The truth is, with 68 percent of B2B buyers preferring self-directed research versus interaction with a sales rep, offering an omnichannel approach to marketing, promoting and demonstrating your product is vital to nurturing your prospects in a way that meets their preferences, regardless of their place in the sales funnel.

Whether your prospect is simply gathering information or has amassed enough intel to make a purchase decision – or anywhere in between – your ecommerce business should provide a complete omnichannel experience to deliver what your audience wants, and when they want it. According to Forrester, here are seven steps to implement omnichannel B2B ecommerce, according to use cases from successful ecommerce brands.

1. Venture Beyond the Web Storefront

“We nailed the vision for our ecommerce platform. It goes beyond powering the website to powering the entire customer experience,” says Mike Wodtke, VP of Ecommerce at furniture design company Blu Dot. When selling in both digital and physical channels, for Blue Dot the omnichannel experience includes B2B, B2B2C and D2C. They do this by maintaining fewer partnerships with manufacturers, which enables more control over the customer experience, and a deeper and more strategic approach for each one.

2. Include Sales/Customer Service in the Process

According to Justin Racine, ecommerce lead at Geriatric Medical, B2B ecommerce sites are more “apps than sites,” and buyers – especially those that are higher value – require assistance, even for self-service. Make sure to keep your sales and customer service teams at hand, as they are well positioned to satisfy that need for self-service customers.

3. Think About the Entire Buyers Journey

We so often think about the awareness and purchase phase, but within the omnichannel ecommerce world, prospects are likely to bounce around the funnel (in a non-linear way) before making that decision. Make sure your sales/marketing/customer success teams have touchpoints along the entire journey, and have a plan in place post-purchase to continue nurturing customers over the long-haul.

4. Capabilities Should Span Internal Teams as Well as Customers

Much has been said about consumerizing (or B2C-ifying) the B2B experience, removing as much friction and simplifying the process for the buyer as possible. For the true omnichannel experience, according to TOMS Shoes, “requirements gathering must span the full spectrum of users touching the system.” The company enabled its sales and marking teams to “elevate the brand and buying experiences using brand-centric, digitally merchandized layouts to facilitate buyer-seller interactions.”

5. Sales Incentives Should Still Reign

The terms “automation” and “customer self-service” often make sales teams cringe, feeling as if they’ll no longer be needed. But according to experts, there will always be a place for your sales reps, especially for high-value clients brining in a large volume of revenue. Your ecommerce leaders should make sure there is a fair compensation structure for digital orders of all sizes, in order to maintain a healthy relationship with your sales team. “There’s no faster way to kill your eCommerce investments than to take money away from the sales teams,” notes Marta Dalton, director of ecommerce at Coca-Cola. “Sellers can either sabotage or ensure your success, so make sure you have their full buy-in.”

6. Think in Terms of Continuous, Long-term Improvement

Pivoting your business into pure omnichannel ecommerce is a huge undertaking, and righting the ship takes time, resources and a complete new approach. Taking a “phased approach without a definitive endpoint,” according to Forrester, allows you to apply omnichannel to a smaller portion of your business – a specific geo or business line – and measure its success. From there, you can see what works and put in place a strategy that makes sense for your business overall.

7. Focus on Rep Enablement

When implementing a mass change to your business, you need to have internal buy-in and preparation. Forrester suggests a “commitment to enablement that starts from the inside and moves out to the customer,” such as webinars that provide ongoing training to your sales and service teams. Having confidence in your internal teams will translate into confidence from your customers.

The full report, Make Omnichannel Real In B2B Ecommerce, is available at https://go.forrester.com/.

Want more B2B content from cleverbridge? Visit our full B2B Ecommerce round-up here, or download our new ebook below.

Ready to connect? Our bolt-on subscription billing, commerce and payments platform lets you automate long-tail orders, reduce churn, and get paid faster. Contact our sales team.

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

The post Implement an Omnichannel Approach for B2B Ecommerce appeared first on cleverbridge.

As we look back on 2018, let’s explore the top 10 most-read items from our blog, decided by you, the readers.

1. Losing Money With Your Volume Pricing Model?

In the digital goods world, volume pricing is made all the more compelling because the cost of selling one additional unit is very low compared to physical goods. Producing and selling another license key for a piece of software or another virtual gift in an online community results in very little additional cost. Because of this high profit margin, digital goods companies frequently offer their products in volume. Here, we’ve identified three different volume pricing models for digital goods to help you evaluate your current strategy and make sure it is working for you. Read more.

2. The Difficulty of Being a Merchant of Record

Billing your global online customers is complex. To effectively and securely collect payments, you must, among many other things, open up merchant accounts, put payment gateways in place, manage contracts with global payment service providers, comply with PCI DSS, and abide by global taxation requirements. When you handle all these things on your own, you are acting as your own merchant of record (MoR). There are cases where it’s to your advantage to act as your own merchant of record. But there are also cases where accepting the responsibility of being the merchant of record has many disadvantages. Read more.

3. Customer Service KPIs: Reducing Contact Rates

There are two primary concerns with resolving customer inquiries: speed and quality. You can’t waste your customer’s time, and you must solve their problem. These two concerns are commonly at odds with each other, but there are ways to synthesize speedy and high-quality responses into a world class customer experience that also saves your business money. And it all begins with measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). Read more.

4. 7 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Models

Much has been said in recent years of the digital business-to-business model (B2B) versus the digital business-to-consumer model (B2C), in terms of scope, customer acquisition and retention, pricing, product variety, and most importantly, profitability. Many companies choose to focus their full efforts on one model or the other, while others attempt to hedge their bets by supporting a hybrid of both. Here, we’ll dive into some of the main differences between the B2B and B2C ecommerce spaces, and the key concepts necessary to support a thriving digital business, regardless of your end user profile. Read more.

5. Five Features of Effective Ecommerce Sites

To keep potential customers on your ecommerce site, it should include features and functionality that consumers now consider essential. Here are five features every effective ecommerce site should have, along with the reasons why they are so critical to converting online customers. Read more.

6. How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting the SaaS Market

The fervent push from enterprise to software-as-a-service within the last decade has enabled end users to sidestep some of the key hurdles associated with software maintenance and implementation. Chief among them include ease of installation and upgrades, streamlined testing and training, and minimizing an otherwise large upfront cost. As SaaS trends evolve further still, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have staked their claim among the topics dominating the SaaS conversation, as many analysts peg AI as the next big shift in the market. Read more.

7. Subscription Billing Models Defined

As more companies apply subscriptions to their businesses, they explore different ways to bill their subscribers. But which model is really best to use? And what are the pros and cons of the model you choose? In order to understand the complexity of subscription billing, we must first break it down into its parts. Here, we explore the basic combination of factors that define the various subscription billing models. Read more.

8. Vertical SaaS Segment on the Rise

Rapid growth in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry shows no sign of slowing down, with research firm OpenView Labs forecasting a 21.5 percent increase to $71.2 billion by the end of 2018, and the cloud market overall to hit $187.3 billion. The vertical SaaS segment in particular remains a significant driver of that growth, powered by an influx of digital businesses that focus on a specific industry. Unlike their horizontal counterparts – whose software suites are available to a much broader audience to maximize revenue and support scale – vertical SaaS companies maintain a narrower focus. Read more.

9. 7 SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce Companies in 2018

For any business with a digital presence – especially ecommerce companies that market and sell exclusively online – driving organic traffic to your website remains a constant challenge and a more integral part of the customer conversion process than ever before. Developing a product or solution that has value and fulfills a consumer need is obviously a significant part of the success equation. But how do you reach your audience in the first place? Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines will increase organic, relevant traffic, and ultimately broaden the top of your sales funnel – a key step in the evolving and competitive ecommerce market. Read more.

10. Factors Powering the Move Toward a Subscription Model

“By 2020, all new entrants and 80% of historical vendors will offer subscription-based business models, regardless of where the software resides. What began as a trickle a few years ago has become a stampede of vendors wanting to make a move to a subscription business model.” This statistic from research firm Gartner forecasts the subscription business model as not just an option, but a necessity when considering the acquisition and retention of customers, and ultimately the long-haul growth of your business. Read more.

Learn how cleverbridge can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow. We take responsiblity 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’s Top 10 Most-read Blogs of 2018 appeared first on cleverbridge.

Onboarding new customers and implementing your product throughout their organization is the obvious goal that your company’s strategy should support. But long gone are the days of the one-and-done sales approach. The key to a successful ecommerce business is to maintain long-term relationships with your
customers, in which reminding them of your value through a quality product and consistent support over time is paramount.

In this ebook, we’ll explore some key solutions that your business can implement to not only survive, but thrive in the competitive B2B ecommerce space:

• Understanding 7 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Models
• Bringing Consumerization to the B2B Buying Experience
• Leveraging CPQ for a Shorter Sales Cycle and Increased Revenue
• Growing Your Digital Business Using Renewal Automation
• A case study exploring how SmartBear Software leverages cleverbridge ecommerce solutions to increase customer renewals

Click the image below to receive your free ebook:

Like what you read? cleverbridge offers a bevy of ebooks, case studies, white papers, videos and other resources in the ecommerce, subscription and B2B space. We explore key topics to ensure your digital business is positioned for success:

• Growing globally using a subscription billing model
• Global compliance risks and solutions
• Key questions to ask when selecting a new payment provider
• Managing the complexities of payment processing
• Acquiring, converting and retaining customers
• Optimizing conversion rate
• Localizing the buyer’s journey for other countries
• Implementing an effective SEO strategy for your web platform
• And much more

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: Position Your B2B Ecommerce Business for Long-term Growth appeared first on cleverbridge.

Performance marketing brings a significant volume of business opportunities to your company. The practice is comparable to a commission-based sales job like a car salesperson or a real estate agent.

But at cleverbridge, we focus exclusively on software companies.

For many, the world of ecommerce causes concern because in many ways the internet remains a world of anonymity and uncertainty. But many global companies take full advantage of performance marketing opportunities, like Amazon, Apple, ebay and Microsoft. For anyone not taking advantage, you’re missing a substantial revenue pool.

A few of the benefits of performance marketing:

• Brings in a large volume of web traffic
• Helps your company reach new customer bases in different countries
• Builds key relationships with high-volume publishers

Performance Marketing and Fraud

Many people maintain the mindset that performance marketing is often connected to fraudulent activities due to the anonymity of the people you’re working with.

In the past, rumors of scary things like cookie stuffing, typo squatting, black hat SEO, link-farms, spam, trademark infringement and brandjacking certainly deterred engagement with regard to performance marketing.

Luckily, utilizing a proactive and experienced performance marketing service can prevent these activities. In today’s ecommerce world, every digital business needs to employ an effective anti-fraud department operating with the latest anti-fraud strategies and technologies.

Especially in Europe and Germany, the stereotypes about being overcautious are true. Every sale is audited with an anti-fraud system and can already be declined before the sale is even registered if fraudulent activities are presumed. More and more, finding fraud before it happens is becoming a standard practice.

It should be common sense to review an application before starting business with a partner. The incoming publisher should be reviewed and some key questions should be answered:

• How was the publisher referred?
• What are our corporate restrictions in terms of the content the publisher is delivering?
• How does the publisher capture leads? Is the traffic of a high quality?
• Is the traffic directed to us and not to any competitors?

A careful look at the web presence of the publisher already solves most of these issues.

The highest security standards along with anti-fraud and data-privacy standards are now rolled into the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can find all details to these updates in a previous blog post about GDPR.

Performance Marketing Offers More Value Than Ever Before

The challenges of the past have contributed a significant development in the area of performance marketing.

The industry’s expansion is such that “performance marketing” is no longer an exhaustive term. New self-publishing tools and social media practices have opened up the rapidly growing industry of Influencer Marketing.

Traditional publishers’ platforms have expanded to reach almost every person around the globe. Many companies are pushing their business into these new areas because social networks are growing rapidly and the so-called Influencers are gaining more and more market power.

Even without owning a specific channel, many companies are investing in placements on social media. The term paid social is also established in the area of performance marketing and companies realize great ROI with such paid placements.

These new platforms and business models bring new ways of tracking and evaluating your business decisions. Additional contribution models have also taken center stage as the industry moves past the typical commission-per-sale. Beginning with customized coupon codes, referrals, commission-per-lead, clicks or impressions, performance marketing has created various multi-touch-attribution models to support your expanding business on various devices.

This should offer a strong sense of how vast these opportunities are – because today there is a long list of marketers in the digital landscape:

Classic websites with content, forums, news sites: This includes single websites from private persons, media or large industry-related forums that generate millions of visitors per month.

Review and comparison websites: A majority of consumers compare products and read reviews before they buy. Luckily, today you can find reviews and comparisons for almost any product on consumer sites, private blogs and through media channels, among other avenues.

Influencer, authors, profile leaders: The term “Influencer” has certainly become a trending topic in recent years. Suddenly, every person has the chance to start a business as soon as they hit a significant amount of followers or subscribers. The typical platforms of influencers are social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. One individual is able to reach millions very quickly. This is the perfect opportunity to get the right product in front of the right audience with the right message. And the chances that the audience believes in the message are much higher since they are voluntarily committed to the channel.

Apps: By 2020 there will be 6.1 billion smartphone users around the world. Based on that number, imagine how many apps are available for these devices. In our industry, this includes anything from comparison apps for comparison websites to payback apps from large retail stores offering you special discounts on various products. App usage and the need for partnerships in this space shows no sign of stopping.

Paid advertising: This is already an extremely common method to better focus your efforts on your target audience, including social media display ads, contextual ads, and pay-per-click.

Webinars or E-learning: An endless number of workshops, webinars and other courses are offered online. Driven by a strategic partnership, taking advantage of these types of programs can generate a good commission.

Keystone

The industry has learned, improved and expanded, and the value of performance marketing is no longer a debatable topic. It’s a must-have for every company as an additional revenue channel, where opportunities are endless.

To learn more about the cleverbridge performance marketing platform, click here, or contact our sales team today.

Jannis Jörger is a performance marketing associate at cleverbridge.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge.

The post Clearing Up Performance Marketing Myths appeared first on cleverbridge.

An email platform, marketing and sales integration, vertical-focused software hosting a database, and IT technology fending against security breaches are among the many tools needed to support an efficient, effective organization.

But how do these organizations research and purchase the necessary products?

We’ve explored a number of ways that separate the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) purchase processes, including market profile, buying cycle and payment options, among others. And in many ways, that doesn’t change.

But the truth is, convenience and simplicity influence all purchase decisions, whether selling to a customer or a corporate entity. The B2B market’s expectations have changed significantly, and the more you can consumerize the process for a business buyer, the more obstacles you’ve ultimately torn down on the path to purchase.

Support Convenience, Self-service Through an Omni-channel Experience

B2C juggernauts like Amazon and Apple have set a new gold standard with the one-click ease of purchase that supports each customer’s channel of choice. Though B2B buying is significantly more complicated due to the sheer volume of moving parts, B2B buyers expect more B2C-like research, sales, purchase and implementation processes.

Some B2B buyers still expect to learn about product features and functionality through the traditional sales rep, but 68 percent prefer to conduct research online, according to a Forrester report. Additionally, 44 percent say that an ecommerce site influences at least half of their offline purchases, the report finds.

The point is, if your company provides only a digital process, or only a human-to-human approach, you will either alienate one half of your prospect queue or the other. It’s vital to offer the flexibility of either/or – as well as the more likely hybrid of both – to accommodate a customer’s buying preferences.

According to the Forrester report, successful B2B businesses “allow their customer to operate in their preferred channel, seamlessly migrate between channels, and realize a consistently great experience regardless of channel.”

After all, in the competitive ecommerce market, companies no longer dictate the end user’s buying journey. The buyers do.

Transparency in Your Pricing Model

Brand transparency has become more important to customers across all industries, in terms of company values, social awareness, if the products are manufactured responsibly and perhaps most importantly, price.

In the B2C space, if a company isn’t upfront about what a product costs during the awareness stage, whether online or at physical retail, you can bet the customer will seek out one of your competitors who take a more honest and direct approach to their pricing structure.

In contrast, B2B has traditionally thrived on providing more ambiguous pricing information. The more customized and complicated implementation process for the B2B buyer often justifies the seller in delaying a quote until later in the conversation. Then, the buyer’s commitment to research and investment in building the sales relationship may trigger the sale to close anyway. In poker terms, if you’ve tossed a good amount in the pot, wouldn’t the risk/reward make sense to go “all in” regardless of outcome?

As the B2B and B2C purchase processes continue to bleed together, however, business decision-makers are empowered to expect at least an approximate price based on their company size and software needs – if not an exact price and payment plan.

Today, due to online research and self-service capabilities, the average B2B customer is almost 60 percent through the buying journey before even engaging with a sales representative – and they certainly wouldn’t progress that far without knowing cost.

As a B2B seller who’s looking to carve out an edge against the competition, it’d be wise to offer it upfront. Host a page on your website displaying your pricing model, or offer it as a downloadable PDF if they enter their email. Once that information is offered, then you can begin a mutually beneficial sales relationship with the prospect.

Read more: 7 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Models

Convince the End User as Well as the Decision-maker

When thinking about your marketing and sales targets, a B2C company targets the end user and a B2B business goes after a company’s decision-maker. Easy enough. Traditionally this makes sense as you want to market to the person who’s making the final decision and opening their wallets.

When targeting a business, however, there may be much more complex buy-in, several decision-makers each of whom you should treat as a customer of your product.

When building email campaigns, blogs and other website content, even when your sales team is on the floor of a conference or networking event, develop separate messaging for each tier of the decision tree.

While the executives may be impressed by a lower price, and the IT department by ease of implementation, the company’s employees are the ones who will spend the majority of their day using your software. They may have little say in the final decision, but their group preference may have a significant impact on the c-suite’s thought process.

A freemium, product demo or online sand box designed specifically for the company’s employees may be exactly what you need to show your product’s value.

Make it Mobile, and Don’t Forget Your Social Media Accounts

We’ve discussed at length the rising popularity of mobile search and voice search, with Google citing hand-held devices as hosting more than half of searches compared to laptops or desktops. And it goes without saying the importance of social media as a branding tool, even ones like Facebook and Instagram that are traditionally geared toward B2C and personal use.

Mobile search feels like more of a consumer trend, but Forrester suggests a continued rise of B2B search taking place on a mobile device. It’d be wise to develop and deploy an app to make research and purchase as easy as possible for mobile, and at the very least ensure your website is flexible and can adapt to smaller screens so you’re not missing out on key customer engagement.

And don’t be afraid to use social media as a way to push content far beyond the website. Far more people use social media for professional and research purposes than one might expect, according to Pew Research Center. In fact, 77 percent of Americans use social media at work, with 24 percent using it to make connections in their career, and 20 percent use it to identify work-based solutions.

Keystone

Though the respective ecommerce models of business-to-business and business-to-consumer are vastly different, every business buyer has had online consumer experiences in their personal life, and therefore appreciates the convenience and personalization that comes with them.

The more ways in which you can infuse the B2C experience into your B2B buying cycle, the more customers you’ll close and the more likely you’ll retain them for the long haul.

Ready to learn more about how cleverbridge can help grow your digital B2B business? Contact our sales team to start the discussion.

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

The post Bring Consumerization to the B2B Buying Experience appeared first on cleverbridge.

Our Digital Marketing Services team has written a lot about performance marketing over the years. We polled our top marketers to identify posts that have gotten a positive response from readers. Read on for our most popular ones. Who knows – you may learn a few tips that you can apply to your digital strategy.

Recruit

5 Ways to Build Publisher Relationships for Success

In order for your program to become successful, you need to communicate, diversify and differentiate yourself with publishers. Deliver a service, not just a tracking platform. Ensure that you’re following basic best practices, and allow room for your publishers’ changing needs. Here are five tactics from our Senior Performance Marketing Manager that will move you in the right direction toward a successful performance marketing program.

Read more.

Think Like a Performance Marketer: Three Keys to Making More Money

Marketing with publishers poses unique challenges to your digital strategy. Unlike your other channels, your success is only as strong as your relationships with individual publishers. But once you treat your publishers as partners and as real people, you can harness their efforts to do what they do best. Read on to learn how to foster mutually beneficial relations and maximize profitability.

Read more.

Manage:

Performance Marketing 101 Series

In this four-part series, we explore an effective path for building a successful performance marketing website, which involves identifying your domain and host, deploying SEO tactics, driving traffic and facilitating conversions, and turning one-time visitors into lifetime customers. This multi-step playbook can help you set reasonable goals and effectively achieve them.

• Part 1 – Performance Marketing for Beginners
• Part 2 – SEO Tactics
• Part 3 – Driving Traffic
• Part 4 – Converting Customers

Three Ways to Leverage Social Media

Building a solid presence on social media is a gradual process. You must select the appropriate channels and build a genuine following there. And you should stick to a disciplined posting strategy that deepens your influence as you promote your products or services. Through a steady and disciplined approach and being responsive to metrics, you will establish a foothold that will burnish your brand online, leading to a more loyal following and more commissions.

Read more.

Analyze:

3 Geeky Habits of Successful Performance Marketing Managers

Performance marketing management is a long game. There’s always one more publisher to email, one more link to send, and of course one more report to create. If it seems like you’re making spreadsheets for spreadsheet’s sake, then it’s time to start looking at meaningful data that inspires you to take action. Here, we illustrate how to tell a story with your performance marketing data in a way that will grow your program and convey the efficacy of your work to clients, bosses, executives, and anyone else who needs convincing.

Read more.

Keystone

Companies must weave in new technologies and adapt to changing advertising patterns and customer engagement habits in order to maximize sales and customer retention. Performance marketing is an effective digital channel with high ROI. But the bottom line is that performance optimization is the way you can ultimately get the most out of interactions with prospects as performance marketing is very much about metrics and data.

One final thought: Our Digital Marketing Services team is working on a new offering that will help our clients form stronger relationships with valuable publishers that will deliver top-line revenue. Stay tuned – we’ll reveal details on July 25.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer and Andrea Bailiff-Gush is the product marketing manager for cleverbridge.  

The post cleverbridge’s Top Performance Marketing Posts appeared first on cleverbridge.

But it gets way easier when you adopt the right approach. In this blog, I’ll share the five metrics you should follow, how you can interpret your results and how you can improve them.

The Funnel Metaphor

Email marketing statistics can be discouraging. There are a lot of them, often labeled with mysterious acronyms (OR? CTR?). To make sense of these metrics, the best approach is to see the emails you send as a funnel during which:

1. The user receives your email
2. The user opens your email
3. The user clicks your link

As with traditional online marketing funnels, the user can choose to leave the funnel at any point. Each step of this funnel can be associated with a metric that describes your performance. Let’s review these metrics and check how you compare to the industry for each of them.

Subscribers Count

How Can You Evaluate Your Subscriber Base?

This is the only absolute metric we’ll discuss in this article. All the others are ratios. The best way to evaluate the growth of your subscriber list is to look at the absolute number of net new subscribers you add each month.

To calculate, use the following formula: New subscribers – Unsubscribes

What Does This Metric Tell You?

This metric will tell you how effective you are at turning visitors and customers into email subscribers. Are your email forms visible enough? Do you provide the right incentive to subscribe?

What Can You Do to Get More Subscribers?

There are a few techniques that can help:

• Opt-in forms
• Newsletter pop-ups
• Opt-in checkboxes

We recommend you combine these techniques with appropriate rewards to maximize their impact.

Bounce Rate

How Can You Calculate Your Bounce Rate?

Here’s the bounce rate formula: Number of bounces/Total emails sent

Bounces are the emails that are rejected by the recipient’s email server. Usually a bounce happens when the user has closed his email account, when his mailbox is full, or if he provided an incorrect email address.

What Does This Metric Tell You?

The bounce rate is the best indicator of your subscriber base’s health. Getting a lot of bounces means that your list is outdated.

How Good Is Your Bounce Rate?

According to MailChimp, the average bounce rate is between 0.17 and 2.76 percent.

What Can You Do to Improve Your Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is one of the easiest factors you can influence.

Tip #1: Activate double opt-in

When you activate double opt-in, your subscribers have to confirm their subscription. This allows you to remove the fake email addresses or the addresses with typos.

Free ebook: Eight Critical Capabilities for Global Ecommerce

Tip #2: Exclude inactive subscribers

Periodically remove from your email list the users who have not opened or clicked one of your emails in a long time. Inactivity is one of the first signs that a user is not using an email address anymore.

Open Rate

How Can You Calculate Your Open Rate?

Here’s the open rate formula: Users who opened your email/Users who received your email

Bounces should not be included in the people who received your email to isolate the “quality” factor.

What Does the Open Rate Tell You?

When your subscribers receive your email, they only have a few details to help them decide if they want to open it:

• Your sender name
• Your subject
• The preview of your email body

In other words, your open rate will mainly tell you:

• If your subscribers recognize your brand
• If your subject is attractive
• If the first lines of your email make it look worth opening

How Good Is Your Open Rate?

According to MailChimp, the average open rate varies by industry and is between 15 and 28 percent.

Campaign Monitor, another email marketing solution, estimates that the average open rate is between 15 and 25 percent.

What Can You Do to Improve Your Open Rate?

Tip #1: Segment your list

The best way to get more subscribers to read your emails is to improve their relevance. To do so, segment your list. If you run a digital business that sells two different types of SaaS products, for example, it could be worth sending a different newsletter to the two groups.

Tip#2: Improve your subject

Adopt a user approach. What would you expect from an email sent by your company as a user? Promotions? Exclusive news? Whatever it is, make sure your subject includes one of these elements.

Tip #3: Add a pre-header

It can be hard to communicate all you have to say in your subject line. Luckily, most email clients display the first few words of your email after the subject. Marketers call this space the pre-header. Use it to tell your subscribers more about what they can expect from your email.

Tip #4: Test your subject

Before sending your email, test it! Is the subject short enough to display well on most clients? Is the pre-header displayed? Solutions such as Email on Acid can help. And if you have enough time, A/B test your subject lines.

Reactivity Rate

How Can You Calculate Your Reactivity Rate?

The reactivity rate’s formula is: Unique users who clicked your email/Unique users who opened your email

Note that the reactivity rate is different from the click-through rate, which is: Users who clicked your email/Users who received your email

The CTR doesn’t allow you to separate the impact of the subject line and the impact of the email body. If your solution doesn’t display the reactivity rate, you can calculate it with the following formula: Click-through-rate/Open rate

What Does the Reactivity Rate Tell You?

The reactivity rate gives you an idea of what the users who open your email think of your email content. If they like it, chances are they will click it and you will end up with a high reactivity rate.

How Good Is Your Reactivity Rate?

According to MailChimp, the average reactivity rate is between 6 and 21 percent, depending on the industry.

What Can You Do to Improve Your Reactivity Rate?

The best way to get your customers to click is to provide relevant content. That’s obvious. But two additional techniques can help you boost clicks.

Tip #1: Use product recommendations

Product recommendations work wonders. Amazon built its fortune off of them. To give you a better idea of the results you can expect, one ecommerce website reported a 175 percent increase in its CTR after adding product recommendations to its emails.

Tip #2: Include category links

Adding links to your different product categories can help a lot as well. It increases the chances that your user clicks your email. After all, your subscribers may not be interested in the products you’re promoting in your newsletter. In that case, they may want to check your other products using your category links.

Unsubscribe Rate

How Can You Calculate Your Unsubscribe Rate?

Here’s the formula: Unsubscribes/Emails received

How Good Is Your Unsubscribe Rate?

According to GetResponse, the average unsubscribe rate is 0.24 percent.

What Can You Do to Improve Your Unsubscribe Rate?

Tip #1: Avoid sending too many emails

A study by GetApp Lab found that the main driver of unsubscribes was email frequency. So one of the best ways to reduce your unsubscribe rate is to reduce the number of emails you’re sending.

Tip #2: Make sure your emails are relevant

The study also highlights the importance of the other elements we discussed: content and relevance. These elements will impact your open rate and reactivity rate, but also, in the longer run, your unsubscribe rate.

I hope this article will help you get a clearer picture of your email marketing strategy’s performance. Are you following additional or alternate metrics? Share them in the comments and tell us how you interpret them.

Ben Cahen is the founder and CEO of WisePops, a platform that helps marketers design engaging website popups.

The post The Email Marketing Equation (and How You Can Master It) appeared first on cleverbridge.

Below is a summary of the key points explored in the presentation.

1. Treat Your Affiliates as Partners

Brands are always looking for ways to increase their online sales through multiple channels. When it comes to affiliate marketing, brands tend to forget the importance of treating affiliates like partners and how this can affect their overall success. Most companies do not have a dedicated resource to nurture and grow their program, leaving affiliates left in the dark. For example, take a look at the AffStat benchmark report of 2016.

2. Set Yourself Apart From Competition

It’s often forgotten, but it’s free for affiliates to sign up for networks. With the software space becoming increasingly competitive, how are affiliates making decisions around what program they should promote?

An affiliate’s decisions are not only made by product reputation and competitive commission rates, but also based on where they can get the best support to receive links, feedback, brainstorming and additional information – areas that will help optimize their businesses.

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? In most cases we’ve seen 90/10, which means 90 percent of your revenue is coming from 10 percent of your program. Depending on how many affiliates you have, in some cases this could mean there’s five affiliates running your program. Putting all your eggs in one basket leaves your program at risk.

Download the Ebook: Subscription Metrics & Reporting Tips

Start offering services not just to your top earners but take a look at your affiliate database as a whole. A service is usually associated with what is delivered to your clients, and not so much with affiliates, so it’s vital to communicate with your affiliate database. In order to communicate effectively, it’s important to understand your audience and what its requirements are. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• How do they promote?
• Who are their customers?
• What regions are they promoting in?
• What offers are most successful for them?
• Are you offering them enough to sell?
• Is your commission fair?
• Do they have different peak seasons than your business?

3. Communication Strategy for Enhancing Relationships

Now let’s take a look at how affiliates prefer to be communicated with. Looking at the AffStat report 2016 , you can see that 84 percent prefer email communication.

Using this information as a guide, you can base your strategy around email communication, and below are a series of ways to do that:

Welcome Email

A welcome email is what affiliates receive once they’ve been accepted into a program. This is their first touch point with your brand, and you want to ensure they have a positive experience, with useful information to get started.

Examples include commission offerings, regional focus, discounts, contact person, links to get started, and custom creatives.

Newsletters

Newsletters are an effective way to share industry trends, events you’re attending and updates to your brand

Activation email campaigns

When affiliates have signed up with your network or program, and they have not yet started promoting your services, it’s important to revisit these affiliates. The question is why have they not started promoting? Have you provided enough information for them to start selling? Affiliate recruitment and activation belong together, and though it’s a challenging task to recruit affiliates, it’s even trickier to get them to promote your product or services.

Congratulate

This goes back to setting yourself apart from your competition. Focus not only on your top earners, but look at new-comers and emerging affiliates – those who are increasing in revenue over a three- or six-month time frame. Congratulating your emerging affiliates will go a long way in that it shows interest and appreciation for their efforts.

4. Affiliate Manager Best Practices

As we discussed earlier, based on the AffStat benchmark report, 80 percent of affiliates join or terminate a program because of their affiliate manager. This shows the importance and influence an affiliate manger has for the success of your business. Here are some best practices to follow.

Affiliate Marketing Managers Must:

• Engage their entire database
• Follow affiliates on social sites
• Make regular visits and host networking events
• Attend industry conferences
• Repond frequently
• Share insight on your plans
• Work together as a team

Affiliate Marketing Managers Should Not:

• Pretend to know more than they do
• “Manage” affiliates
• Find ways to cut commissions
• Ignore affiliate requests
• Allow affiliates to speak first
• Set rules and never break them

5. How to Put This Into Practice

In order for your program to become successful, you need to communicate, diversify and differentiate yourself with affiliates. Deliver a service, not just a tracking platform. So ensure that you are following the basic best practices, always respond, listen to what they have to say, and allow yourself room for exceptions when it comes to program terms. Following these steps will move you into the right direction toward a successful affiliate program.

Amy Carabini is a Senior Affiliate Marketing Manager. To learn more about Affiliate Marketing Services, contact am@cleverbridge.com.

The post 5 Ways to Build Publisher Relationships for Success appeared first on cleverbridge.

Email design trends change constantly, so keeping up can be difficult. But as email marketing continues to shift from sending out large lists for the masses to customer lifecycle campaigns, it’s important to take another look at your content.

Let’s start with the basics.

Email Design Basics

• Keep the width to 800 pixels maximum.
• Assume that images aren’t going to display, so add in background colors and alt text to ensure you still get your message across.
• Code mobile responsive emails. Today almost 60 percent of emails are opened and read on a mobile device; responsive HTML is now the new standard.
• Be sure to code each email with different ISPs in mind and test your emails in Gmail, Outlook, AOL and more. Email rendering, or how separate email clients read and display your HTML, is an important aspect of email design.

Take a few minutes and mull over your current email templates. Do you have each one of the basics covered? If so, good for you! Now it’s important to distinguish what kind of emails you’re sending: transactional or marketing emails.

Transactional emails vs. marketing emails

There are two types of emails a subscriber can receive: transactional and marketing. Transactional emails are individualized emails triggered from a customer’s action — usually an order confirmation or a subscription renewal reminder. These emails are simple and direct, and are typically light on images, colors, and content. The message of these emails should be clear: here’s information on your recent transaction. Whereas marketing emails, or commercial emails, can be image heavy, full of color, and content. They should also have an attractive call to action.

Taking Email Design to the Next Level

Another challenge in email marketing is getting your audience to engage with the content of your emails. It’s important to strike a balance with your design so that your content and images are engaging but not so outlandish that ISPs flag content as spam.

Glyphs

Glyphs are small characters that look like images that can be added to subject lines and preheaders. These small emoticons can be used to brighten up an inbox in a sea of promotional emails.

Subscribers respond to visual content, so using glyphs tastefull can be an excellent way to distinguish your communications. But you should use them only sporadically; if overused, they’ll become commonplace to your subscribers and may even seem spammy to email clients.

GIFs

GIFs are image formats that merge several images together to appear as a moving image. They can increase the value of a static image, even if it’s a small arrow pointing to a limited time offer.

This small bit of animation can be a breath of fresh air for your readers. Be careful with rendering, since not all ISPs – Outlook in particular – render GIFs and will display a static image instead.

Don’t rely on images exclusively

Don’t assume that your images are going to display by every ISP. As a backup, use background colors to add design elements without relying on images. Rather than using an image for your call to action, hard code a button in your email that will always render. Use HTML to add in elements such as a hover or highlight over the text of your button to add emphasis to your call to action.

Test, test and test again

The most important thing for email design is to test with your audience. While from an industry-wide perspective glyphs or GIFs may have higher subscriber engagement, they may not work for your subscriber list. Run A/B tests and closely follow your subscribers’ interactions with your emails.

Designing Marketing Emails for an International Audience

United States

Email marketing trends have been leaning toward cleaner, simpler design. Emails with too many click opportunities, or calls to action, present too many options for subscribers and result in less subscriber engagement. Rather than clicking, U.S. readers will simply not engage with a cluttered message. Emails with one main call to action and smaller calls to action near the footer have higher engagement with Americans.

Japan

Japanese email design is vastly different from the design of U.S. emails. To a U.S. reader, Japanese emails can seem cluttered, as if they include as many graphics as possible. Japanese readers expect images with bright colors, often with bright text layered over collaged images. You’ll often see that emails are packed with information — the more the better. With North American audiences, we’re used to leaving a bit of mystery in the content to prompt the subscriber to click through, whereas Japanese email tends to take the opposite approach.

Europe

Email design for European countries has similar aesthetics to the United States. However, European subscribers are accustomed to a more formal tone to the copy in their emails than U.S. subscribers might be. For example, a banner that says “Get Jammin’ Today” may not fare as well in EMEA as it would in the United States. European customers would be more comfortable with a traditional “Buy Now” call to action.

It’s important to test new content with your subscribers, always ensuring that they are engaging with it in a positive way.

Keystone

Email marketing is one of the best ways to build long term customer relationships and grow recurring revenue. Make sure you are creating effective emails by understanding design best practices for different marketing and billing events, and different types of customers.

Ben Meyer is a Marketing Services Manager at cleverbridge.

Explore our managed email marketing services.

The post 12 Quick Tips for Designing Effective Marketing Emails appeared first on cleverbridge.

Having a markdown promotion on the actual days of Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S.) and Cyber Monday (the following Monday) is just table stakes if you are looking to capitalize on this ecommerce free-for-all. To hit your revenue goals, you have to get creative to stand out from the deluge of other advertisers.

Here are three ways to get noticed and get customers this November.

Don’t cross the streams, but do cross the channels

Chances are that you have spent a fair amount of time with the rest of your team planning the details of your Q4 promos. Some coupons get sent in emails, some creative gets shared on Facebook, and every channel is getting its own flavor of Cyber Week. The omnichannel approach is having its heyday, but don’t be tempted to create complicated “if this, then that” web of exclusions across your digital efforts. Egon Spengler was wary of crossing streams. You, on the other hand, should not be.

Some advertisers are tempted to use coupons and promotions as a way to differentiate which buyer came from which channel. So they offer better deals to customers in email than on display. Even more confusingly, they want all other coupons suppressed in the affiliate channel.

Suppressing certain deals from affiliates is counterproductive. As we have said before, customers will find ways to purchase with links intended for another channel. Blocking affiliates from your promotions won’t lead to efficient tracking. It only means your channel silo house of cards comes tumbling down.

Instead of using coupons and promotions as a way to differentiate your buyer funnels, create a unified message about your promotion, and communicate that out through your different channels. Of course, add different flavors of length and imagery, but don’t sweat the details on which coupon goes where and which demographic gets the discount and which does not. It all flattens out on Cyber Week. Everyone will web search for the best deal, and if the best deal is not present in that moment, all your efforts go to waste.

Pick an earlier date

Yes, this piece mentions Cyber Week in the title, but that does not mean you need to stick to the days that typically constitute the week. Picking an earlier day in November will give you a jump on the attention-grabbing spree on the days adjacent to U.S. Thanksgiving.

Going up against fewer advertisers also drives down the cost of media placements, stretching your budget to cover more prominent slots or more slots total. Last year, many companies launched preview deals the the Friday before Black Friday. In 2015, many great deals could be found on the previous Tuesday.

We recommend no more than a three-day run of your promotion. You might be tempted to start the markdown at the beginning of the month and run it all the way through the end of Cyber Week. If you go that route and publicize the length, there will be much less urgency among potential buyers.

Instead, create urgency twice in the month instead of just once. Pick your earlier date, run the promotion for a few days, and publicize your “days left” of the offer. You will convert bargain shoppers who will be surprised by the early offer. Then you can focus on converting customers who skipped your first offer, expecting a better one at the end of the month. You cannot lose.

Keep it simple

We cannot drive home this point enough: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the busiest ecommerce days of the year. Every merchant is vying for attention, and attention is in limited supply that week. Consumers do not have time to figure out the terms of your offer.

• Which product category does this coupon cover?
• What’s my free shipping threshold?
• How much do I have to spend to get the best discount?

These are all questions you do not want potential buyers dwelling on. Don’t make customers try to figure out if their coupon works for one type of product but not another one. Don’t have them going back and forth on your product pages, adding items to the cart to see if they can receive free shipping.

Keep it simple. Make your discount site-wide, make it count on every item, and don’t bog down your promotional copy with stipulations. “Get 30% off all products” is the perfect copy. This lets your shoppers get in and get out.

If you cannot markdown every product because of product margins, than get cozy with the phrase “up to.” If you are marking down product A by 30%, product B by 40%, and product C by 15%, then communicate that your promotion is “up to 40% off” instead of specifying each offer in your copy. You are not misleading your customers; rather you are avoiding information overload and discount confusion.

Keystone

Q4 is the time to reach your revenue goals by converting new customers and upselling existing ones. You don’t have to plan your promotional calendar completely around Black Friday and Cyber Monday though. However, you do have to keep channel partners informed and communicate your plans to them.

Nick Oswald is an Affiliate Marketing Manager at cleverbridge.

Wondering how you can generate more revenue through affiliate marketing? Reach out to us today!

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