Archive for ‘Marketing’

I was tossing around concepts for an article, when I decided to settle on the issue of hyperbolic discounting. True to my collaborative self, I shared the title with an industry professional, and here’s what he emailed back: WTF is HyerpWTF&$*R.. Love…

How well do you know your customers and their needs? And, how well do you meet those needs? Do you just create a product and send it out? Or, do you take the trouble to analyze who your customers are, what they…

Reporting is part of every marketer’s job and—according to the experts—is an integral step in creating and maintaining a culture of growth. Yet most marketers don’t have a formal process or spend any significant amount of time compiling and sharing results…

Facebook’s VP of Growth Alex Schultz is the VP of Growth at Facebook. Before joining the mothership, he was a marketing manager at eBay. He has no educational background in marketing, instead opting to get his masters in physics at…

We are living in the era of personalization. We have an abundance of data at our fingertips, but we don’t always make the most of the opportunity it provides. Many businesses have been incredibly slow to take up personalization. In fact it…

Recurring billing is one of the hottest strategies in digital marketing, especially for SaaS providers. Right now, the trend is spreading faster than a Katy Perry song. Recurring billing — or we can call it the “subscription business model” — is the…

Brennan Dunn is a hacker and entrepreneur running Planscope.io. He recently gave a presentation at the 2014 Microconf discussing the 6 tactics he used to triple Planscope’s growth rate. This blog post provides a summary of each tactic. A…

It’s never fun to lose customers. To lose customers is to lose money. In SaaS, we call it churn rate. Churn rate is defined as “the percentage of subscribers to a service that discontinue their subscription to that service in a…

Harness the power of audio, and dive into a large and deep market by starting your very own podcast. Yes, that’s right… A podcast. Despite being “Oh, so 2005,” according to Time, it’s one of the best avenues for growing…

The marketing process I will share with you today built back-to-back 7-figure companies (a software company in 20 months and an ecommerce company in 12 months). The software company, Bloomfire, was acquired for 7 figures at month 20 and is continuing to…

When Seth Godin talks, marketers listen. And luckily for marketers, Godin has a lot to say. He’s wrote 18 books and runs a well-respected marketing blog, posting his musings about everyday. He’s probably given close to 1,000 talks, one of…

Customer relationship management (CRM) doesn’t have to be complicated. If you’re using a cloud-based tool like Salesforce, you may be wondering how to gauge the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. As a marketer, we’re always asking ourselves, “how can I…

It’s the little things that matter in the end, especially in a field like customer service. You might be spending a lot of time and effort making sure every experience you deliver to customers is mind-blowing (including how good your processes…

When we’re bidding adieu to an old year and hello to a new, we like to read (and write) about predictions for the New Year. I’m not immune to the New Year excitement bug, even though I tend to work on…

SaaS marketers have a tough job. Marketing is hard. But what about marketing something that has no physical presence? Or marketing something that is constantly changing? Or marketing something that has some goofy name? Or marketing something that only about 20 B2B…

List building is one of those things that marketers are always looking for ways to do better and faster. Even with the rise of social media and content marketing, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective digital marketing…

Want to build an online community? When you understand the power of the online community, you’re bound to answer in the affirmative. Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks, will tell you the online community is the most powerful way to connect…

Pricing pages have a huge impact on online sales. Designing the right pricing page is key to increasing checkouts and revenue, but there’s a lot more to a pricing page than its design. Since emotions and psychological triggers influence purchasing behavior, and…

Today we have a fun little quiz that determines what kind of tech entrepreneur you are. Take the quiz below and when you’re finished, share your results with your followers! We’d like to thank

Once you’re an established SaaS, you’ve overcome the beginner stage issues. You’ve got users, you’ve got some word of mouth going, and things seem pretty good. But if your business team gets too complacent, you can easily stall out and flounder. Mistakes…

How many times have you seen customer support “tips” that are vague and totally useless for your business? “Be human.” “Have a voice.” “Be thorough.” All perfectly reasonable advice, but what are you supposed to do with it? Instead of ambiguous catchphrases, let’s talk about real,…

I rave about email marketing all the time. But I need to shoot straight with you about email marketing lest you think it’s some holy grail of marketing. Your emails are useless unless they actually make it to the user’s inbox. Let…

You probably have at least a rough outline of your marketing plan for 2015; maybe you even have it all laid out. But sometimes when you’re planning for the coming year it’s easy to focus on scaling what worked well during the…

As a great appreciator of finely crafted email newsletters, it hurts that I have to caution so strongly against their use. But the (very few) marketers who actually are sending high-end newsletters know more than anyone that newsletters, as a general…

If you could split marketing into two philosophies, one would entail the art of marketing while the other would entail the science of marketing. The art of marketing is all the right-brained creativity that goes into a marketing program. These marketers…

“You’re gonna get a tetanus infection.” “And, then, you’re gonna die.” Howard Leventhal invited students to participate in what they thought was an evaluation of public health brochures. He divided them into two groups and then showed each group a tetanus brochure. The…

Content marketing requires a unique type of investment. With most outbound marketing, the investment is cost related. But with inbound marketing, while there are costs, the biggest investment is time. Content marketing is a process and typically requires a good amount…

You can define conversion any way you choose. Marketers, especially those with longer sales cycles, often elect to call an email opt-in a conversion. It’s not wrong to do so; but let’s face it, most of your email subscribers don’t give you…

No matter what vertical or category your business falls into, referral programs have been proven to work for all types and size companies. But knowing how to do referral programs well is another story. In this webinar, Friendbuy…

App marketing is serious business. With the number of app downloads now at record setting highs, there’s a lot at stake for marketers competing on the app store. To win in this environment, we need to set goals, measure as much…

We constantly talk about testing email headlines, email layouts, emails for mobile, and email timing. But, what about looking at what we’re actually sending our subscribers? Would you read your own emails? Here are 8 ways to energize your subscribers: 1. Do not talk…

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford Henry Ford famously said that he invented the Ford T without asking for any feedback from his potential customers. According to him, people were not…

Your users are unique, so your mobile marketing should be, too. Indeed, since mobile consumers expect a curated and individualized experience, your mobile marketing should be perfectly personalized in order to truly engage them. You can do this with information provided by…

What if I told you there was one message you could send right now that your users were almost guaranteed to read? What if I also told you this message could help you retain users? You’d say spill it already. Fine. The good…

You’re short on time, but not on projects, right? Email segmentation can seem like just another task on a long list of low-priority items. Maybe you’re segmenting your email list, and maybe you have no idea what that means. Perhaps you’re under…

Hang on to your brain. I’m going to throw some numbers at you. Apps are a big business. Really big. App sales are a $25 billion industry, as reported by WSJ. This doesn’t account for the broader revenue generated by other…

All great marketing starts with a deep understanding of your customer. If you don’t have that, it’s nearly impossible to create campaigns that will resonate with your target market. This might seem obvious, but it’s easy to get lost in the…

Seth Godin believes that “marketing is a contest for people’s attention.” Unfortunately, it is a contest that most email marketers are not winning. While many email marketers set up permission-based email lists, an average of 60% of the lists are…

We all know that the golden rule to content marketing is “provide value.” Many people don’t realize this is just the first part of a two-part rule. The second part is “deliver your content to the people who will find…

Photo by Stacy, Flickr Creative Commons “Eat your beets.” That’d be mom talking to her son Zack. Zack doesn’t like what he sees. These round globs are red. Dark red. They appear to be bleeding. His mother says, “You’ll love them. Trust…

An effective user acquisition strategy is the holy grail for many marketers, whether it be a mix of channels that generate a constant flow of new users at a sustainable cost or a clever tactic that gives a new…

You know engaging content is important. But no matter how often you update your website or post new blogs, nothing seems to increase traffic to your site. Since everything from word choice to formatting and structure has an impact on whether or…

According to the Federation of Small Businesses, SMEs (small and medium enterprises) have embraced mobile/social advertising. However, only a small percentage of them view mobile apps as a significant opportunity to break out from the clutter. One of the most cited reasons…

“The crowd sometimes plays a tremendous role to give you wings and carry you to victory.” – Bela Karolyi With those words, famed Romanian and U.S. gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi showed that he understood the power his “customers” had to take his…

How well do you know your customer? Do you know where they spend their time online, their average annual income or revenue and their biggest problems relevant to your solution? How about how they take their coffee? (Ok, maybe that last one…

Freebie seekers. The very words send a shudder through both product and service-based businesses alike. The worry is that these potential customers will cause a drain on the system – taking, taking, taking without buying. However, with the right approach, this…

In the marketing world, we put the bulk of attention on getting new customers. Of course, that is important to keeping your business running. However, keeping your customers coming back deserves as much, if not more, attention, especially in a SaaS…

One of the things I struggled with the most when I was a Marketing Manager at a SaaS company was learning how to set goals for our department. It sounds like a simple-enough task, but over time I came to see…

There’s no doubt that videos engage viewers at a much deeper level than plain text, but how can you be sure that you’re optimizing ROI for your site’s videos? In this webinar, Ezra Fishman (Director of Marketing at Wistia) and Kristen…

In organizations, processes are setup to produce consistent, repeated, and predictable results with minimal friction. These processes are refined overtime (if needed) in order to make the organization as a whole better and more efficient. It should be no different in…