It's funny – usually the "hottest trend" is something new. Medieval recipes are not all over our menus and jazz is not dominating the charts.

But occasionally something old finds new life and takes off.

And if you're smart, you pay attention when it does.

Any good idea has to cling to life, not quite living its potential, not quite dying off, until the stars are right. You then realized it was an idea before its time – which, often, are the most powerful ideas.

In marketing, the hottest trend is not social media. In fact, it's been a bad 12 months or so for it.

Privacy scandals are still fresh in people's minds.

Our feeds are more noise than signal, despicable dubious algorithms controlling what we see.

All the big data-sucking, privacy-destroying players face fresh regulation across the world.

I'm not saying social media is dead. You can advertise through it and do very well for your business. But it's time for a new idea in marketing … and, in this case, it's an old idea whose time has come.

This idea flips digital advertising on its head – which is exactly what it needs.

Instead of shoving obnoxious ads in your clients' faces, you have them come to you.

Instead of harassing them into impulse buying, you reward their attention and build the relationship.

Money (and more importantly, control) does not flow towards Facebook, Twitter or whoever. No algorithm is going to choose to bury your material at the bottom of the heap.

And instead of treating your clients like a commodity, it treats them as part of your family.

No wonder content marketing is already the hottest trend in 2019.

The great thing about it is you can use it on social media. The two are not mutually exclusive – in fact, they can work well together. The magic with content marketing is, instead of relying on someone else's platform, you steadily build your own.

If, one day, Facebook bans you or penalises your content?

No problem.

If you want to bypass social media entirely?

That's A-OK too.

For a while, digital marketing seemed to be held host by these big platforms. Now, people realize they always had a choice.

If you want to be free to advertise your way and enrich your clients in the process, then this is how you do it.

And if content marketing is not something you're fully embracing, just know this: your brand will start to lag behind those who do.

Direct Marketing produced $ 2.05 trillion in sales in 2012. That represents about 8.7% of US GDP in 2013. This represents several key points.

First, competition in direct marketing is stiff. With all those advertising dollars being spent on direct marketing, you need to ensure your message is getting through and being heard. Second, with stiff competition, you need to craft compelling messages, not once, but repeatedly. You need to do this effectively and efficiently, if you want to do more than just tread water.

Thus, it's important to develop a marketing strategy that optimizes your budget spend by employing direct marketing more effectively. Here are 5 essential components of successful direct marketing.

1) Deliver a Compelling Sales Message

Several elements go into creating a compelling sales message. Successful sales letters and other marketing content must be relevant, useful, and persuasive. Marketing content that works grabs your prospect's attention, shows uniqueness, and builds trust with your prospect. Employ these three elements in all your direct marketing content.

· WIIFM – Tell your prospect exactly what's in it for him or her.

· Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Clearly describe why your solution is the superior one.

· Testimonials – Let your satisfied customers "sell" for you.

2) Follow-up Leads Promptly to Attract and Engage Your Prospect's Attention

You may have a lead-generating sales letter, but if you do not follow-up, valuable leads will slip through the cracks. Follow-up a live event with a phone call, an email, or a letter that invites the prospect to take the next step.

Offer a free demonstration of your product or service. Set up an appointment with a subject matter expert who can go into greater detail on how your company's solution works, and why it's better than the competition's. Then, before the scheduled demonstration, send a white paper that explains your product in detail.

Follow-up, engage and spark your prospect's interest in your solution.

3) Promote Your Brand

Benefits from branding give companies and edge over competitors that do not brand. Branding helps position your product or service favorably. It also gives you pricing and distribution power. The takeaway is: never miss an opportunity to brand.

Direct marketing affords you many online and off-line media to build brand awareness. Online media: (1) Banner advertising; (2) Blogs; (3) Email; and (4) Website. Off-line media: (1) Print advertising – sales letters, postcards, brochures; (2) Press Releases; and (3) Public Relations.

4) Nurture the New Customer Relationship

Lead nurturing is just as important as lead acquisition. Most companies want to develop long-term relationships with customers. That's because they become repeat customers. And, over time, repeat customers generate more sales and profits to your bottom line.

Outbound marketing provides many ways to build and maintain a driving lead nurturing program. You can employ email, direct mail, social media, mobile, podcasts, seminars, phone calls, and videos.

5) Integrate and Synchronize Online and Off-line Direct Marketing

To optimize your message and direct marketing budget, success lies in finding the right mix of online and off-line methods. One method is not necessarily better than another. Instead, the secret sauce to successful direct marketing depends on how you deliver these various methods together.

You can integrate and synchronize these methods along the sales cycle beginning with message delivery. Start with a sales letter, follow-up with a phone call or email. Refer your prospect to your website for deeper marketing content, and do not forget to brand through this process.

Achieving the right marketing mix produces a "multiplier effect" that helps you close sales faster and easier. Employing different media in a consistent and coherent manner working towards the same goal optimizes your marketing efforts.

Do not Overlook the Value of Direct Marketing

With so much attention focused on inbound marketing laTely, it's easy to overlook direct marketing's benefits. However, as you can see, it still commands the lion's share of sales. Therefore, it's prudent to examine your marketing strategy's focus and align your budget accordingly.

Before you undertake a direct marketing campaign, employ these five essential components to compete effectively and efficiently for that $ 2.05 trillion market.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to establish a good income with little or no overhead at all. Just a whole lot of honest hard work, dedication and of course, good information. This article is designed to provide you with some excellent advice on the business of affiliate marketing and help you find your way in and around it to a nice, consistent profit!

Trying to market popular products online will not produce good results in your affiliate status. You want to have a good quality product but it does not have to be uber popular. Choosing very popular products means you will be in fierce competition ahead. You may be unable to make a profit.

When selecting an affiliate marketing program, check out their resources in terms of sale-boosting items for you. A good affiliate program will offer you banner images, content for text ads, and letter templates, in order to help you boost sales. A sale for you is a sale for them, and you want to work for a company that understands your value as an affiliate.

Try looking into secret links. There are plenty of including affiliate links into your text without them being completely obvious. Be transparent about them if you use links and take advantage of their use. Make sure your readers understand the reason for the link so there are no surprises.

If someone visits a site about sports, they expect to see sports-themed news, ads, and merchandise. Only a sports-related link would benefit your affiliate site. If the site has relevant links, people will be more likely to access them.

It is better to affiliate partners that put out products if possible. You are more affiliate revenue by working with businesses that have a greater variety of products which are interesting to your consumers. Avoid one-trick pony and fads.

Anything you write during a marketing campaign or for your business, in general, should be written in plain, easy-to-understand language. Do not open the thesaurus and look for rarely-used words that make you seem a bit too snobbish. This is your Internet business, not a Newspaper. Readers want it simple.

It is advisable for associate partners to use text services in order to gain greater responsibilities.

A great affiliate marketing tip is to provide your real name and a working email address to your visitors and customers. Providing your name and email address will make you look reliable, and you want to look as reliable as possible in order to gain the trust of your visitors.

If your site has a sports-related theme, your viewers are there for sports. Only a sports-related link would benefit your affiliate sites that are related to the products you market. Your visitors will follow a link that is relevant to the information on your site.

Remember to always provide great, timely, valuable content that really gives your readers helpful and useful information. When you do this, your readers will have more faith in you and will be much more likely to want to do business with you. A great deal of affiliate marketing depends upon building a good relationship with your clients and providing yourself trustworthy and knowledgeable.

Consider using paid advertising to get a jump start on your affiliate marketing program. Ads that are targeted towards keywords related to your site.

One good way to evaluate a potential affiliate marketing partner is to examine the material they give to potential customers, such as their sales letter. You can learn a lot about an affiliate by seeing how they treat their customers. Think of yourself as a customer and ask yourself if the affiliate is someone you would buy from.

It is so important that your readers trust you and your content. Readers support authors who provide them with quality contact by purchasing through your links.

You do not want to spend much time working on a company's affiliate program only to never get paid or to discover that they mistreat referrals. Check the company's reputation by visiting the appropriate blogs and user forums. Test communications through email and telephone. Do they promptly answer emails? Are they rude? Are phone calls put on eternal hold? They way they treat you is how they will likely treat the customers you refer to them.

Create a hard deadline for consumers to buy certain affiliate products. When visitors feel time pressure, they are more likely to jump on the deal. This approach is likely to render a good strategy that may help improve your sales.

A great affiliate marketing tip is to disguise your affiliate link. Sometimes marketers will try to scam you by simply changing your link around so that they'll receive your commission. You can avoid this by disguising your link. An easy way to disguise your link is by making it redirect to a domain or page.

You need to be quite aware of who is visiting your target audience is in affiliate marketing. You need to work to meet the needs of your message to resonate with your readers. Try to figure out what makes them visit your website and then expand on that knowledge. What specific things are they interested in?

Do not make the mistake of focusing on just one sales technique. You may have the best blog in the world, but you are still losing out on customers who need a little more push or do not like reading a blog. Advertise on other sites. Send out emails with value-added sales techniques to take people from prospects to customers.

You should reveal your affiliate position to your readers. Being honest like this helps readers feel that they are sure to appreciate that.

There may seem to be a million and one things to remember about affiliate marketing, so many different things to think of and take care of to cultivate your online earnings from it. Hopefully, this article has enlightened you somewhat, to the complexity and confusion and you are now ready to embark on a career change to affiliate marketing that could very well, change your life!

If you want to make your business more successful than it is now, you may want to look into personalization techniques. You will find such techniques from places like McDonald’s, Burger King, IHOP and Starbucks. Learning personality to add your business is not a bad thing because most people nowadays will not pay attention to generic brands. This doesn’t mean you have to be edgy and bold but it can mean you could be gentle and passionate through the words and placement of your content. Read on to learn more about personalization techniques and tactics for your business.

Building your network marketing business, the easy way

when you are building your network marketing business you can do it the easy way or the hard way. The hard way is figuring out who you are and why you do what you do. This can take decades or longer if you choose to focus on the cash flow instead of focusing on attraction and Authority. If you ever went to the store and bought chips or cookies or even a health food item, there’s always a catchy slogan somewhere on there. The best examples are Nikes old motto “just do it.” This is only icing on the cake though. You have to dig down and show your personality through your specific actions and words in everything you produce.

This could be called branding for your network marketing business. It is preferred to think of it as personalization. This includes color choices, graphic choices, targeting and many other factors. If you choose to leave a signature or motto that also will help brand or personify your business. You may have seen a lot of cartoons and videos online from certain businesses to help reinforce this personal branding by sharing a particular cartoon character. This will also help as well because it sticks in the in the viewers mind. And viewers will remember and relate to this character later on as they surf your website.

The do’s and don’ts of personalization for network marketing

Brought up quickly and efficiently, there are only a couple of do’s and don’ts for network marketing personalization. Don’t make it forced, be natural and allow your personality to show through. Be creative in all areas of it and work with it until you’re happy with the results from your marketing effort. Keep your text font readable and large enough for all types of audiences. Do a test run with your project before going completely with it. Run it with a small test group and get feedback and make changes from it. Don’t overly spend on advertising cost for it you will lose more than you will gain. Be original and don’t steal ideas and have fun with it.

Affiliate marketers earn money by selling products created by other companies in exchange for a commission. But things online have become much more competitive than when affiliate marketing first started out almost 20 years ago. Affiliate marketing is still a good way to make money online, but the rules have changed in recent years.

Today's successful online entrepreneurs have figured out how to make affiliate marketing work more effectively so their efforts bring the results they want. How do they do it?

Make Affiliate Marketing Work For You

The best way to make affiliate marketing work effectively is to increase the exposure of your affiliate links. These are the links that take your prospects to a sales page or website and which track sales back to you.

Your Own Website

One of the most important elements of affiliate marketing today is to have your own website or blog. This is where you produce content relevant to the products you want to sell. You can write general articles and provide links to recommended products at the end of the content. The most important things to remember are that everything you write should be the factual and the truth. This helps position you as an expert worth paying attention to.

Building an Email Marketing List

It can be challenging to build an email marketing list these days because people have such jamed inboxes. That being said, knowing your niche and your target audience are two of the best ways to come up with an incentive they will be keen to get and so will be happy to give you their contact information.

Two good incentives would be an eBook or eCourse on a hot topic related to your niche. Think of the kinds of problems people have in your niche and create an information product which offers real solutions.

Be Careful About What You Sell

Do not promote anything you would not use yourself or are not impressed by. You do not want to get the reputation of being an affiliate who will pretty much sell any old rubbish just to get a commission. Rather, you want to show you're in the know, with great deals on products that really work.

Keywords In Your Content

Keywords related to your niche will help drive free traffic via the search engines. Your keywords should be related to your topic or niche. They should be words that an ordinary person interested in your niche would search for. Keyword all media files such as images and videos as well.

One of the basics of all marketing and advertising training is a teaching of “Maslow’s needs pyramid”. This pyramid shows the different motivators and needs in a person’s life and how they are built one upon the other. Supposedly this is presented to help the marketing student understand consumer motivation and thinking. The problem is I’ve never seen it applied, in the text books. It’s presented as the foundation of human motivation and then it’s dropped.

I’d like to present to you a way to use Maslow’s needs pyramid so that you can get inside the consumer’s mind and develop an understanding of what’s truly motivating them as they consider purchasing your product or service.

Maslow’s needs pyramid present human needs such that each need is pursued and met before the next level of needs can be considered; they build upon one another. The needs from most basic to most complex are:

– physiological needs: food, shelter, sex

– safety needs: clothing, weapons, defense of self

– social needs: social acceptance

– esteem needs: acceptance of self by self

– fulfillment needs: a feeling of having and fulfilling a purpose

So the question is, “How do we use this paradigm to get inside the consumer’s head?”

Let’s consider a personal fitness training service. Here’s how it works at the most basic level. Place yourself in the position of the consumer and think as if you are considering hiring a personal fitness trainer.

1. How will personal fitness training impact my acquisition and use of food? Of shelter? Of sexual behavior? (Now you see why sex is used in marketing so many products – we react to it instinctually)

2. How will personal fitness training impact my personal safety?

– you’ll be in better shape and can run faster from a mugger, perhaps.

3. How will personal fitness training positively impact my standing in society? In my social circle? Access to different social circles?

4. How will personal fitness training positively impact how I think about myself?

5. Will personal fitness training have an impact on my personal sense of fulfillment?

I understand that most consumers, will ask themselves these types of questions without really thinking about them. The answers you develop as you purposely ask yourselves these types of questions will give you insight in the processes a consumer may consider or be susceptible to as they are considering purchasing personal fitness training services.

This process will also help you define ways to market that will get consumers to consider your personal fitness training service if they are not. Using Maslow’s needs pyramid helps you target your marketing. It is the foundation of:

Getting Attention

Developing Interest

Creating Desire

Facilitating Commitment

Motivating to Action

If you can use Maslow’s needs pyramid to get inside the head of the consumer by running it through a filter of questions like the one’s I’ve presented above you’ll have a tangible marketing advantage because you now can respond to your consumer’s internal dialogue.

Using this type of filtering process can also help you create need in those that have not yet developed an interest in your product or service. Simply put yourself in the consumer’s place and present you’re marketing to them in such a way as to answer or resolve each need in the hierarchy.

Maslow’s needs pyramid is a powerful tool that is taught to every marketing and advertising student in the world but it must be understood and applied if it’s to actually be useful. Try using Maslow’s marketing filter the next time you are considering a marketing campaign. It’ll help you get a better grip on what the consumer is thinking and feeling.

Are you looking for some effective online marketing tips to make your business more profitable? If so, you are reading the right article. First, keep in mind that online marketing is a lot easier than conventional marketing. In this article, we have some easy web marketing tips for you. Read on.

1. Know your Target Customers

Knowing your target customers or clients and having a list of ways of targeting them are the two most important things. What you need to do is do deep research to find out about your target market. Alternately, you can hire someone else to do the same for you.

Here is what you need to find out. The demographics, buying habits and the likes and dislikes of your customers. Once you have found these details, your next move is to find a way to target them.

2. Optimize your website for SEO

Today, most business people know that their website should be optimized for search engines, which is important for better search engine ranking. If you are new to SEO, you can easily learn the basics.

Basically, if you want to optimize your site for search engines, what you need to do is have the right tags, titles, keywords, meta descriptions, alt texts, and quality content. There are software tools that can help you with this.

3. Run Google AdWords (PPC) Campaigns

Google AdWords is another way of getting visitors for your site. This is a form of online advertising that you can run by paying Google. Google will show your ads on relevant places on the Internet. Google AdWords is a faster way of getting a better search ranking.

For some relevant search terms, your website URL will appear on top of the page. So, chances are that visitors will click on your link instead of other links below.

4. Advertisement Congruence

If you run ad campaigns for your website, ad congruence is an important thing. Ad congruence is a situation when your business advertisement and the home page of your website look similar. In other words, both will have the same message.

If your landing page content is entirely different from the advertisement, your visitors will get confused and may click away. So, make sure you consider this point.

5. Write Quality Blog Posts on a Regular Basis

With a blog, you can improve your SEO drastically. Each blog post should be longer than 500 words and should include relevant keywords, which is important to trigger a positive response from major search engines. Moreover, high-quality content can help your customers as well.

6. Get Backlinks From Authority Sites

As far as SEO goes, backlinks play a great role. If you do not know, backlinks are the links to your site on another website. If you have a lot of backlinks, Google thinks your content is valuable and it gives your site a rank boost.

The Takeaway

Online marketing has given a new approach to businesses so that they can make more money. With these tips, you can increase conversion rates and make your customers keep coming back for more. Hope these tips will help you as well.

If you are a small business owner, you know how hard it’s to manage all aspects of your business. Marketing is the backbone of any business as far as growth is concerned. Unlike large companies, small startups have to work with smaller budgets. As a result, the owners have to try their best to get the maximum return on their marketing investment. In this guide, we are going to give you a few secret tips that may help you get the highest ROI.

1) Make sure you have Realistic Goals

Having solid goals is the first thing you need to do. This is important if you want your marketing plan to be effective. You can have different goals and ways to achieve them. For example, you can find a way to spur on your customers or clients to sign up for your weekly or monthly newsletter.

In the same way, for better revenue growth, make sure you have an eye-catching call-to-action in your newsletters. This will increase the click-through rate.

2) Choose a Suitable Channel

Not every marketing channel can work for you. So, you need to choose a channel based on real data. This channel can be a platform that can help you exchange information with your customers, such as social media.

Of course, you may have to spend the time to get familiar with these channels. As soon as you have learned to use them, you are good to go.

3) Run Optimized Marketing Campaigns

This is one of the best cross-platform technique. With this approach in place, you can make your message more effective whether you are using ads on newspapers, TV or the Internet.

It’s good to have an integrated marketing campaign as it may have a positive impact on the visibility and efficacy of your message. In fact, experts say that 70% customers lean toward the integrated marketing method. So, an optimized campaign can give better results.

4) Write Content

Marketing can be done in more ways than one, and content marketing is on top of the list. Writing content for your blog or website can help you get a number of benefits down the road. The fact of the matter is that content is king as far as getting your site listed on the first page of Google is concerned. Once your site is listed on top of the search results page, your ROI will go up.

5) Use task Automation Platforms

With the help of digital marketing, you can reap many benefits. Digital marketing has a lot of tools and platforms that allow you to do the automation of your marketing tasks. Some of the platforms are MailChimp, Facebook, and WordPress. The automation of tasks can save you a lot of time and investment dollars. At the same time, it will boost your marketing ROI.

Conclusion

If implemented the right way, these secret techniques can help you increase your marketing ROI significantly. So, make sure you give them a go if you are a serious small business owner. Hope this helps.

If you’re new to marketing automation, you might want to think about how you and your team will want to adopt those automated processes in the right way. Considering how the marketing automation industry is growing with increased adoption rates, it’s important to ensure automation is done efficiently. For starters, let’s consider a few statistics:

a. About 49% of businesses use some form of email automation. (Email monday, 2018)

b. In the next two years, an additional 21% of marketing leaders plan to use a marketing automation platform. (Salesforce, 2017)

c. Spending for marketing automation tools is expected to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. (Martech Today, 2018)

d. 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years. (Venture Harbour, 2017)

e. 80% of marketers using automation software generate more leads. (LinkedIn, 2016)

Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics

Clearly, many industries are adopting marketing automation software and technology tools;these are few really important things that you need to keep in mind while making your choices:

1. Don’t automate bad processes and beware of outsourced lists

Map your marketing processes that drive traffic and leads thoroughly. Flow of leads through the funnel, including allocation and their sources are key. Hence, map those properties accurately. Make sure that the members of your team who run these processes are on-board with any changes that such automation will bring to their day-to-day work. Appointing a change manager (champion) who is a marketing process specialist will save you time and money. Identify and eliminate poor processes – fix the process before you can automate it.

2. Beware of outsourced lists and automate lead qualification to stay compliant

Avoid buying email lists and sending them automated email campaigns. These will fail and become costly to resolve. Especially now, with GDPR, this can get your business into a whole lot of trouble. Automation tools can be a life-saver with their inbuilt measures to ensure that some of your processes are compliant with the new laws. That said, the software is an only enabler and you must do the work to stay compliant. To further help the process, focus on creating exciting content that will motivate people to sign up for your content offerings (say, eBooks and animated GIFs) and build + grow your own opt-in database that can deliver better lead conversion.

Email databases will expire as the years roll by so it’s important to keep generating new leads at a higher rate than the expiry rate; which is about 25% per year. To generate new leads, you need to consistently create better content, design interesting calls-to-actions &landing pages, write engaging blogs and optimise your website for the search engines. Automation is great for nurturing leads, but you need to generate those leads first for the next step to happen.

3. Don’t let fancy features fool you

When deploying a marketing automation for your needs, don’t let fancy features fool you. Each software will have different learning curve, and maybe using a software with an easier UI might speed up processes. But, if it doesn’t solve your marketing process related (specific) problems, then it might not be the software for you.

Marketing automation has become a vital tool for businesses of every size. It can help you gain and sustain a competitive advantage. Speed up sales results. Plus, enable you to engage more contacts with personalized messages sent at the right time. So you can build good relationships.

Yet not each marketing automation system is the same. In fact, very few have all the essential tools in one package of services. If so, that can cause you to integrate system parts from third parties that can cost you time and money, especially when things go wrong down the road.

That is why it’s vital to first know what a full all-in-one marketing automation system is all about.

Marketing automation is a server-based software that integrates different technologies.

4 Automation Technologies Most Vital for Marketing Campaigns

First, it includes a CRM that allows you to collect, store and use information about your contacts. To be able to segment your contacts by custom fields and tags, behavior – such as opening emails and clicking on links, plus purchases.

Second, it includes an automated messaging system for emails, text, postcards and tasks. This allows you to send each message to contacts based on when they opted in, a date, behavior, purchase and more.

Third, it has eCommerce functionality. It integrates order pages with a form and payment gateway for one-click purchases. Plus it can allow you to integrate with a shopping cart if you prefer. Most of all, it can automate processes based on successful or failed transactions, subscriptions, trial periods, payment plans, coupons and more.

Fourth, it must have a campaign builder that enables you to take each contact on a personalized journey with measurable results. This allows you to create multiple campaigns for opt-in, sales, upsell, downsell and retention.

A marketing automation system such as one by Ontraport can provide additional features. These include marketing tracking to help you see which ads, landing pages and emails are generating the most cost-effective results. Affiliate marketing and membership site to help you boost the number of customers and sales. Landing page and form builder to enable you to design professional looking sites in minutes. And a lead router and scoring system to help you and your sales team follow up leads and convert them into customers.

Three key benefits of a marketing automation system are that you can customize it for your business. You can have multiple marketing campaigns at the same time that operate 24/7. Plus you can automate processes specific to contacts along their journey. But there are also marketing automation mistakes you can make along the way.

Marketing Automation Mistake #1: Sending eMails to Contacts Who Did NOT Opt-in

Marketing automation involves permission based emails. That means you send emails to contacts who give you permission to send them information. You can get permission when each contact opt-in to your system. However, importing a list or manually adding contacts to your marketing automation system is a violation of SPAM rules. If you do this you can compromise the delivery of emails even to those whom give you permission.

Marketing Automation Mistake #2: Not Maintaining a Database of Active Contacts

Even after you get a contact to opt-in, you must keep them active. That means, you must continually send them emails with relevant content to engage with at least once per week. Otherwise, they may forget you and not open the few emails you send. Over time, they can become less engaged, diminishing email delivery of your entire database. A re-engagement campaign is an effective method to get non-engaged contacts to interact with your emails again. You get these contacts to tell you if they’d like to remain on your list or opt-out. So you can maintain a consistent and clean contact database.

Marketing Automation Mistake #3: Focusing on the Wrong Metrics

Marketing automation allows you to measure the results of your campaigns. This includes opt-ins, sales conversion, email open and click link rates, landing page visits, sales, ROI and more.

However, focusing on the wrong metrics can cause you to misinterpret the true results. For example, you may have two campaigns where one has much higher open rates and lower click rates. Yet when you calculate click to open rates you can see an entirely different result. Before starting each campaign, it is vital to know the metric you seek to focus on to determine success.

Marketing Automation Mistake #4: Not Split Testing Campaigns

All campaigns differ by the type and number of contacts, content and more. Split testing campaigns is the key to finding what works right. But the key to split testing is to test just one variable at a time. Such as a headline, price, offer, design or target audience. The campaign that wins is the new control. Then you can test other campaigns against the control.

Marketing Automation Mistake #5: Not Having a Certified Consultant on Your Team

Marketing automation is both an art and a science. It requires a mix of technology know-how with direct response marketing expertise. Plus an objective mindset that is not biased toward the company or product. These are why it is best to have an independent consultant certified in the use of the marketing automation software on your team. To develop the strategy and build a custom automation system for your business. Plus, to train your team on using the system.