Personalization—an Overview

Marketing today has evolved into something much more than creating advertising collaterals and sending them to everyone in the company database. Marketers can no longer survive with a blindfolded approach to prospecting. In fact, leading companies are looking to create superior customer experience through personalization. In today’s internet age, prospects are more informed than ever before. They also have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting the right vendor. In order to strike a chord with the prospects in such environment, the marketing team has to focus on establishing a personal, one to one relationship with the prospect. Only building this relationship and cementing it over a period of time will enable the business to gain an edge over competition. In this scenario, Personalization becomes an indispensable tool as it helps you connect better with your audience. In this write-up, we provide you a few tips that you can put into action when looking to introduce personalization into your marketing strategy. This is because the prospect profiles have changed radically.

1. Get data—you cannot create a personalized experience for your prospects unless you understand them. And you can understand your prospects only when you have meaningful prospect data. So the first step towards personalization is to capture prospect data.

2. Rope in technology—Prospects today don’t have the time to answer too many questions. You should use technology to automatically capture prospect preferences and profile them, so that you don’t rely too much on the prospect to provide the information. There are various marketing automation platforms that track prospect behavior and provide you with detailed prospect information.

3. Be customer centric—adopt a customer-centric approach to business, which extends beyond marketing and sales. Think from the customer’s perspective as to how you can help them have a experience with your company that is truly unique and personalized.

4. Centralize data—bring all your functions on a common platform that facilitates easy data exchange. That means, sales team should know about every complaint or suggestion that the customer service team receives, and the marketing should know about every feedback the sales team gets. Easy information exchange will help you approach the customer with more relevant offerings.

5. Use next generation marketing tools—Earlier print advertising was probably the most common method to reach out to prospects. Today, a prospect is everywhere, thanks to Web 2.0. You need to be present at all these various avenues, and build a relationship with them. Be it Social Media Networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs or sites that promote data sharing like YouTube, SlideShare—you need to follow the prospect in a bid to understand their needs.

Personalization can help connect better with your prospects by creating a one-on-one relationship between you and the prospects. Individualizing prospect experience helps you build a more transparent, direct and value adding relationship with your prospects and can help drive sales and generate revenue.

Tracking your Leads

Identifying your leads and capturing information about them that will help you to qualify your leads and close sales is very important for any business. Tracking the leads that come in is as important as lead generation. But do you know nearly 80% of leads are never followed up?

Newplans.com's built in IP Tracking functionality is way beyond other analytical tools. While other systems only tell you where the lead came from, Newplans.com goes a step beyond the standard webmaster tools and provide a detailed analysis of your web traffic--including tracking the name of the company that accessed your marketing material or your personal/company website---using the advanced IP tracking system.

By providing you detailed information about the lead such as company name, exact location, and their online activity, Newplans.com helps you engage in well targeted marketing that helps you reach out to your ideal audience and market your listings better.

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com/

Give your prospects an interactive experience

Flyers, brochures, postcards, though tried and tested successful marketing tools, are not enough to have everlasting impact on your prospects. Time constraint along with the availability of multiple choices makes it difficult for buyers to make a buying decision. Effective marketing collateral are great at helping people understand and remember what you’re trying to sell them.

Newplans has integrated various interactive technologies to help you focus on the key selling points of your listing by making them more interesting to your prospects. Using Newplans.com, you can offer an interactive experience for your prospects by creating hotspots on floor plans, pictures, site plans, or stacking plans.

Using Newplans you can also link a hotspot to an image, add a note, attach a document, video or any web-link. Newplans comes with a library of icons to accurately represent content behind each hotspot. Hotspots can be created freehand or using icons.

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com/

Crack the Social Media Code

Buyers today are web smart. Their buying decision is hugely depended on the kind of research they undertake on the net. Hence, it is vital that your listings should be on the web where your prospects can find you easily.

Newplans.com offers Social Media Content Syndication at the click of a button! That means you can publish your presentations, videos, brochures, flyers, e-mail templates and other high-impact marketing materials, or their links, on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Slide Share. By publishing your marketing collateral on social media and other classified sites, you are making it available to millions of prospects on the web.

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com/

5 Ways to Strengthen Your Brand

Five easy steps are all it takes to create a stronger, positive brand image

Brand image is largely based on how customers and prospects associate with the business. Customers and prospects form a certain perception of the business based on their interaction with it. That becomes the brand image of the business. The brand image is one of the most important assets a business has. A business’s success is largely dependent on how its prospects and customers perceive it as a brand. Here are 5 steps that will propel your brand towards creating a positive image.

Know Your Customers: Understand your customers. Knowing the target audience well enables a business to have well-directed, relevant communication with them.

Consistency: Be consistent in your approach to customers. Consistency has to be on two accounts—frequency of communication and the content. This influences the customers, to associate certain words and images used consistently in company communication, with the brand.

Build Brand Presence: Today there are various tools available for customer interaction. These include e-mails, live chats, webinars, blogs, Videologs, Social media and so on. Be available to your customers across these various touch-points.

Add Value: Provide your customers with something they perceive to be of value. Some examples are free tips in your domain of expertise that would be of use to your customers, going that extra mile to simplify the buying process for the customers etc.

Innovate: Be unique in your product/service offering. Constantly innovate so that your brand is a class apart from your competitors. If you are dealing in a product that has way too much competition, innovate on other fronts. An example would be offering customer service on social media or at home customer service, that would set differentiate you from your competitors, lending a unique feel to your brand.

By following these simple steps, a business can significantly influence its customers and prospects to associate positively with its brand.

Content Syndication

Content syndication is a way of getting web contents around the internet. In simple terms, content syndication refers to distributing your content on various websites. Making content syndication a part of online marketing strategy helps in generating high traffic, brand awareness and improved SEO rankings. Content syndication helps in getting qualified traffic which in turn results in high in-bound links to other contents on your website or blogs. 

     

Successful content syndication process includes several steps like:

Content - People surfing the net are usually looking for information pertaining to their search. Hence it is vital that the content published is relevant and meaningful and non-sales like. The information reaching your audience should be educative and should help in converting prospects into loyal customers.

Networking – Reach out to your targeted audience and make it easy for them to subscribe to or share your content. Keeping them updated on new content published is also important. Join various social networking sites to reach out to a varied range of audience.

Web feed – Web feed refers to making the content available from a site to provide others with the summary of the website’s newly added content. With RSS feed there is a steady flow of syndicated content to your readers. Web feeds allow your website visitors to subscribe to and receive frequent updates on the content added by you recently.

Publish – Publish fresh content to all major article, newsletter, and social media sites. Make sure that you refrain from publishing duplicate content. Also, encourage readers to post comments on the content you publish.

With content syndication it is easier to spread word about your business and brand to many people at once. More content you generate, more the visibility enjoyed by your business which, in turn, will generate more customers

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E-mail Deliverability

Every marketer understands the importance of creating and maintaining e-mail lists to send out e-mail campaigns regularly to their prospects. However, the success of every e-mail campaign is governed by the senders’ reputation and e-mail deliverability rate. To ensure that your e-mails are successful in establishing your relationship with your recipients, you have to first make sure that your e-mail reaches its destination i.e. the recipients’ inbox.

Of the thousands or millions of e-mails sent out, it is not unusual that around 10% of the recipients don’t get your e-mail. This is where e-mail deliverability plays an important role. Though the concept of e-mail deliverability may sound simple, the process can be complex.

To ensure optimal e-mail deliverability here are some best practices that every marketer should be well aware of.

Permission – It is a good practice to get confirmation from your e-mail recipients to be included in your e-mail list. This will ensure that your e-mails are not blocked or unsubscribed by uninterested recipients.

E-mail content – Recipients look forward to significant and relevant content. The more relevant and meaningful your e-mail is, better it is received by the recipient.  Avoid using typical spam phrases and too many images to evade your e-mail from being flagged as spam.

One to one marketing – It takes more than to simply insert the recipient’s name in an e-mail body or the subject line to personalize it.  An advanced marketing automation system like MindMatrix’s AMP will enable you to personalize every graphic and text in the e-mail going out of the system. Moreover, it will also allow you to customize e-mails based on the contact’s past behavior.

Plan your campaigns – Sending too many e-mails in close intervals will result in more bounces or unsubscribed rates. But too little can also lead to no results. Hence it is important to make sure that you send out e-mails at least once every 90 days.

Option to unsubscribe – Make it easy for the recipients to opt out of the e-mail list and all future e-mails by providing an unsubscribe button in the e-mail body.

Request to white list – You can request the recipient in your e-mail to add your e-mail address to their ‘Safe Senders’ list. It is advisable to use only one e-mail address to send out the e-mails every time.

Testing – Many recipients may block images in the e-mails they receive. Hence, it is always better to test your e-mail before mass sending them to check whether your e-mail communicates the message without displaying the images.

Bounce management – Handling bounces is very vital for better e-mail deliverability.

E-mails sent to recipients may bounce back for many reasons. It could be because of wrong e-mail address or it could be due to technical glitch.

Monitoring e-mail campaigns – Every e-mail sent out needs monitoring to ensure maximum deliverability. Reports on open rates, click thru rates, bounce rates, unopened rates will help you to know how well your e-mail has performed and also help you to device a better e-mail campaign to be sent out next.