out, but that price will remain pretty consistent every time you re-up your plan. In addition to shared hosting, InMotion offers upgrades to managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers. DreamHost
Like SiteGround, DreamHost is one of WordPress’s three recommended hosts, and includes managed WordPress hosting in its basic shared plans (it also offers a managed plan with more bells and whistles called DreamPress). Like InMotion, it has an industry-leading free trial period — a full 97-day money-back guarantee — and transparent pricing that doesn’t increase after your initial contract. It’s the best of both worlds. DreamHost is notable for being completely customized, skipping the customary cPanel that SiteGround, InMotion, and so many other web hosts use for a control panel it’s built and tailored in-house. Think of it a little like Apple versus Android: Dreamhost customers love it, but it’s not universally compatible should you ever migrate to or from a different host. In addition to shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting, Dreamhost offers upgrades to VPS and cloud hosting, as well as dedicated servers. Ratings and reputation don’t always match up
Two other popular web hosts to considerBluehost and HostGator are both hugely popular web hosts that rank highly in tech publications like PCMag and CNET. There are good reasons why. HostGator has month-to-month contracts available on all its plans, the option to purchase a dedicated IP address, plus Windows-based servers — a little less common than Linux. Bluehost’s shared hosting plans all have some sort of built-in managed WordPress hosting features, and its offers contracts as long as five years, which will score you some really low prices. But user reviews for both providers don’t line up with those industry publication rankings. User reviews always need to be taken with a grain of salt (was someone just having a bad day?) but from a 30,000-foot view, we’re not convinced their customer service can compete. If you want to try them out anyway, both offer money-back guarantees — 45 days for HostGator’s and 30 days for Bluehost. A hosting service we don’t recommendWe recommend avoiding GoDaddy. It has a nice variety of plans and price points, but truly abysmal user ratings. They make sense: Its support documentation is all over the place, and customer service verges on laughable — phone wait times are long, chat is only available during certain hours, and it doesn’t offer any email support at all. You can absolutely do better. How to Find the Best Web Hosting Provider for YouFirst, get a handle on what you actually need from your web hostThe first thing to understand is how much web hosting your site or sites need to function well, without paying for what you don’t need. It starts with a game of Match the Specs. Knowing your site’s stats (or what you predict your site’s stats will be) before you start comparing options and offers will help prevent that upsold-at-the-register feeling. Here are the basic ones to know:
Match what you need with what each host offers, and try not to get too distracted by the stuff a host offers that you aren’t going to use — Bluehost isn’t a better host than DreamHost because it supports Drupal if you’re never going to use Drupal. At the shared hosting level — the most common and where most websites start out — all six providers we looked at are fairly tit for tat: two or three tiers of plans with a variety of perks, functionality, and resources that increase with each tier. Unless there are specific conditions you’re trying to meet (you really do need that Drupal, for instances) at a pure specs point of view, we think you’ll be happy with any of them. What stands out?1. SiteGround’s plans appear quite a bit smaller than the competition, ranging from 10GB–30GB of storage and approximately 10K–100K monthly visitors, compared to 100GB of storage for GoDaddy’s lowest tier, and unlimited storage and bandwidth on most of the rest. Don’t let that dissuade you, especially if you like the rest of what SiteGround’s got going for it. For lots of websites, 10–30GB is plenty, especially sites that aren’t streaming or hosting gigantic media files.
2. SiteGround, DreamHost, and Bluehost all include some kind of managed WordPress hosting into their shared hosting plans, instead of considering it an upgrade. (SiteGround also includes managed Joomla hosting in its shared hosting packages.) It’s not all that surprising: These are the three web hosts WordPress recommends to its many millions of users, and it tracks that they would prioritize those users needs into their core offerings. WordPress will absolutely work seamlessly on all shared web hosting plans, managed or not. With managed hosting, though, everything is designed with WordPress in mind: it comes pre-installed, core updates happen automatically, customer support has more specific expertise. If you like the sound of that, you may want to skip shared hosting altogether and shop for managed WordPress hosting instead. 3. Most web hosts run Linux on their servers. If your website requires a Windows operating system, Hostgator and GoDaddy are your two options from these six. Shared hosting comparison
*SiteGround and Hostgator both offer unmetered bandwidth, but provide recommended traffic thresholds Then, put customer service to the testBeyond any basic “does my website have what it needs to function well,” customer support is the single most important thing a web host can offer. Think of it like health insurance. It doesn’t matter how robust the policy is. If the claims process is a nightmare, you’re going to switch providers. Customer support can be split into live support — phone calls, help desk emails, and chat — and knowledge centers, which include everything from help articles to tutorials to community forums to blogs. Both live and self-help support are vital for when you’re having issues in set-up or performance. When it comes to a knowledge center, you want a catalog that’s well-organized and easy to search, with a huge library of hyper-specific content. Bonus points for active moderators who are answering questions. What stands out?1. Out of our six hosts, InMotion’s support center is the one to beat. It has a gigantic database of detailed articles, tutorials, videos, and FAQs, plus a well-moderated community forum. If something doesn’t make sense, keep on scrolling: InMotion support staff is present in every comments section with advice, recommendations, and clarification — the only one of our six providers to do so. InMotion’s support center is through and easy to navigate. 2. SiteGround and DreamHost also have great resources that are complete, informative, and intuitively organized. Even though the quality of the content in HostGator’s support is rich, it looks looks like it was designed in the mid-90s and never updated. 3. Bluehost’s and GoDaddy’s organization is particularly atrocious. Go straight to the search bar — better yet, Google what you’re looking for. Don’t even bother browsing. As for live support, your priorities are fast access and nuanced, specific help from people who know what they’re talking about. That’s tricky to evaluate without being a long-term customer. One way is to get a sense of a web host’s reputation, particularly over the past two years (all six of our web hosts have been around since at least the early 2000s — lots has happened since then). What stands out?1. SiteGround is overwhelmingly the crowd favorite out of the six hosts we looked at. It’s the de facto recommendation of Reddit users, and hugely well-regarded everywhere else: like we mentioned, it’s one of only three web hosts recommended by WordPress (DreamHost and Bluehost are the others), and has over twice as many five-star user reviews as any other provider on WhoIsHostingThis. 2. If you start reading user reviews, you’ll notice how many are focused on customer support. This is especially apparent with Bluehost, HostGator, and GoDaddy, whose products rank high with industry publications like CNET and PCMag, but who are ravaged by customers unhappy with the the support they’re provided. Ratings and reputation don’t always match up
But the true test of support quality is to experience it yourself, and that’s where free trials come in. All six hosts have some sort of money-back guarantee on their shared hosting plans, which means you can set up your website and see what you think of the service with relatively low stakes — just your time and any add-on fees you opt into, like paying for domain registration. We recommend going to town with customer support during that trial period. Get on live chat, open tickets, hop on the phone as much as possible to see if you like what you’re being served up. What stands out?1. DreamHost and InMotion are the real leaders of the money-back guarantee, with 97- and 90-day free trial periods respectively. These are the best you’re going to find from any web host, anywhere, and give you a lot of time to test out customer support, tools, and functionality. HostGator comes in second with a 45-day trial. Every other host offers a nice-to-have but swift 30 days. 2. SiteGround, InMotion, and Bluehost put a lot of resources into their support channels, with 24/7 access across phone, live chat, and email. 3. You have to pay money to speak on the phone with someone from DreamHost: $10 for one callback, or you can purchase packages of three callbacks for $15. 4. HostGator and GoDaddy both lack any email customer support. Customer support comparison
* DreamHost customers can request a callback from technical support, but will be charged $10 Try not to worry about uptime too muchBeyond customer service, the most common complaint you’ll read from customer reviews is about uptime – or rather, lack thereof. Uptime is vital to your business: in 2013, Amazon.com famously went offline for 40 minutes and lost $4.8 million. Every single web host in the world strives to have 100 percent server uptime, but there’s unfortunately no industry standard to evaluate how well they do. Lots of web hosting review sites do personal tests to try and gauge server performance, including WhoIsHostingThis and Web Hosting Facts, but since these tests only look at one site at a time, and often for short amounts of time, they are best used as indications, not gospel. That said, all six of our web host sites perform well in these micro tests, with reported uptimes over 99.9 percent. To try to avoid the “just trust us” promise of near-perfect uptime, most hosts provide some sort of guarantee of at least 99.9 percent uptime. However, that guarantee isn’t much of a guarantee. It just means your bill can be discounted in the event of any unplanned downtime. There’s a lot of fine print on these guarantees, too, including not accepting self-reported or third-party uptime data, and not providing refunds for downtime that was out of the host’s control (for example, a hurricane). What stands out?1. Bluehost is one of the only host to offer no uptime guarantee, and instead just says most of its downtime issues are resolved in 15 minutes. We’re not impressed by Bluehost’s no-promises uptime agreement. 2. SiteGround zooms out to view uptime annually instead of monthly, like most everyone else. If your average annual uptime is below 99.9 percent, you get one month of free hosting. SiteGround is also the most transparent when it comes to its uptime, and lists both its cumulative 12-month uptime and the previous month’s uptime right on its site. 3. DreamHost zooms in to view uptime hourly. For every hour of service interruption below 100 percent uptime, you get a day of free hosting (capped at 10 percent of your bill). The caveat: money back is only eligible when you manually flag that you think your service is sub-par. DreamHost doesn’t track it automatically. Uptime guarantees aren’t exactly guarantees
*Only available on InMotion’s highest-tier shared hosting plan Migrations matter, especially if your website already existsFrustrating support and downtime — particularly when they’re combined — are the most common reasons to abandon one host and join another. It’s always possible (and free) to migrate your existing site manually to a new web host (another reason those knowledge bases are so critical). But it gets more challenging the bigger and more complicated your site is, which is why web hosts often provide some sort of “managed” migration to ensure it’s done right. What stands out?1. InMotion’s managed migration policy is the most generous: three are free, and then it’s just $10 per transfer after that. 2. The oddest policy is Bluehost’s, which requires you to purchase five managed migrations at a time for $150. The economics aren’t so bad if you have five sites to migrate — less so if you only have one or two. 3. DreamHost is also unique insomuch as it is the only host out of the these six that doesn’t use cPanel, but rather its own custom control panel. Transferring an existing site in and out of DreamHost is always going to be a manual process managed by you. The exception is WordPress sites, whose migration DreamHost will manage for a whopping $99 each.
Other web hosting specs to look forBackups: It’s best practice to manually backup all your files and databases and store them on separate machines — we consider it one of the top 4 content areas you should worry about. But lots of web hosts advertise complementary backups to act as a kind of auto-save in case you corrupt a file, delete something vital, or otherwise break your website. SiteGround’s backup policy is the beefiest and most integrated as a feature. It automatically backs everything up every day. For its mid- and highest-tiered plans, restoring those backups is free; the lowest-tiered plan is $20 per restore. GoDaddy offers a similar service, but for $2/month. Everyone else treats automatic backups and restores as worst-case scenarios: Somehow you’ve wiped out your entire website and you forgot to make any manual copies.
SSD storage: Solid State Drive technology is notably faster than regular “spinning” hard drives, which in turn means content is delivered to your website and your website’s visitors faster. It’s pretty common among well-known web hosts to include SSD storage in even lower-tier shared hosting plans. GoDaddy is the only one of the six hosts we looked at that doesn’t offer it on its basic shared hosting. You have to spring for its managed WordPress hosting to get SSD storage. SSL certificates: Certificates for Secure Sockets Layer encryption (SSL) are like internet passports that confirm your website is secure enough for your visitors to submit sensitive data, like credit card information and passwords. It’s considered best practice to have SSL certification — in fact, Google considers it as a factor in how your site will show up in search rankings. Most web hosts include basic SSL certificates for free in their shared hosting plans (although GoDaddy only offers it with its highest-tier shared hosting plan). That basic SSL certificate should be enough for most websites. More advanced encryption is needed if your website is also connected with a physical presence, like a brick and mortar store. Those suped-up SSL certificates are available for purchase through all web hosts. SSH access: Secure Shell access means you have a secure channel straight into your account to manage files and databases. It’s a feature that’s critical if you’re have a web developer or technically-inclined site administrator who wants to manage and troubleshoot everything themselves. All six web hosts provide SSH access. Email hosting: If your web host includes email hosting, it means you’ll have access to a customized email address and room to store your emails. Lots of web hosts offer this, often for free. SiteGround, InMotion, BlueHost, and GoDaddy include unlimited email hosting on their lowest-tier shared plans; all six hosts include it on their highest-tier plans. It’s worth keeping in mind that email isn’t stored in a separate place — it all pulls from the same server space as the rest of your site, which means it will impact how much room is “left over” for you to use. If that doesn’t sound ideal — maybe your website is already pretty weighty — your web host isn’t your only option for getting a custom email address. GSuite (aka GMail for businesses) and services like Hover also provide email, and often it’s a more robust, more intuitive solution, like what you’re used to with your personal email. Lots of small business owners prefer keeping their email and websites on separate hosts: if your web host is also your email host and it goes offline, you’ll be without access to email. Quelle horreur. Look for room to grow long-termA typical upgrade pattern for a new website is to start with shared hosting, max that out, and then jump to VPS, cloud, or dedicated. WordPress websites might take a pit stop in Managed WordPress hosting for awhile, too — which, depending on the host, could be on a VPS server (like Bluehost) or cloud server (like DreamHost and HostGator). It’s time to upgrade when your site’s size and traffic over-burden your current plan. Sometimes, the host will let you know it’s time to upgrade — that will happen if you’re, say, overwhelming a server and making everyone else’s sites on that server slow down. Another reason to upgrade is if you’re ready for more functionality, customizability, and autonomy: upgrading usually gets you access to a more robust toolkit. What stands out?1. SiteGround is unique in that it leaps from shared hosting straight to cloud, without the traditional VPS onramp. 2. InMotion is a little less modern than its competition by not offering some sort of cloud hosting solution. 3. GoDaddy has created another stepping stone between shared hosting and full-blown VPS with something called “business hosting” — basically the power of VPS with the straight-forward cPanel interface of shared hosting. No web host wants to put a ceiling on your website’s growth
Always pay for domain privacyIf you’re creating a new website, you’ll need to register a domain. All six web hosts allow you to register with them (sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee) even though it’s not required — you can register a domain with Namecheap or GoDaddy and still be hosted by SiteGround or InMotion. When you’re purchasing that domain, always opt into domain privacy, which means proxy contact information from the domain administrator will be submitted to the WHOIS registry. If you don’t opt in, you will be spammed. A lot. Domain privacy usually runs $1–2/month and is billed annually. Always, always, always get domain privacy. Or you’ll be sharing lots of personal info. DreamHost includes domain privacy for free with all its shared plans; Bluehost offers it for free on its highest-tier shared plan. Recap: The Best Web Hosting Services
via Quick Sprout http://www.quicksprout.com/best-web-hosting/ Quality content takes time and effort to produce. I am sure you know this if you regularly publish content on all your distribution channels. But many brands lose quality in pursuit of higher quantities of content. While I agree that quantity is important as well, your quality can’t suffer as a result of this strategy. You need to learn how to avoid stale content. I work with many businesses that run into this problem. They want to publish at least one piece of content a day on all their distribution channels. Among their websites, blogs, and social media pages, it’s a lot of content. Before you know it, that’s upward of 30 posts per week across these platforms. However, that doesn’t mean you need to come up with 30 unique pieces of content. This approach will take too long and ultimately hurt your quality. That’s why you need to learn how to effectively repurpose your content across multiple marketing platforms. First, you need to learn the top ways to come up with new content ideas. Once you have an idea, you can turn it into multiple posts on each channel. In fact, sometimes you won’t even need to come up with a new idea. You can use old content to your advantage here as well. Worker smarter, not harder. As we continue through this guide, I’ll explain how you can repurpose your content across all your distribution channels and give you some ideas to try. Identify your most popular contentBefore you spend time producing new content, I recommend re-using older publications and posts. After all, you already spent time working on these. Why let them go to waste? But don’t just use any content. Start with your most popular pieces. Identify your content with the highest engagement rates. Look for:
If you’re struggling to find what you need, try using Buzzsumo to see which content had the highest engagement on social media. Here’s what the content analyzer tool found when I put quicksprout.com into it: It shows me which posts from the past year were the most popular. But you can filter the time based on your needs. In addition to Buzzsumo, you can use Google Analytics to see which pages on your website are the most popular. After you analyze your content with these tools, make a list of your top performing publications and posts. This will be your starting point. You’ll use this list to repurpose content. For example, if you had a high performing blog post, you can turn it into a YouTube video. You could use a Facebook post with the highest number of likes on your Instagram story. The ideas are seemingly endless. As we continue, I’ll give you some more examples of how you can proceed. Build custom infographicsGoing through your old posts, you want to find ways to repurpose them for even more engagement. Here’s what I mean. If you take an email newsletter that had the highest number of opens, click-throughs, and conversions and turn it into a blog post, the idea is that the blog post will be high-performing as well. Otherwise, what’s the point? You don’t want to publish content just for the sake of publishing. Your content needs to be actionable and drive engagement. That’s why infographics are ideal for this strategy. Infographics are the most shared types of content across social platforms: People are visual learners. The graph above is a perfect example of that. Sure, I can tell you infographics get shared the most. But when I show you, it really sinks in and makes it easier for you to process. Scan through all your top performing posts you identified earlier. Look for facts, statistics, or anything else that could be turned into a visual representation of the concept. If you have never built an infographic before, don’t be intimidated. It’s not that difficult. Refer to my post on how to enhance your content by building infographics for a list of tools that will make this process easy for you. Once you create these infographics, you’ll have many options. The same infographic can be used in different ways. You can:
The list goes on and on. Leverage your social media platformsYour social media profiles have lots of benefits. They expose your brand to a wider audience and help you engage with your followers and customers alike. Posting content on social media also helps you drive traffic to your website. Anything you create gives you an excuse to post on social media. If you haven’t been doing this, you need to do so moving forward. All your videos, infographics, and pictures are a must. Social media is the number one way for publishers to drive traffic to their blog posts: If you look at my Facebook page and my Twitter profile, you’ll see I use this strategy for all my blog posts. It’s easy. Plus, it gives you an excuse to post something every day. I’m shocked whenever I see businesses not using this tactic. They publish three or four blogs per week but struggle to come up with social media posts. When you implement this strategy, plan your posts accordingly. For example, there’s no reason to share the same blog post on all your social platforms simultaneously. Spread out those promotions throughout the week. This will maximize your exposure and increase the chances of driving more traffic to your site. Create more evergreen contentYou can’t repurpose old content forever. At some point, you’ll need to create new pieces. But you can make repurposing easier by creating evergreen content. Are you familiar with this concept? Allow me to explain. Simply put, evergreen content stays relevant for longer periods of time than regular content. Ideally, the majority of your content will be evergreen. But it’s not realistic or likely that this will be the case for everything you create. For example, last year, I wrote a post on top marketing trends to look for in 2018. Once 2019 comes, this post will lose its freshness. When you write your evergreen content, you want to be as broad as possible. This post was fresh for an entire year. That wouldn’t be the case if it was the top trends to look for in January 2018. Do you see the difference? Extremely specific content will only be relevant for a short period of time. Therefore, it’s more difficult for you to repurpose it. Here’s another example. If you write a post about the Apple’s latest iOS update, it’s fresh only until a new version of the software is released. That’s not evergreen. Here are some tips to help you find an evergreen topic: FAQ sheets are great for evergreen content. Produce how-to guides or videos on topics that won’t be changing for years. Clarify industry terms and concepts. Again, I’m not saying you should be producing only evergreen content. That’s not realistic. But if you publish an evergreen topic tomorrow, you could potentially repurpose it on another platform next year. That’s the idea. Find the most interesting statistics you publishedIf you’re like me, you use statistics in your content all the time. Stats are a great way to back up any claims you’re making. I recommend doing this because it proves your legitimacy and lets your audience know you’re not making things up. But if you’re not repurposing content, those statistics get buried in your posts after they are published, never to be seen again. Go back, and find the most interesting ones. In the future, keep a list of all statistics when you find them. Then you can use them on other platforms. Earlier, I talked about creating infographics. But that’s not the only way you can repurpose data. Tweet a statistic. Use them in your Instagram captions. Include a stat in your email subject line. Post the most relevant ones on your website. Get creative with this strategy. Start a podcastPodcasts are another great way to repurpose your content. That’s because you have many different resources to work with there. All your blog posts and YouTube videos are viable options for a podcast. You can summarize this content, nearly word for word, with your podcasts. Since podcasts are growing in popularity, it’s a great way to reach an audience that doesn’t want to read blog posts or watch videos: Consider bringing a guest on your podcast to make things more interesting. Have some fun with it. I try to keep this in mind with all my podcasts. Fine-tune your writing skillsIf you’ve got lots of audio, video, and visual content, you need to learn how to turn that into written content. Start blogging more often. Write every day if you can. It’s like anything else. The more you do something, the better you’ll get at it. I wasn’t born a great blogger. It’s a learned skill. Are some people better writers than others? Absolutely. If you can’t find the time to write or can’t figure out how to write quality content, find someone on your team who can handle these responsibilities. Once you’re able to write better, you can write a blog post about one of your YouTube videos, for example. Keep things simple. Make your content easy for people to read and understand. These are just some examples of things you can turn into written content:
Encourage user-generated contentYour content isn’t the only type you can repurpose. If you can find creative ways to encourage user-generated content, it will be easy for you to use this to your advantage as well. Then all you have to do is sort through that user content and find the best pieces to repurpose for your needs. Here’s an example of how GoPro encourages UGC on its website: As you can see, it offers an incentive for people to submit their own content. GoPro is giving away a million dollars, split between anyone who submits content that the company uses in a promotional video. This saves the team a ton of time. Instead of going out to different locations all over the world to shoot videos on their latest camera model, they put their customers to work instead. Plus, they’ll be able to get way more footage this way as opposed to trying to do this on their own. Once the videos are submitted, GoPro can repurpose them in a bunch of different ways. They can be used for advertisements, social media posts, YouTube videos, website content, and they can even be embedded in emails. Come up with a similar strategy, and encourage your customers to submit pictures and videos. I recommend using social media as a distribution platform for your UGC campaigns. You can also find UGC without asking for it. Sift through your comments. Look at the comments on your social media pages and blog posts to see which ones can be repurposed. If you notice similar comments or questions, use them to create an FAQ page. Find your strongest introductionsSometimes, all you need to do is repurpose a portion of your previously published content. If you want to repurpose a short form of written content, I recommend using your post introductions. If you need help with this, learn how to write blog post introductions that make the rest of your post irresistible. Once you identified these top introductions, it’s easy to repurpose them. Use an introduction from a blog post in an email newsletter. Use the same text in a YouTube video description. Preview your introductions on social media. Here’s an example of how Conversion XL uses this strategy: This also connects to one of my previous topics about leveraging your social media platforms. Rather than posting a link with a CTA such as “check out my latest blog post,” consider using this strategy instead. The text associated with the link would be the opening lines of the blog post introduction. ConclusionYou don’t need to create new content every time you want to publish something new. There are ways for you to use your existing content to your advantage. Just repurpose the work you’ve already done across all your distribution channels. Start by identifying your best content. You’ll want to use that to increase your engagement metrics. Build infographics. Share statistics. Post everything on social media. Moving forward, create as much evergreen content as possible. This will make it easier for you to repurpose your content in the future. Turn blog posts into podcasts. Use videos and other audio files to create posts. Encourage user-generated content so you can repurpose it. As you implement these strategies, you’ll realize you’re currently sitting on enough content to last you for months to come, as long as you can repurpose it effectively. Use this guide as a reference to steer you in the right direction. What type of content is your business repurposing on your distribution channels? via Quick Sprout http://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/31/how-to-repurpose-your-content-across-multiple-marketing-platforms/ Nearly every email marketing platform promises the same thing: great deliverability, intuitive tools, designer-quality templates, and useful reporting so you can make the most of every email you send. We looked at the best email marketing services and found that yes, they do all reliably deliver email, make it easy to manage your massive lists, and make sending emails more intuitive. But they’re not all the same. These are our four recommendations and how they stack up.
The 4 Top Email Marketing PlatformsIf you’re a more advanced user — maybe you’re already dreaming of your complex automated email workflows and your robust tagging system — check out ConvertKit. Its workflow builder is the easiest to use, not only letting you visually map out your emails sends, but also editing the emails in those flows seamlessly. Instead of clicking back and forth between editing your workflow and editing each email one-by-one, you can edit them all from one space: the workflow simply slides to the side when you edit an email and slides back out when you’re done. It’s our most expensive top pick, but if you’re living in this software, it’s very much worth it. Don’t have a big budget, but love the idea of a visual workflow builder and a robust tagging system? Consider GetResponse. Its workflow tool is easy to use, just not as amazingly intuitive as ConvertKit’s. At half the price, though, it might be worth the tradeoff. If you’re new to email marketing, Mailchimp is a great place to start. Its templates are knock-out gorgeous. There’s helpful just-in-time information at every step. And just about all of its reporting, testing, and tools are free on the Forever Free plan. You’ll get up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month at that price. When you grow too big to stay free, it won’t be painful: Mailchimp’s pricing is competitive. Finally, Mailjet: the Google Docs of email marketing services. Astonishingly, it’s the only option we found with real-time collaboration. We’ve lived in a world where design and copy and merchandising and a dozen more people are sending feedback to one sole email marketer like it’s 1999. Get everyone in the same email builder and collaborate. You’ll need to sign up for the Premium plan to access to this feature. If you choose Mailjet, we recommend the upgrade. Our Top Pick: ConvertKit
ConvertKit’s product is hands-down the best in its class. It’s intuitive in a way that we didn’t even know to ask for — like the game-changing way of the iPhone touchscreen. We won’t be surprised if more platforms start to copy ConvertKit. How’s it so great? Updating the emails in a flow is phenomenally simple. You’re always working in the visual automator flow chart. Click into any email and the flow chart slides to the side. Edit the email, then click on any other email to edit that one. You can seamlessly move from one email to the next and save them all at once. Imagine, for example, that you have an automated flow to sign up for a webinar and you’ve changed the price or the date of the webinar. You’d like to change it throughout the entire email sequence. This method makes it simple to move from email to email within the sequence without using a bunch of tabs, or trying to remember where you left off. ConvertKit’s demo page has a good video walk-through of its best-in-class workflow. If that alone wasn’t enough to win it our crown, ConvertKit’s tagging system is impressively robust and operates as its segmentation functionality. Instead of grouping your subscribers into multiple lists (where you’ll get double charged by most services), with ConvertKit, you have one list and many tags. You can manually tag subscribers with just about anything, and auto tag them based on source, link clinks, and purchases through integrations. Use those tags to target your emails to particular customers, or use conditional content tags to show or hide different pieces of information to subscribers within each email. Here’s an example: You’re a skydiving instructor. You use your list to sell skydives with customers and potential customers, and run a Conquer Your Fears email course to get new leads. You also use your list to up-sell existing customers multi-packs of skydives, and you offer a six-week 40-skydive instructor training course. As we discussed in The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation, your job is to long-term guide each of your customers through the different points of your conversion funnel. The people who’ve signed up for the Conquer Your Fears challenge are not the same as the ones interested in the training course. You need a more complex system of tagging and segmentation. You need ConvertKit (or GetResponse, depending on your budget). You’ll be able to tag each of your subscribers with the number of skydives they’ve done — based either on purchasing from your web-store, or by clicking a link in an intro email. ConvertKit is not the best email marketing service for everyone.We appreciate ConvertKit’s honesty in its blogpost 5 Reasons you should not switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit. Even though ConvertKit is our favorite email service provider, we totally agree! If you want beautiful, drag-and-drop email templates, you should stick with MailChimp. ConvertKit doesn’t have them.
ConvertKit highly encourages text emails that create the feeling that you just opened Gmail and sent a note. So, it only comes pre-loaded with three email templates: text-only, classic, and modern. The difference? Text-only has no pictures; classic and modern have pictures. Classic uses a serif font; modern uses a non-serif font. That’s it folks. There are no fancy email templates, no GIFs, no header images.
And, ConvertKit isn’t free. Even on its lowest plan, you’ll be paying $29 a month (or $24 if you pay annually up front) — which is still $29 or $24 more than you’d pay to get started with MailChimp. There is a 14-day ConvertKit free trial, but you’ll be paying up front, no matter how successful (or unsuccessful) you are at building a list of subscribers. If you don’t have a list yet, you might want to start with MailChimp. And if you have one list, and plan to send to them all the same thing, MailChimp will serve you well. Other ConvertKit features to note
CovertKit Customer Support
Runner-Up for Best Workflow: GetResponse
The best things about GetResponse are its visual flow builder (a less powerful version of ConvertKit’s flowchart style that doesn’t integrate with its email editor) and its landing page integrations. If you’re going to be doing any webinar marketing, these landing pages are already set up for you to crush it. And GetResponse probably won’t blow through your budget as fast, either.
GetResponse has the most complex pricing structure of our top picks. With MailChimp and ConvertKit, your price increases as your subscribers increase, but you aren’t necessarily unlocking a bunch of features or tools — you already had access to most of them. With GetResponse you pay based on the number of subscribers you have and the level of service you want: Email, Pro, Max, or Enterprise.
Monthly prices listed. Sign up for an annual plan to save 18%. If you go opt for two years, you’ll save 30%. No refunds if you cancel early. Other GetResponse Features to Note
GetResponse Customer Support
Best Email Marketing for Beginners: Mailchimp
If you’re looking for a free or freemium product, Mailchimp is the place to start. (You probably already knew that. As FastCompany says, Mailchimp is probably the biggest name in the freemium category.) You get access to almost all of Mailchimp’s features without dropping in any credit card information. Once you outgrow the free plan, you can upgrade easily. It’s also an easy starting place for beginners. To Mailchimp, you’re not sending an email, you’re having an interaction with your recipient: It’s not an abandoned cart, it’s a show of deep interest in a product and an opportunity to capture their interest! As you scroll and build your interactions, Mailchimp acts like a cheery, helpful workbook with with pro tips, best practices, and optimization advice waiting for you on every page. (And it’s good stuff you’ll recognize from how to write emails that get results.) Don’t just send a receipt, MailChimp says, send some suggestions for other products they may want to add to their order! We concur. The interactions you create will be beautiful. Mailchimp’s pre-made templates are beauties ready for images, GIFs, designed headers, the works. Its drag-and-drop tool isn’t necessarily impressive, but it certainly isn’t hard to use, and allows for simple customizations. Add a module, delete one, edit one, or swap the order. Other Mailchimp Features to Note
Mailchimp Customer Support
Best Platform for Collaboration: Mailjet
If there are a lot of cooks in your email marketing kitchen — we’ve run campaigns that needed buy-in or comments from design, branding, copy, merchandising, PR, legal, and more! -- then Mailjet Premium is going to be a game-changer. Instead of funneling all email campaign changes through one person, emailing out a preview, and having that same person make all of the changes, everyone can hop into Mailjet and collaborate. Make comments, make changes, and even lock down sections that are already approved. Track changes and restore old versions whenever you’d like to rewind. Worried about letting loose the power of email sends to everyone? Add a “publication request” and automatically require manager sign-off before anything gets launched. It’s the stuff Google Docs has conditioned us to expect — and Mailjet is the only service that offers this option. For this reason, we recommend Mailjet for larger marketing and branding teams. If it’s just you working on an email campaign, real-time collaboration won’t matter at all, and we think you’d be just as happy with Mailchimp. There’s nothing else super special about Mailjet on its Free and Basic plans: you get access to drag-and-drop email templates and 24/7 support. Opt for Basic and Mailjet will drop its branding. Every Mailjet plan allows you to have unlimited contacts. Want to add a million people to your list? Go for it. You’ll only be limited by the number of emails you can send in a day or a month. On its free plan, that’s just 200 a day. (It’s really more of a trial than a plan in our book.) Other Mailjet Features to Note
Mailjet Customer Support
Recap: The Best Email Marketing Platforms
via Quick Sprout http://www.quicksprout.com/best-email-marketing-services/ With the holiday season quickly approaching, your business needs to take steps to prepare for a potential surge in sales. But you can’t assume people will buy from your brand during the holidays if you sit back and do nothing. The brands able to recognize the latest marketing trends will have success in the coming months. Consumers are willing and able to spend money during the holidays. It’s a fact. How you prepare and position yourself will determine how much of the market share your company will control. Even though the ecommerce industry is a competitive space, there is plenty of money to go around. In fact, experts predict ecommerce sales to increase by 17-22% during the 2018 holiday season. November 1st to January 31st is considered the holiday season. I know what some of you are thinking. There are holidays throughout the entire year. What makes the ones during those dates so special? Research shows consumers say they will spend nearly $800 during the winter holidays: On average, they spend more money during the winter holidays than during all the other top-spending holidays combined. It’s the season of giving, and it’s usually a happy time of year. People are feeling generous when buying gifts for their friends and family. However, the holiday season can be stressful. The weather starts to get colder. Stores get busier. Consumers feel overwhelmed with the length of their to-do lists. As a marketer, you need to make the buying process as easy as possible for the customer. With your ecommerce platform, there is no reason for people to fight the crowds at their local shopping malls. They can buy holiday gifts from the comfort of their homes. I’ll explain how you can use this situation to your advantage and benefit from a major boost in ecommerce sales during the 2018 holiday season. Don’t wait to start your promotionsWhen is it appropriate to start running holiday ads? Right now. You need to learn how to build hype for the holiday season as an ecommerce brand. This is your chance to let people know what to expect. Tell them what type of sales you’ll be running or whether you’re planning to release a new product around that time. They may not necessarily buy something the first time they see your holiday ad, but be persistent. Continue running promotions on all your distribution channels. When consumers are ready to buy, your business will be on their minds. All too often I see ecommerce brands hesitant to start these promotions early. They think it’s a waste of money because people don’t start shopping until late November at the earliest. But that’s not the case. Research shows that only 27% of consumers don’t purchase any gifts before Thanksgiving: This means that more than 70% of people have done at least some holiday shopping before Thanksgiving. It’s not unreasonable for a customer to buy gifts during the first week of November. The earlier you can start your holiday promotions, the greater chance you’ll have of driving more ecommerce sales. Recognize the most popular shopping daysAs you can see, there is a surge in ecommerce sales between November and January. But some days are more popular than others during that time. Over the past five years, Cyber Monday and Black Friday have consistently been the most popular days for holiday shoppers: We’ve all seen those crazy Black Friday videos every year. Hundreds of customers running into stores, trampling on anything and anyone who gets in their way. Six people fist-fighting over the last TV in the store. It’s madness. Why does this happen? It’s because everyone loves to get a deal. As an ecommerce brand, you need to run ads promoting ways customers can save money by shopping online. They don’t need to deal with that mayhem to get a bargain. Here’s another strategy you can consider. There’s no need for you to wait till Cyber Monday to slash your prices. Since so many people are shopping during those two days, your brand could get lost in the shuffle. To stand out, create your own brand holiday that same week. Send out email reminders, post on social media, and update your website. Then your customers will know they can get great deals on the Tuesday or Wednesday before or after Cyber Monday. If you implement this strategy, you should still continue to run deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The last thing you want to do is let your competitors steal your customers during the two most popular shopping days of the year. Put emphasis on your return policyObviously, you don’t want to deal with returns. However, your return policy is important to your customers. This is especially true during the holiday season. When people buy gifts, they don’t know whether the recipient will like what they get. What if they already have one? What if the size is wrong? That’s probably why holiday ecommerce return rates are so high. Customers are more than three times as likely to return a holiday ecommerce purchase than a standard brick and mortar purchase. Ecommerce return rates are 10% higher during the holidays than the rest of the year. Furthermore, 80% of consumers expect free returns. However, only 25% of retailers have a free return policy. This is your chance to differentiate yourself from the competition. Offer free returns. We know that 83% of customers read return policies before buying something, so make sure this information is easy to find on your website. Here’s something else you should keep in mind: 72% of consumers are willing to shop more frequently and spend more money with businesses offering easy returns. If you make this process simple, you can boost revenue by optimizing the customer experience. Consider extending the length of your return deadlines, especially during the holiday season. Here’s why. Even if your company has a 30-day return policy with no questions asked, it still may not be good enough. What if someone buys a gift for Christmas in early November? The return policy could be invalid before the recipient even opens their gift. Take all of this into consideration when you’re creating your return policy. Advertise how easy it is for customers to return gifts without any hassle. Don’t charge for shippingIn addition to offering free returns, you should offer free shipping as well. I already discussed how much money people plan to spend during the holidays. They’ll do whatever they can to save money when they have the chance. If they are torn between buying something from two different brands, they’ll ultimately decide to go with the company that will ship their items free. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. Free shipping was cited by consumers as the most important option when buying online: The reason why businesses don’t offer free shipping is because they don’t want the cost to come out of their pockets, which is understandable. To offset the shipping cost, just raise the prices of your products. Your customers won’t know the difference. They’re still paying for the advertised price and can benefit from free shipping. Here’s an analogy. Have you ever stayed at a hotel offering free breakfast? Obviously, that breakfast isn’t free. Its cost was included in your nightly rate. The same concept can be applied to free shipping. Offer rewards for customer loyaltyThe holiday season shouldn’t be a time for you to start focusing on customer acquisition. Would you be happy with getting new customers? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean you should be marketing to a new audience. Instead, focus on generating sales from your existing customers. These people already know who you are and what you stand for. They’re familiar with your products and don’t need any introduction. You can increase sales by implementing a customer loyalty program. You can use this strategy all year. Research indicates 82% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands offering loyalty programs. If you have these programs in place, make sure you remind your loyal customers they can save money with their rewards during the holidays. As I said before, people are spending a ton of money during this season, so they’ll gladly look for any way to save a few bucks whenever possible. During the holidays, 86% of consumers will stay loyal to businesses that have rewards programs: Furthermore, 90% of shoppers say they plan to take advantage of rewards programs during the holiday season. And 50% of consumers plan to use those rewards to buy more gifts than they normally would. But just because someone is a member of your rewards program doesn’t mean they won’t buy from another brand. The average consumer participates in four different rewards programs. To ensure your customers buy from you instead of your competitors, you need to offer better rewards and incentives. Make it easy for customers to track shippingEarlier I mentioned that people are stressed during the holidays. They have much to do and have many things on their minds. To stay organized, people want the ability to track the progress of their orders. You should send shipping notifications and tracking numbers to your customers. This is a great chance for you to create an actionable drip campaign. First, send an email to the customer confirming their order was completed. Then, send a second email notifying them the order has shipped. This is an appropriate time to include the tracking number. Finally, send a third email when the product has been delivered. Click-through rates to tracking pages increase during the holiday season: This should tell you that consumers are genuinely interested in tracking their orders. It gives them a chance to make sure everything is going according to schedule. Studies show 93% of consumers refer to their emails for these notifications, and 38% of people want to be contacted on multiple channels. If applicable, consider sending text messages and push notifications. Here is another reason why tracking packages is such an important feature for you to offer. Statistics indicate that 33% of people have had packages stolen from their doorsteps. Nearly 26 million Americans had packages stolen from their doorsteps or front porches during the 2017 holiday season. With ecommerce sales expected to rise during the 2018 holiday season, it’s safe to assume theft will rise as well. These are alarming numbers, but it’s reality. By alerting your customers their orders have been delivered, you can help reduce the chances of theft of their purchases. Prioritize mobile commerceBy now, I hope you’ve recognized the importance of mobile optimization. Your website should be mobile friendly, and some of you may have even developed a successful mobile commerce app. Don’t overlook mobile commerce during the holidays. It should remain an important part of your marketing strategy. On Black Friday of 2017, 57% of ecommerce traffic came from mobile devices. People were using their smartphones even while shopping in stores. Mobile commerce held a 37% revenue share last year during the holidays. This was up from 17.5% in 2016. I expect this trend to continue rising in 2018 and the coming years as well. Consumers will turn to their mobile devices to buy during the holidays. As you can see from these numbers, ecommerce brands with mobile apps will have a competitive advantage here. Make sure you utilize all the features at your disposal. Send out push notifications to mobile app users to remind them of flash sales. You can also send notifications about order updates, which I discussed when talking about tracking orders. Appeal to those last-minute shoppersEarlier I told you that you should start advertising as soon as possible because people start shopping for the holidays sooner than you may think. But some people just love waiting until the last minute. Don’t stop running your holiday campaigns until the season is officially over. Make sure you find ways to appeal to last-minute shoppers. The best way to do this is by offering fast shipping options: As you can see, people who wait until the last minute to buy gifts are significantly more likely to buy from retailers offering fast delivery. Last-minute shoppers are 39% more likely to abandon their shopping carts if the delivery options are too slow. Overall, 67% of consumers abandoned ecommerce shopping carts in the last year because of slow delivery times. This is a 16% increase from last year. And 92% of consumers said that receiving their delivery on time was the most important factor they considered when purchasing a gift. Unfortunately, it may not be reasonable to combine your fast delivery feature with your free shipping incentive. If a last-minute shopper needs something shipped overnight two days before Christmas, they’ll have to pay a premium for shipping. But by this point, they’re willing to pay as long as it arrives on time. ConclusionThe holiday season is a great opportunity for you to take advantage of consumer spending habits. Since they spend more money, you have a chance to make more money. But this won’t come automatically. Start promoting your holiday sales as early as possible. Run your best deals on the most popular shopping days of the year. Make it appealing for customers to buy from you instead of your competition. Offer free shipping. Have a hassle-free return policy. Reward your most loyal customers. Allow your customers to see their order status and track the shipping of their packages. Don’t forget about mobile customers and last-minute shoppers. Follow the advice I’ve outlined above, and use this guide as a reference to generate sales during the 2018 holiday season. Happy holidays! How is your business planning on appealing to holiday shoppers this season? via Quick Sprout https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/29/how-to-use-the-2018-holiday-season-to-drive-sales/ Email marketing needs to be a top priority for your company’s content strategy. 80% of retail brands named email marketing as the top driving factor in customer retention. Plus, email has the highest ROI per $1 spent compared to other content strategies. On average, for every $1 you spend on your email campaigns, you can expect to receive $40 in return. That’s why it’s so important for you to get more email subscribers without annoying your website visitors. But having a huge list of subscribers is useless if you don’t know how to manage your content. If you are sending the same campaigns to everyone on your list, I bet your results aren’t that favorable. People on your email list shouldn’t be grouped into one category. Why? For starters, these people are very different. In addition to their demographic differences, your subscribers will have separate wants and needs. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to run an email campaign relevant to everyone on your subscriber list. Irrelevant content is the second most common reason why people unsubscribe from email lists. You worked hard to get them to sign up, but all of that will be thrown away as soon as they unsubscribe. You need to avoid that. Email segmentation is a must if you want to deliver relevant marketing content to your subscribers. If you’ve never segmented your email lists or your current segmentation methods need improvement, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll explain what you need to do to elevate your email marketing strategy with segmentation tactics. Encourage your customers to create profilesOften, businesses don’t segment their email lists because they simply don’t have enough information to do so. How can you segment your subscribers if the only piece of information you have about them is their email address? Email addresses alone won’t be enough. That’s why you should encourage your customers to create profiles on your website. You’ll use these profiles to improve their shopping experience. Then they can store their payment information, billing addresses, manage their order histories, etc. But these customer profiles will benefit your segmentation strategy as well. You’ll get more information about each customer. And you can use that information to segment your lists accordingly. That said, customer profiles shouldn’t be a requirement. Some ecommerce shops force customers to create profiles just to buy something. I strongly advise against this strategy. In a perfect world, yes, they’ll create profiles. But you don’t want to lose conversions because of this. Instead, try to give them a reason to sign up. Here’s an example from the Lululemon website: As you can see, they list the benefits of creating a customer profile. No hard sell or any pressure to do so. People who create a profile will benefit from:
When the customer creates a profile, you’ll collect more information about them. We’ll talk more about what type of info you should be asking for as we continue through this guide. Don’t ask for too much information right awayIf people want to sign up to receive emails from your company, they shouldn’t have to submit a blood sample to do so. Obviously, I’m exaggerating here. But you’d be surprised at the number of form fields some brands require when a customer signs up for email content. I understand your reasoning behind this. The more information you get from your customers, the easier it will be to segment them into different categories. However, if you ask for too much, it will turn people away from signing up in the first place. Why should they trust you with personal information that’s, in their opinion, irrelevant to their shopping experience? They just won’t sign up. Plus, you can still come up with effective segmented lists with just a few form fields. Here’s a great example from the Champs Sports website: In addition to asking for a website visitor’s email address, Champs also requires them to give their first name. While this won’t necessarily help them segment their subscribers, it will help them personalize their messages. With the information on this list, Champs can segment new subscribers based on:
That’s plenty. You can create multiple lists with just those three pieces of information. For example, one group could be females between the ages of 18 and 25 living in New England. The content they receive would be significantly different from a group of men between the ages of 35 and 50 living in southern California. Limit the form fields on your opt-in page. There’s no reason for you to know their favorite color or mother’s maiden name. The more information required to sign up, the fewer people will subscribe. Let your subscribers customize their contentAnother way to deliver relevant marketing content is by simply asking your subscribers what they want to receive. If they can customize the type of emails you send, they won’t be surprised or annoyed when they get a message. Everything delivered to their inbox will be extremely relevant. Set up these options through your customer profile settings, which we just talked about. In addition to letting people customize their email content through their profiles, you can give them options on the types of content they want to receive when they initially sign up. Here’s a great example of this strategy used by Lowe’s. Lowe’s only asks for the customers’ email addresses and zip codes. They can use this to segment their audiences by location. But look at how Lowe’s offers customizable email options. By default, everything is checked. However, people can uncheck the types of content they find irrelevant. For example, let’s say someone wants to receive only marketing promotions from this company. Any time they got a message about home improvement tips or upcoming events, they would be annoyed. These newsletters are irrelevant to them. They can opt out of those by simply unchecking the appropriate boxes when signing up in the first place. Use the double opt-in strategyWhen I work with other businesses, I see this problem all the time. They have many subscribers on their email lists that don’t belong there. That’s because some people provided their email addresses without realizing what they were getting into. To get more subscribers, some websites have a default setting during the checkout process to join their email lists. But the customer doesn’t realize they’re going to get bombarded with marketing emails just because they wanted to buy something. While I don’t have a problem with this strategy overall, it needs to be implemented with a double opt-in to complete the signup process. Your content won’t be relevant if it’s being delivered to people who subscribed by accident. Double opt-ins help ensure that subscribers actually want to receive marketing messages from your business. The easiest way to implement a double opt-in verification message is with a welcome email: Once a new subscriber confirms they want to be on your email list, you can segment them based on the factors I previously discussed and will continue to cover moving forward. If a customer doesn’t complete the process, don’t send them emails unless it’s related to their order. Segment based on engagementAnother way to segment your subscribers is based on how they responded to previous emails you sent. You should be tracking actions such as:
Then, segment your subscribers accordingly based on this behavior. For example, someone who never opened an email could potentially get a similar promotion in the future. Whereas a subscriber who already opened that message shouldn’t receive it again. It’s irrelevant to that person. This tactic will help you improve your open rates and other metrics due to your segmentation strategy. Segmenting based on engagement is another way to take advantage of your customer profiles, which I discussed earlier. When someone browses on your website while logged in to their customer profile, you can segment them based on their browsing behavior, purchase history, and the frequency with which they visit your site. Someone who is on your site weekly shouldn’t get an email saying “we miss you.” That type of message is only relevant to subscribers who have been inactive for several months. Understand the needs of your B2B clientsSegmenting email subscribers is extremely important for B2B companies. It’s a great way to improve your overall B2B marketing strategy. Those of you who operate a B2C and B2B company should have those two categories segmented, at the very least. But you should take that one step further on the B2B end. Your B2B lists should be even more specific than your B2C lists. The number one factor contributing to B2B marketing success in the previous year was creating higher quality and more efficient content: Understand who will be receiving these emails. You can segment these lists based on a job title. Company owners who have more buying power and final decision-making should not get the same messages that a warehouse manager would. Segment your B2B lists based on industry, company size, and marketing budget. Your clients that spend $50,000 a year on your products and services shouldn’t be getting the same marketing content as B2B clients that spend $5,000 annually. Put your subscribers into customer groupsMy last point leads to the next one: not all your customers are the same. Put them into groups based on a number of factors related to their status as a customer as opposed to general factors such as their age and location. For example, new customers shouldn’t be getting the same emails as people who subscribed over a year ago. A great way to start communicating with your new subscribers is by creating a series of actionable drip campaigns. If you put all your customers into one group, you won’t make as much money from them. Here’s what I mean. Your customers who spend the least amount of money shouldn’t be getting emailed about your most expensive products. Instead, send them promotions that entice them to spend a little bit more or shop more frequently. That’s why segmenting your subscribers based on spending is an effective strategy. Targeted emails based on this type of segmentation yield an average of an additional $14 in sales per subscriber. Some of you may have nearly 10,000 or more subscribers on your email lists. So do the math. These additional profits will add up quickly. Send birthday emailsAs we’ve seen throughout this guide, age is a great way to segment your subscribers for a number of reasons. But you can do even more with that information if you have it. It may sound cheesy, but sending birthday promotions to your subscribers can go a long way. You can take advantage of their birthdays more than just once a year. Take a look at how The Hook Up uses this strategy to send an email on its subscribers’ half birthdays: This personalized content is extremely relevant to the recipient. It’s unique to each subscriber. Discounted dinner for being a half year older? Sign me up. You can even start birthday promotional messages early. For example, let’s say your email lists are segmented by birthday months. Everyone who has a birthday in November can receive a message in October about getting ready for their birthday with a new pair of shoes or something along those lines. Obviously, you’ll tailor the message accordingly based on your business, but you understand what I mean. Start smallRight now, some of you might not be segmenting your subscribers at all. Don’t get overwhelmed and bite off more than you can chew when you start. Research shows that half of businesses aren’t segmenting email lists. So you shouldn’t be too alarmed yet. Don’t try to come up with dozens of different lists right away. Start by trying to segment your existing subscribers. Send a poll to the people on your email list about their interests, and group them accordingly. Change your current landing page to get more information from new subscribers. You need to walk before you can run. Starting slow will help you make sure you get things right. The last thing you want to do is put people on the wrong list. That strategy will backfire because your content will be more irrelevant to them than ever before. ConclusionSegmenting your subscribers is the key to email marketing success. If you learn how to segment your customers accordingly, your marketing content will be more relevant. As a result, fewer people will unsubscribe from your list, and your email campaigns will be more profitable. Encourage your customers to create a profile. Just don’t force them to give you too much personal information. On sign-up, let your customers customize the type of content they want to receive. Use a double opt-in landing strategy to make sure people actually want to be on your email marketing list. Segment subscribers based on engagement, browsing history, and previous purchases. Understand the difference between your B2C and B2B clients. Your B2B lists should be even more specific. Group your customers based on spending habits. If you’re new to email segmentation strategies, start small. Focus on the basics before you try more complex tactics. Ultimately, this will help you deliver relevant marketing content to all your subscribers. How is your brand segmenting subscribers on your email lists? via Quick Sprout https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/26/how-to-deliver-relevant-marketing-content-by-segmenting-your-email-subscribers/ As an ecommerce shop, you always need to come up with new ways to increase your revenue. But with that said, it’s a common misconception that you need to find new customers to generate more sales. That’s simply not the case. In fact, there are plenty of ways to increase revenue without acquiring new customers. Rather than trying to get more transactions on your ecommerce site, you should be focusing on tactics that increase the amount of each transaction. Don’t get me wrong. Obviously, new customers and more transactions are great news for your business. But it’s not the only way to make more money. What’s the average order value on your platform? This is a metric that you should be tracking at all times. If you’re unfamiliar with average order value, abbreviated as AOV, it’s really easy to calculate. Tactics that improve your AOV work for new customers and existing customers alike. It’s all about how you display information on your website. I know what some of you might be thinking. Your current average order value is adequate. Do you really need to make any changes? Absolutely. When it comes to what’s acceptable as an AOV, the sky’s the limit. Don’t settle for anything less. There is always room for improvement. Use this guide as a reference for increasing your AOV. Once you apply these strategies, your ecommerce revenue will increase as a result. Set a minimum for free deliveryFree delivery has a major impact on ecommerce conversions. In fact, 60% of consumers will abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process if they’re presented with extra costs, like shipping. So I’m definitely a big advocate of not placing those shipping costs on your customers. But with that said, you don’t need to offer free shipping for every order. Here’s what I mean. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for the shipping. It’s either going to be you or the customer. So those shipping costs should be included in the base cost of your products. That way, shipping is perceived as free to the customer, but you’ll still be able to cover those costs with their purchase. If you want to increase the average order value, set a minimum purchase amount for free shipping eligibility. REI uses this strategy on their website. Take a look at this shopping cart. The total cost of the of the cart is $22. But this total isn’t enough to be eligible for free shipping. REI reminds their customers in two places on this page that they ship orders over $50 for free. As a result, people will be more inclined to add additional items to their cart. Why pay for shipping if they don’t have to? Assuming the customer in this scenario takes the bait, REI was able to increase the purchase amount of this transaction by more than double the initial value. Upsell on the checkout pageThe most successful ecommerce shops find ways to upsell their customers right before they finalize the purchase process. However, you need to be careful if you decide to implement this strategy. Here’s why. Upsells shouldn’t take away from the initial purchase intent. By the time your customers reach your checkout page, they already added items to their cart and want to convert. Don’t let your upsell be a distraction that eventually hinders them from completing the purchase process. The buying process needs to be as fluid as possible with minimal friction. So don’t make the upsell be an extra step. Let me show you a great example of an upsell from Jetties Bracelets that conveys what I’m talking about. Based on what the customer added to their shopping cart, the website automatically generated an upsell of other items that are frequently purchased together. If the customer wants to add these upsells to their cart, all they need to do is click one button. This takes the value of this order from $9 to $27. As you can see, a simple upsell on the checkout page can triple the order amount. Just make sure that it isn’t too distracting or forced upon the customer. You still want them to convert, even if they don’t go for the upsell. Offer package discountsBundle or package discounts provide an incentive for customers to spend more money. The concept behind this tactic is simple. You can generate more profits by focusing on your pricing strategy. Most pricing models make it more expensive to buy a singular item. But if the customer is willing to buy higher quantities of that item, they’ll receive a discount depending on how much they’re willing to spend. It’s the basic strategy behind “buying in bulk,” which is common for B2B companies. However, you can apply the same method to your B2C ecommerce shop. Customers shouldn’t have to buy thousands of an item to get a quantity discount. Look at how MeUndies accomplishes this. They use this strategy all over their ecommerce site. For starters, they advertise that customers can save up to 35% off items by purchasing packs. Then, if you look at their navigation menu, “packs” is one of the five options for segmenting products. They reinforce these discounts when a customer clicks on a pack to purchase. For this pack of underwear, MeUndies offers a discount for buying three as opposed to just one. However, if they buy a 6-pack, the cost per pair goes down even less. Customers will benefit from additional savings if they buy a 10-pack. The price of one pair of underwear is $20. But if they buy a 10-pack, it’s $15 per pair. This strategy encourages people to spend more money because it makes them feel like they’re getting a better value. Customers can get a 25% discount by spending more money. As a result, you’ll benefit from getting a higher average order value. Include a gift wrap optionAnother way to increase the AOV of your ecommerce shop is by enhancing the value of your products. What can you do to make your products more valuable? One strategy that I like is the gift wrap option. During the holidays, 82% of shoppers plan to buy gifts online. But holidays aren’t the only time of the year when people buy gifts. People get gifts for birthdays, weddings, graduations, and retirements, as well as other milestones and accomplishments. So your gift wrapping feature should be available 365 days per year. Look at how Target uses this strategy on their ecommerce store to increase their AOV. On the checkout page, there is an option for shoppers to select if their order includes a gift. If the buyer wants gifts wrapped, it’s going to cost them an additional $5.99 per item. So an order with three gifts adds roughly $18 to the shopping cart. At this point, it’s all about convenience for the customer. Without this option, the customer would have to get the gift sent to their house, then wrap it themselves before delivering it or re-shipping to the final recipient. There is nothing convenient about that. But the gift wrap option eliminates these steps and ultimately improves the customer experience. So they’ll be happy to spend more money. Charge more for personalized itemsLet’s continue talking about ways to enhance the value of whatever you’re selling. If you can figure out how to apply this concept to your business, it can result in a major increase in revenue. That’s because consumers say that they are willing to pay 20% more for personalized products. You need to recognize this fact, and adjust your personalization strategy accordingly. Check out how The Perfume Shop does this on their ecommerce site. They give their customers a chance to get custom engravings on certain bottles. However, this upgrade comes with at an additional cost. But as we saw, customers are willing and able to pay more for customization. It would be unreasonable for them to expect a premium feature like this to be available at no additional cost. Incentivize minimum spending thresholdsWe talked about minimum spending thresholds earlier. Having a minimum order amount for free shipping eligibility is an example of this strategy. But with that said, free shipping isn’t the only way to encourage higher spending with thresholds. You can set up a discount based on spending amounts. Here’s an example from the Rue21 ecommerce website. Customers can take advantage of getting 30% off of their order, which is a significant amount. However, there is a catch. In order to get the 30% discount, they must spend a minimum of $40. This strategy works well because it also has a deadline. As you can see, they have a running clock for when this promotion expires. So customers will feel as though they need to act fast to get this discount before it’s too late. By combining these two strategies, Rue21 is able to increase their conversion rates while increasing their AOV at the same time. Use BOGOHave you heard of BOGO? BOGO stands for “buy one, get one.” It’s up to you to decide how you want to fill in the sentence after that. Buy one, get one free. Buy one, get one half off. You’ve got lots of options to choose from. The reason why BOGO works so well is because psychologically, it encourages people to spend more money. After all, how could they pass on such a good deal? Here’s what I mean. If you have a buy one, get one free sale, then that implies that if someone buys two items, they’ll get two free. If they buy three, they’ll get three free, and so on. Maurices uses this strategy on their website. It’s the first thing that you see when you navigate to their ecommerce homepage. Don’t let BOGO limit your creativity here. You can run other promotions based on the same concept. For example, buy two, get one free would encourage people to spend even more money. Either way, this strategy can help you increase your average order value. Give cash backIf you create a cash back system on your ecommerce site, it gives people an incentive to spend more money. The more money they spend, the more cash back they’ll receive. Ultimately, they’ll benefit from these rewards as much as you will. So it’s a win-win scenario for everyone. The Kohl’s cash system is a great example. For every $25 that a customer spends, they’ll receive $5 in Kohl’s cash. This promotion is valid on their ecommerce shop, as well as in their physical store locations. So for those of you who have brick and mortar shops in addition to your ecommerce platform, you may want to consider a similar structure. Once customers spend money, they receive Kohl’s cash in the form of a coupon. These coupons are automatically stored on their customer profiles. Kohl’s doesn’t have any limit on this spending. So if a customer spends $1,000 on a transaction, they’ll get $200 in Kohl’s cash as a reward. I know what some of you are thinking. If the cash back eventually gets redeemed, wouldn’t it lower your average order value for those future purchases? Not necessarily. It’s unlikely that people will spend only the amount of their reward for those future purchases. Plus, you can set dates for when the cash back can be redeemed, which is what Kohl’s does. So there’s a chance not all of these rewards will even be used. Recommend products to your customers58% of consumers are more likely to buy from online retailers that recommend products based on their purchase history. In addition to their previous purchases, you can also recommend products based on what your customers are browsing for. For this strategy to be effective, it works best if you encourage people to create a customer profile. Then it’s easier for you to monitor their behavior. It’s also effective for those of you who have a mobile app. In fact, personalized recommendations made my list of the top 10 features of a successful mobile commerce app. When you recommend products to your customers, it speaks to them. We talked about this earlier when we discussed upselling. But you don’t need to wait until the customer reaches their shopping cart to offer recommendations. Here’s an example from Sephora’s website. In addition to recommending and showcasing their bestsellers, they also have a “recommended for you section” on their homepage. The items displayed will vary depending on who is browsing. For example, let’s say your ecommerce shop sells sports equipment. One of your customers recently purchased a new set of golf clubs on your website. The next time they visit your site, you could recommend golf balls, tees, golf spikes, and other similar accessories. These recommendations will ultimately help you increase your AOV. Create a loyalty program based on spending tiersLoyal customers spend more money. 82% of consumers are more likely to shop from businesses that offer loyalty programs. Plus, repeat customers spend 67% more money than new customers. That’s why you need to learn how to increase sales by implementing a customer loyalty program. However, there are so many different types of loyalty programs out there. One of my favorite options is to create a program based on spending tiers. This is the best way to get your existing customers to spend more money each time they shop. Here’s a look at the Nordy Club benefits, which is a loyalty program from Nordstrom. As you can see, the benefits get better as customers reach each spending level within a calendar year. These loyalty programs reward your customers that spend the most money. For the most part, people probably won’t spend $500 or $2,000 in one purchase. However, they may be willing to spend an extra $50 or so on each transaction to get them one-step closer to the next rewards tier. By encouraging them to spend more, your average order value will increase. ConclusionWhile new customers are always great for company growth, they are necessarily a requirement for increasing your revenue. Instead of prioritizing customer acquisition, you should focus on strategies that encourage both your existing customers and prospective customers to spend more money on your ecommerce site. The average order value is a metric that you should be tracking. Regardless of your current AOV, I’m confident that you can improve that number. Not sure where to start? Use this guide as a reference. If you implement the strategies that I’ve outlined above, you’ll notice a significant boost in your ecommerce average order value. How is your ecommerce shop taking steps to increase your AOV? via Quick Sprout https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/24/how-to-increase-the-average-order-value-on-your-ecommerce-store/ Is your pricing page designed to drive conversions? There are some common problems I see all the time when I’m analyzing these landing pages. It’s a tricky situation for businesses. On the one hand, you want your pricing page to be informative, useful, and beneficial to your prospective customers. But at the same time, you want to make sure it’s designed to make people spend as much money as possible. All too often, I see pricing pages that are either on one end of the spectrum or the other. You need to find that middle ground. You’ve spent a lot of time learning how to generate more profits by focusing on your pricing strategy. Now you need to learn how to properly display those prices. What types of pricing pages will encourage website visitors to convert? Pages that are transparent and build trust will ultimately be your best bet. Here’s why. If your pricing page is honest and doesn’t withhold any information from prospective customers, you can still implement tactics that encourage people to spend more money. In fact, 73% of consumers are willing to pay more for products and services that promise complete transparency. Furthermore, 39% of consumers say they’re willing to switch brands to pursue transparency. Both you and the customer will benefit from trustworthy and transparent pricing pages. Those of you who need help increasing conversions on your ecommerce platforms will learn how to create profitable pricing pages by reading this guide. Here’s what you need to know. Create a comparison tableThe best way to show customers their options is by displaying a comparison table. This makes it easy for them to make a decision without having to navigate to different pages or do too much scrolling. Ideally, your comparison table can be displayed on one screen. Here’s an example of how Netflix uses this strategy on its pricing page: As you can see, this is an extremely simple yet effective design. Netflix offers three different subscriptions:
The first line of the table shows the price. It’s obvious and transparent how much each option will cost. There are no surprises or secrets here. After that, it lists seven features. The comparison table shows whether each price point has the listed feature. This is the perfect size for a comparison table. According to research on short-term memory, the brain can store only about seven items at a time. Most adults have the capacity to store five to nine pieces of information in their short-term memory bank. If your comparison table has 30 lines, you’ll need to cut that down significantly. It’s just too much for people to process, and you’ll struggle to get conversions. Plus, if they have to keep scrolling to see information, it’ll be difficult for them to keep track of which option is the most appealing to them. If you don’t know how to shorten your comparison table, here’s what I recommend. Only include line items that are different for each price point. For example, if all your options come with a 30-day free trial, don’t add that to your table. Instead, find another spot on your pricing page to showcase that feature. Showcase your value propositionFor your business to be successful, you need to create a highly effective value proposition. Your value proposition will explain how your brand, products, or services will benefit your customers. Highlight what makes your company better than your competitors. Here’s a look at how Constant Contact displays these benefits on its pricing page: The platform offers a 60-day free trial. Nothing says trust and transparency like the offer of two free months. This gives customers a chance to get to know the software without having to pay for anything. It shows that this company stands behind its product. Constant Contact also gives its customers the option to cancel any time. It doesn’t make anyone commit to long-term contracts, and it doesn’t charge cancelation fees. In addition to the 60-day trial period, Constant Contact will refund customers 100% of their payments if they cancel within 30 days of signing up. The company guarantees satisfaction. As you continue to scroll down this page, you’ll find the pricing options. But the website visitor is already primed to convert after reviewing the company’s value proposition. If your value proposition isn’t on your pricing page, you need to put it there right away. This will help you build trust with your customers and increase their chances of converting. Highlight the top optionTell your customers what to buy. There are a few different ways to approach this. If you look at the Netflix comparison table above, you’ll see the highlighted top choice. The premium service was red, while the other options were grey. The red color jumps out at the customer more than grey. Plus, the premium subscription was the most expensive. Obviously, you want your customers to spend as much money as possible. I know what some of you are thinking. Is this strategy trust-building? Yes. Your most expensive option will likely still be the most beneficial to your customers. Continuing with the Netflix example, spending the most money gives people the option for ultra HD and the ability to stream videos on four devices simultaneously. These features aren’t available with the other subscriptions. Let’s take a look at another example. GoDaddy highlighted its top option by referring to it as the best value: Obviously, everyone wants a bargain. As you can see, the best value choice is also the most expensive. But again, this gives its customers the most bang for their buck. But your top option doesn’t always have to be your most expensive. A great way to get your customers to convert is by putting your top option next to a choice that’s significantly more expensive. This will make it look even more appealing. You can also entice consumers to select a certain option by telling them it’s your best seller or most popular choice. Implementing this strategy helps create social proof, which I’ll discuss in greater detail shortly. Encourage people to spend more moneyYour top option likely won’t be the cheapest. But you can still encourage your customers to spend. Here’s an example from the Litmus pricing page that illustrates my point: As you can see, this comparison table shows customers what’s not included in each plan. It conveys this message by listing those features in a light grey color with a line going through the text. Litmus is being completely transparent here. Now its customers won’t expect those features in a particular plan since it was clearly shown that certain options aren’t included in the selection. If people want certain features, they’ll be encouraged to spend more money. Take a closer look at this pricing page. Litmus also highlighted its top option by calling it the best value selection. By positioning it between the least expensive and most expensive option, the value choice seems more appealing. Offer free trials based on costYou already saw a couple of examples of free trials so far in this guide. Netflix offers a free trial period to all new customers. Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial for new customers as well. Including a free trial establishes trust with your customers. But how long should your free trial last? I like the idea of increasing the free trial length based on the cost. For example, let’s say you offer a service that costs $10 per month and another one that costs $100 per month. Setting both of these trials at 14 days would be ineffective. For a customer to dish out $100 per month, they need to be absolutely certain that the cost is worth it to them. Give those people an extended trial. Pandora uses this strategy on its pricing page: By offering a free trial, Pandora doesn’t force customers to pay for its services without testing them out first. Customers who sign up for the $4.99 monthly service get their first 30 days free. If someone signs up for the service that’s double the price, their free listening period is double the length as well. Consider using this strategy on your pricing page. You may not be initially thrilled about offering your service free, but it will pay off in the long run. In fact, research shows that the overall conversion rate for monthly and annual plans is roughly 60%. That’s pretty good if you ask me. Don’t hesitate to offer extended trials. Understand the paradox of choiceLess is more. That’s the paradox of choice. The more options you give your customers, the less likely they will convert. Look back at all the examples I showed you so far. All these pages have three options for customers to consider, with the exception of Litmus, which had four. However, that fourth option from the Litmus pricing page was for enterprises that need custom pricing. Basically, it offered three choices to most people. If you have five, six, or seven different plans for people to select, it’s hurting your conversion rates. Researchers conducted a study on this concept. When customers in a grocery store had the option to sample six flavors of a product, the conversion rate was 30%. However, when they had the choice to sample 24 flavors of the same product, only 3% converted. Another study found that decreasing the availability of product choices resulted in a 10% increase in revenue. Limiting choices also helps build trust and transparency. It shows people that everything your company has to offer can be found in just a few different options. They won’t have to sift through dozens of choices to find what they’re looking for. Create social proofWhen designing your pricing page, you need to learn how to effectively use social proof to increase conversions. The concept behind social proof is simple. If other people are doing something, it must be right. That’s what you want your prospective customers to think. Take a look at how Pipedrive creates social proof at the bottom of its pricing page: After people have a chance to review the pricing options for Pipedrive, they’ll see this screen as they continue scrolling. More than 75,000 sales teams use this service. Pipedrive has customers all over the world. The product must be good if more than 75,000 people are using it, right? That’s the idea behind social proof. Furthermore, the company features customer testimonials on its pricing page. It lists the name, company, and position and includes a photograph for each testimonial. For a more in-depth analysis of this, review my guide on how to correctly manage customer testimonials to increase your brand credibility. This will help you build trust with your customers. Here’s something else to consider. Take a look at the bottom right corner of this pricing page. Do you see the little message box? This gives the company’s customers a chance to communicate via live chat. I’ll discuss this tactic in greater detail next. Add a live chat featureYou need to communicate effectively with your customers. As you just saw in the Pipedrive example, adding a live chat feature to your pricing page shows that your brand is available to assist prospective customers on demand. This will help you build trust and show how transparent your pricing is. If a customer has any questions or needs clarification, your live chat support team can offer solutions. Let’s look at another example. Here’s the HubSpot pricing page: It has a chatbot that automatically pops up. The note encourages visitors of the page to write a message if they need help understanding any of the pricing options. In addition to the live chat function, HubSpot also includes its phone number on the page. This adds more credibility to the website and improves its customer service. Having both live chat and phone support available will appeal to a wider range of customers based on their preferences for customer service communication. Justify your pricingDepending on your business, some of you may have high prices for your services. If your most expensive option is only $5 per month, you may not need to justify that price. However, if you’re charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for your products or services, some justification may be necessary. This is important for B2B companies. Unlike the average consumer, businesses need to see a return on their investments. Spending money on your service is an investment for them. What will they get in return? Show them. Buffer added case studies to its pricing page to justify its pricing: These case studies explain how other companies benefited from the product. Business Insider reached 1 million Facebook fans. The Seattle Times increased its traffic by 150%. In addition to justifying the prices for the company’s services, this strategy also creates social proof, which I previously discussed. Build an interactive estimation toolThis isn’t applicable to all of you, but it’s a useful strategy for some brands. Depending on your pricing model, the cost of your service may not be the same for everyone for each billing cycle. Some businesses base their prices on usage and other metrics. However, this strategy can sometimes appear untrustworthy since the prices aren’t set in stone. Adding an interactive estimation tool to your pricing page helps with transparency. For example, MailChimp has prices that fluctuate based on the number of subscribers their customers have. Its pricing tool gives people a chance to see how much they’ll get charged if they add subscribers to their mailing lists. As you update the number of subscribers, the prices for the plan change accordingly. Prioritize securitySecurity needs to be a top priority for your business. Why? Research shows that 69% of consumers say they are concerned about their privacy and security. And 68% of people do not trust brands to appropriately protect their personal information. With so many people concerned about security, use your pricing page to showcase how you protect your customers’ information. Check out how Highrise accomplishes this on its pricing page: The pricing page features the words “safe and secure” all over it. Highrise goes above and beyond to explain to prospective customers that it prioritizes security. This strategy will help you establish trust with your customers and ultimately increase the chances of them converting. ConclusionIf you want the conversion rates on your pricing page to increase, you need to make sure your page promotes trust and transparency. Build a comparison table that lets customers view all their options on one screen. Leverage your value proposition. Tell your customers what to buy by highlighting your top option. Use this strategy and other tactics to encourage people to spend more money. Offer a free trial. The more expensive the service, the longer the trial should be. Limit choices on your pricing page. Fewer options will result in higher conversions. Create social proof and justify your prices. Make sure your customers know their security is a top priority for you. If you follow the tips I’ve outlined above, you’ll be able to increase conversions on your pricing page. How does your company’s pricing page promote trust and transparency? via Quick Sprout https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/22/how-to-create-a-trustworthy-and-transparent-pricing-page/ In today’s competitive landscape, your business needs to leverage as many distribution channels as possible to increase sales. By now, I’m sure you understand the basic concepts of applying a social media marketing strategy. You’ve created business profiles on the most popular networks. You’re sharing content on a regular basis. Your efforts have helped you get more followers. But you’ve got to elevate your game and learn how to convert your social media followers into customers. According to research, 74% of consumers use social media to guide their buying decisions. And 71% of people are more likely to buy something based on a social media recommendation. Simply put, consumers are eager and willing to use social platforms to find new brands, conduct research, and aid the purchase process. As a marketer, you need to recognize the latest social media trends and use them to your advantage. Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform. This social network makes it very easy, friendly, and appealing for brands to reach their target audiences. Take advantage of everything Instagram has to offer. I’ll show you the top 11 ways to drive sales on Instagram. 1. Run contests and giveawaysPromotional contests and giveaways are two of my favorite strategies for brands to engage with their audiences on social media. If you can learn how to run a profitable giveaway, your efforts will result in more sales. I know what some of you are thinking. How can you make money by just giving away your products? Let’s review an example to show you what I mean. Here’s a look at how Lander used this strategy on a recent Instagram post: The company is giving away a smart lantern, power bank, phone case, and lightning cable. Doing this increases the exposure of its page. It gives people a reason to follow its profile and engage with the brand. As you can see, this giveaway is a bit different from the ones you may have seen in the past. Lander partnered with other brands to sponsor this giveaway. Again, this strategy will drive more users to its page. These other accounts will post information about the giveaway and direct users to follow Lander’s profile to win. Here’s a look at the caption from one of the other accounts it partnered with: There are plenty of other ways to get creative with this marketing tactic. Instead of giving away items at random to your followers simply for liking a post and following your account, you could run a more structured contest that requires skill. Contests that encourage user-generated content are the most effective. To enter, ask your followers to upload a picture and tag your brand. This strategy will expose your company to anyone who follows the users who enter. If someone sees that their friend is promoting a brand, they’ll be more inclined to follow your profile and potentially enter the contest as well. Now that you’ve got these users interested in your products, you can use other strategies to get them to buy. Even if they didn’t win the contest, the product you were giving away is still on their minds. 2. Take advantage of the “swipe up” featureThe swipe up feature is a game-changer for businesses. For years, you probably had some trouble getting users on Instagram to navigate to your website from a specific link. You would post content and then direct people to click a link in your bio. But that strategy has lots of faults. First, it’s an extra step for the user. They have to navigate to your profile page and then make another click. People don’t want to go through that hassle. Plus, what if you want to promote two different landing pages? Or maybe three? or four? You will not have multiple links in your bio. That’s too confusing. The swipe up feature eliminates this problem. Now you can use your Instagram story to drive traffic directly to specific landing pages. Here are a couple of examples: Once your business profile reaches 10k followers, you’ll have access to this feature. Just promote a product or service on your story, and add the swipe up function with a link to a landing page about your promotion. If you’re advertising a specific product, a logical landing page would be to the product description on your site. There, the user can look at additional photos and add the product to their shopping cart. These lead magnets are a great way for you to drive more traffic to your website and ultimately increase conversions. 3. Use shoppable postsIf you have an ecommerce brand, you need to take advantage of shoppable posts. This strategy allows you to sell products directly through the Instagram platform. The reason why I love this feature so much is because it increases the chances of getting your current and prospective customers to buy something. Here’s why. Right now, you’re relying on consumers navigating to your website to buy your products. This can be from organic traffic, paid ads, or direct navigation. The problem is that people probably won’t do this every day. But they’re active on Instagram daily. In fact, 500 million people use Instagram on a daily basis. So there’s a great chance your target market falls into this category. Here’s an example of a shoppable post from Patara Shoes: It’s simple. This post is just a regular image that includes one of the brand’s products. You also see a tag of the product by name, the price, and a link to purchase it. All someone has to do is click on the tag, and they’ll be directed to the website. This is much easier than having to manually search for the product by opening a web browser. Shoppable posts increase conversions. Check out the caption. It’s creating FOMO—the fear of missing out. I’ve discussed this strategy in the past. Telling users they have only a few pairs of these shoes left nudges them to buy right now. If you’ve never sold products on Instagram before and don’t know where to start, check out my complete guide on how to increase your ecommerce product sales with shoppable posts on Instagram. 4. Post the same product more than onceIf you post a product once and then never promote it again, people may forget about it. Think about the way users behave on Instagram. They quickly scroll through their feeds. The first time they see your product, they may not have a reason to buy it. But if they see it more than once, it may start to pique their interest. According to a study from Sprout Social, more than 60% of people need to see something on social media between two and four times before they buy it: I’m not saying you should post the exact same image four different times on your Instagram page. That’s boring and might even cause people to unfollow you. Get creative. Start with a post of just the product. A few days later, you can share another image of the product on your Instagram story. The following week, run a contest to promote the same product. Weeks later, you can share a video of the same item being used in a demonstration. Posting the same product multiple times increases the chances of people buying it. 5. Partner with social influencersUsing social influencers to promote your brand, products, and services is an extremely efficient tactic. In fact, 94% of marketers say their social influencer strategy was effective for their companies. That’s because social influencer followers trust them. We know that 82% of people are likely to follow recommendations made by micro influencers. And 94% of consumers believe these influencers are highly knowledgeable. Basically, if you can get an influencer to promote your brand, you will get sales. Instagram is the primary social platform for influencers across the globe. This is a cost-effective marketing strategy. Most influencers will charge only a few hundred dollars or so for a post. However, if you’d rather work with celebrity influencers, be prepared to spend significantly more. But for the most part, that’s not necessary. I recommend looking for influencers who have between 10k and 50k followers. These people have more authentic interactions with their followers and higher engagement rates. Plus, the cost per post will be less. If you’re struggling to find the right influencer to promote your brand, review the top 10 platforms for effectively managing social influencers. 6. Respond to comments and messagesI know it may seem like a time-consuming and tedious task, but you need to respond to your followers on Instagram. By responding directly to comments on your post, you will add a human element and personal feel to your brand, which people really appreciate. This strategy is especially important if people are asking questions or voicing complaints about your business. Respond to these comments as fast as possible to come up with a resolution. It shows other users who see your responses on social media that your brand values customer service. Consumers are willing to pay more for good service. You can expect to see an increase in sales by communicating with your customers effectively on social media. 7. Go liveThe majority of the strategies I’ve discussed so far focus on Instagram posts. But that’s not the only way you can reach users and drive sales. Like other social networks, Instagram has a live broadcast feature. This is your chance to engage with your audience in real time. Users can comment on your broadcast. Acknowledge those comments. Answer their questions. Show them you’re listening. Social media users love watching live videos. What’s a good reason to go live? That decision is yours. But there are lots of different ways to get creative with these streams. Give your followers a tour around your office. Introduce them to your employees. Show them how products get made at your manufacturing facility. If your company is at an event, give your followers exclusive access to what happens behind the scenes. This type of content will keep your audience engaged, get them excited about your brand, and ultimately increase the chances they’ll make a purchase. 8. Run targeted adsHow can you reach people on Instagram who don’t follow your account? Some of the strategies, such as location tagging, running contests, and working with social influencers can accomplish this. However, those strategies don’t always expose your brand to people within your target market. Running targeted advertisements will do this. Instagram has been acquired by Facebook. You can set up your ads the same way on both networks. You can use parameters such as age, gender, and location to select your ad audience. You can even take that one step further and target users based on their interests. Here’s an example of a targeted Instagram ad from Tentree: As you can see, this post looks like any other post on Instagram. The only difference is that it says “sponsored” where the location tag would normally be, and there is a CTA button at the bottom. But when a user is scrolling through their feed, this post blends in with the rest of the content they’re consuming. It’s not invasive or annoying. Yes, you’ll have to pay if you want to run Instagram ads. Those of you who don’t have the funds in your marketing budget for this right now would want to stick with the free strategies on this list. However, if you can afford it, I recommend at least trying it out to see how it works for you. This can be a great way to drive sales by reaching a new audience. 9. Use your story to showcase productsEarlier I mentioned examples of posting content to your Instagram story. But now you can use your Instagram story to sell your products the same way you did with shoppable posts. As of June 12, 2018, Instagram brought the shopping feature to stories. Here’s a look at an example from Madewell: As you can see, the post is promoting a silk button-down cami. Since the shopping feature on stories is new, the post features additional text as a way to tell the users the post is clickable. If you tap on the button as instructed, you’ll be redirected to the brand’s website. From here, you’ll have an option to buy the product displayed in the story: Use this strategy if you’re running an ecommerce shop. As I said before, people need to see a product multiple times on social media before they decide to buy it. Add shoppable stories to the list of ways to showcase your products. 10. Connect your followers to your Facebook pageIf your company has an Instagram profile, it probably also has a Facebook page. Since Instagram was acquired by Facebook, these two platforms have lots of features that work together. I mentioned this earlier when I talked about running targeted ads. Now you can sync your Instagram followers with your Facebook business page. Once this process is complete, you can use messenger bots to nurture those users. There are more than 300,000 active monthly bots on Facebook messenger. Clearly, other businesses are taking advantage of this strategy already. Jump on board now before your competitors’ bots steal your customers. 11. Offer discounts to your followersEveryone loves a good deal. Share discounts with your followers on Instagram to encourage them to buy. Instagram is a great platform for running flash sales. Since your story disappears after 24 hours, you can use that type of post to share a promo code. This will make your followers feel as if they’re getting an offer other people don’t know about. That feeling of exclusivity will also encourage them to buy. Look at how J. Crew offered a discount in this post: Notice anything different about this post? The reason why I used this as an example is because it also uses another strategy I discussed on this list. This is a targeted advertisement. Don’t think your promo codes should be limited to just your profile posts and stories. Combining that deal with a targeted ad can be extremely effective. That’s because your ads will have CTA buttons bringing users directly to your website. If someone clicks on the “shop now” button in the J. Crew ad, they’ll be able to use the promo code right away. This is much easier than having to navigate to a new window. ConclusionYou can’t rely on website traffic alone to sell products. Take advantage of other distribution channels as well. Social media influences consumers’ purchasing decisions. Since Instagram is growing at such a rapid rate, it makes sense to use this platform as a primary method of driving sales. Plus, as you’ve seen from this list, Instagram has features that allow businesses to sell items directly through its platform. If your Instagram marketing strategy needs improvement, refer to this guide. Once you implement these strategies, it will be easier to generate sales from Instagram users. How is your business using Instagram to drive sales? via Quick Sprout https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/10/19/how-to-drive-sales-with-these-11-instagram-marketing-strategies/ Moovly Partners with Bynder to Offer Video Creation Solutions// function popupCenter(pageURL, w,h) {var left = (screen.width/2)-(w/2);var top = (screen.height/2)-(h/2);var targetWin = window.open (pageURL, '_blank','toolbar=no, location=no, directories=no, status=no, menubar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=no, copyhistory=no, width='+w+', height='+h+', top='+top+', left='+left);}function pinIt(){var e = document.createElement("script");e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');e.setAttribute('src','https://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999); document.body.appendChild(e);} // October 18, 2018 Moovly Partners with Bynder to Offer Video Creation Solutions
VANCOUVER, CANADA — (October 18, 2018) Moovly Media Inc. (TSX.V: MVY) (OTC: MVVYF) (FRANKFURT: 0PV2) (“Moovly” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce a partnership with leading cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) software provider Bynder to offer brands and enterprises brand-aligned video creation solutions. A global leader in digital asset management (DAM) and one of the fastest growing companies in Europe according to the Financial Times, Bynder provides companies with a smart and fast way to manage their digital files, including images, audio files and videos. Through the new partnership, companies will now have access to these digital assets within Moovly, enabling them to seamlessly create new videos and presentations that are fully aligned with company brand guidelines. The Bynder integration was initiated when Moovly won a major contract with a multinational client through a competitive bid process. That led to a broader partnership through which many more corporations can take advantage of both Moovly’s and Bynder’s integrated solutions. Geert Coppens, co-founder and CTO of Moovly, commented: “As both Bynder and Moovly come with an open API, our combined solution enables enterprises to leverage their company media assets to easily create new video content for communication, marketing or training. This new partnership illustrates our commitment to integrate and partner with leading companies to strengthen our offering in the market and add value to our platform.” “The partnership with Moovly supports our goal to make cloud-based digital asset management more efficient for everyone. The powerful, yet user-friendly video creation capabilities of Moovly extend Bynder’s integration options in a significant way,” said Karalynn Lewis, Technology Partnerships Manager of Bynder.
For more information on Bynder, please visit www.bynder.com.
About Moovly: Moovly is the leading provider of creative cloud-based tools to tell marketing, communications and training stories using videos and presentations. Moovly’s advanced Studio Editor with over 175 million digital assets seamlessly integrated (via partnerships with Shutterstock & Storyblocks) is all you need to make engaging video content to promote, communicate or explain your product, service or message. Moovly’s API and BOTs technology allow 3rd parties to automate parts or all of the content-creation process, including mass customization, personalized videos (video version of mail merge), automatic content creation or updating by connecting data sources. With clients including users from >300 of the Fortune 500, small businesses, freelancers and Ivy league universities, Moovly is an intuitive, cost effective choice for DIY creation of engaging video-based content.
“Your story begins with Moovly”
Files are available for download here. For additional information about Moovly, please refer to www.moovly.com. Brendon Grunewald Dan Whittle The post Moovly Partners with Bynder to Offer Video Creation Solutions appeared first on Moovly - Create videos and video presentations. from Moovly – Create videos and video presentations https://www.moovly.com/investors/moovly-partners-with-bynder-to-offer-video-creation-solutions via IFTTT from https://seanbrian0.blogspot.com/2018/10/moovly-partners-with-bynder-to-offer.html |
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