Business Science and Technology

What is content Marketing? || Definition and Overview

2022-09-17T07:06:00.003+00:00

First of all, what is content?

Content is any idea, information or experience that you produce and publish for the purpose offering it to your audience online. The format of the content is most commonly text, but it can also be visual, audio, or video.

In the realm of the digital world, content should be:

• Useful

• Easy to consume

• Shareable

• Original

• Relevant

• Compelling

• Timely

• Personalized

• Authentic

• Engaging

• Educational

• Entertaining

• Insightful

• Conveying a story

• Contextual

Content has to be well planned and carefully designed as it is created with a specific purpose in mind.

Content creation involves creativity and skillfulness that help in transferring of your thoughts and opinions. For this, using content in content marketing must be done with specific goals, and thus it is something you should think through.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creation and distribution of online materials and services that directly or indirectly promote a brand or a company. A direct promotion refers to the creation of promotional materials and the content used for advertising purposes. On the other view, content marketing is frequently void of any direct promotion. The goal of this kind of content is simply to increase interest in your products or services. Which means, content marketing indirectly attracts and acquires leads and customers.

In terms of SEO, content helps with keyword placement and website optimization. For email marketing and social media marketing, content is used to encourage interest through these two channels. The same can be said for paid advertising (SEM).

In content marketing, quantity does not take precedence of quality.

In terms of content marketing, quality is considered very essential. There is so much stuff online. So much, that it is impossible for people to take in all of that content without feeling overwhelmed. This is why quality started to become more and more important. People are now quite selective of what blogs they follow, which post they are going to share on social media, which links they will click on in the email. For this producing quality content is essentially going to help with achieving your business goals.

Companies that use content marketing strategy have consistently been showing better results in achieving their goals. When you implement quality standards into this strategy and make sure the content truly matches those standards, the results are going to be even better. The potential for achieving goals increases with high-quality content that is why this is an important part of a business strategy. Quality is what counts nowadays, and if you want to be successful in content marketing and see the benefits it can bring to your business, you must think about creating content that stands out for its quality.

What you need to think about when creating content?

In business, content is not created randomly. It is not about writing the content you love, personally enjoy or about a viral video everyone is talking about. It is not about writing anything that comes to your mind.

Content creation includes so much more than having an idea about a certain topic. It is a planned strategy that is supposed to bring your business certain results, which means that you should think about all the aspects that could help you create content that brings you to that goal. Starting from the target audience, to search engine optimization, here are the things you need to consider. Now let us break those things down.

1. Audience

In content creation, you have to have your audience in mind first. After all, you are creating content for the users primarily. Regardless the type of content, regardless the methods used for content distribution, the content you create has to resonate with your target group. This means that you have to think about the following aspects:

• Determine your target group

• Think about their possible questions, problems, dilemmas, etc.

• Be able to predict what kind of information can help in these situations

• Publish content that is relevant to your target group

• Use the language your target group can identify with

2. Niche

Niche in marketing refers to determining a concentrated topic that corresponds to the interests of your target group, as well as to the products you are selling if there are some. It is a subject you want to focus on with the intention to specialize in that particular subject and become a sort of an expert. By choosing your niche, you choose to focus on one narrow topic, which helps you define the road for your content marketing strategy.

3. Resources

The next step is determining the resources you have. The resources are needed for content marketing strategy, and they have to be planned and assigned to content creation like any other strategy.

4. Competitors

There is no doubt that uniqueness is an essential part of content creation, but it never hurts to check out what your competitors are going. This way you can keep up with the industry trends and standards.

5. SEO

In terms of SEO, content is essential. One of the major tasks of search engine optimization is particularly optimization of content. The main purpose of content optimization is to attract search engine crawlers and get the content indexed. This increases the visibility of the content and helps with increasing website ranking in the search engine results.

Start with content marketing?

To start with content marketing, you will need a plan. Simply starting a blog and publishing content is not enough. Instead, think of content marketing as a tool to help you achieve your goals, regardless if that is increasing sales, generating new leads, etc. These goals are important because they affect the type of content you are going to create, as well as the ways you will distribute content.

The target group

Think about your target group as listed earlier and what kind of content they would like to read. It has to be something interesting, helpful, engaging, and relatable. It has to be a content of high quality.

Gathering ideas

Start by brainstorming some ideas that first come to your mind, and then choose the ones that are most likely to bring a lot of visits and a lot of potential conversions. When using external resources, you should always use credible ones and make sure you provide a reference in a form of a link.

There are many types of content, and different types of content have different purposes. For example, “About us” page should be informative and provide details about you and your company. On the other hand, a “how-to” type of post will feature instructional text, preferably with images or videos.

What you need to have in mind all the time, regardless the type of content you decide to create, is the fact that each piece is a segment of overall content marketing strategy. Therefore, it needs to be in accordance with global goals, and it has to follow the approach your company is taking.

Building your Brand

In terms of content marketing, branding is another aspect you should think about. Branding represents the process of creating a unique name and image for a product. This is mainly used in advertising campaigns, to create a sort of differentiated presence on the market and to make a product stand out from its competitors. When it comes to content marketing, content enables you to develop a branding strategy. It allows you to tell a story about your brand and create influence through high-quality content.

Content distribution

Finally, after successful content creation comes content distribution as a way to spread the influence of that content and eventually enable it to achieve its purpose, regardless if that is gaining conversions, leads, visits, etc. There are many different ways to distribute content, which will be explained in a separate chapter, but what is essential to think about in relation to content distribution is the following:

• Data from the previous campaigns

Take a look at the data from the previous campaigns to find out which distribution channels provided the best results. When it comes to the best results, make sure you analyze the performance and how each channel affected your business. For example, if you notice a large number of visits from Facebook, but hardly any conversion, maybe this social network is not the way to go in your case. On the other hand, if you notice that email campaigns produced great results in the past, make sure you include this channel when planning content distribution for the future campaigns.

• Current trends

Everyone interested in promoting their business online has to keep up with current trends.

Things on the internet change all the time. Some social networks are growing in popularity, some are introducing new features, search engine algorithms are updated, etc. Since all of these, and many other factors affect content distribution, you need to keep up with the current situation and keep an eye on trends that are being introduced because these trends can affect your content marketing strategy.

Read more on: Types of content marketing

How to describe your father in French (full steps)

2022-09-07T10:05:00.001+00:00

Mon père [My father]

Écrire une description d’un père en utilisant des grandes lignes. (Write a composition in French about a father using the outline below as a guide.)

· Le nom et l’âge du père. : The name and age of the father.

· Le Lieu de résidence et le village : The residence and the home town.

· La nationalitédu père : the nationality of the father

· Le travail qu’il fait : The work he does.

· Sa taille et son teint. : His height and his complexion.

· La forme du corps du père. : The form of the body of the father.

· Sa situation matrimoniale. : His marital status.

· Le nombre d’enfants qu’il a : The number of children he has

· Le groupe ethnique et la réligion : The ethnic group and the religion.

· Son plat favori et son jeu préféré : His favorite food and his best game.

· L’habit qu’il aime porter : the dress he like waring

· Sa couleur préférée : his favorite color

· Son caractère : his character

· Ses heures de loisir et son ambition : His leisure time and his ambition

· Tu l’aimes? Pourquoi? : Do you like him? Why?

Savoir s’exprimer / savoir le dire [How to say it]

§ Le nom de mon père est Mr ………/ mon père s’appelle Mr………/ Mr………. est mon père

§ Mon père a …….ans / l’âge de mon père est ……../ mon père est âgé de ……ans

§ Mon père habite à………../ mon père réside à…………/ mon père vit à……../ le lieu d’habitation de mon père est …………/la résidence de mon père est…….

§ Le village natal de mon père est ………./ la ville natale de mon père est………/ mon père vient de ………..

§ La nationalité de mon père est ………/ mon père est de la nationalité ………. / mon père est un citoyen ……….

§ Mon père est un ……….. / mon père travail a …………..

§ Mon père a une taille ………. / la taille de mon père est…………. / mon père est un homme ………….

§ Le teint de mon père est …………./ mon père a un teint ………….. / mon père est un homme de teint ………. / mon père est ………..

§ Mon père est ………… / mon père a une forme ……………. / la forme de mon père est ………….

§ Mon père est marié à madame ………/ la femme de mon père est madame ………. / l’épouse de mon père est madame …………

§ Mon père a ……….enfant(s) / les enfants de mon père sont au nombre de …………/ tous les enfants de mon père sont …………

§ Le groupe ethnique de mon père est ……… / mon père est du groupe ethnique …………. / mon père est un …………….

§ La religion de mon père est ……….. / mon père est un …………. / mon père pratique la religion …………..

§ Le plat favori de mon père est …………./ la nourriture préférée de mon père est ………….. / mon père aime manger ………….

§ Le jeu préféré de mon père est ………… / le jeu que mon père préfère est ………….. / mon père aime jouer …………..

§ L’habit que mon père aime porter est ………… / mon père aime porter ………… / le vêtement que mon père aime porter est ………….

§ La couleur préférée de mon père est …………. / mon père préfère la couleur …………….. / sa couleur préférée est …………….

§ Mon père a un ……….caractère / le caractère de mon père est ………..

§ Mon père ……….aux heures de loisir / comme loisir, mon père ………. / aux heures de loisir, mon père ………….

§ L’ambition de mon père est de ……………../ ………..est l’ambition de mon père

§ J’aime mon père parce qu’il ………… / la raison pour laquelle j’aime mon père est ………../ j’aime mon père car ……………

Read also about: How to describe yourself in French (full steps)

Mon père [my father]

Mr. Alex Ofori est mon père. Il est âgé de quarante deux ans et il réside présentement à Accra. Il vient d’Agona Suedro dans région centrale du Ghana. Il est chef comptable à Eco banque. Mon père a une taille géante et un teint noir. Il n’est pas trop gros. Marié à une seule femme qui s’appelle madame Rose, ils ont seulement trois enfants : Richard, Rita et Philippe.

Mr. Alex est Fanti et un fervent chrétien D’Assemblé de Dieu. Le plat qu’il aime le plus est la pâte à la sauce de noix de palme. Il aime jouer le basketball, mais il lit souvent la bible quand il est libre. Il aime porter le complet avec cravate. Sa couleur préférée est le bleu. Mon père est très gentil et calme envers tout le monde. Son ambition majeure est d’établir un grand restaurant. Je l’adore beaucoup parce qu’il travaille dur, aime et s’occupe bien sa famille.

How to describe yourself in French (full steps)

2022-08-31T17:31:00.004+00:00

Soi-même [one self]

Écrire une description de soi-même en utilisant des grandes lignes. (Write a composition in French about yourself using the outline below will guide you.)

Votre nom : Your name

Votre âge. : You age

Le lieu d’habitation : Where you stay

Votre village /ville : Your home town.

Votre nationalité : Your nationality

Votre profession : Your profession.

Votre teint : Your complexion

Votre taille : Your height

La forme de votre corps. : The form of your body.

La forme de votre tête et visage. : The form of your head and face.

Votre groupe ethnique. : Your ethnic group.

Votre plat favori et jeu préféré. : Your favourite food and best game.

Votre heure de loisir et ambition. : Your leisure time and ambition.

Votre opinion. : Your opinion.

You can also read : How to Create a Business Plan from scratch in E-commerce || 8Tips

Savoir s’exprimer [How to say it]

Mon nom est ……………….. / Je m’appelle…………../ Je me nomme…………

J’ai………..ans / Mon âge est ……….ans / je suis âgée de …………ans

Mon lieu d’habitation est………… / j’habite à ……………. / je réside à ………..

Je viens de ……….. / mon village est ……… / /ma ville est ……………

Je suis de la nationalité …..../ ma nationalité est …… / je suis un, une …..

Mon travail est ……… / je suis …….. / je travaille à …………..

J’ai un teint ………. / mon teint est …………… / je suis …………..

J’ai une taille ………. / ma taille est ……………./ je suis ……………..

J’ai une forme …….. / je suis ……….. la forme de mon corps est …………….

Ma tête est ………… / j’ai une tête ………….. / la forme de ma tête est ………

Mon visage est …………/ j’ai un visage ………. / ma figure est …………….

Je suis du groupe ethnique ………. / mon groupe ethnique est ………….

Mon plat favori est ……/ j’aime manger ……../ la nourriture que j’aime est ….

Mon jeu préféré est …. / j’aime jouer …… / le jeu que j’aime est ………….

Aux heures de loisir, j’aime ………/ j’aime ……… aux loisir

Mon ambition est ……………/ comme ambition, je ……………..

Je suis toujours fier de moi-même parce que ………………

Moi-même.

Mon nom est Felix Owusu. J’ai quinze ans et j’habite maintenant à Zenu près de la station. Je viens de Kumasi dans la région d’Ashanti et je suis ghanéen. Je suis élève à Methodist School Complex Ashaiman à Lebanon zone 5. Mon teint est clair, ma taille est géante et j’ai une forme svelte. J’ai une tête un peu grosse et un visage à peu près ovale.

Venant de Kumasi, je suis un Akan et mon plat favori est le foufou à la sauce de noix de palme. Mon jeu préféré est le football, et souvent, j’aime jouer au tennis avec mes amis. Mon ambition majeure est de devenir un docteur chirurgien à Korlebu Teaching Hospital. Je suis toujours fier de moi-même parce que mes amis recommandent ma propreté et mon intelligence.

Top 5 E-commerce Platform that you need in 2022

2022-08-31T10:26:00.002+00:00

Here are the best Ecommerce Platform available for you

1.       1. Shopify
2.    BigCommerce
3.   Business.adobe
4.    WooCommerce
5.    Volusion

As you have a vision of what you want to do and you have your goals in mind; Now it is time to manifest this vision by creating a physical or digital store that perfectly matches your idea.
To begin with, you have to consider using one of the e-commerce platforms as a website integration that will enable you to take advantage of numerous features to set up and manage your online store. Here are the most relevant one you need for your business

Shopify

Shopify presently hosts over 450,000 active online shops. The platform is constantly evolving with new softwares and extensions, growing in popularity, especially among beginners. There are three pricing plans, begining with Basic Shopify, available at $39 per month. For a growing business, you might want to consider Shopify plan ($79 per month) or even Advanced Shopify ($299 per month) which includes more advanced features, such as reports. Shopify Plus is an enterprise-grade solution but to find out more, you will have to send an inquiry.

Vital reasons to choose Shopify

The platform gives:
• Customization of the store with 100+ templates and 1500+ softwares
• Unlimited bandwidth, products, and inventory data
• Manual order creation
• Discounts codes and gift cards
• Website and blog
• Tracking sales and grow trends
• Free SSL certificate
• 24/7 customer support
• Free 14-day trial

The ability to connect with a Facebook page and sell on this social network, as well as a mobile friendly shopping cart, are the features that certainly make Shopify a platform suitable for reaching online users. The process of using the platforms is also pretty straightforward with simple design and integration of 70 external payment gateways, making accepting payments easy. SEO tools and secure hosting are also benefits offered by the platform. The main drawback is the fact that running the store might become a bit costly, with additional extensions which are paid separately, or when you do not use Shopify Payment, in which case additional transaction fee is applied for every sale.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce gives a variety of solutions favorable for businesses of all sizes. The platform allows creating stores with engaging features to helps increase sales. In fact, the solution is perfect for those who are not much tech savvy and are reluctant to tamper with the code themselves. Highly customizable platform with a great selection of e-commerce templates, reliable hosting, and seamless migration process are some of the features that make BigCommerce a desirable solution for an e-commerce business.

Other benefits of using this software include:

• Single-page checkout
• Coupons, discounts, and gift cards
• Professional reporting tools
• Product rating and reviews
• Integration with Facebook, eBay and Amazon, Pinterest, Google Shopping
• No transaction fees
• Unlimited products, file storage, and bandwidth
• Unlimited staff accounts

There are not many plugins because the platform itself is very customizable and already provides a set of integrations to help you optimize and boost the performance of the online store. The plans start with the Standard plan (available at $29.95 per month), the most popular. Plus plan ($79.95 per month) and Pro plan ($249.95 per month). Finally, there is the most
advanced solution called Enterprise, but to get more details, you will need to get in touch with the customer support. There is a 15-day free trial period.

Business.adobe

Another established name in the world of e-commerce is Magento, offering solutions for small businesses, as well as advanced technology and reliability recognized by some of the top players on the market, including Coca Cola, Charlotte Tilbury, Burger King, etc. Over 250,000 merchants are using the platform to grow their businesses and increase sales.

Some of the available features the software comes with are:

• Flexibility to customize the platform to provide branded experience
• Open source platform
• Thousands of plugins and extensions
• Extensive documentation and resources
• Tools to attract and retain customers
• Product bundling, gift with purchase, and customer reviews
• Free Magento social integration to catalog products on social media and create advertisements.
For beginners, Magento offers a free Magento Community Edition platform. It is a good way to experiment with the features and learn how to integrate and grow your e-commerce business with this platform. There is no clear pricing on the website regarding solutions for growing businesses and large enterprises. The best way to find out more is to schedule a free product demo.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an ideal e-commerce solution if your blog is hosted on WordPress platform.
The software is specifically designed with WordPress in mind, providing hundreds of free and paid extensions to help you fully customize the store based on your requirements. The software seamlessly integrates with WordPress, and it offers easy migration from other platforms.

Features provided by WooCommerce include:

• Selling both physical and digital products worldwide
• Mobile-friendly platform
• Marketplace with free and paid extensions
• Comprehensive documentations related to setup, extending, theming, etc.
• Unlimited number of products
• Secure code
• Pre-installed payment gateways
• Geo-location support making shipping and tax calculation simpler
• SEO-friendly platform
• Discount coupons and codes
• Built-in analytics + 3rd party integrations

WooCommerce offers a self-hosted solution, which means you retain full ownership of the information and data shared through your e-commerce store. There are no transaction fees, and you will have support available for all the paid products provided by WooCommerce.
Getting started is free. You will log in to your WordPress account and go from there. To get the most out of your store, you will probably need to use some of the extensions, such as:
• WooCommerce Subscriptions – If you are going to use recurring billing to your membership website(from $199)
• Products Add-Ons – To create additional options for products, including select boxes, text areas, custom price input, etc.(from $49)
• WooCommerce Bookings – It enables appointment bookings on your own website (from $249)
• Stripe – It allows accepting different credit cards directly in your store (free)
• Product bundles – It is used to create customizable offers and product bundles (from $49)
The purpose of these extensions is to provide advanced features and functionalities for running an e-commerce business, which is why it is worth exploring the features and how those can help with optimizing and improving your store and customer experience.

Volusion

Besides an e-commerce platform, Volusionis an all-in one solution with options to grow your business with built-in SEO management, newsletters, and CRM system. This provides an interesting option for hosting an e-commerce website even if you are only starting out and exploring the market. You can upgrade at any moment enabling you to unlock more features you might need as your business grows.

All plans include features such as:

• Free, responsive themes
• Securely accepting payments
• Built-in SEO tools
• Social media integrations and reporting tools
• Expert support plus helpful resources
• Inventory management
There are four plans, starting from Mini (available at $15 per month) with a limit of 100 products and 1GB of bandwidth. The Plus plan is a more advanced (priced at $35 per month) with 1000 products and 3GB of bandwidth. In case you need a solution that goes beyond these limitations, you can choose Pro plan (the price is $75 per month) with 10,000 products, 10 GB of bandwidth and priority support, or Premium plan (for $135 per month) with unlimited products, 35GB of bandwidth and dedicated account manager. A free trial is available during the 14-day period. Advanced features you can unlock with more expensive plans include:
• Rating and reviews
• Newsletters
• Abandoned cart reports
• eBay and Amazon integration
• API access + batch order processing
• Deal of the day + customer loyalty plan
With comprehensive website builder and responsive themes, the platform allows creating highquality e-commerce websites with no coding experience. You will have full control of managing the content, with customization options to help you explore the benefits of your content. It is quite easy to connect the platform with the most popular tools for an e-commerce business that provides additional functionalities. Finally, the built-in SEO management and reporting features are powerful options to explore the influence of your website and your content, which helps with running your online business.

You will notice a lot of similarities between platforms we have mentioned here, and chances are you will find more platforms that provide a solution for running an e-commerce website.
The choice should be based on the needs of your company and the budget you can provide for the platform integration. When it comes to choosing different plans, try using the solution that is enough for your current needs, but always make sure that there is a possibility to upgrade to a more compressive solution once you need it.

How to Create a Business Plan from scratch in E-commerce || 8Tips

2022-08-29T09:03:00.005+00:00

everything we do on this planet start with an idea. You decide to open an online shop just like the one you have in from of your house, with a particular idea in mind. However, to make this idea concrete, to turn it into a business which will eventually bring profit, you will need to organize it properly. Even if you are completely new to the digital world, it is essential that your catch up with the trends and practices that will enable you to run your business successfully. If the assets are limited, and you are unlikely to afford an expert to help you with setting up, you should explore a DIY method, where you would study and discover each aspect of running an e-commerce website.
To make sure you keep your ideas and thoughts organized, start creating a business plan.

What is a business plan in general?

A business plan is a document which highlights business goals and strategies on how to reach those goals. It also defines the key aspects of starting and running a business. Essentially, it is a roadmap that will include where you want to go and how to get there. It is a way to describe where you see your business with details about the actions that are needed to reach that destination.
There is no need for a business plan to be long or exhaustive. It is likely that no one will analyze that plan, except for you and people you get involved in the project, so make it concrete and spot on. Focus only on those segments that will help you with defining your vision and determining a set of actions you will take.

The followings are the main parts of your business plan

This part of a business plan should contain basic information about your business. These include:

Your Business name

The business name is the name you choose for your business. It is the name that should eventually become recognizable, distinctive and associated with your business. It will become a part of your brand. This is why determining a business name is a crucial decision in the business plan. It requires a lot of thinking, piling up the ideas and eventually choosing the right one.
When it comes to making a decision on which business name to choose, it is helpful to know characteristics of a good business name. These are

A good business name must:
• Be easy to spell
• Be relevant and associated with your products
• Trigger emotions
• Contain keywords
• Be clear and professional
• Be powerful and have deeper meaning
• Be unique
A good business name must not:
• Overuse keywords
• Have irrelevant keywords
• Have negative connotations

• Infringe upon anyone’s rights
• Be offensive
• Be difficult to spell

Your website

Ideally, your business name should match your website name. Use a tool, such as this business name generator, and check if a particular website domain name is available. The tool will also show plenty of alternatives, so even if the name is not available, you will get suggestions on which modifications of that name are available.

Your Logo

Depending on the scale of your business and the budget you have, you could hire a professional designer who would design a logo once you have a business name. Or you design it yourself. Apart from a business name, it is helpful to share some keywords and topics that are associated with the brand, the story behind the name, etc. This helps with the process of creating a logo.

If you prefer DIY method, here are some tools to help you out:
Logomakr– The tool offers low quality + CC license with free logo, while you will need to pay for high-resolution photo.

LogoShuffle– Provide your business name, slogan, and keywords, select the icons, font categories and change colors to get logo mockups. Shuffle the ready-made designs, and once you find the one, you can buy it.
Tailor Brands– You will provide a logo name and a short description after which you will be offered a series of example pairs where you will choose the one your prefer. This will enable the tool to create a logo tailored to you, after which you can purchase the logo.
Online LogoMaker– Add text, choose symbols or upload an image, and get started creating your logo.

A free logo includes a low-resolution image, while payment is required to download a full resolution logo.

Other business details can include:

• Social media profiles
• Blogs you can cooperate
• List of competitors
• List of keywords you want to associate with your business

Your Product information

The next part of the business plan is focused on your products. Start with defining what you are selling and how you are going to sell.

The Product to sell

When you start with developing this business plan, you already have in mind the exact product you are selling. However, what you need to define here are the following things:
Produced product or sourced externally
If you are creating products, you will need to provide information about the supplies needed, the way you will obtain supplies and the time required for making those products. On the other hand, if you are going to buy products to sell them in your store, you will need to focus on choosing suppliers. The goal is to get the best product for the best possible price. Planning these activities in advance helps you stay organized and prepare everything to quickly
implement the plan Digital or physical products In most cases, you will either sell digital or physical products. However, when it comes to books or music, you can choose which one to sell, a digital format which is downloadable and instantly available, or a physical product. You can always offer both formats.

Place to sell

Since e-commerce is focused on sales that are conducted online, the primary place to sell products is the internet. However, this does not stop you from selling off-line as well. Choosing between a physical or a virtual store is simply a matter of how you want to run your business.
The main convenience an online store offers is that it can be accessed anytime anywhere. There are no limitations regarding space which means that the customer base is much wider than when it comes to a physical store.
In terms of business owners, a virtual store primarily represents a smaller investment. The only costs involve web hosting and technical support if you need it.
You can always opt for an option to run both virtual and physical store. You could open a physical store alongside a virtual one. When we focus on the virtual realm, there are a couple of ways you can sell online. Firstly, you can have your own website. Alternatively, you could join marketplaces and sell through their website. This choice is also something to include in the business plan. If you are planning on using several marketplaces, provide all of this information in the business plan, to help you further along with the planning and promoting products.

Your Investment

Opening any business requires an investment. Even though running an e-commerce business does offer this advantage of being the one that needs a small investment, you will still need a certain amount of assets to open and start running a virtual store. It is helpful to determine the assets you can invest, and then compare those to the actual costs you will have when opening up an e-commerce business.

Your Web domain

The domain is the first thing you will have to purchase when setting up a business. The actual costs may vary depending on the provider, as well as on the type of domain extension you choose (.com, .net, .shop, etc.). The domain is bought yearly, but you can choose between one year, two year or even five-year period.

The Hosting

Hosting is an online storage for your website, and it is the place where your website will be built on. There are many hosting providers on the market, offering hosting packages anywhere from $5 to $10 per month for first-time customers and basic plans. For e-commerce, you will need a hosting that is flexible and can grow as your business grows.

Technical support

Although running an online store is a more convenient method of commerce in general, it still requires a bit of know-how, especially when it comes to setting up a website, online payments, etc. You might be able to handle some portion of the tasks, such as setting up and optimizing a website, but you might want to hire a professional to handle sections with online payments (credit card payment, PayPal integration, etc.). In case you are not able to set up a website yourself, the costs here will be greater. Additional costs can include:
• Website optimization expert to improve performance of your website
• Photographer for product photos
• Content writer for product description/blog content
• Administrator for handling management and customer support
• Marketing expert to work on promoting your products
In case you opt for a marketplace instead of your own website, you will obviously avoid a part of these costs, such as the domain and hosting. Still, selling through marketplace usually requires a certain fee, that is often calculated as the percentage deducted from the sales.

Your Product related costs

This section of the investment can vary hugely from business to business. For starters, you might sell products by acquiring them directly from the manufacturer. In this case, you usually do not have to buy the actual products, but instead, you will simply purchase them once you receive an order.
On the other hand, if you make your own products, you will probably need some kind of materials to make them. These costs should all be included in the calculation of your business investment.
When it comes to offering services, you will think about the following:
• Who will be handling the service (this person’s time should be paid accordingly)
• Costs related to providing the service (if you need to drive yourself to a location to provide the service, the costs of transport should be included in the price of the service)

Sometimes it is not possible to predict the exact costs but an approximate value. Then it is always better to calculate a higher value, just in case. Once you have all the values, the sum of those is the investment you will need to start your business.
These three elements make up a core of the business plan. These are the base from which you will form a strategy later on. For example, having determined a business name, you can then work on social media marketing strategy, by creating online profiles with this name. While a lot of information is included in these three parts, there are still more aspects of e-commerce website you should have in mind.

Other things in the business plan
Your Predicting profit

Each e-commerce has a goal of acquiring profit through sales. This is the primary goal you want to achieve, and we will focus on different methods for achieving this goal later on, but when setting up a business and defining a business plan, it is helpful to try to predict the profit over a given period.
Since each business requires an investment, the first income you acquire from sales will be enough to cover this investment, and it might be a while before you start gaining profit.
Here is how to predict the profit:
• Choose a period you want to focus on
• Predict the number of sales you can expect (based on the market research, previous experience, etc.)
• Multiply the predicted number of sales with the product price
• Predict the recurring purchase trend, and add this to the previous sum
• Subtract the investment needed for the same period from the total predicted revenue

Pricing

Another part of the business plan you will work on is pricing for the products or services that you offer. Since the price essentially should cover the costs needed for that product or service to be provided, plus some profit for you, a good starting point is predicting the costs to make (or buy) an individual product or to provide a particular service. It is how you get an estimate on
how much to charge. Even though the cost of website hosting is not directly part of the product cost, it is an expense you will have to pay from the revenue you obtain. Thinking about overall predicted costs might give deeper insights into how to form the product selling price.

The second thing you should consider when determining the pricing is the situation on the market. Make sure you explore the internet and look up businesses that offer the same products or services. Take a look at their pricing, and check out if there is a space to modify your price further.

Special offers

Special offers are usually a part of the company strategy, which is why you could plan and predict those offers with the initial business plan. Here are a couple of options:
• First-time offer – Offering a special discount to first-time customers only
• Newsletter discount – Sending out discount codes to your subscribers
• Bundles – When selling product, you might want to provide a special (discounted) price for buying a bundle of products
• Seasonal offers – Holiday seasons are popular times to offer discounts and special offers, so you might want to plan this for Christmas, Easter, etc.

Your Plan for promotion

So far, the business plan was focused on what to sell, where to sell and how to determine costs and pricing. Finally, the business plan should also include a section on how you are going to promote the products. Since promotion includes an important part of your strategy and it helps with estimating profit, it is very helpful to plan online promotion in advance.

Your Channels for promotion

Channels for promotion include the platforms you will use to advertise your products and try to reach the online customers. Unlike traditional marketing channels used for reaching customers, e-commerce is focused on the online media, and the usage of the following channels:

• Website
• Third-party websites (gaining inbound links)
• Social media
• Paid advertising

Promotional activities

Besides a direct promotion, which can range from promoted posts to paid video adverts, other promotional activities that are not as direct when it comes to promoting the actual product, but still are efficient at raising awareness of your brand. Those include promotional activities such as:
• Special offers
• Discounts
• Loyalty club
• Contests
• Giveaways
• Collaboration with other brands

Despite the fact that the promotion of the actual product is not a direct goal, these activities are still called promotional because they help with:
• Placing your brand on the market
• Raising awareness of what you do
• Increasing interest in your brand
• Engaging those interested in your brand
• Improving the level of loyalty with rewards, benefits, etc.
Since promotional activities improve your online influence, try planning them in advance inside a business plan. The main reason why it is good to prepare them in advance is the fact that you will be able to define the budget for each of these activities. Furthermore, you will be able to plan the exact period when you will be organizing each activity. You do not want to host several of those at the time, nor do you want to overlap with other activities you plan for your
business. For example, when introducing a new product in your store, you might not want to offer a discount for that product, but instead, you could host a contest or a giveaway.
To successfully plan promotional activities, think about these:
• Type of the activity you want to organize
• Goals you want to achieve (promotion of the products, introducing new products, engaging previous customers, etc.)
• Period during which the promotion is going to be active
• Terms and conditions for participation
• Cost related to organization

Determining your goals

The sale is the most obvious and the most common goal of each e-commerce website.
However, this does not have to be the only goal. Here are some example goals you could have in mind:
• Sell 100 products during the first month of running the business
• Increase the number of sales by 10% each month
• Gain 20 recurring customers
• Work with affiliates to increase the number of new customers
These are only some ideas, and the numbers are used just as an example. You should define a goal based on your own business and based on the predictions related to the business success.

The Benefits of having a business plan

Having a plan of action for any business is always recommended. Here is why:
A better Organization
A business plan helps you stay organized. When you have a business plan as a reference, you will always know what your next steps are and what you need to complete preparation. Being organized helps you save time and effort by determining a roadmap you will follow.

Good Time management
We all know that time is of crucial importance, especially when starting up a business as you will soon become overwhelmed with the number of tasks you will face with. However, if you have a business plan, you will be able to organize your time much more efficiently.
Perfect Asset distribution
Since a business plan has the information about the estimated costs, this is an excellent reference when thinking about your available assets and how you are going to distribute those.
Unified approach
Finally, a major benefit you will see with the business plan is the fact that you will recognize activities that will require different departments to work together. This is simply a matter of organizing and distributing work, but the point is that e-commerce is and should be seen as a part of global business running. Combining the power of sectors such as online marketing brings more benefits for your business by joining the forces to work on achieving the common goal.

11 ways to Increase Conversions through Email Marketing

2022-08-27T19:03:00.004+00:00

What is conversion?

A conversion is a desired action taking place, and with email marketing, this action is taking place through email message as a channel. The email recipients basically follow a path from the email to the external link, most commonly a landing page on your website.

This can be many different things for different businesses. For some, it might be a sale. For others, it might be an event RSVP. Sometimes, it can be a visit,
simply reading the latest blog article. To think about conversions and to analyze them, you have to define this desired action in your own terms.
You might have several conversions in mind, as all of those could help with achieving your goal.
This is completely natural, and in fact, each marketing section could have its own conversions. For example, social media marketing can have its own conversion such as becoming a follower, clicking on an ad, etc. When it comes to email marketing, it is important to have in mind that one email campaign should only have one conversion.

Once you have completely defined a conversion, the next thing you will need to focus on how to increase conversion.

1. How to increase conversions?

When you think of a conversion, you think about desired actions you want users to perform. Your goal with email marketing is to refine your strategy in order to maximize the number of these desired actions being completed. Optimization of email design and A/B testing are things that will help you with increasing conversions, and so are these.

2. Subject line that engages

Numerous studies over the past years have proven the fact that subject line has a tremendous impact on campaign performance, with more than 30% open rate depending solely on these few words. A subject line is what encourages people to open your email. It needs to be engaging and catchy. Since conversion rate is related to open rate, as the opening has to happen first, with possible conversion to follow, one of the starting points in increasing conversions is modifying the subject line. There is no universal solution for the best subject line, so A/B testing is a recommended option.
Having your email opened is a path towards conversion. It is followed by stunning email content.

3. CTA that inspires

In the focus of the email there is a CTA. A button or a link that invites the recipients to click on it. The goal with CTA is to inspire as many clicks as possible, which will take the recipient to the landing page. When it comes to increasing conversions, the more clicks mean more potential conversions. This is why you need to pay attention to the text, color, formatting and position of the CTA inside the email body. Again, A/B testing could be a way to go for, experimenting with different variations.

4. Landing page that converts

At the point where the email recipient reaches the landing page, you will notice a significantly lower number of them in comparison to the number of addresses the email was delivered to. It is a natural process that the number of users decreases as the moment of a conversion approaches, with each phase of the sales funnel. As with all prior stages, a landing page is a place where you either lose or gain customers. Obviously, your goal is to gain them so you will need a landing page that converts.
Landing page, or lead capture page, is where you want users to take action, i.e. convert. There are many types of landing pages, depending on the industry, the type of audience or products, the business goals, etc. This means that there are no universal instructions for creating a perfect landing page, but there are things you need to consider when designing one, as those impact the power the landing page has in terms of conversions.

5. Effective headline

A headline is at the top of the page, and it represents one of the essential aspects of the landing page, together with the CTA. This is where you need to grab user’s attention. A good headline should be descriptive, telling more about the offer, product, event, etc. An effective headline also has to grab the attention of the reader. It should be something they can identify with, it should be engaging, remarkable and attracting them to learn more. When we consider visual aspect, formatting is also important for an effective headline. It should be easily noticeable, which you can achieve with different color and large fonts.

6. Brief description

A reader’s attention span is short, especially nowadays, when people interact with too much content on a daily basis. You literally have a couple of seconds to attract the attention of the reader, so get straight to the point. There is no need for too many words. Instead, be concise, but make sure you provide enough information. It is similar like with a headline. You need to be persuasive and engaging to get readers interested. Unlike with headline, a description can be a bit longer, but try to keep it simple and short as much as you can. The goal with the description is to offer more information about the offer and a reason for the reader to click on that CTA.
Not understanding your headline or what you offer is might be a reason to lose lots of customers, which is why this description should be composed in a way that appeals to your target audience. In the same time, it has to be informative so that even the first-time visitors can exactly understand what you offer.

7. Prominent CTA

The second thing on the landing page that deserves full attention is the CTA. This button is where conversion happens, regardless if that is a download of a free material or signing up for a membership on your website. This is why CTA needs to be prominent so that no visitor will miss it.

8. Impressive layout

The visual aspect of the landing page is very important. This has to be a beautifully designed page, with a custom design for that particular page. It has to be well-organized, with each section being carefully placed so that they do not overlap and thus disrupt the user experience.
It also has to be accessible and adjustable for all devices. The layout also refers to the use of images, fonts, text bubbles, logo, etc. and anything that can help you provide necessary information with an impressive design.

9. Boastful testimonials

This is not something you should highlight because you want to keep the description brief, so leave the testimonials for the end of the page. However, feel free to include them, because they can encourage those visitors who are a bit indecisive about clicking that CTA button. These can include comments from the previous customers, the list of customers, etc. This kind of recognition helps you build your own reputation, and thus it can help with conversions.

10. Other things to consider to increase conversions

These are other things to consider when it comes to increasing conversion and those include:
• Timing it right – Even though there is generally no perfect time to send an email, analyzing past conversions might help you find that sweet spot, the time when you are most likely to convert customers. It can be a specific day of the week, a particular time of the day, or perhaps after a certain event. This can help with the conversion rate, so make sure you explore email marketing statistics with this idea in mind.
• Improve email design – Email design is a very important part of increasing
conversions, so you should explore different ways to optimize the email layout to get the most out of it.
• Pay attention to other things to do and things to avoid – There are general things to do and avoid if you want to improve the success of your campaign. These refer to both email deliverability and conversions, so explore different suggestions to see if your approach needs a bit of refinement

Now that you have complete idea on how to increase conversion, the next thing you will need to focus on is tracking those conversions.

11. Tracking conversions

Tracking conversions is the process where you gather the data from a specific email campaign. Email campaign on its own may or may not be a success. To measure this success, you need to track conversions and determine the exact number of conversions you were able to generate.
Besides measuring success, this tells a lot about your email marketing strategy as a whole. The best way to track conversions is to generate a custom report with conversion details you have available. Those can include:
• Conversions happening after first, second etc. click
• Time or day when the conversions happen
• Conversions in regard to A/B testing if you have conducted such a testing
• The place conversions happened (on the landing page, on other pages, etc.)

The idea with tracking conversion is to go beyond the click (on CTA button in your email). The scope of data goes further, as you want and need to analyze the way this conversion happened after the recipient has clicked on the link in the email. You need to know how visitors behave once they reach the landing page. Do they immediately hit that CTA and thus convert? Do they navigate to the homepage first, and then the conversion happens there? What is the
abandonment rate, i.e. the percentage of those who visit the landing page, but leave without being converted? All of this together helps you figure out how conversions happen, allowing you to use this recipe to boost your business success.
You will need assistance for tracking the clicks and their path, as well as to compare rates between several metrics, which is why you will need to use tools.

Using an email marketing tool to track conversion

There are numerous email marketing tools available on the market. What is necessary to highlight here is that tools offer features, that can be more or less alike, but monitoring email traffic is usually one of those features available.
Since monitoring is one of the important tasks in email campaign management, you will often see this option integrated.
Most tools track opens and clicks. Those are two basic metrics that will help assess email deliverability, but to focus on conversions, you will need more data. Email analytics available with email marketing tools can also include:
• Integration with Google Analytics
• Link tracking
• Goal tracking
• Tracking opens

Email campaign tagging

The other option for monitoring the performance of an email marketing campaign is through campaign URL tracking. Google offers a tool to track custom campaigns in Google Analytics. All you need to do is provide information about the campaign, after which a URL will be automatically generated for you. To access the Campaign URL Builder, use this link: https://gadev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

Lead Nurturing Marketing Email

2022-08-26T14:42:00.002+00:00

Lead nurturing represents the process of developing a relationship with the subscribers by listening to their needs, offering helpful information and answers to any questions and doubts they might have.

In terms of online marketing and sales, a lead is a potential sale contact. That is the person (or another business) with interest in the products or services you provide. Lead generation is the process of gathering email addresses of those potential customers through various different methods, including advertising, content marketing, networking, social media marketing, etc.

Obtaining new leads is an integral part of an online business strategy, but only a small percent of those leads will be willing to make a purchase immediately. Others need a little bit of encouragement.

What is a lead nurturing email campaign?

A lead nurturing email campaign is an automated, personalized, email campaign that marketers use to take users on a journey that may impact their buying behavior.

These campaigns are automated, meaning they’re created using email automation technology that sends scheduled blasts to potential leads based on their brand interactions.

But the beauty of lead nurture email campaigns is their customized nature, built using data, analytics, and user behavior research. This information allows marketers to create personalized campaigns that are targeted and engaging, encouraging high-quality leads that take the next step through the sales funnel.

Sales funnel

To begin with, let us focus on so-called sales funnel. A sale happens in several stages, which are commonly known as phases or stages of a sales funnel. The word funnel is used for a reason.

The funnel is the widest at the top, meaning that the first stage of the sales funnel is where you will reach the largest number of leads. The funnel gets narrow towards its end, and so does the sales funnel. It gets more narrow with each sale stage until eventually it includes only a part of those initial leads.

The stages of the sales funnel include:

• Brand awareness– This is the point where the potential customers become aware of your products and services.

• Interest in your brand or product – At this point, the potential customers shows interest in your brand by registering for an event, commenting on your blog, signing up for a newsletter, etc.

• Evaluation – Most internet buyers are not impulse buyers. Instead, for each

purchase, they go through the process of research and comparison during which they evaluate your brand.

• Purchase – This is the final stage of the sales funnel, where the lead becomes your customer.

From the first stage, brand awareness, until the final stage, purchase, the funnel tightens and the number of leads drops. Each stage is where you either keep or lose a lead, which is why lead nurturing process has become so important for email marketing. This process helps you keep as many leads as possible in each sales funnel stage, so that you increase the number of those who reach the final phase, i.e. purchase.

How to nurture the relationship?

Since a good relationship is, in essence, the way you nurture leads, you will need to explore different ways to improve this relationship. You should not be self-centered because lead nurturing is all about paying attention to your subscribers. They should be in the focus of your lead nurturing process because the main goal is to engage them and keep them satisfied through each sales phase.

Build relationship gradually

SStart by gradually building the relationship. Even though it might be tempting for you to speed up the process and quickly turn a lead into a customer, this usually happens more slowly than you would want. Patience is very important for building a strong relationship with the potential customers, because you want to allow them to naturally go through all of the phases until they decide to become your customers. Your role in this process is not to rush and nudge them to do something, but instead, you should simply follow the process and use lead nurturing tactics to encourage them to interact with you, to get to know more about your brand, etc.

Understand the Buyer’s Journey

It’s crucial to understand the buyer’s journey, both in general and in terms of how it relates to lead nurturing. And there are at least three main stages of the journey that you need to understand to better know your prospects.

• Awareness: When a potential buyer realizes a want or need for a specific product or service.

• Consideration: When a potential buyer has defined their want or need and is now researching a possible product or service solutions.

• Decision: When a potential buyer has figured out what their solution is and is comparing the available options to choose the best one for their needs.

Keeping the buyer’s journey in mind helps you determine the kinds of content you should be creating.

Predict the need

Successful lead nurturing is a process where you follow the subscribers through the phases of the sales funnel, and one of the best ways to succeed in this task is to predict the need. Try to anticipate what the subscribers will think, need, want in each of the phases, and be prepared.

Here is one example.

Imagine you own a company that provides small companies with email marketing software. A subscriber downloads your free ebook and gets to become a member of your mailing list, your new lead. He is still in the first phase. He might be wondering if he needs this tool and how it can be used. To encourage the subscriber to go into the next phase, you will send an email with resources on email marketing which can show different strategies for improving the business performance.

This way, you were able to predict the state of mind your potential customer would be in.

Fulfilling this need is something that will help you build a relationship and take the potential customer into the next phase of the sales funnel.

Be relevant

Lead nurturing is a delicate process in which an action can improve your client to customer relationship, but it can just as easily cause you to lose a potential customer too soon. Always make sure your message is relevant. Not only does lead nurturing have benefits on the relationship with the recipients, but it also helps you establish your reputation as a respectable sender. This means that you build an influence in a certain industry, which will gain you respect and trust from your community. In return, this community will respond with loyalty. Therefore, your email message should be relevant in terms of:

• Topic – You should not get off topic. The email needs to be about the topic which is related to your business, as this is something that the recipient will find relevant.

You have your niche, so stay in it. That is what your subscribers are expecting.

• Time – Pay close attention to the timing, because some content might be timesensitive, which will influence email marketing as well. This especially refers to limited-time offers, seasonal content, etc.

Lead nurturing tactics

There are many ways to nurture leads, depending on both the type of business you run and the overall business strategy you have. The main goal of the lead nurturing process is to nurture the relationship with your subscribers so that you keep them engaged and loyal to your brand, which also results in sales. To achieve this goal, you could use one of the following tactics.

Targeted content

As much as your website visitors have one thing in common (following your brand), they also have a lot of differences. The idea with this approach in lead nurturing is to create content that is closely targeted at a specific group of subscribers. This way you make the connection with a specific group much more personal and full of understanding. Getting to know your subscribers shows a great level of care, which is a perfect way to ensure a high level of loyalty among them.

To be able to use targeted content as a tactic for lead nurturing, you will first need to learn more about your subscribers. One of the best ways to do so is with online forms. Instead of simply obtaining a subscriber’s email, using online forms allows you to gather more data about each subscriber, the data that will help with segmenting your audience, identifying their needs and targeting them through content that is specifically designed for them.

Besides using online forms on your website, you could also send email surveys or organize a social media contest, but the concept stays the same. You need to learn more about your subscribers in order to use this strategy.

For example, if you segment your subscribers based on the location, you will be able to send a targeted announcement about your upcoming events in a specific city. There is no need to send an email featuring an event in Boston, to someone who lives in Europe. The same goes for other criteria. Promoting your latest small-business guide to large companies would also be a futile strategy.

Lead scoring

The concept of lead scoring is this. You use a custom scale to rank leads based on the perceived value each of those represents to your business. This idea is also based on the fact that not all subscribers are alike, but instead of segmenting them based on different criteria, with lead scoring you assign a score to each lead. This way you basically put a numeric value on a lead, based on the fact how likely they are to become your customers. As a result, you can prioritize the leads based on the lead score. Those with a high score are deeper in the sales funnel, closer to purchase, meaning that the lead nurturing could help you successfully convert them.

Like with most lead nurturing tactics, for lead scoring, you will need to have a tool. Marketing automation platforms allow you to get insights into the way the visitors interact with your website, which helps with understanding the leads in a better way than simply viewing the statistics in Google Analytics.

To start ranking and prioritizing leads, you will need to add numeric values to certain actions.

The choice of the actions is based on your own business and website because you know your subscribers much better than anyone else. You know which actions are more likely to lead to sales, and you also know how to score them. Here are a couple ideas:

• A visit to a specific page – If, for example, the statistics show that a visit to a

particular page of your website has 40% chance of resulting in a purchase, then you will assign a high score to the leads who visit this page and prioritize communication with those leads.

• Social media interaction – Certain actions on social media, such as commenting or sharing your content may be an indicator that this lead should have a high score, which is why you need to keep monitoring on social media as well.

• An event confirmation – This action can indicate that the person is interested in your brand and wants to learn more on your seminar or webinar, which is also something worth knowing in the process of lead scoring.

Seizing the moment

They say “timing is everything” in business, and this is particularly true when it comes to lead generation. Your lead nurturing campaign has to be closely monitored so that you can seize an opportunity in the perfect moment. For example, if you have just had someone subscribe to your newsletter, take the opportunity to contact them and show appreciation. If the user has visited your website after a while, take advantage of this information and follow up with useful content, additional information, asking for feedback, etc. All of this helps you keep the connection with the subscribers.

This part of lead nurturing is largely automated with marketing automation tools because it is impossible to sit all day long and keep waiting for an opportunity to come up. Instead, use a tool to set up criteria that will initiate a follow-up. For example, after visiting a certain page, the subscriber can receive a follow-up with additional information.

It is believed that leads nurtured this way have much larger potential of being seen as sales opportunities because through this approach you are targeting them based on the need they have. This kind of approach has better chances of succeeding than a mass email or a monthly newsletter you send on a regular basis to the entire list. This is because you are reaching the subscribers just in the right time, at the moment they have a need or request that needs to be met. If you manage to fulfill that request, you are going to be perceived as trustworthy and

helpful, which overall affects the level of loyalty. In case the subscriber had any doubts about you, this way you will surely encourage him to go down the sales funnel.

Measure Results and Update as Needed

Just as crucial as getting your content and timing right is utilizing data to adjust as needed. Once you start sending your emails, track specific email metrics to see how they’re being engaged with and what sorts of conversions they’re leading to — particularly emails that are part of drip campaigns. If an email isn’t getting many clicks or responses, tweak it with Collaboration of sales and marketing

Another strategy that has been proven as quite effective in lead nurturing is a collaboration of sales and marketing reports. The exchange of the data between the two is crucial for recognizing and nurturing leads.

On one hand, there is a sales department. This department uses reporting and sales analysis to identify the customer profile, highlighting the patterns and behavior. Understanding why users become your customers, understanding what it is that finally gets them through the sales funnel, is something you can take advantage of. This knowledge allows you to understand new potential customers better and provide assistance as they go through the funnel more quickly.

On the other hand, we have marketing where this knowledge can be applied. This way you get to design a marketing strategy to take full potential of your resources and increase the number of generated sales. A sale is an opportunity, and to take this opportunity you need to have a deeper understanding of the buying process. This allows you to create a more personalized and more effective connection through lead nurturing.

The goal of both departments is increasing sales and continuous efforts in analyzing and assisting the buying process. Measurable results from both ends will make this collaboration work seamlessly.

Lead nurturing is one of those email strategies where the goal is to improve communication with potential customers, and this can be achieved through a refined approach that focuses on the customers and the needs or wants they might have. To make these strategies work and to make the most out of lead nurturing, start by having a customer as the central point. Then, you go on to develop an approach and use tactics that will still be focused on the customer as they gradually lead the customer through the sales funnel, to the actual sale. With this kind of thinking, you will be able to form a successful lead nurturing strategy. In the long run, not only does this strategy help with immediate sales, but it improves business to customer relationship and the level of loyalty the customers have.

11. Email Marketing Tools you need

2022-08-25T12:33:00.004+00:00

There are a lot of email marketing apps and tools on the market. Some offer a simpler dashboard with a limited number of options, which are a great solution for small companies, personal blogs, etc. For e-commerce websites and larger companies, more advanced options are necessary, in which case you should consider an advanced email marketing solution. A lot of tools offer the most basic options for free, while advanced settings are a part of a payment plan. Limitations, and thus distinctions between plans, are usually displayed through the number of emails you can send per month and the number of email addresses you can add to the mailing list managed through the software. Again, these factors are something that will determine the solution you are going to choose.

Marketo

Here is another all-in-one marketing software, offering applications for marketing automation, account-based marketing, email, mobile, social, digital ads, web, marketing analytics and predictive content. Having such a tool that combines all the most important marketing tasks is really helpful and makes the job a lot easier. Besides managing an email marketing campaign, a

set of all the features Marketo offers allows an opportunity to create and manage a complex business strategy The packages are divided into bundles and the email marketing bundle includes email and landing page creator, intelligent nurturing, A/B testing, audience segmentation, forms and

progressive profiling, automated workflow, etc. Unlike some other more simplified versions of email marketing software, this one is surely enough to provide even the most experienced marketers with a platform where they can explore the full potential of their business. There is no clear pricing for the email marketing bundle, but it is based on the number of contacts in your database. To learn more about the packaging and about the pricing, you will have to contact their sales department.

TinyLetter

This software is known for its simplicity. It is perfect for sending newsletter emails, updates and similar emails, which is something smaller blogs would benefit from. This is not a solution for businesses that want to go ahead with email marketing because advanced customization and settings are not included. The software offers a custom background and a few options for

branding and customization. There are no templates or advanced settings.

With TinyLetter you can send unlimited number of emails per month to a list of 5000 email addresses. The tool is free and there is no possibility to upgrade to a paid plan. In case you want to upgrade, you can do so by signing up for one of the MailChimp’s plans, as the same company owns both tools. The contacts are directly transferred from TinyLetter account when you upgrade.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms. It offers a variety of tools, suitable for both small companies to big websites. It is particularly useful for online stores, because of e-commerce integrations, targeted campaigns, etc. Other features include campaign tracking, segmentation, A/B testing, automation, integrations with WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Advanced analytics is also available, with data about email deliverability and the option to integrate Google Analytics and campaign URL tracking for even more insights. The platform itself is quite straightforward with drag-and-drop features that help you design your

own email. Ready-made templates are also available making the email design quite quick and easy, using the existing elements, as well as your own visual content, such as images, CTAs, graphics, etc. to completely customized your email campaign.

The “New Business” plan is the basic plan perfect for new businesses. This plan is free and it comes with the limit of 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. This is everything you need to get started and learn more about the platform. This way you can make sure that this particular tool is something you will benefit from before you decide to go for a premium version. If your business goes beyond these limits, you can choose “Growing Business” plan

(starting at $10 per month) or go for “Pro Marketer” plan (starting at $25 per month and additional $199 for pro subscription)

GetResponse

GetResponse is an all-in-one platform, which combines email marketing features, with landing page design and marketing automation. This kind of combination of tools makes it a great starting point for businesses looking for ways to grow and expand their reach. The most important features in terms of email marketing include email templates, auto-responders, advanced segmentation and analytic, A/B testing, etc. List building program helps with growing a mailing list with web forms and import feature. When it comes to email design, a drag-anddrop method is used, apart from which, you also get access to the image editor, landing page templates, etc. Real-time activity tracking, subscription statistics, goal tracking and other stats will help you understand your subscribers and the success of your email campaigns. There are four pricing options, starting from the basic one with 1,000 subscribers, email marketing and marketing automation basic features and 1 user for $15 per month. “Pro” plan comes with 5,000 subscribers and additional automation features for $49 per month. If your business needs are even larger, choose “Max” plan, with 10,000 subscribers and advanced features for $165 per month, or “Enterprise “option, starting from $799 per month, with all the available features, 100,000+ subscribers and 10 users. There is a one-month free trial.

Campayn

Campayn is an email marketing solution for small businesses. The software comes with email design features, follow-up emails, detailed reporting with the ability to track responses and clicks, sign-up forms to be embedded on your website, etc. The main reason why this is a small business tool is because it lacks advanced tracking, segmentation, and analysis, which are essential for large companies.

All of the features the tool offers are available with each pricing option, starting from the free account, with a limit of 500 contacts and 20,000 emails, with one follow-up email and basic reporting. The price of the software is determined by a number of contacts. Multi-user is also available as a paid option, otherwise, the tool comes with a single user account.

SendLoop

SendLoop is a digital marketing platform combining email marketing, marketing automation and email gateway in a simple-to-use platform. The most important features include email templates and builder, email delivery infrastructure, reporting, mobile solution, marketing automation, integrations, list management, etc.

There are multiple payment plans available with unlimited email delivery for each plan. The price starts from $9 for 500 subscribers and it goes up as the number of subscribers increases.

Hubspot

This platform is perhaps the most advanced tool of them all, as it comes with an impressive list of features and tools that are particularly designed to help marketers in the management of their tasks. When it comes to email marketing, you will need Hubspot’s marketing software which includes features like content optimization, email marketing, custom workflow, goalbased nurturing, marketing automation, A/B testing for CTAs and emails, event-based segmentation, predictive lead scoring, etc. These kinds of features can really help you take your business to a next level. Hubspot is generally recommended for medium to large business, due to the type of features the platform offers, as well as due to the costs.

Read more on: 7 main types of Email marketing you need

There are three payment plans, starting with “Basic”, available at $200 per month. All Hubspot plans are billed annually and all include onboarding fee, starting at $600 for the “Basic” plan.

There are many more email marketing tools you can find online, and it is worth exploring them, the features they offer and how your business can benefit from those features. The bottom line is: a tool is something you use to assist your marketing efforts. It does not need to be advanced or pricy if that is not what you need. You should adapt the tool to your business needs. Then

define the goals and the features you need an email marketing app to have for you to achieve those goals. In the end, you could test the tool by watching a demo or a review, or you could even sign up for a free trial if the platform offers this as a part of their service.

FreshMail

Here is another tool that comes with a free limited account. This kind of tool is very useful for newsletters, with its templates, auto-responders, and campaign scheduling. It also comes with opportunities for A/B testing, transactional emails, etc. The combination of these features allows you to grow your business through the interaction with subscribers. Email marketing

automation, Google Analytics integration, targeting, segmentation and personalization are also features that make this tool quite handy in your everyday business.

For frequent senders, payment is based on the number of subscribers, with 500 subscribers and 2000 email per month being a limit for the free membership. Paid membership starts at $14 per month with up to 1000 subscribers and unlimited sending. There is also a payment option

where you pay as you go, meaning you only pay when you send emails, which is suitable for those that do not send emails on a regular basis. These plans start from $30 for 5000 emails.

Campaign Monitor

Creating custom and yet effective email campaigns is an essential part of email marketing, and with Campaign Monitor you get access to hundreds of pre-designed templates, as well as a drag-and-drop builder to customize them. Signup forms for your website are also available.

When it comes to analytics, you get access to real-time, interactive data for each campaign, which allows you to evaluate their performance. Integrations with major e-commerce platforms, CRM and websites are available.

Payment plans are generally divided into three groups, basic, unlimited and premier, starting at $9 for 2,500 email limit and 500 contacts. However, each plan offers an opportunity to expand the number of contacts you are reaching out to, which is additionally charged. It is free to signup for the service and to design a campaign, you only pay once you decide to send your first email, which is a great opportunity to test the tool and see if it would be a good addition to your business strategy.

Litmus

editor built for email, which basically allows you to create your own custom email from scratch. Other features include checklists to monitor

performance, spam testing with major spam filters, email analytics, and community. With instant email preview, you get to see a preview of the design across more than 50 apps, which helps with optimizing email in a better way.

There are four payment plans, starting from “Freelancer” plan priced at $79 per month. Each plan comes with a 7-day free trial and 200 email previews available during the trial period.

Top 10 web design mistakes to avoid

2022-08-25T05:04:00.003+00:00

Web design is the process of planning, conceptualizing, and arranging content online. Today, designing a website goes beyond aesthetics to include the website’s overall functionality. Web design also includes web apps, mobile apps, and user interface design.

Avoiding the most common web design mistakes should help you on the way to that success.

We’ll walk you through the worst web design mistakes that you need to avoid. We’ll also provide examples, plus killer tips to help you nail your web design and outshine the competition. Remember – don’t try any of these at home…

1. The design does not speak for itself.

If you are a policeman and you want yourself to be identified as one, then you must always wear the right uniform and the right badge. The same principle goes with web design: you have to wear the right ‘tie’ for your users to know who you are and what you do. If you are selling e-books and tutorials, then you don’t want to let people think that your site is that of a local restaurant they are familiar with.
Start asking if you have solid branding. Do the colours, the font styles, and the objectives of your company reflect your website design, and vice versa? Do you use only the necessary and the right elements for your company to be clearly identified? Do you use trigger keywords to make
people understand at once what you offer? People don’t take more than a minute to guess what your website is about, so you had better show the right face at once.

2. Noisy, unorganized visuals

Since design is about visuals, you must show how user-friendly your website is. User-friendliness is just another technical way of understanding user-centeredness, and if your design is poor in this
respect, then it is another way of saying that you don’t deserve a user. Noisy and unorganized visuals here mean that your content is not properly laid on the surface. Do you have clear navigation? Do the
elements of your website fall on the right sections or areas of the page as a whole? Do your posts have a clear readability, example are they well-spaced, scannable and friendly to the eyes? Do your ads and banners fall on the right areas, so as not to be mistaken for something else? Are there too many distracting elements, like flashy banners and animated texts?

3. 3. Your design manipulates or prohibits users from spontaneity
This may sound very harsh, but you may not be aware of it yet. You know these terms for sure, but for web design, this means that a part or the whole of your design forces users to do something or not to do something.
If people don’t want to enter into your survey, don’t force them to do so in exchange for access to something they’re asking for. How about a pop-up window? Any sudden music playback? Do any links of yours require a new window? We all know that these things are annoying. How about access to some materials or pages? Do you require your users to sign up first? If you are really strict with your content, at least you make yourself clear about why things should be kept that way.

4. Unclear or broken navigation and structure

People hate it when they click a broken link, or worse, a link that leads them to somewhere else. More so, despite the fact that you have a navigation bar, sometimes people want to look for something immediately and specifically without scrolling on your hover buttons one by one. The question now is, do you have an internal search engine and a link to your sitemap?

It is always a failure for websites if their goals are naturally and usually not met. People are being led to your site for a reason, and you only want to satisfy their need. If they cannot find what they are looking for in the first few minutes, then all your efforts and planning fail.

5. Confusing and misleading links

Links are but the circulatory system of the internet. These are the necessary elements wherein all (relevant) pages meet and are anchored upon. Knowing how important links are, you should treat links with respect, and so your users as well. Let the links say what they are about to see and nothing else.

Make a clear distinction also of the differences between your underlined or coloured words or phrases with your links. Make sure also that your links at different states (hover, on, off, etc) portray a different visual cue so as to aid people in knowing which links they have already clicked or not. Lastly, buttons should appear as buttons, and those which are not should not appear as such.

6. 'Long’ pages

The word ‘long’ here equates to two aspects of a web design: length and time. In length, your website should not be so long (vertically or horizontally) that people get sick going back to some key areas they find important. If you are providing a single-page website, make sure that you give assistance to your users by anchor links which will help them jump from one section to another, or even back to the top of the page.

Long texts and content should also be broken down into pieces or ‘chapters.’ You can lay these chapters out in separate pages which is done in a lot of designs. If you are about to integrate a presentation or a PDF, be sure that at least you provide the first few pages or slides first – those that don’t take the most amount of time to load or download. Afterwards, always give users the link to the whole file.
Additionally, you must realize that people hate it when their data connection is slow, and worse, when the website they are in need of connecting to is darn slow and even non-responsive. That’s where
optimization comes in, and that’s where you really need to learn to trim your content to a loadable limit. If you are really a good resource, then be a good resource.

7. User filtration

I have discussed manipulative web designs, but I would like to give more space to user experience as a whole. Remember that readers are impatient, and you cannot blame them if they are seeking only
convenience. Do any of your pages or resources need a ‘higher clearance level’ for them to get access to, such as a required membership? If you are really serious about membership and if you want to take control of and grant access to specific content, at least you must make it easy and clear.
Users won’t be happy if it requires them to fill in personal information over and over again; they are lucky if their browsers have an auto-fill feature. How about you allow other registration methods, such as linking a Facebook or Google account which is quicker? The same also goes for purchases and payments. Do you provide prices at once? Do you make them feel safe when they enter credit card details, or at least provide a PayPal assurance? Does your CAPTCHA look too blurry or is it illegible,

meaning that people will just get frustrated making too many attempts?
Remember that making that utmost appeal to your potential clients or customers is not enough; you must actually guide them along up to the last step and not leave them coughing in the middle. User filtration comes in when they are about to bite what you offer, but turn away frustrated in the middle of the process.

8. Unreachable contact details

Don’t ever forget to include contact details that are visible, comprehensive, and offer a lot of options. Make sure also that the options you offer on your contact area are all working fine and someone is ready to respond.
Remember that your contact information is what makes your users feel assured that they are understood by humans, so you don’t want to compromise it by letting users call an offline channel.

Read more on: What is email marketing?

9. 9. sing splash pages
No, this is not really a sacrilege to web design, but you must understand that using splash pages will create a very rigid barrier between search engines and your site. If you are really worried about SEO stats and reports, then removing the barrier will lead to better results.
Using splash pages can often be seen as an amateur way of advertising as well; it is the equivalent to a shout-out. Do your marketing the natural way, and people will visit you naturally as well.

10.Old design and content

Carefully look at how your website is designed. Is it already out of date? Is the content updated at least regularly? Will there still be somebody looking for your old product?
Always consult a professional if you are not sure if your site needs a redesign. If you have trouble loading your site with content, you can always outsource for talented individuals. If you are really serious about your site’s goals, then you need to do something.

Email marketing Do and don’t

2022-08-24T09:15:00.008+00:00

There are six core areas that represent the essential stages of e-mail marketing at its best. They are delivery, content, timing, testing, legal and measurement.

1. Delivery
There is no point in looking at e-mail marketing until we address how to miss the junk folder and land in the inbox. The messages you are sending are, of course, going to be legitimate and opted-in, but unfortunately they share many characteristics of spam e-mail such as the large volume being sent in a short period of time, and the sales-focused copy with words like ‘free’ or ‘offer’.

Over the years ISP’s and spam filters have tried many ways of trying to distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mail. First they looked at the content of the e-mail and, in particular, keywords used. However, spammers quickly learned to get around this by changing ‘viagra’ to ‘v1agra’ or hiding their text within an image.

Therefore, there has been a shift to looking at the reputation of the sender instead. If the server sending the e-mail has a history of a high number of complaints or invalid addresses then the ISP is more likely to block the e-mail. Yet even this was not enough, as spammers moved on to switching servers very quickly. Therefore, ISPs looked to change the emphasis so that new servers found it harder to get e-mail campaigns delivered than an established server with a good reputation.

All of this has made e-mail delivery a complex area and helped create further growth in the e-mail service provider (ESP) industry. For only a few pounds per month, ESPs help take the majority of the burden off you, allowing you to concentrate your time on creating quality e-mail campaigns.

Do:

● Keep your lists clean. ISPs will look at the amount of bad addresses you are sending to, and complaints your e-mails are generating from their customers as to whether you deserve your e-mail to be delivered.

● Be relevant with your e-mails. Just blasting your database with non-targeted offers will lead to higher complaints, as well as having other detrimental effects on the success of your e-mails.

● Use an e-mail service provider – even if you have limited budget there are providers who will manage the send from their white-listed servers for a few pounds per month, thus taking the burden of looking after all the technical aspects required to get good delivery rates.

Read more on: 11. Email Marketing Tools you need

Don’t:

● Just think that using an ESP will guarantee good inbox placement. An ESP will help out with providing the technical infrastructure to achieve good delivery rates but only you are in control of your sending reputation.

● Add to your list any e-mail addresses that you can get hold of. Sending unsolicited e-mails, or sending to old lists, will cause delivery issues.

2. Developing content for e-mail

When thinking about developing content for an e-mail it is useful to think about the context of your customer checking their e-mail account. Increasingly the inbox is becoming overcrowded, with more than 180 billion e-mails sent and received each day in 2013, according to the Radicati Group. This allows for less time per message, which means you need to stand out amongst the clutter, and grab their attention when they do open your e-mail.

In addition, there is also the longer-term impact of getting your content right or wrong. Those brands that are trusted by the customer and have provided relevant e-mail content previously are more likely to be opened than those sent by brands whose messages have failed to send anything that inspired or was relevant. Your customers will learn to know which brands’ e-mails are not worth their precious time to open.

Do:

● Write punchy short copy. E-mail users tend to scan an e-mail to see if there is anything of interest, so you need to grab their attention. Writing long copy may work in a direct mail letter, but the way people read e-mail is different.

● Focus your effort on the top of the e-mail, which is visible when opening. This is known as ‘above the fold’. If you don’t engage them here then they won’t scroll to find something else in the e-mail.

● Be relevant. This is common sense, but if there is nothing of interest in the e-mail they don’t need to respond. Worse still, if the customer develops a perception that there is never anything relevant to them in your e-mails, then even when there is, the chances are they will ignore the e-mail. Either send different versions to different segments, or utilize dynamic content where whole areas of the e-mail are tailored to the customer’s preferences or past purchases.

● Craft your design so that your key messages still jump out even when the e-mail client does not download images without the recipient first clicking.

Don’t:

● Worry about certain keywords or content getting your e-mail blocked. The days of the word ‘free’ causing your e-mail to land in junk are over. What is important is your reputation as a sender with ISPs.

● Include any attachments, JavaScript, Flash or video. It won’t work and will cause many of your e-mails to be blocked as ISPs consider this to be a security concern.

3. Timing and frequency

When is the best time to send an e-mail? How often should I e-mail my customers? These are probably two of the most asked questions in e-mail marketing. Of course the answer to either of these is not simple. The best time to send an e-mail is not as important as the quality and relevance of the message. There are plenty of examples of e-mail campaigns that perform extremely well no matter what time of day.

Second, how often to send to your database should really be geared around how often you have something valuable and relevant to say. This will not be the same for each segment of your database. New customers should get a welcome programme, defected customers might get an incentive to come back and make a purchase, or you might want to follow up on those who requested a brochure – in order to convert them to a purchaser. E-mail marketing is not just e-mail newsletters.

Do:

● Only send when you have something of value.Don’t get fixated by needing to maintain a certain frequency.

● Time e-mails around the customer life cycle, not just when you have an offer. Instead of treating everyone the same, think how you can improve conversion rates, encourage loyalty and reduce defection through ‘triggering’ special e-mails at key times in your relationship with the customer.

● Send an e-mail before they forget who you are. After putting the effort into getting website visitors to part with their e-mail address, don’t leave it a few weeks till they get your first e-mail. By then the
relationship between you and the customer is likely to be colder, and therefore it is more difficult to engage with them through e-mail.

Don’t:

● Presume that additional e-mails will always generate more revenue. A long-term effect of too many e-mails will lead to your subscribers switching off and ignoring your messages, reducing the revenue generated from e-mail.

4. Testing

One of the greatest strengths of e-mail is the ability to get a message out to your customers in minutes. This presents a danger and an opportunity when it comes to testing. First, the danger is to skip necessary but tedious pre-flight checks through the desire for speed of delivering the e-mail. E-mail has a certain complexity, which means your e-mail may not display as you intend, or it may get caught in spam filters. Then the opportunity. Due to the speed to create a campaign and collate the results, marketers can test different versions to samples of their database. This takes the guesswork out of what type of subject line or call to action creates the most opens and clicks.

Do:

● Try different A/B split tests to prove what works best. Ensure that you send to a minimum of 1,500 per test, otherwise the results are unlikely to be reliable.

● Test in different e-mail clients and webmail providers to make sure the e-mail arrives in the inbox, looking exactly how you intended. Alternatively, use an application such as Litmus.com, which does all of this for you.

Don’t:

● Test more than one thing at a time when split testing, otherwise you won’t know what caused the change in results.

● Send your e-mail without having sent yourself a test as an e-mail. E-mail systems can mangle text and break links as they are not as strong as your browser at handling HTML.

5. Legal and ethics

The law around who you can send marketing e-mails to does vary from region to region. In Europe the privacy legislation is also implemented differently in each member state. In the UK marketers are required to get consumers to opt-in to receive e-mails. However, they can operate on an opt-out basis with corporate customers. This means they can send e-mails until the receiver tells them to stop. With all types of e-mail marketing an option to easily unsubscribe through a link or e-mail address must be
included in each message, and actioned promptly.

While it is important to understand the law, just ensuring you don’t end up in court is not enough. There are many examples of brands pushing the law whether it be making it difficult not to opt-in, or indeed difficult to opt-out. This is self-defeating, however. If someone does not want to be on your list there is no point in keeping them. It can cause deliverability issues as more recipients use the ‘report as spam’ button – and damage to your brand can also occur.

Do:

● Make it clear on your data captureforms what they are opting into, what they will receive and how often.

● Make it easy to unsubscribe, and honour those unsubscribes.

Don’t:

● Think that just because you are within the law that your data capture policy is ethical. In reality, spam is defined by what the recipient thinks is spam, not what the law courts say.

6. Measurement

E-mail marketing campaigns can be fully tracked to enable you to see who got the e-mail, who opened the message, clicked or purchased an item. This presents marketers with a wealth of data in which actionable decisions can be made to improve their e-mail marketing.

Do:

● Track opens, clicks and conversion activity. Every ESP enables you to do this and even Google Analytics will allow you to track how many sales can be attributed to a specific e-mail campaign.

● Report trends, not just specific e-mail campaigns. This enables you to identify if you have declining performance and to project what would happen if that trend continues.

● Analyze per segment of your database.The more you break down the reporting information, the more insight it will give into where your e-mail marketing is and is not working. For example, how do new customers perform compared to existing customers? Is there a difference between gender? What content does each segment prefer?
All of this will then lead on to ideas as to how you can improve underperforming segments.

Don’t:

● Just measure short-term metrics of what happened in that campaign. You need to take a long-term view. Here is an example. If you average 15 per cent open rates, is it the same 15 per cent each time? If so, why are the remaining 85 per cent so inactive? Now you have identified those people it provides a huge untapped opportunity.

● Be happy with industry benchmarks. Just because your competition may average 12 per cent open rates and 3 per cent click rates does not mean you should settle for these. Those brands that put the time
and effort into making their e-mail marketing programme relevant and timely usually improve on the benchmarks by at least 50 per cent.

Email marketing Do and Don't

What is email marketing?

2022-08-20T13:00:00.001+00:00

Email Marketing is an e-mail sent to a customer list that usually contains a sales pitch and a ‘call to action’. This could be as simple as encouraging the customer to click on a web link embedded in the e-mail.

A good email message for successful communication should be:

• With a relevant, yet engaging subject line

• Concise and spot on

• Planned

• Sent at the right moment

• In the language the recipient understands

• Relevant to the recipient

• Without any grammatical or spelling errors

• Without any broken links

Some examples of e-mail marketing campaigns could include:

● a hotel promoting a special summer discount;
● a recruitment company informing business clients about a free seminar;
● a gadget store offering a money-off code to be used at its online checkout;
● a fitness center offering members a special printout voucher that entitles the bearer to bring a friend along for free;
● a beverage company encouraging people to download a game that
integrates into the user’s Facebook profile.

How to start with email marketing?

Once you know the basics, it is time to start with email marketing. In essence, this is a method for achieving goals, a strategy which utilizes your own resources (a mailing list) to boost your online performance.

You must set up goals

Like with any other campaign, if you want to reach success, you have to know what that success is. Goals you want to achieve will dictate the campaign settings, writing style, target audience, etc. They will also dictate the way you measure success. This is why the first step is setting up goals. Here are a couple of examples to get some ideas:

• I want to drive new signups for the service

• I need new leads

• I want to invite people to an event

• I would like to encourage people to donate

• I want to sell my product

These goals are a bit too general and unclear. In order to measure success, you should try to make them measurable. For example, avoid “I want to drive new signups for the service”, but add a measurement “I want to drive 100 new signups for the service”. Or, instead of “I want to sell my product” try “I want to increase sales by 35%”.

You must determine the pace of sending

One of the first things you will need to establish is the pace. The schedule of sending is important to keep you organized, but it also makes users feel more comfortable, as they know when to expect an email from you.

There are studies that have been analyzing the performance of email marketing campaigns, in order to find out what would be the best time to send an email. Multiple types of research have come to the conclusion that Tuesday is the best day for sending emails, while morning, 10 am, in particular, was highlighted as the best time.

In the end, consider the number of emails you send. Some people love getting the scoop every day. Some prefer being updated occasionally, once a week or even monthly. To make sure all of them are satisfied, you can do two things:

• Allow users to choose the pace at which they will receive emails.

• Send emails only when you have something worth sharing

You must establish a style/template

It is time to focus on the actual email. Here are some of the most important things to consider:

• Consistency

Consistency in styling your emails means that you should choose a style and stick to it. This refers to both the writing style and to the visual style. As much as the content of the email needs to be fresh, things that work need not be changed.

• Accuracy

Speaking of credibility, here is another thing that could help you gain or lose credibility. Your email needs to be accurate. Accuracy refers to both grammatically correct text, and to the accuracy of the actual data. For example, if you are sharing some statistics or product prices, make sure those are in fact accurate. Otherwise, you are at risk of recipients unsubscribing, or even reporting you as spam.

· Remember, mobile users read e-mail too

More and more people are accessing their e-mail... including your e-mail marketing missive... on their smartphones and tablets while on the move. That presents a challenge for the e-mail marketer. Think about small display sizes... users may not see your entire subject line, for example, and small display size may affect the way that your carefully crafted e-mail looks. Think about mobile users when you are designing your message: try to ensure it will work on a smaller display, keep your key content to the top right of the e-mail, and make sure it works in text-only form too

• Professionalism

Professionalism refers to your entire approach, as it combines accuracy, consistency, sending relevant emails and keeping up with the schedule. After all, you represent your company and you need to think about the kind of image you want to create for your company through this campaign.

Use rich media judiciously

By and large you should avoid rich media (flash, video, audio, interactive banners, etc) in your e-mail marketing. Rich media can be really useful in augmenting the content on a web page, but it rarely adds value to e-mail communications, and often has the opposite effect.

You must explore and use tools

There are so many email marketing tools on the market, that you might even have a hard time choosing which one to use.

These can either be software that you install on your local machine, software you run on your own server, or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering hosted by an online service provider. These systems let you manage your e-mail list, craft your design templates for your messages and, most importantly, help you to track your e-mail campaigns.

Some of the functions that e-mail marketing tools can provide (and this is not an exhaustive list) include:
● Easy-to-use tools that let you create and work from e-mail templates without having to be a technical expert.
● Testing tools that allow you to check your message will make it past major spam filters.
● Tracking tools that show how many people have ignored, opened or responded to your e-mail

Here are the things you need to have in mind when choosing an email marketing tool:

• Usability

Make sure the tool is user-friendly, as you do not want to spend hours studying how to set up and manage a campaign. The interface that allows email campaign management needs to be simplified and most tools use drag-and-drop method for this reason.

• Features

Determine the features you want and need to have, so that you can focus only on a selection of tools. For example, you might want to have email automation functionality, as well as social media integration. You might need a simple interface, or you might want an advanced marketing solution.

• Costs

A lot of tools offer free trial period, which is a great way to test them first. Most platforms determine their pricing based on the number of contacts you are allowed to have and based on the number of emails you can send per month.

How to Grow Your Marketing Mailing List and more

2022-08-20T07:27:00.004+00:00

While managing a mailing list is a regular task, so is the process of growing the list. Due to a mailing list decay each year, it is essential that you keep trying to grow your mailing list, to keep the number of subscribers on the optimal level. And if you are only just starting out your business, it will be even more important for you to explore different strategies that will help you grow your mailing list.

Subscribe button

The preferred way to grow your mailing list is having a subscribe button on your website or blog. With this option, you give a chance for your subscribers to join the list for them to be updated about your new blog updates or latest promotions. Usually the subscription option includes two fields such as; a name and an email address.

Additional information can be required depending on the website design.

If you are website designer, observe the following carefully while designing a subscription button a website:

Read more on: 11. Email Marketing Tools you need

The position

As some page users don’t usually scroll down the entire page, the button should be near the top to increase the signup rate. Aside that, it also looks more noticeable when placed in front of the text. A subscribe button used to be commonly placed in a sidebar, next to the text, which is a great option to go for when you think about desktop users. However, have in mind that approximately half (if not more) of your visitors will now come from mobile devices. If the subscribe button is in a sidebar, they are unlikely to see it, due to mobile-optimized web design which will show the sidebar below the text.

The size

Let it be of the right size, meaning that it needs to be quite big to be noticed, but yet not too big to disrupt the user experience.

The color

As being part of the website design, so make sure the style matches the website.

Offer something in return

Here the idea is to let users subscribe to a blog or a website, and get something in return. It has to be something that subscribers will see worthy enough to leave their email address. Here are some tips:

• A discount

• Early access

• A free download –

• A coupon

Ask subscribers to share

Respectfully ask your subscribers to share the email if they trust one of their friends would benefit from it.

It also helps if you are able to provide a sort of encouragement for sharing.

A company gives a bonus card and a discount for those who refer a friend:

Use social media

You can use social networks in two ways to reach new subscribers.

• Ask people to subscribe to your newsletter

Because you want to boost the performance of your post, you could include a link to a lead page where they would get something in exchange for their email address. It could be anything, for example a free template, an eBook, or a coupon. You could use all your social media accounts for this kind of promotion, as it helps you reach a great number of users, you might not be able to reach otherwise.

• Use a Signup button

Some social media websites, such as Facebook, offer a Signup button. This means that the social media users can sign up to your blog directly from your Facebook page. Once they click on it, they will be redirected to a landing page where they can subscribe. Again, it does help if you have something useful to share, such as a free download.

Read more on: What is email marketing?

Use paid ads to invite new subscribers

The process of gaining email addresses can be boosted through paid ads. Here are a couple of steps to use:

Step 1: Create a stunning landing page

It is very helpful to have a landing page. You will not be targeting your own website visitors. Instead, you will be focusing on new visitors, and when they first visit your website, you want them to see an amazing presentation.

This includes custom landing page design, beautiful images, immaculate formatting, and of course, a prominent subscribe button.

Step 2: Create an offer your target audience will love

Create something that your target audience will love and find useful which they cannot resist when they visit your website. Even though it will require resources to be invested, this has been a proven method that significantly increases a signup rate.

Step 3: Create an ad campaign

Now you have a landing page and an offer featured on that page. The last step is to promote the landing page using any of the paid advertising options that are available to you. For instance:

• Google AdWords

• Bing Ads

• LinkedIn Ads

• YouTube Ads

• Pinterest Ads

• Facebook Ads

• Twitter Ads

• Advertising on other website or blogs

The best way to get optimal results is to use all of the approaches to a certain extent.

According to your business and the resources you have available for growing a mailing list, make sure you define a strategy that will produce great results in the long run.

You could determine the exact cost of an email. For example, based on your prior experience, you have concluded that 10 new email addresses equal to at least one sale, then you could calculate the value of a new contact. This could help you with determining the budget.

Monitoring and the analysis of the process will only help you make your strategy even more successful, as you will learn more about your subscribers, the way they interact with your content, which channels they use to find your website, etc. And the more you get to know your subscribers, the easier it will be for you to convert them.

7 main types of Email marketing you need

2022-08-19T21:28:00.002+00:00

There is no a strict classification of emails. For instance, some marketers choose to group emails into transactional and non-transactional, while some choose to go beyond that, and have even more narrow groups, so they have a welcome email, a notification email, etc.

The first main division we could highlight is based on the number of emails you send in the campaign, so we have one-to-many and then one-to-one emails.

One-to-many email

One-to-many emails refers to the emails sent to the entire mailing list or a certain targeted group within that list. The core advantage of these emails is that they have a huge reach, thus the great potential to generate traffic and escalation conversions.

Even though you reach out to a huge number of subscribers, you will still be designing a single email. This could also have a negative effect because your email might seem too general and it might lack personalization.

Within this large group of one-to-many emails, there are several types of emails:

A newsletter is one of the most popular types of emails. These generally contain information from your blog or website that you have recently published. They could also feature the news about your company, events, announcements, etc. By sending regular emails, you establish a connection with the readers, you bring them back to your website in the attempt to engage and convert them. On one hand, a newsletter is a very useful type of email as it allows you to combine different types of content, such as new articles from the blog, the announcement of the upcoming event, etc.

Basically, you share any news related to your company. While this can be considered a benefit, it can also be seen as a drawback, because due to this compilation of information, your call-to-action button may be less in the focus. A newsletter email is usually sent according to a certain schedule you have determined.

Advantages of email newsletters

Brand Awareness: Newsletters create certain anticipation in readers. Whether it is a daily newsletter or a weekend communication, readers get into the habit of receiving it. So if you’re considering sending email newsletters, make sure you’re sending them on a regular cadence. If readers enjoy the content, they will most likely stay subscribed to the newsletter. Building a habit In your email subscribers enables them to recognize your brand and associate it with a positive sentiment.

Repurpose Content: Newsletters generally contain information that you have already published. Many companies do quick summaries of their most popular blog posts and link to the articles from their newsletter. In this way, they bring subscribers back to the company website and engage them with more company content.

Diverse Content:Email newsletters give you the freedom to include different content types all in one email that might be important to your organization. For instance, the same newsletter can contain a popular blog post, a new offer, an announcement of an upcoming event, information about a discount and a link to a survey. There might even be a video embedded in the email.

Disadvantages of email newsletters

Diluted Call-To-Action: Newsletters can be overwhelming with multiple calls-to-action. If you include a series of blurbs or article summaries, the attention of your recipients will most likely be spread across these tidbits of information as opposed to staying focused on a certain element. Of course, you can address this by prioritizing the most important information at the top of the newsletter and include a clear call-to-action after or alongside each block of text.

Design: With newsletters, the layout becomes a much more complicated task than with dedicated email sends. You’ll have to spend some time deciding on the right placement of images and text, alignment and prioritization of information.

Digest email

This type of email is similar to the newsletter, but the design is much simpler and concise. In a digest email, you share the most important pieces of content in a form of a short list with links.

This way you help your subscribers find your content easily, which is especially helpful for blogs that publish a lot of content. The goal is the same as with the newsletter, you share information, increase brand awareness, and generate traffic, but the design is what differentiate these two.

Digest emails are frequently automated so that the software simply picks up the scoop from your blog and send it to the subscribers. This is a perfect way to keep the subscribers informed if you have a lot of content published each day. Having a schedule for sending a digest email could be helpful to your subscribers, as they will know when to expect the new digest.

Dedicated send email

A dedicated send email is an email your organization will send to a specific group of people that subscribe to your business. For instance, when you’re hosting an event, like a conference or webinar, you may want an announcement to only those who have registered or signed up.

Essentially, these emails won’t be to your complete list of subscribers, but only to ones that are in need of the information your email includes.

The main benefit of a dedicated email is the ability to highlight a single event that is important to you. You will have a strong call-to-action button, which will have much more impact on your campaign. Unlike newsletters, dedicated emails are usually sent without any specific schedule.

Sponsorship email

Like with paid ads in search engine marketing, email marketing also allows getting promotion through paid methods. With a sponsorship email, you pay to be included in a newsletter of another website or company. This means a huge new lead potential, as you will be targeting an entirely new community.

Of course, to make sure you are getting quality leads, you need to collaborate with companies that have the same target group as you. This kind of advertising will be relevant to the recipients and this way you will be able to get visitors who are genuinely interested in products and services you provide.

Advantages Of Sponsorship Emails

Highly Targeted: The biggest advantage of sponsorship emails is that you can be specific in defining the segment you want to reach. Get granular in identifying the different characteristics of your target audience — number of employees, geographic location, their interests and challenges, etc.
Exact ROI: There is a very specific investment in sponsorship emails — you know how much you are paying the vendor. Now you only need to track the results you are getting (visits, leads, sales) to determine your return on the cost you have paid. Knowing the exact ROI will help you fit it into your marketing budget and build accurate marketing reports at the end of the quarter.

Disadvantages Of Sponsorship Emails

It's Paid: Sponsorship emails are sent to people you haven’t earned as subscribers (they didn’t opt-in to your list). In this context, you have to pay to get content in front of them. Vendors offer different payment packages and here you enter the land of negotiation. Some of the most popular options are paying a flat free, paying based on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model or paying per new lead acquired.

Dedicated Resources: Sponsorship emails and management of the vendor relationship require a big marketing effort and tight control. In addition to brand synergies, you'll also need to understand the data behind their emails. If your industrial business has a small marketing team, this type of email marketing can be difficult to execute.

One-to-one email

This group of emails includes the types of emails that are sent to a single user. The focus of such email campaign is not a huge reach because you will not be contacting the entire community.

On the contrary, you will be focused on one subscriber only. The goal of this approach is to establish a connection with the subscriber, strengthen the relationship, and increase the credibility of your brand.

The main benefit of these emails is that you can focus on one user as you introduce the user to your brand and community. Usually, you will use the existing content to do so.

The most common types of the one-to-one emails include:

Lead nurture

This is a type of an email that is supposed to establish a firm connection with your subscriber.

After someone signs up for your newsletter, sending out lead nurture emails can help them discover more about your brand, obtain even more free resources, discover more great content on your blog, etc. Since lead nurture emails are usually automated, your company will benefit from them without any extra work once you have a new lead.

Unlike other emails where you reach out to the entire list of subscribers or a certain targeted group, the reach of lead nurture email is much lower, because you only target new leads. However, the reach is not even the goal here. The idea is to deepen your relationship with the subscriber and you will accomplish that by focusing on their needs.

Advantages Of Lead Nurturing Emails

It's Timely: Study after study shows that email response rates decline over the age of the lead. You need to use lead nurturing campaigns to take advantage of the dynamic between subscriber recency and CTR. What that means is that if you have a new lead, don't wait to contact them!
It's Automated: Once you set up lead nurturing, emails are sent out automatically according to your schedule as new leads come in. This leads to a high return on a low investment. You might launch the campaigns and forget about them, but the emails will be doing the work for you, helping you qualify leads and push them down the sales funnel faster. See what we mean by needing a marketing CRM platform?

It's Targeted: Studies show that targeted and segmented emails perform better than mass email communications. Lead nurturing enables you to tie a series of emails to a specific activity or conversion event. You can craft your follow-up email based on the action a lead has taken on your website, thus showing that you know their interests in the topic and what they might need next. Lead nurturing emails can highlight reconversion opportunities that tie back to their earlier interests based on this information.

Disadvantages Of Lead Nurturing Emails

Generates Less Concurrent Buzz: With dedicated sends to your email database, you can generate a lot of buzz around your brand. If you're sharing a brand new product or service, there is usually an increase in engagement resulting from simultaneous forwarding and social media sharing (especially if you have Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter sharing links in your email). Lead nurturing cannot quite achieve the same buzz effect because it is programmed to schedule fewer emails to segmented audiences. So while there will still be sharing, you won’t see a huge spike in traffic and conversions on a specific day. Rather, the visits and leads will trickle in.
Passive Tracking: Because lead nurturing is automated and marketers often forget about it after they’ve set it up, it also tends to be underreported. Make sure your lead nurturing campaigns include unique tracking tokens. Remember to revisit your marketing analytics often to evaluate performance and prove the ROI of your efforts.

Notification emails

Notification emails are also known as alerts and auto-responders. They notify the recipient each time something happens, and these actions are also known as triggers. The sender needs to establish some criteria for an outgoing message, something that will be a trigger for notification email to be sent.

For example, a confirmation email about a successful online purchase, congratulations on a subscription, a welcome email, a birthday email, etc. and many other types of emails that are triggered by a specific action.

Social media emails

Unlike the above email campaigns, where you reach out to your subscribers, social media gives you an option to reach users' inboxes through the social media platform. For example, LinkedIn groups allow their administrators to send LinkedIn announcements, which will be sent to the members' inboxes. The same goes for Google+.

Although you do not really have access to user's email, nor could you use a software to customize the email or track conversions, this could still be a good way to leverage the power of an email campaign. This approach opens up new opportunities to grow your business. You are able to reach the people who might not be completely familiar with your brand which is a great way to gain new leads and potential customers.

Conclusion

The choice of the email type you are going to send depends on the goal you want to achieve. Each type has its distinctive features and it fulfills a certain purpose. Understanding the distinctions among them will help you make a better choice for the future campaigns.

Building an effective marketing website strategies

2022-08-06T20:32:00.005+00:00

An effective website is essentially about the convergence of two things:

your business goals and the needs of your target market. Build something that aligns the two and you will end up with an effective website. Broken down like that it sounds simple, but achieving that convergence can be a tricky process – and a quick surf around the web will soon demonstrate that it is easier to get it wrong than to get it right.

For a website to be successful people need to be able to find it, but if you build your site to cater for the right people’s needs you significantly increase the chance that, once they arrive, they will become more than just a passing statistic.

What follows is a high-level overview of the important elements to consider when designing your website from a digital marketing perspective. It is not meant to be an exhaustive guide.

The main steps of building your marketing website

Different businesses will follow different processes involving different groups of people when designing, developing and implementing a website, but regardless of the approach you choose to take, how formal or informal the process, there are a number of key stages that generally form part of any web development project:

● Planning: establish your goals for the site; analyse the competition; define who your target market is, how they will find you online and what they will be looking for when they arrive; map out a schedule and decide who will do what and when.

● Design: decide on the ‘look and feel’ of the site: colours, graphics, information architecture (the arrangement or structure of the information), navigation, etc. The way that information is arranged can have a big impact on a site’s usability and its perceived relevance and authority both for users and search engines.

● Development: putting it all together, taking the agreed design and constructing the actual pages of the site, crafting the content, links and navigation hierarchy.

● Testing: making sure everything works the way it should before you let it out onto the big bad internet.

● Responsive web design (RWD) – if your customers are mobile then you would probably be wise to design your site with mobile screen sizes and functionality in mind.

● Deployment: your new site becomes live on the internet for the whole world to find... or not, as the case may be.

Read more on: What is Email marketing?

Choosing your domain name

Every website on the internet has a unique address (a slight simplification). It is called an IP address, and is not very interesting, informative or memorable to most humans. It consists of a series of numbers something like 209.85.143.99. While this is fine for computers and the occasional numerically inclined tech-head, it’s not much use to the rest of us. These domain names – things like digitalmarketingsuccess.com, google.com, wikipedia.org or harvard.edu – are naturally much more useful and memorable to your average human than the IP addresses they relate to.

You need your own domain name

If you don’t have your own domain name, you need to register one. As a business, if you want to be taken seriously online, piggybacking on someone

else’s domain is completely unacceptable. The good news is that registering a domain is cheap (less than US $10 per year, depending on the domain registrar you choose) and easy. It may be included as part of the package offered by your website developer, or you can easily register a domain yourself. You can check availability, select your domain and register it in minutes online.

Some things to bear in mind when choosing your domain name are:

● Make it catchy, memorable and relevant: choose an easily identifiable domain name that is relevant to your business and easy for people to remember.

● Use a country-specific top level domain (TLD) to appeal to a local audience: the TLD is the element of an internet domain name that comes after the ‘dot’. For instance in the domain name digitalmarkrting.comthe top-level domain is com or COM. If your market is local, it often pays to register the local version of the domain (.co.uk or .ie, for example) or the more generic .com, .net or .org. If you’re appealing to an international audience, a generic TLD may serve you better.

● You can buy multiple domain names: there is nothing to stop you buying more than one domain to prevent others from registering them. You can then redirect the secondary domains to point to your main website. Another option is registering country-specific domains to give yourself an online ‘presence’ in each country you do business in. You can then deploy a regionally tailored version of your website to each of those domains (the preferable option), or redirect them to a localized section on your main website.

● Consider different suffixes: there are so many available these days .mobi. insurance .sport and so on. Maybe one of these suffixes is a cool idea for your particular brand?

● Keywords in a domain name can be beneficial: you may decide to incorporate one of your keyword phrases into your domain name. Opinion varies on the significance of this in terms of its impact on your search engine ranking, but it may help both search engines and users to establish what your site is about right from the start.

hosting – your marketing website’s home on the internet

Your finished site will consist of files, applications and possibly a database, all of which sit on a computer that is permanently connected to the internet. This computer is your web server, and will be running special software that will accept requests from users’ web browsers and deliver your web pages by return.

Unless you belong to a large organization with its own data centre that has a permanent connection to the internet backbone, it is highly unlikely that you will host your site in-house. A much more likely scenario is to arrange a hosting solution through a specialist hosting provider.

Different types of hosting

There are basically three different types of hosting offered by web hosting companies – all of which are perfectly acceptable for your business website. Which option you choose will depend largely on your budget, how busy you anticipate your website will be (in terms of visitor traffic), and the amount of control you want over the configuration of the server (whether you need to install your own custom software, change security settings, configure web server options, etc).

Shared hosting accounts

With shared hosting you are essentially renting space on a powerful server where your website(s) will sit alongside a number of other websites (typically hundreds, sometimes thousands on a single server). Each hosting account has its own, secure virtual space on the server where you can upload your site’s files. A dedicated control panel for account administration offers some degree of control over server configuration and usually provides access to a suite of additional software and tools to help you (or your webmaster) manage your website(s).

Virtual dedicated hosting

With virtual dedicated hosting a single server is ‘split’ into a number of virtual servers. Each user feels like they’re on their own dedicated computer, when in fact they’re sharing the resources of the same physical machine. The users will typically have complete administrative control over their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server (VPS). Virtual dedicated hosting offers complete flexibility in terms of the administration, software and configuration options available, you’re still sharing server resources with other users/ websites.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting solutions provide a dedicated, high-powered server for your website(s), and your website(s) alone. You don’t share space or system resources with anybody else – which means you don’t share the cost either... making dedicated hosting comparatively expensive.

Dedicated servers offer much more power and flexibility, because changes made to the server affect only your website(s). That means that you (or your webmaster/technical team) have complete control over server configuration, security, software and settings. They also typically offer much more capacity in terms of space and bandwidth than shared hosting – making them suitable for high-traffic sites.

Because of the flexibility and control offered by dedicated hosting solutions (complete control over the host computer), they tend to require more technical ability to administer than shared hosting environments.

Server co-location

Co-location is essentially the same as dedicated hosting, except that instead of the hosting company providing a preconfigured dedicated server for your website, you buy and configure your own server, which is then hosted at their dedicated hosting facility. This offers perhaps the ultimate in flexibility, because you have complete control not only over the software and setting on the server, but also over the hardware specification, operating system, software, security... everything. Co-location is essentially the same as hosting your own server in your own office – except that your server is plugged in to a rack in a dedicated hosting facility with all of the bells and whistles you’d expect.

Cloud-based hosting

Cloud-based hosting is different to traditional hosting models in that you pay for your hosting based on the resources you use, rather than paying for a fixed hardware resource and monthly allowance of space and bandwidth. Essentially, when you’re hosting in the ‘cloud’ your web server is a virtual entity, it doesn’t exist on a single physical server, it is distributed across multiple clustered servers, sharing resources between them. In theory, cloudbased hosting can be cost-effective, because you only pay for the resources you use; instantly scalable, because you can tap into practically limitless56 Understanding Digital Marketing computing resources on-the-fly; and inherently reliable, as there is no single point of failure. If one physical machine keels over, the others share the load until another comes on stream to replace it. That is a very simplistic explanation of how cloud computing works... but you get the idea.

Cloud computing, which encompasses cloud-based hosting, is not without its issues. These largely revolve around data ownership, privacy and security; the debate, as always, is ongoing. That said, cloud-based hosting is really gaining traction in the marketplace, and increasing numbers of hosting providers are now offering a cloud-based ‘pay for what you use’ option as part of their portfolio. As always, you need to weigh the merits of what is on offer and decide what works best for your business

Choosing your hosting company

When choosing your web host, bear the following in mind:

● Choose a host in the country where your primary target market lives: this is important, because search engines deliver local search results to users based in part on the geographical location of the server on which the web pages reside (which they can infer from the server IP address).

● Make sure the host is reliable: do they offer guaranteed uptime/levels of service? Many hosts publish live server statistics that demonstrate the reliability of their services. You should expect a service level approaching 100 per cent from a high-quality hosting service.

● What sort of support do they offer: make sure the hosting you choose includes efficient and effective support 24/7. If your website goes down you need to be confident you can call on your host for assistance whatever time of the day or night.

● Backup and disaster recovery:if the worst happens and the server goes belly up, what sort of disaster recovery options does the host have in place? Ideally your host should take several daily snapshots of your entire account/server, allowing them to restore it and get your site back up and running as quickly as possible, should the worst happen.

● What do others think: find out what other customers think. Read testimonials, and search for discussions on webmaster forums and social media sites relating to the hosts you are considering. Are other people’s experiences good or bad? Post a few questions.

● Shop around: hosting is an incredibly competitive industry, so shop around for the best deal – but bear in mind that the cheapest option isn’t always the best choice.

Read more on: Email marketing Do and don’t

Arranging your information

Getting your information architecture right is absolutely critical to the success of your website. It can be difficult to know where to start. The keywords your potential users are searching on should give you a good indication of both the content they are looking for and the search terms you want your site to rank for in the SERPs. Take those keywords and arrange them into logical categories or themes. These themes, along with the staple ‘homepage’, ‘about us’ and ‘contact us’ links, give you the primary navigation structure for your site.

Define your content structure:

Look at your main themes, the keywords you have associated with each of them and the corresponding information or content you want to include beneath each. Now define a tiered hierarchy of subcategories (your secondary, tertiary navigation levels, etc) within each theme as necessary until you have all of your targeted keywords covered. Arrange your content so that the most important information is summarized at the highest levels, allowing the user to drill down to more detailed but less important information on the specific topic as required. Try not to go too deep in terms of navigation subcategories – it is rarely necessary to go beyond three, in exceptional cases four, levels deep from the homepage

Your homepage

The homepage is often perceived as one of the most important pages on your site, but is potentially one of the least useful, both to your business and to your site visitors. For a start, homepages tend, by necessity, to be relatively generic.

Where a homepage comes into its own is as a central reference point for navigating your content. It is also a convenient central location that users can easily return to.

Your homepage should be a ‘jumping off point’ for the rest of your site, offering intuitive one-click navigation to all of your main sections or themes, and telling people immediately what your site is about, and how it can help them. It is also a good place to highlight new products and services, special offers, incentives, news or anything else you want to promote on your site.

Writing effective web content

The golden rule of writing effectively in any medium is to know your audience – the more your writing is tailored to your audience, the more effective it is. It is exactly the same on the web.

Writing effective web content is about taking what we know about web users in general, and the target audience of our website in particular, and applying that knowledge to deliver our information in a format that meets those readers’ needs:

● Grab attention: web users are impatient – forget flowery introductions and verbose descriptions, make your writing clear, concise and to the point from the start.

● Make it scannable: avoid large blocks of uninterrupted text. Use headings, subheadings and bullet points to break up the text into manageable, scannable stand-alone chunks.

● Make it original: unique, original content is a great way to engage your users, establish your relevance and authority, and search engines love it.

● Use the inverted pyramid: the inverted pyramid writing style often used for newspaper stories tends to work well on the web. Aim to deliver the most important points of your story first, going on to deliver supporting details in order of decreasing importance down the page. Ideally, the user should be able to stop reading at any point and still get the gist of the content.

● Be consistent: use a simple, easy-to-read writing style, and keep things consistent across the site. If you have a number of people creating your content, consider developing a style guide or house style to help maintain consistency.

● Engage with your reader: use a conversational style, and write as if you were talking to an individual rather than an audience. It will help your writing to engage with the reader on a much more personal level.

Digital marketing| strategy and more

2022-08-06T15:17:00.004+00:00

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.

Why do you need a digital marketing strategy?

The simple answer: because without one you will miss opportunities and lose business. Formulating a digital marketing strategy will help you to make informed decisions about your foray into the digital marketing arena, and ensure that your efforts are focused on the elements of digital marketing that are most relevant to your business. It is a crucial first step towards understanding how the constantly evolving digital marketplace relates to you, and how it affects the relationship between your business or brand, and your customers and prospects.

Unlike conventional forms of mass-media marketing, the internet is unique in its capacity to both broaden the scope of your marketing reach and narrow its focus at the same time. Using digital channels you can transcend traditional constraints such as geography and time zones to connect with a much wider audience. At the same time, digital technology allows you to hone your marketing message with laser-like precision to target very specific niche segments within that wider market. Implemented effectively it can be an incredibly powerful combination.

And therein lies the crux of our need for a cohesive digital marketing strategy. If you’re going to harness the power of digital marketing to drive your online business to dizzying new heights, you need a thorough understanding of your market, how your customers are using digital technology, and how your business can best utilize that same technology to build enduring and mutually rewarding relationships with them.

As digital channels continue to broaden the scope available to us as marketers, so they add to the potential complexity of any digital marketing campaign. Having a clearly defined strategy will help to keep you focused, ensure that your marketing activities are always aligned with your business goals and, crucially, that you’re targeting the right people.

Digital marketing – yes or no

There are really only two key questions you need to answer when it comes to deciding whether or not your business needs a digital marketing strategy.
They are:

1 Is my audience online/is it going to be online?

If your customers use digital technology to research and/or purchase the products and services you provide, then you absolutely need to embrace digital marketing now in order to engage with them and retain them. If they don’t, then you don’t. It really is that simple. Just bear in mind that as the next generation of consumers start to become your new customers, they are likely to demand more digital interaction from your business. If you’re not in a position to deliver that, they could well choose to spend their money elsewhere.

2 Are my products/services/brands suited to digital marketing?

This can be a tricky one – but the answer is usually yes. Typically it doesn’t matter
what your product, service or brand is: as long as you have established that there is a viable online audience for it (see question 1), then you should be promoting it online. While some products and services are obviously more suited to online purchase and fulfilment than others (digital files, such as e-books or music, spring to mind), you will also find being marketed effectively through digital channels plenty of items that few people would ever dream of actually purchasing over the internet. Consumers go online to research, evaluate and compare their choices. They make purchasing decisions based on the quality of their online experience, then head to a bricks-and-mortar store to hand over their cash. Boats, cars, houses, apartments, horses, tractors – you name it – they are all being actively and successfully marketed online.

Laying strong digital foundations

The good news is that you’ve almost certainly already started the process of defining your digital marketing strategy. Before even picking up this book you’ve probably been thinking about digital marketing in the context of your business, about what your competitors are doing online and why, about how your customers and prospects are integrating digital technology into their lives, and about how you can best exploit these new and exciting digital channels to foster longer, more productive relationships with them. These are the components that will form the foundation of your digital marketing strategy:

● Know your business: is your business ready to embrace digital marketing? Are your products/services suited to online promotion? Do you have the right technology/skills/infrastructure in place? How will digital marketing fit into your existing business processes? Do those processes need to change, and are you and your staff ready to accommodate those changes?

● Know the competition: who are your main competitors in the digital marketplace? Are they the same as your offline competitors? What are they doing right (emulate them)? What are they doing wrong (learn from them)? What aren’t they doing at all (is there an opportunity there for you?)? How can you differentiate your online
offering from theirs? Remember, competition in the digital world can come from just around the corner, or from right around the globe.
The same technologies that allow you to reach out to a broader geographical market also allow others to reach in to your local market. When you venture online you are entering a global game, so don’t limit your analysis to local competition.

● Know your customers: who are your customers and what do they want from you? Are you going to be servicing the same customer base online, or are you fishing for business from a completely new demographic? How do the customers you’re targeting use digital technology, and how can you harness that knowledge to engage in a productive and ongoing relationship with them?

● Know what you want to achieve: if you don’t know where you’re going, there’s a pretty fair chance you’ll never get there. What do you want to get out of digital marketing? Setting clear, measurable and achievable goals is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. Are you looking to generate online sales, create a source of targeted sales leads, improve your brand awareness among online communities, all of the above or perhaps something completely different? Your goals are the yardsticks against which you can measure the progress of your digital marketing campaigns.

● Know how you’re doing: the beauty of digital marketing is that, compared to many forms of advertising, results are so much more measurable. You can track everything that happens online and compare your progress against predefined goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). How is your digital campaign progressing? Are certain digital channels delivering more traffic than others? Why is that? What about conversion rates – how much of that increased traffic results in tangible value to your business? Measure, tweak, refine, re-measure. Digital marketing is an ongoing iterative process.
The process of formally defining your digital marketing strategy forces you to sit down and analyse with a critical eye the market in which you’re operating, and to really think about the different components of your business and how digital marketing can help you to achieve your business goals.

Read more on: Top 10 web design mistakes to avoid

Know your four "Ps"

You might be asking yourself how all this newfangled digital ‘stuff’ fits in to the traditional marketing mix: the venerable four Ps of Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Well, it breaks down something like this.

Place

Let’s start with the obvious one: it’s the internet. It’s the 2.4 billion plus people around the world who have decided it is better to be connected... whether it is accessed through a computer, a mobile device, internet protocol television (IPTV) or whatever else might come along. That’s really it.

Price

Pricing is critical online. You have to be competitive: this is the internet, and pricing is transparent. You don’t necessarily have to be the cheapest – but to compete you need to make sure your overall value proposition to the customer is compelling. Overprice your product and a host of price comparison sites will soon highlight the fact, as will the countless peer review communities where consumers actively debate the relative merits (or otherwise) of everything from financial products to wedding stationery.

Product

This is what you have to offer – your unique value proposition to your customers. A good product, of course, is the cornerstone of all successful marketing, but it is particularly crucial in the digital arena. A product that delivers tangible benefits and fills a real need in the marketplace – something that leaves the customer with a genuine perception of value – gives marketers the scope they need to do their job effectively. When you’re promoting something viable, it’s much easier to engage with consumers and to convince them to buy.
Conversely, the best marketing minds in the world will struggle to promote a product that doesn’t deliver the goods. And this is where the all-pervading, viral nature of the internet can really come back to bite you. If you promote a product online and that product doesn’t deliver, you had better be prepared for the backlash.

Digital consumers are no wallflowers – they are vociferous and well connected. They won’t keep the shortcomings of your product or business to themselves – they’ll shout about it from the tallest building in cyberspace, and others will quickly pick up the cry. Once that happens you can pretty much shelve your marketing ambitions and go back to the drawing board.
So, it is important to make sure your product and the entire customer value chain associated with it is right from the start. You need a solid foundation if you’re going to build a sustainable online business, and that all starts with a sound product.

Promotion

Promotion is everything you do, online and offline, to get your product in front of your prospects, acquire new customers and retain existing ones. Examining those options will form the bulk of the rest of this book: in the following chapters we’ll discuss the major forms of online promotion available now, and will go on to look at emerging and future trends. Here we summarize the main elements in order to whet your appetite:

● Your website: your website is the hub of your digital world – and perhaps the most important element in your whole digital marketing strategy. It’s a vital piece of online real estate to which all of your other online activity will direct your prospects. A lot of the digital marketing techniques discussed in this book are about generating traffic to your website – but traffic in itself is worthless. To become valuable, traffic must be converted – and that is essentially what your website should be: a conversion engine for the traffic being directed to it.

Read more on: 11. Email Marketing Tools you need

● Search engine optimization (SEO): part and parcel of the website is SEO, or the process of aligning content on your website to what your prospects are actively searching for, and presenting it in a manner that makes it accessible to both people and search engines. The organic or natural search results (the results in the middle of the search engine results page) is the place to be if you want to increase targeted traffic to your website.

● Pay per click search advertising (PPC): pay per click advertising offers you a way to buy your way onto the search results pages for chosen keywords or key phrases. Depending on your business and what keywords you want to rank for, this can be an extremely effective way of generating search engine traffic quickly, although as the
medium continues to gain in popularity more competitive keywords are becoming prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses.

● Affiliate/performance marketing and strategic partnerships: how to partner with other organizations and websites in mutually beneficial relationships to promote your products or services.

● Online public relations: using online channels such as press releases, article syndication and blogs to create a positive perception of your brand and/or position you as an authority in your particular field.

● Social media: the focus of Web 2.0 and a massive growth area for marketers online and one that can potentially offer highly targeted advertising to niche social groups based on profile information they volunteer through sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and so on. Social media and social networking is an entire branch of
digital marketing that is producing incredibly exciting results.

● E-mail marketing: the granddaddy of internet marketing, suffering something of a crisis in the wake of perpetual spam bombardment, but still an important tool in the digital marketer’s arsenal, particularly when it comes to maintaining ongoing relationships with existing customers and prospects who have ‘opted in’ to receive
information.

● Mobile marketing: the up-and-coming star of digital... mobile is finally poised to deliver on the latent potential that has been promising to erupt for years. With smartphone penetration growing and fast mobile internet becoming almost ubiquitous, at least in urban centres, mobile means your customers now have access to your content any time, any place, anywhere!

● Customer relationship management: retaining existing customers, and building mutually rewarding relationships with them, is another important element of digital marketing. Digital technology makes developing an enduring connection with your customers more straightforward and effective than ever before.

● Content marketing... I feel people have always understood the importance of good content but now that Google and other search engines will rank your pages based upon its content offering – and the fact that content is pulling better response (at times) than display media – it cannot be ignored (please refer to Chapter 11).

● Display media: what used to be just plain old online advertising has developed into its own science, with incredible results and new technologies every day. Retargeting, in particular, is an area worthy of examination. Online video, online audio, real-time bidding – lots to consider here.

Mango | Health benefits and more

2022-05-08T17:07:00.013+00:00

The king of fruits, mango fruit is one of the most popular, nutritionally rich fruits with unique flavor, fragrance, taste, and health promoting qualities, making it numero-uno among new functional foods, often labeled as super fruit.

Mango is one of the delicious seasonal fruits grown in the tropics. The tree is believed to be originating in the sub-Himalayan plains of Indian subcontinent. Botanically, this exotic fruit belongs within the family of anacardiaceae, a family that also includes numerous species of tropical-fruiting trees in the following plants such as cashew, pistachio ..etc.

Scientific name: Mangifera Indica.

Mango has more than what you think

Mango is a tropical tree cultivated in many regions of India, and now its farming distributed wide across the world in many continents. Usually, fruits grow at the end of a long, string like stem, with sometimes more than one fruit to a stem.

Each fruit measures 5 to 16 cms in length and about 4 to 10 cms in width, and has typical mango shape, or sometimes oval or round. Its weight ranges from 150 gm to around 750 gm. Outer skin is smooth and is green in unripe mangoes but turn into golden yellow, crimson red, yellow or orange-red when ripen depending upon the cultivar type. Fresh mango season last from April until August.

Mango comes in different shapes and sizes depending upon cultivar types. Internally, its fresh is juicy, orange yellow in color with numerous soft fibrils radiating from its centrally placed fat, oval-shaped stone (enveloping a single large kidney-shaped seed). Its flavor is pleasant and rich, and tastes sweet with mild tartness. A high-quality mango fruit should feature no or very less fiber content and minimal sour taste. Mango seed (stone) may has a single embryo, or sometimes polyembryonic.

Here are amazing health and benefits of mango

Mango fruit is rich in pre-biotic dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals, and poly-phenolic flavonoids antioxidant compounds.

According to new research study, mango fruit has been found to protect against colon, breast, leukemia and prostate cancers. Several trial studies suggest that poly-phenolic anti-oxidant compound in mango are known to offer protection against breast and colon cancers.

1. Mango fruit is an excellent source of vitamin-A and flavonoids like beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, and beta-cryptoxanthin. 100 g of fresh fruit provides 765 IU or 25% of recommended daily levels of vitamin-A. Together; these compounds have been known to have antioxidant properties and are essential for vision. Vitamin-A is also required for maintaining healthy mucus membranes and skin. Consumption of natural fruits rich in carotenes is known to protect the body from lung and oral cavity cancers.

2. Fresh mango is a good source of potassium. 100 g fruit provides 156 mg of potassium while just 2 mg of sodium. Potassium is an important component of cell and body fluids that helps controlling heart rate and blood pressure.

3. It is also a very good source of vitamin-B6 (pyridoxine), vitamin-C and vitamin-E. Consumption of foods rich in vitamin C helps the body develop resistance against infectious agents and scavenge harmful oxygen-free radicals. Vitamin B-6 or pyridoxine is requires for GABA hormone production within the brain. It also controls homocystience levels within the blood, which may otherwise be harmful to blood vessels resulting in CAD, and stroke.

4. Further, it composes moderate amounts of cooper. Copper is a co-factor for many vital enzymes, including cytochrome c-oxidase and superoxide dismutase (other minerals function as co-factors for this enzyme are manganese and zinc). Copper is also required for the production of red blood cells.

Selection and storage

Mangoes are seasonal fruits; fresh mango fruit season begins in the month of March end, when the rich fragrance heralds its arrival in the markets.

Mangoes usually harvested while they are green but perfectly mature. Un-ripe ones are extremely sour in taste. Organic mangoes are left to ripe on the tree; however, over-ripe fruits fall off from the tree and tend to be spoiled.

In the store, mangoes come in various sizes and colors; therefore, select the one based on the serving size and variety of fruit you love to devour. Alphanso variety from India (mahrashta state) and sindhuri (kesar) varieties from Pakistan are known for their uniqueness. Totapuri mangoes feature parrot-beak shape tips, smooth shiny and come in attractive green-yellow or orange colors. Totapuri types are best eaten raw, or while just short of full-ripe stage. The pulp features a mix of sweet and tart taste with special mint or close-like flavor depending on the cultivars. Several US cultivars such as Hayden and hybrids are equally popular.

Choose ones with intact skin without any bruises or cuts. Unripe mangoes can be kept at room temperature for few days, and to ripen, keep them in paper covers. Ripe fruits should be stored in the refrigerator but never below 10F (50C). Bring back to normal temperature when the fruit is to be eaten to get the natural taste and flavor.

Read more on: Apple | Health benefits and more

Preparation and serving method

Wash mangoes in cold running water in order to remove dust and any surface pesticide. Mop; dry its outer skin using a soft cloth. Mango fruit should be eaten all alone without any additions to experience its rich flavor.

Cut the fruit lengthwise into three pieces in such a way that the middle portion consists of husky seed. Then, slice through the skin to separate the skin from the pulp. Chop pulp into desired sections.

Alternatively, using a sharp knife, cut through the flesh on either side of the central seed. This way, you get two big half of a mango fruit. Then, take one-half and score the flesh in a horizontal and vertical pattern taking care not to cut deep through skin. Invert the whole half to push out the cubes as shown in the picture:

Here are some serving tips:

Mango fruit can be enjoyed all alone without any additions

Fresh mango cubes are a great addition to fruit salads.

Mango juice with ice cubes is a popular, delicious drink.

Mango fruit juice blended with milk as mango-milk shake. Mango fruit is also used to prepare jam, jelly, ice cream and in candy industries.

The unripe, raw, green mango has been used in the preparation of pickles, jam (marmalade), and chutney in the Asian countries.

Safety profile

Mango fruit should be avoided in the diet in individual on warfarin therapy. Mangoes, being high in vitamin-A, could result in potentiation of warfarin activity that may result in increased blinding risk. (Reference link Food and lifestyle interactions with warfarin).

Apple | Health benefits and more

2022-05-08T17:02:00.004+00:00

Delicious and crunchy, apple fruit is one of the most popular and favorite fruits among the health conscious, fitness lovers who firmly believe in the concept of “health is wealth.” This wonderful fruit is packed with rich phyto-nutrients that, in the true sense, indispensable for optimal health. The antioxidants in apple have several health promoting and disease prevention properties, and thereby, truly justifying the adage, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Scientific name: Malus Domestica.

Apples are obtained from the medium-sized tree belonging to the Rosaceae family. The apple tree is thought to be originated in the mineral-rich mountain ranges of Kazakhstan, and today, being cultivated in many parts of the world.

Apples fruit features oval or pear shape. Its outer peel has different colors depending upon the cultivar type. Internally, its crispy, juicy pulp is off –white to cream in color, and has a mix of mild sweet and tart flavor. Its seeds are bitter in taste, and therefore, inedible.

Hundreds of varieties of apple that are meant to be used either as table or dessert apples or in cooking grown in the US and Worldwide. Cooking apples tend to be larger in size, crispier, and tarter than dessert types.

Here are some of the amazing health benefits of apple.

Delicious and crunchy apple fruit is notable for its impressive list of phyto-nutrients, and anti-oxidants. Studies suggest that its components are essential for optimal growth, development, and overall wellness.

1. Apples are low in calories; 100 g of fresh fruit slice provide only 50 calories. They, however contain no saturated fats or cholesterol. Nonetheless, the fruit is rich in dietary fiber, which helps prevent absorption of dietary-LDL or bad cholesterol in the gut. The fiber also saves the colon mucous membrane from exposure to toxic substances by binding to cancer-causing chemicals inside the colon.

2. Apples are rich in antioxidant phyto-nutrients flavonoids and polyphenolics. The total measured anti-oxidant strength (ORAC value) of 100 g apple fruit is 5900 TE. Some of the important flavonoids in apples are quercetin, epicatechin, and procyanidin b2. Additionally, they are also good in tartaric acid that gives tart flavor to them. Altogether, these compounds help the body protect from deleterious effects of free radicals.

3. Apple fruit contains good quantities of vitamin-C and beta-carotene. Vitamin C is a powerful natural antioxidant. Consumption of foods rich in vitamin C helps the body develop resistance against infections agents and scavenge harmful, pro-inflammatory free radicals from the body.

4. Further, apple fruit is a good source of B-complex vitamins such as riboflavin, thiamin, and pyridoxine (vitamin B-6). Together, these vitamins help as co-factors for enzymes in metabolism as well as in various synthetic functions inside the body.

5. Apples also carry a small amount of minerals like potassium, phosphorus, and calcium. Potassium is an important component of cell and body fluids helps controlling heart rate and blood pressure; thus, counters the bad influences of sodium.

Selection and Storage

Fresh apples can be readily available in the stores all around the season. Choose fresh, bright, firm textured apples with rich flavor. Avoid fruits with pressure marks over their surface as they indicate underlying mottled pulp.

Fresh apples can be kept at room temperature for few days and stored inside the refrigerator for up to two to three weeks. Wash them in clean running cold water before use.

Preparation and serving tips

Wash apples thoroughly in the running water to remove any surface dust, insecticide/fungicide sprays. Trim off its top end using a paring knife, and cut the fruit into two equal halves. Take out tiny, centrally placed, bitter seeds. Slice the fruit into desirable cubes or slices.

Here are some serving tips:

Eat apple fruit as it is along with its peel in order to get maximum health-benefits.

Sliced apple turns brown (enzymatic brownish discoloration) on exposure to air due to conversion in iron form from ferrous oxide to ferric oxide. If you have to serve them sliced, rinse slices in water added with few drops of fresh lemon.

Cloudy as well as clear apple juice is a health alternative drink with dinner.

Apple fruit is also used in the preparation of fruit jam, and fruit salads.

Safety profile

Good yield demands close attention and supervision of apple fruit crop. According to environmental working group report, apple fruit is one of the heavily pesticide-contaminated produce. The most common pesticides found on apple are organo-phosphorous and organo-chloride pesticides like permethrin and DDI. Therefore, it is recommended to wash the fruit thoroughly before use. If possible, use organic certified apples.

11 Health Benefits, Uses, and side effects of eating pawpaw

2022-04-29T22:25:00.006+00:00

Papaws grow in tropical climates and are also known as papayas. Their sweet taste, vibrant color and wide variety of health benefits are just a few reasons to add them to your diet.

The imaginable health benefits of consuming papaya include a reduced risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, aiding in digestion, improving blood glucose control in diabetics, lowering blood pressure, and improving wound healing.

Possible health benefits of consuming papaya

Papayas are an excellent source of vitamin C and one single medium fruit provides 224% of your daily needs.

Consuming fruits and vegetables of all kinds has long been associated with a reduced risk of many lifestyle-related health circumstances. Many studies have suggested that increasing consumption of plant foods like papayas decreases the risk of obesity and overall mortality, diabetes, heart disease and promotes a healthy complexion and hair, increased energy, overall lower weight.

1. Age-related macular degeneration:

The antioxidant zeaxanthin, found in papaya, filters out harmful blue light rays and is thought to play a defensive role in eye health and possibly ward off damage from macular degeneration. A higher intake of all fruits (3 or more servings per day) has also been shown to decrease risk of and progression of age-related macular degeneration.

2. Asthma prevention:

The risks for developing asthma are lower in people who consume a high amount of certain nutrients. One of these nutrients is beta-carotene, contained in foods like pawpaw, apricots, broccoli, cantaloupe, pumpkin and carrots.

3. Cancer:

Consumption of the powerful antioxidant beta-carotene (found in pawpaw) has been shown to have an inverse association with the development of colon cancer in the Chinese population.

Among younger men, diets rich in beta-carotene may play a protective role against prostate cancer, according to a study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Nutrition.

4. Bone health:

Low intakes of vitamin K have been associated with a higher risk for bone fracture. Adequate vitamin K consumption is significant for good health, as it acts as a modifier of bone matrix proteins, improves calcium absorption and may reduce urinary excretion of calcium.

Read more on: Apple | Health benefits and more

5. Diabetes:

Studies have shown that type 1 diabetics who consume high-fiber diets have lower blood glucose levels and type 2 diabetics may have improved blood sugar, lipids and insulin levels. One medium papaya provides about 4.7 grams of fiber.

6. Digestion:

Papayas contain an enzyme called papain that aids in digestion and can also be used as a meat tenderizer.

Pawpaw is also high in fiber and water content, both of which help to prevent constipation and promote regularity and a healthy digestive tract.

7. Heart disease:

The fiber, potassium and vitamin content in pawpaw all help to ward off heart disease. An increase in potassium intake along with a decrease in sodium intake is the most important dietary change that a person can make to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease.

8. Inflammation:

The choline is a very important and versatile nutrient in pawpaw that aids our bodies in sleep, muscle movement, learning and memory. Choline also helps to maintain the structure of cellular membranes, aids in the transmission of nerve impulses, assists in the absorption of fat and reduces chronic inflammation.

9. Skin and healing:

When used topically, mashed pawpaw appears to be helpful for promoting wound healing and preventing infection of burned areas. Researchers believe that the proteolytic enzymes chymopapain and papain in papaya are responsible for its helpful effects. Ointments containing the papain enzyme have also been used to treat decubitus ulcers or bedsores.

Papaya is also great for your hair because it contains vitamin A, a nutrient required for sebum production that keeps hair moisturized. Vitamin A is also necessary for the growth of all bodily tissues, including skin and hair.

Adequate intake of vitamin C, which papaya can provide, is needed for the building and maintenance of collagen, which provides structure to skin and hair.

10. Kills Parasites

Ancient farmers used pawpaw as a natural pesticide, according to a 2005 dissertation. Extracts taken from Asimina bark kills mosquitoes and beetles. An experiment described in the 1998 volume of the "Journal of Economic Entomology" looked at the effect of pawpaw on brine shrimp larvae. Scientists often use these small crustaceans to measure the pesticidal ability of common chemicals. In the study, the authors exposed the larvae to pawpaw extracts during a single testing session. This treatment killed the juvenile shrimp in large quantities. Extracts taken from small Asimina twigs proved most effective. As pawpaw is not toxic to humans, the twigs could provide an inexpensive, renewable and safe way to process foods.

11. Treats Lice Infestations

Lice infestations remain common in many parts of the world. These parasites have become resistant to some conventional medications. Natural treatments are preferred to synthetic compounds due to concerns about toxicity, according to a 2011 review in "Planta Medica." Asimina extracts should provide an effective and safe solution to infestation given the parasite-killing ability of pawpaw. Patients experiencing a lice infestation received a home-made shampoo containing pawpaw extracts. Preliminary work showed this treatment mostly effective, and a final study showed it to be 100 percent successful.

Business Science and Technology

What is content Marketing? || Definition and Overview

First of all, what is content?

What is content marketing?

What you need to think about when creating content?

1. Audience

2. Niche

3. Resources

4. Competitors

5. SEO

Start with content marketing?

The target group

Gathering ideas

Building your Brand

Content distribution

How to describe your father in French (full steps)

Mon père [My father]

Savoir s’exprimer / savoir le dire [How to say it]

Read also about: How to describe yourself in French (full steps)

Mon père [my father]

How to describe yourself in French (full steps)

Soi-même [one self]

You can also read : How to Create a Business Plan from scratch in E-commerce || 8Tips

Savoir s’exprimer [How to say it]

Moi-même.

Top 5 E-commerce Platform that you need in 2022

Here are the best Ecommerce Platform available for you

1. 1. Shopify 2. BigCommerce 3. Business.adobe 4. WooCommerce 5. Volusion

Shopify

Vital reasons to choose Shopify

BigCommerce

Other benefits of using this software include:

Business.adobe

Some of the available features the software comes with are:

WooCommerce

Features provided by WooCommerce include:

Volusion

All plans include features such as:

How to Create a Business Plan from scratch in E-commerce || 8Tips

What is a business plan in general?

Your Business name

Your website

Read more on: Building an effective marketing website strategies

Your Logo

Other business details can include:

Your Product information

The Product to sell

Place to sell

Your Investment

Your Web domain

The Hosting

Technical support

Your Product related costs

Other things in the business planYour Predicting profit

Pricing

Special offers

Your Plan for promotion

Read more on: Lead Nurturing Marketing Email

Your Channels for promotion

Promotional activities

Determining your goals

The Benefits of having a business plan

11 ways to Increase Conversions through Email Marketing

What is conversion?

1. How to increase conversions?

Read more on: How to Grow Your Marketing Mailing List and more

2. Subject line that engages

3. CTA that inspires

4. Landing page that converts

5. Effective headline

Read more on: Lead Nurturing Marketing Email

6. Brief description

7. Prominent CTA

8. Impressive layout

9. Boastful testimonials

10. Other things to consider to increase conversions

11. Tracking conversions

Read more on: Email marketing Do and don’t

Using an email marketing tool to track conversion

Email campaign tagging

1. 1. Shopify
2. BigCommerce
3. Business.adobe
4. WooCommerce
5. Volusion

Other things in the business plan
Your Predicting profit