As with all marketing channels, the first step is to look at the big picture, namely the lifecycle of your affiliate marketing publishers – acquisition, engagement and retention. Are you looking to extend your audience by acquiring new publishers? To engage with those who have already expressed interest in your network but still need your guidance? To retain your publisher base and make them advocates of your overall program/network? All of the above? If you are ready to grow your network, add these five types of email reach-outs into your communication plan today!

1. Recruitment (Acquisition)

Just like acquiring new customers, recruiting publishers into your network is hard work. They might not know your product or services. Once you have identified a target list of the publishers you want to recruit, create content that highlights the benefits they will receive by promoting your product or service, such as:

• our reward strategy
• the cookie lifetime
• your conversion rate
• promotional guidelines

This will help filter out any publishers that are not in line with your promotional strategy, and those who are interested can register to your program/network. (Always include a link to sign up.)

2. Welcome Emails (Engagement)

Welcome emails are the first touch point the publisher has with your brand after they have been accepted into your program/network. It is important to engage with your publishers directly with relevant information. To help them get started, state the advantages of your program: highlight your commission structure, the top products you would like them to put focus on, what regions you want to further grow your brand presence and any guidelines when promoting your brand such as keyword restrictions. Most importantly, make sure they know who their point of contact is for any questions.

3. Activation Series (Engagement)

Activation emails are for those publishers who have shown interest in promoting your brand or service, but have not begun actively promoting. It could mean they lack an understanding of your brand or they need guidance for the links or marketing assets in your program. The program should be set-up through the eyes of the publisher. Do they need a custom discount or a different commission offering?

Do their promotional strategies match with what you are selling? Are they updating the content and links?
If the answer is yes, you might be missing out on great potential. Create a series of emails or personalized communication tailored towards the publisher, and provide information about what they might need in order to start selling your products or services.

4. Promotional/Seasonal (Retention)

Holidays, such as Black Friday, Cyberweek, etc. provide a big boost for sales. Plan ahead to make sure you are taking full advantage of these opportunities. Engage with your publishers and inform them of your upcoming promotions. Remember to give them enough notice to make the changes on their site, a 24-hour turnover time is not realistic. Make sure you provide the discount details, and the duration of the sale along with any supporting materials. The Q4 holiday season is the busiest time for most online sales. Prepare well and communicate effectively, so you can enjoy the reward afterwards.

5. Newsletters (Retention)

Newsletters are particularly successful if you manage a network wider than just your own performance marketing program.  Create a relevant newsletter that provides helpful insights into the industry, promotes events you are going to attend, and showcases your industry knowledge, involvement and presence. Newsletters are a springboard to promote other programs in your network. You can use them to highlight new program announcements, seasonal promotions, tips and tricks for your audience.
As subscribers tends to lose interest in newsletters very soon, work on appealing content, define a cadence you want to respect (avoid too many, as well as too few emails) and make your messaging clear.

Keep in mind that publishers have different needs according to the where they are in the lifecycle. These proactive emails can be a powerful tool to nurture relationships in every stage – acquisition, engagement and retention. Plan well and then watch your network grow!

Simon is a Marketing Campaigns Specialist for cleverbridge.

The post 5 effective ways to grow your performance marketing network appeared first on cleverbridge.

The purpose of this post is to help you create a compelling value proposition for your product or service. The following framework will certainly get you a competitive advantage in the market.

What does ‘value proposition’ really mean?

Your value proposition serves as an introduction to the market. It highlights the value you promise to deliver to your customer. It also tells a potential customer why to buy your product over the one from your competition.

What are great value proposition examples?

First, let’s have a look at some best practices out there. Below you see 3 of my favorites.

1. Hotjar

The value proposition of Hotjar is especially great because they did everything right. They have a strong value statement, a supporting paragraph, a clear call-to-action and they name their target users in a fun image. Moreover, they use a bright green color to highlight the main benefit of their tool.

2. Value Proposition of Uber

The client value proposition of Uber simply highlights the benefit future employees are looking for – “get paid”! Furthermore, it is nice that they show an image of their typical employee persona, a friendly cab driver reading the newspaper. He is probably just a model but the shirt and the type of sweater certainly make him an ideal cab driver.

How to write a persuasive and unique value proposition?

I will explain my favorite technique with the help of an example. Let’s take Dropbox. A cloud storage service and therefore a rather unemotional software product.

It is fair to assume that no one gets up in the morning and says to himself: “Wow, I need this awesome cloud storage service, today!”
However, companies like Dropbox still need to sell their product. Hence, they need a compelling value proposition.
First, we need to be aware that we are all humans and we are by nature ego-centric. It is always tempting to just tell the story of why we are awesome and why everyone should buy our product.

Boring marketers usually just brag about how great the company is, by saying for example:

“Get our award-winning Cloud Storage Service today – 500 GB for $9.90 a month!”

But to be customer-centric, you have to shift your point of view and forget about what you’re selling and start focusing on what the customer is getting.

Therefore, you first need to remember the following:

People don’t buy product features, they buy the added value the product creates in their life.

Projecting this idea onto our Dropbox example, does that mean adjectives like “the fastest, quickest and newest service” will sell? No it doesn’t!
Instead, you need to use phrases like “Feel safe, your data is backed up securely and protected in the cloud”. This is what the target audience ultimately cares about -> not losing their data!

But seriously, how to come up with a full-fledged value proposition in under 15min?

Simply translate features into benefits by asking the right question: “How does this feature help your customer?”

Doing this over and over again gives you an enormous amount of product benefits to formulate a truly customer-centric value proposition. See the script below:

Now we have some solid punchlines to create a unique and strong value proposition. The final result could look something like this:

You want to work from everywhere and share your files with anyone? Get our Premium Cloud Storage and get the mobility you deserve.
or for a more security aware audience:

You want to focus on your work and don’t have to worry about losing your data? Let our Cloud Storage Service take care of it. We back you up!

You see how easy it can be to write something customer-centric! With this technique, you come up with a bunch of value statements at once. Of course, for the perfect punch line you have to tweak it and A/B Test it a couple of times, but this technique puts you directly in the shoes of your customer.

How to display the value proposition on your landing page?

Once you defined your value proposition, you need to embed it into the above the fold part of your landing page.

Usually, the above the fold part includes the following 6 elements:

1. Your value proposition as the main headline
2. An explanatory paragraph underlining it
3. Calling out your potential customer/user persona
4. The main features of your product
5. A clear Call to action
6. An eye-catching background image (but be careful, not too catchy!)

Instead of explaining each list item one by one, I will simply give you a visual case study. Below you see how I implemented all of the above on the landing page of my brother’s SaaS Company.

As you can see, it tells you instantly what storrito.com does, what benefit it offers and who the ideal user persona is. Moreover, some key features and a clear call to action.

Pro Tips:
Don’t use a background image that is too eye-catching. A/B Tests have shown that for example, human faces are bad for your conversion rate because their eyes are literally too eye-catching, they distract the user from the main focus action. That’s why those manikin illustrations became so common.

Create an ideal buying persona for your service and display them. You can do this with the help of the persuasive technique of “unity”, which I described in another post.

Always challenge and A/B Test your value proposition

Finally yet importantly, you should always test different versions. (Fun fact, a study of Optimizely showed that companies who do multivariate testing get better results from their testing efforts. They found 5 variants per test is a good number to shoot for.)

One very effective way to test different value propositions is the so-call 5-seconds test. It means within 5 seconds it should be clear to a new visitor what you are selling and to whom you are selling it.

So get a fresh pair of eyes, some friends or colleagues will do. Show them your landing page, turn off the screen after 5 seconds and ask them: “What was this page about?” If they cannot answer it -> rework your design. There are also some services out there which can help you with that.

You have a good chance of winning a 5-seconds test if your value proposition answers the following questions:

• What does your product or service do for the customer?
• What problems and pain points of the prospect is it solving?
• What is your unique selling point? What makes you better than the competition?
• It’s easy to understand (no generic marketing phrases)
• Is it persuasive and therefore convincing?
• It calls out your target customer

In the spirit of testing. I invite you to challenge my work and analyze the landing page of my blog conversion-gorilla.com. I am open to your honest feedback.

Summary

“People don’t buy product features; they buy the added value the product creates in their life”

Always raise the question: “How does this product feature help my customer?” and then derive the benefit from it. Do this repeatedly. You will have a bunch of benefits in no time.

Embed your value proposition on the above the fold part of your website. Together with a clear call to action, a call out of your target audience and a paragraph supporting it.

Julian is the Growth and Conversion Specialist for cleverbridge. He consults our top Clients with best practices in E-Commerce & Subscription topics. Together with his team, he is constantly running A/B Tests on our clients’ checkout pages to optimize their overall business.More posts from Julian about conversion rate optimization are available here.

The post How to write a unique value proposition in under 15 minutes appeared first on cleverbridge.

Retaining customers takes more than just high-quality products and a smooth user experience. Customers buy — and continue to buy —  from brands they’re emotionally connected to. In fact, 70% of emotionally engaged consumers spend up to two times more on brands they are loyal to (source).

So the question is, how do brands create emotional connections with their customers? While there’s not one simple answer, there is one method that stands head and shoulders above the rest: storytelling.

Keep reading to learn four different ways to build stronger connections and retain more customers through storytelling!

1.     Tell your customer’s story.

When we have an emotional connection to a story — whether it’s fact or fiction — it’s likely because we relate to the story’s characters. The same concept applies to brand storytelling. Elicit an emotional response by making your customers the hero of your stories, or by giving them a hero they can relate to.

Start by considering your ideal customer’s needs and pain points. Why would they buy a product you sell? What problem do they need to solve? Then, create content that illustrates these needs and pain points as part of a narrative.

Let’s pretend you sell sales prospecting software— although it may be tempting to produce a video showcasing the various features of your product through a screen recording, instead, we recommend telling the story of the typical user. Perhaps you show a day in the life of a sales rep who isn’t meeting quota, then using your product, you show the same sales rep hitting his goals without a problem.

2.   Humanize your brand.

With so many options available to the average consumer, brands often become indistinguishable from one another. As a result, customers have no real attachment to one particular brand over another.

Through storytelling, however, you can help your customers understand more than just what they’re buying, but also who they’re buying from.

We recommend placing an emphasis on your actual staff in your branding materials. Feature your employees on your social media profiles, highlight their accomplishments, even celebrate their birthdays and personal milestones.

One example leveraged by companies all over the world is using storytelling techniques within advertising and marketing content to depict the story of your company— how it started as a small team of individuals and grew into what it is today. Although this example has clearly been done before, everyone’s origin story is different. Telling your own story will set you apart from similar companies and humanize your brand in a way that other marketing tactics can’t.

3.    Show your company’s values.

Studies show that only 13% of consumers cited frequent interactions as a reason they have a relationship with a specific brand. Although this statistic may come as a relief to marketers who are frankly tired of the fight to get in front of consumers, it also poses more questions than answers. If interaction doesn’t contribute to customer relationships, what does? According to 64% of consumers, that answer is simple: shared values (source).

Whether through video or a written narrative, discuss the values that drive your brand. Beyond selling products, what does your company stand for? What positive change do you want to make for your customers, and for the world at large?

With that being said, resist the urge to manufacture values for the purpose of increasing customer retention. Brands often latch on to trending social issues and hot-button topics not because of strong values, but because they want to cash in on some favorable attention. Your customers know the difference between genuine virtues and virtue-signaling, so make sure the brand stories you tell are honest and authentic.

4. Promote user-generated stories.

Customer retention hinges on two factors above all else: trust and authenticity. And, it’s been proven time and time again that customers trust user-generated content much more than traditional marketing content. In fact, 92% of consumers trust other customers more than they trust advertising from brands (source).

Retain more customers by encouraging your existing customer advocates to tell their own stories. While this might seem like a difficult task, there are plenty of ways to involve your customers beyond simply asking them to talk about you. For example, you might interview a lifelong customer about their experiences with your brand. Then, transform the interview into a narrative-driven case study.

The best part about user-generated content is that your customers are probably already creating it— search social media for your brand name, hashtags associated with campaigns, or posts your company is tagged in. You’ll be surprised by how many customers are already telling their own stories about their experiences with your brand!

Final Thoughts

Of course, no matter how great your branding is, you’ll only retain customers if they truly love your products. But, given how crowded the ecommerce space is, forming meaningful connections through brand storytelling can be a brand’s competitive edge.

Sam Holzman is a Content Marketing Manager at ZoomInfo, a leading B2B contact database that helps organizations accelerate growth and profitability. He regularly covers topics related to sales, marketing, and recruiting and likes to write about sports and travel in his free time.

The post 4 Ways to Improve Customer Retention With Storytelling appeared first on cleverbridge.

But the speed of change, business growth, and stream of new product offers add up to product pages featuring inaccurate, out-of-date information. Also, selling the same products on different platforms necessitates presenting them to appeal to the different visitors each platform attracts.

“We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I’ve seen them again and again throughout my business life.” -Steve Jobs (source)

1. Products

Avoid descriptions that are:

Unclear – Confused customers leave your site. Clear descriptions convert.

Incomplete – Strike a balance between too little detail and too much.

Boring – Don’t copy stock language, modify it to match your customers.

Redundant – Repetitive language annoys customers, driving them away.

Contradictory – Confused customers won’t buy, even if they like your products.

Error-filled – Typos and errors decrease sales and increase returns.

Wordy – Say only what you know your customers need to read to buy.

Tips:

• Organize products by category in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-navigate system.
• When selling internationally, translate descriptions properly and include local units of measure.
• Avoid making promises you can’t fulfill. That only drives up returns, decreasing customer satisfaction.
• Make sure your prices are competitive, converted into other currencies correctly, and are optimized for sales and promotions.

2. Digital Assets

Don’t include pictures or videos that are:

Too small – Customers only buy what they can see.

Ugly – Unappealing pictures cost sales.

Broken – Images must include alt text, so customers know what you’re trying to show them.

Incomplete – Focus product images and videos on product benefits.

Non-contextual – Show products being used and in combination.

Out-dated – Schedule periodic updates to refresh content.

Tips:

• Today’s customers buy experiences. Use mixed media to create delightful personalized customer experiences that convert.
• Videos convert more customers than images alone. Use these types of videos:
  • Unboxing – tantalize customers before they buy
  • Assembly – explain your products to reduce confusion
  • Use – assembly doesn’t mean use, so show customers both
• Videos that start automatically when a page loads annoy customers, costing sales.

3. Customized Content for Different Personas

Sales means speaking your customers’ language, but that doesn’t mean English. Product information management (PIM) is a tool for managing different versions of content across platforms. So, selling the same product across stores that attract different kinds of customers, means creating tailored content. Know who you’re selling to.

Buyer Personas – “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers” (source). Focusing on the wrong customers, or having no focus, ensure failure. Research these questions:

• Who are we selling to now?
• Who do we want to sell to?
• How are these groups similar and different?
• Where do these groups exist online?
• Who are our competitors?
• Who do our competitors sell to?

Understand your buyer personas’ problems and present your products as solutions. What’s important to your buyer personas? Speak to your customers’ values!

Social Proof – A 2014 study found 94% of customers research online before buying, and 55% of those research half the purchases they make (source). A 2017 poll found 23% of people signing up for  new online services said recommendation was the key factor (source). If your product pages don’t include reviews, you will convert fewer customers.

• Address negative reviews promptly instead of deleting them. Offer exchanges and refunds. Drive authenticity by showing customers you care about them.
• Comment on positive reviews, so customers know you read them. Saying, “Thank you,” is often enough to encourage repeat business.

Thinking like a customer, instead of like a business owner, ensures you don’t lose touch with your target markets.

4. Marketing

Content marketing stats:

• 3x more effective than paid search (source)
• 62% cheaper than traditional marketing (source)
• 60% of marketers make one new content piece daily (source)

Avoid creating content that is:

Generic – Don’t copy watered-down, face-value descriptions from the manufacturer.

Unfocused – Content must speak directly to your buyer personas.

Over-focused – Content full of hyper-specific jargon turns off interested buyers.

Redundant – Content shouldn’t say the same thing over and over.

Not Optimized – Easy to find content performs best.

Salesy – Provide value first, sell second.

Other Content Marketer Mistakes:

• Buyer personas should tell you where potential customers exist online. Push content there to speak to them, but be careful. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn are different. Think about where your customers expect to be pitched to.
• Content needs to match and be optimized for social media by channel. Create content easily adaptable to different formats. A blog post that’s a long list works on SlideShare, but not on Instagram.
• The easiest way to organize your social media is to look at what your competitors are doing, and do it better. Do research on your competition’s social media to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
• Finally, every piece of content needs to point the reader in the right direction. End your blogs with calls to action (CTAs), include hyperlinks in social media posts, and make it easy for customers to enter your sales funnel.

A post without a CTA is no post at all.

5. Buyer Experience

After researching personas, ask yourself, “Do my product pages reflect my buyers’ lifestyles and styles of communication?” Start thinking like a customer by examining your website’s UX.

The bottom line is every page, link and button has to work.

Make your website as easy-to-use as possible:

Don’t require users to register – Collect vital info during checkout, instead of before.

Make your site easy to navigate – This doesn’t just mean including a site map. Organize information logically. Give customers obvious next steps.

Highlight security and certifications – You’re asking people to give you their credit card information. Make sure they know your site’s secure.

Provide easy, powerful searches – Search should be easy-to-find on every page, and never return blank results.

Eliminate all problems – Test your website to eliminate technical glitches, dead links and to ensure fast loading.

Design your product pages with your target market in mind – Target markets, and what’s important to them, vary by sales platform and product. Sales success comes from making the promise a given customer wants to hear and keeping it, no matter what.

It bears repeating, but knowingly or unknowingly, these mistakes are costing your organization in lost conversions. Avoiding them just might mean achieving greater sales success.

Ceejay S. Teku is the founder and CEO of Catsy, a cloud product content management provider. Ceejay is a product content management professional, who helps companies attract visitors, convert buyers and drive revenue.

The post Avoid These Product Content Mistakes to Drive Sales Success appeared first on cleverbridge.

That’s where two product concepts designed to deliver added value to your customers come into play: upselling and cross-selling.

These tried-and-true methods help companies highlight benefits of their products, improve sales (even of under-performers), and make an operation more efficient. They rely almost exclusively on your marketing team’s ability to craft specific messages that engage your audience.

If boosting your sales numbers sounds like a good plan, let’s discuss your two best suggestive options for achieving it.

The Secret Upsell Sauce

Upselling is a tactic to increase the value of the orders customers place by moving them to a higher tier or a high-end product version. Your online store can often suggest newer versions or more advanced models to fit specific needs.

The secret to upselling effectively is having multiple tiers and helping customers realize the value they’ll get from the more expensive purchase. Show them how they benefit as well as what a good deal it is.

The barrier at the point of the upsell is when your customer set aside a certain amount or had a certain cost they were expecting to pay. Stick close to that price point while highlighting how the new option better meets the demands they have.

The Gap Cross-Selling Fills Best

Cross-selling is the promotion of products that are similar or complementary to what your customer is already buying. This effort can happen during a sale, and you’ll often see it on product pages and shopping cart pages. It can also occur after a deal, usually in an email campaign that highlights everything your customer needs to make the most of their initial purchase.

Cross-selling is all about finding a way to fill a gap of the original item after the customer is ready to buy. Showing those gaps to customers early in the sales process runs the risk of sending them to your competitors, so many companies wait until a product is purchased.

Think of ordering an expensive knife, and then on the checkout page you get a discount on a high-quality sharpening stone. The marketing angle is protecting the investment of the original knife and allowing it to last longer, instead of discussing how the blade will dull with use.

At the same time, you wouldn’t want to pair the high-end sharpening option with an inexpensive knife because it draws attention to the disparity in quality.

The Data Isn’t In

Cross-sell and upsell opportunities involve two different tactics, so many companies try to figure out which is best and then focus solely on that. In truth, there’s no clear winner.

Different studies taken at different times, focusing on various markets, highlight a range of results. Some say upselling is 20 times more effective than cross-selling, while others note that cross-selling to a small fraction of customers can generate as much as a 180% lift in sales.

The one thing that the data does seem to agree on is that focusing on at least one of these elements can boost your sales. In industry comparisons, category leaders and the fastest-growing brands are those more likely to prioritize upsells or cross-sells.

Your best results are going to come from A/B testing to determine when each method works for you and your audience.

Why and When to Upsell

The core benefit of upselling is that it can create a deeper relationship with your customer. You’re taking time to provide the best products for all of their needs, hopefully increasing their customer lifetime value (CLV).

Choosing when to upsell depends on your products and your time to educate your audience on replacements.

When you purchased your most recent car, you might have chosen heated seats or alloy wheels, which replaced the standard options and increased the overall pric. That upsell happened at the time of the original sale.

If you buy an upgrade during your next vacation, whether it’s the hotel or the airline ticket, you’re likely paying for the improvement after the original sale was completed – when you check-in for the flight or room.

Get the most out of upsells by limiting the choices customers see and demonstrating the value and benefits of the option that has your best margins.

Why and When to Cross-Sell

Cross-selling focuses on complementary goods that don’t replace your initial sale product. They make it easier to use your core product or make the core product more efficient. Cross-selling increases CLV by driving up the value of a sale while you’re generally paying less in processing, handling and other payment-related fees.

One of our favorite reasons to cross-sell is that it shows you how customers think about your products and how much they’re willing to spend on a package deal.

To make the most of your cross-sell efforts, focus on products that are required for improved operation. Today’s TVs tend not to come with high-quality built-in speakers, so major retailers often push sound bars or systems when you go in to buy a new set.

Build a Total Offer Together

If you’re struggling to think of upsells and cross-sells for your business, consider one so successful that it’s become a cultural hallmark: Would you like fries with that?

For fast food, it was a cross-sell that proved so successful we now see “value” meals at nearly every fast-food restaurant. It became a go-to upsell option over time so that it could always be available at the time of purchase.

That connection is important, and we see it as an eventuality of nearly every sales funnel. These two techniques can support each other and help your business grow.

Remember the Rule of 25

After you’ve put your offer options together, review your campaigns and how they’ll be sent to customers. Make sure you don’t overinflate costs your customers face or put too many messages in their way to make the sales process unpleasant.

A reasonable rule-of-thumb is to keep your offers from increasing the overall order cost by more than 25%. It encourages people to take the offer without feeling overwhelmed or backing out of the whole purchase.

The rule helps us remember the point of the entire process: you want to provide something better for your customer while also generating higher revenue. If you start focusing too much on these add-ons, you soon won’t be able to see the forest for the trees.

Jake Rheude is the Director of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an ecommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of ecommerce. He has years of experience in ecommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.

The post Offer More or Offer Something Similar? How to Choose Between Up- And Cross-Selling appeared first on cleverbridge.

They may be considering if the price is too high, conducting research with your competitors, or just can’t decide if the product meets their needs.

Either way, studies place the average cart abandonment rate for ecommerce companies at around 75 percent, meaning that you’re sacrificing substantial revenue without a meaningful solution in place.

That’s where cleverbridge comes in.

Your company’s main goal should be to sign new customers while keeping the ones you have. With cleverbridge’s new fully customizable cart abandonment email campaigns, we enable our clients to:

Widen Their Global Acquisition Funnel

The solution helps you reach new customers globally with simple opt-in messaging. Our campaign is 100 percent compliant with Global Data Privacy Regulations, allowing you to branch out beyond your country’s borders.

Recover Lost Revenue with Customized Campaigns

Our automated campaign reaches out to customers at specific moments in their buyer journey with customizable email templates and messaging aimed to close the purchase funnel.

Win New Customers

This proven campaign converts casual site browsers into new customers, ensuring prospects don’t drop out of the top of your sales funnel.

Automate Their Re-marketing

Our email marketing services team will act as a managed service to allow you to automate your re-marketing efforts. We manage everything, from setting up the campaign to reporting and optimization.

“This solution is flexible and multi-faceted,” says Ashley Kolpak, email marketing specialist, cleverbridge.

“Whether it’s helping to close the gap on quarterly goals or engage more directly with potential customers, cart abandonment email campaigns are a win/win for our clients,” she adds.

For more information on cart abandonment email campaigns, click here. To get in touch with our digital marketing services team, contact em@cleverbridge.com.

Want more like this? Check out some other resources on cart abandonment.

• 6 Tips for Creating a Cart Abandonment Campaign that Converts
• 5 Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Recovering Lost Customers with Cart Abandonment Emails

Also, check out our brand new B2B ebook series to help position your business for success.

Ebook Series: 4 Key Topics to Help Grow Your B2B Ecommerce Company in 2019

The cleverbridge platform can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow globally. We take responsibility for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post cleverbridge Unveils New Cart Abandonment Solution appeared first on cleverbridge.

The opportunities for B2B ecommerce companies in 2019 and beyond are near endless, but the companies that truly capitalize on this trend are those that understand the changing needs of the B2B consumer – and those needs are changing fast.

We’ve compiled a series of mini ebooks that explore four key topics that you should consider as you think about the evolving needs of your prospects and customers.

Read on and let our sales team know if you have any questions.

7 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Models

Whether you sell to consumers or to other businesses – or both – it’s important to structure your ecommerce experience around the preferences of your end user.

The way you approach your sales and marketing efforts should be tailor-made to the needs of your specific customers, from the awareness stage to the buying decision, and beyond.

This handy ebook walks you through seven key differences between B2B and B2C ecommerce models, and offers a richer understanding of each to help maximize customer conversions.

Read it here.

Bring Consumerization to the B2B Buying Experience

Innovations in email platforms, marketing and sales integration, database software and IT technology have powered a surge in large purchases among companies in recent years. And business decision makers expect the same convenience and efficiency they experience as consumers.

Providing a simple, self-service buying process for business buyers can tear down obstacles on the path to purchase.

Learn how to “consumerize” the B2B buying process in this new ebook.

Read it here.

Renewal Automation: Understand the Value of the ‘Long Tail’

There’s no better sign of a healthy and successful company than when your customers re-up their subscription when their contract ends. But with finite sales resources, there’s only so much you can do to give every one of your customers the personal touch.

By automating your customer renewals – especially the low-dollar contracts that equal big money when added up – it’s easier than ever for your customers to sign on the dotted line.

Learn what renewal automation can do for your business in this new ebook.

Read it here.

Leverage CPQ for a Shorter Sales Cycle, Increased Revenue

The B2B buying experience is inherently complicated, but there are many ways to demystify the process and move your prospects through the funnel more quickly.

One common frustration is manual price quoting, which takes up a lot of sales resources, and it’s easy to be error-prone. Using the Configure Price Quote (CPQ) sales tool, the B2B seller can provide a customized cost estimate based on a set of rules for each specific prospect.

Here, we’ll discuss how CPQ can help you deliver a quick and accurate quote to your prospects with zero hassle.

Learn how to “consumerize” the B2B buying process in this new ebook.

Read it here.

Want more like this? Check out some other recent posts:

• Navigating the B2B Sales Role in the Face of Growing Ecommerce
• Land and Expand: Grow Your Existing B2B Customer Base
• 7 Social Media Tips and Tricks for Ecommerce Companies

The cleverbridge platform can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow globally. We take responsibility for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post Ebook Series: 4 Key Topics to Help Grow Your B2B Ecommerce Company in 2019 appeared first on cleverbridge.

Why is it wrong to write product descriptions like that?

First, they don’t give any added value to customers. Prospects don’t want to know every spec of a product and read a description as if it was written by a manufacturer; they want to know what’s in it for them.

Second, they don’t address your customer personality and the tone of voice they’d like to hear from your brand.

And third, such descriptions look and sound the same. They don’t help your ecommerce website stand out from the crowd of competitors.

There’s also another catch:

Even if you write product descriptions with the best ecommerce copywriting practices in mind, you still need to craft a countless number of them. It leads to the problem we all know as content duplication, and that’s what Google algorithms hate so much.

To avoid Google penalties for duplications, don’t plagiarize and rewrite product descriptions from competitors. Don’t use the same expressions over and over again because you think they are “words that sell.” Don’t stuff descriptions with the most obvious keywords in the hope of high rankings. Avoid common grammar mistakes and remember to check every text for plagiarism before publishing.

Long story short, consider the tricks of writing original product descriptions that would please both customers and search engines.

Here they are:

1. Watch Your Language

When you write dozens of descriptions, there’s a temptation to use general terms for every description to complete it faster. All those “world-class,” “top-notch,” “innovative approaches” and “the best solution on the market” with “cutting-edge technology” tell nothing about your product.

Forget about them. Use facts, figures, and numbers wherever possible to increase your credibility.

Also, avoid an adjective overdose. It’s okay to use some to boost customer imagination, but too many adjectives confuse readers and slow them down.

What to do?

Use only one adjective before a noun.

Avoid the most obvious adjectives: chances are, your competitors will use them too. Choose emotional words that make readers feel something. Don’t describe the obvious. Why write what your product looks if you can show it in the picture?

2. Use Citations

First, they don’t count as duplications or plagiarism if you publish them with a proper reference. And second, they can serve as social proof for your consumers to buy from you.

Even if you have the best product in the world, people may not trust you. They need referral recommendations to decide if your product is worth their attention, and that’s where positive reviews or real feedback from real customers can help your product descriptions shine.

Add their feedback to descriptions, structure them as citations with a link to their profiles, and include their photos for credibility.

3. Tell Stories But Be Concise

Know that people often scan content online rather than read it thoroughly, so make sure your product descriptions are short, sweet, and easy to read. For that, combine paragraphs with bullet points and “need to know” aspects. It will give you room for creativity and original text writing, and enable you to convey valuable information to consumers.

To develop more ideas for product descriptions, use storytelling.

Our brain retains 70 percent of information through stories; they give us an emotional response and make us remember. Storytelling in descriptions would help you not only avoid duplications but also make your product stand out from the crowd of competitors.

4. Add Value

People don’t want to know about the description of the product as much as they want to know what’s in it for them. How can they benefit from it? What makes it different from others on the market?

Create value in product descriptions. Focus on your buyer persona, write with words they use, and think of your brand tone of voice: how would you speak to them if selling in a traditional store? Answer the five W’s in your text and show people what’s in your product beyond its specifications.

Writing “for everyone,” you risk duplicating tons of other ecommerce websites and making your descriptions vague. Sell emotions, not products. This will help you avoid plagiarism and differentiate your store in the marketplace.

5. Synonymize and Paraphrase

When you’re short on time and need to write 50-plus descriptions for products of the same category, it becomes challenging to stay creative and write an original text for each. The smart use of synonymization will save you.

Deploy ecommerce SEO practices, not merely replacing words with synonyms or changing the word order in original sentences to keep your content original and fresh.

The same goes for paraphrasing. Use rich vocabulary and expand or shorten phrases wherever appropriate. Think of LSI and long-tail keywords, and forget about marketing buzzwords and vague superlatives.

Summary

Check product descriptions via plagiarism checkers to see if you duplicate other websites by mistake, and revise them accordingly. Write an original text for every product card; treat your consumers like humans, not numbers.

Map your sales process to see what you can optimize on your ecommerce website to engage potential buyers. Consider split testing your product descriptions to understand what formats perform better. Don’t be afraid of A/B testing, but make sure to optimize for positive customer experience.

And sales won’t take long in coming.

Lesley Vos is a regular contributor to publications on business, marketing, and self-growth. More posts from Lesley are available here.

The post Secrets to Avoiding Duplications in Your Product Descriptions appeared first on cleverbridge.

Here are six tips to help turn your shopping cart visitors into real paying customers through a widespread email campaign.

Cart Abandonment Email Campaigns aim to retarget cart-abandoners to get them back to the ordering process. This retargeting tactic represents one of the most powerful tools to tackle shopping cart abandonment. In this blog post, I’ll discuss reasons why customers abandon the cart and how to use cart abandonment campaigns to turn those users into paying customers.

Understanding the Cart Abandonment Phenomenon

Statistics from various agencies set the average percentage of cart abandonment between 50 and 80 percent, based on different verticals.

A study conducted by Baymard Institute pointed out that an average of 67.89 percent of shoppers abandon the checkout process. A report released by Smart Insights in late 2017 set the global cart abandonment rate at 75.52 percent. The bad news is that experts agree that these rates will increase in the future.

Here is a shared truth: cart abandonment isn’t always the counter-effect of bad shopping experiences. In the majority of cases, cart abandonment is simply a natural consequence of users’ interaction in the ecommerce world.

Someone searches, window-shops, tries to find something he maybe doesn’t really need, but just wants to know more about it.

Here’s another factor to keep in consideration: shopping is not only a matter of money, but it also undergoes a psychological process. Before finalizing a purchase, shoppers consciously and subconsciously ask themselves questions like, “Do I need this item?”; “What are the disadvantages of buying it?”; “Is there anything that could be a better fit for me?” These questions keep them from buying as they bring about uncertainty.

Nevertheless, ecommerce marketers can implement best practices to reduce churn rate.

5 Reasons Why Customers Might Abandon Your Cart

On a scale from the most to the least frequent reasons, the Baymard Institute listed them as follows:

1. Shipping or tax-related extra costs
2. The length, complexity or the additional requirements within the checkout process
3. Delivery-related issues
4. Payment-related concerns
5. An overall poor experience offered on the website

Here is something interesting: the conversion rate of the overall online shopping experience could increase by 35.26 percent by simply following best practices on checkout usability and understanding the user’s needs.

How to Use Cart Abandonment Campaigns to Win Those Customers Back

It’s estimated that almost half of the emails sent after a user abandons the cart are opened, with a 21 percent click-through rate. And 50 percent of the recipients who engage with the content convert their actions into purchase.

This reflects 10 percent of the overall number of individuals who got the email going back to the purchase process (especially, with a discount applied).

Cart abandonment email campaigns have an important impact. Here are six tips to consider while creating a cart abandonment email campaign:

1. Subject Line:

Customize it. As its main objective is to clearly communicate the purpose of the email, it needs to be concise. It can be used to convey a sense of urgency and encourage an immediate action: “We’re still holding your product – Act fast.”

2. Preheader:

Use it to increase personalization. For instance, adding the customer name and telling something more about the circumstance. It compels the recipient to open the email.

3. Product Image and Price:

This is the most important information to share within the email: “what” for “how much”? Images presenting the product triggers the mindset of which item the recipient wanted to purchase.

If you are not sure whether the user already has sufficient information about the product, add a short description. Offering a discount? Make sure to highlight it, as it’s a key value proposition.

4. Call to Action:

Design and position are fundamental. The CTA shouldn’t distract the reader from the product and the information, but at the same time be evident enough to induce purchase. Colors and text should be selected carefully and A/B tested in different versions to determine what converts best for the audience.

5. Layout:

The simpler, the better. We need to remember that the focus is the item we are selling and avoid content overload. A few compelling sentences detached enough from the cart block is all our email actually needs. The design can also work as an “enhancer” for brand recognition and awareness.

6. Contact Information:

Facilitating the contact to a sales team increases the chances of purchase.

Get Consent

Another sensitive topic to be considered before even sending an email is consent. In times of increased regulation aiming to protect sensitive personal data, the way we collect consent is crucial to avoid being reported.

Since data collection and management are core elements in email marketing, optimization tactics can be implemented to improve the chances of getting the consent according to law. Some of the most used way for data collection are:

• Light-box popping up in the shopping cart
• The positioning of the email address field on top of the personal details form
• The requirement for account creation

Keystone

A proven cart abandonment rate of around 70 percent means that online shopping has wide margins for growth and conversion. The spectrum of action is broad as well: from improvements in the shopping cart or the website in the pre-abandonment phase, to an effective, personalized and calibrated email communication, up to a methodic analysis of the audience to understand what might cause a “psychological” abandonment.

As demonstrated above, the online shopping experience is as tricky and varied as the numerous reasons that bring virtual shoppers to the checkout process. Understanding the reason behind every non-converted transaction is key to deal with the phenomenon and precondition to finding the best strategy to reduce churn.

The post 6 Tips for Creating a Cart Abandonment Campaign that Converts appeared first on cleverbridge.

Note that keywords are what visitors use to get to your website, and Google ranks websites for the most relevant ones. It’s therefore vital to use them well for you to be able to drive the kind of traffic you want to your page.

That will only be possible if you do keyword research. While you cannot do it by yourself, there are tools that you could employ for no extra cost. Here are some of the best free keyword research tools.

1. Google Trends

Google is trusted. Therefore, it‘s only logical that this tool will get you what you want. Also, it’s always better to get information and keyword data from the most used search engine. Google Trends, as the name suggests, keeps track of how search trends keep changing. Note that users should not apply the same keywords all year round since search queries and phrases do not remain static. If you want to rank for relevant keywords, Google Trends is helpful tool.

2. Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker is another effective free keyword research tool with one of the most prominent keyword databases.

As searches become more specific, there’s an increasing need to use long-tail keywords. As much as the one-word keywords are still relevant, the long-tails lend themselves to more meaningful search results and can improve your site’s SEO. The tool will also help you with keyword analysis. That is, how much the keyword is being used, the keywords your competitors use and keyword difficulty.

3. Google Keyword Planner

This is another Google creation that you need for keyword research. Just like Rank Tracker, Google Keyword Planner also boasts one of the largest keyword databases. Among the many actionable insights include average monthly searches, keywords your competitors are ranking for, and a series of other metrics. You will also benefit from suggestions which will make keyword creation an easy task.

Being Google’s tool, you are already at an advantage. Google Keyword Planner is also user-friendly, and you will waste no time trying to navigate it.

4. Google Search Console

If you’re not looking to invest a lot in a paid tool, Google Search Console would be another good option. Recommended by countless SEO experts, this tool provides you with a list of keywords that are most searched during a given period. It will also provide you with keyword data on videos, images and content. The best part is that you can sync it with other tools like Google analytics, which enables you to identify richer insights

The interface is user-friendly, and if you’re new to it and you can always get training to help you navigate the features and functionality.
The role that keyword research plays in the success of SEO cannot be ignored. For this reason, you need to do everything possible to see to it that the keywords you use are relevant.

Dancun Kanguri is the content writer at keyword.com.

The post 4 Free Keyword Research Tools to Look for in 2019 appeared first on cleverbridge.