So Long, Silos! 5 Tools Marketers Should Centralize via Work Management

In 2009, Apple released its famous iPhone 3G commercial touting “There’s an app for that.” Whether you want to check snow conditions, see how many calories are in your lunch, or find where you parked the car, there’s an app for that, the commercial says.

No phrase better describes the current marketing landscape. Want to send an email? Run an ad campaign? Chat with your colleague? There’s a tool for that.

This sounds great in theory: A marketing tool for everything you could ever need! It’s a bit different in practice.

Social media management platform Buffer recently released an article titled “The Marketer’s Toolbox: The 60 Marketing Tools We Use at Buffer.” Yes, 60. That’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.

Both managers and line workers cite working across too many systems as the number one reason their teams are unable to execute flawlessly, according to Wrike’s 2018 Operational Excellence Survey Report.



Important information is isolated, or siloed, when these tools don’t “talk” to each other. Details get lost and work is duplicated. Employees waste valuable time navigating and copying/pasting text across browser tabs in brain-numbing work.

To better organize projects and tasks, many marketing teams consider implementing a work management system. However, work management should never be just another tool your team has to use.

The best work management platforms seamlessly centralize information and simplify your team’s workflow across these existing systems. Here are five tools every marketer should sync with their work management platform to limit marketing silos, minimize switching costs, and streamline workflows.

1. Gmail

Despite the proliferation of social networks and chat apps, email is still top dog for communication. With 1 billion active users worldwide and 53% of the US email market, Gmail continues to gain tens of millions of active users each year.

But digging through threads for the right information, consolidating feedback from multiple stakeholders, and fielding ad-hoc email requests is haphazard and time consuming.

Work management features like dynamic intake forms, real-time @mentions and comments, and proofing and approvals offer marketers a more effective way to handle projects and requests. But with half the world’s population using email, your inbox is still an important and necessary place to be.

Rather than require users to work in two tabs at once, leading work management platforms send automatic email notifications when important task changes or updates occur. Some even provide a Gmail add-on so users can manage tasks inside the work management system without ever leaving their inbox.

In addition to viewing and editing tasks associated to notification emails in Gmail, you can also create tasks from new email threads, attachments and all!

2. Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe’s Creative Suite is arguably the most important of all the solutions in a creative marketer’s tool belt. From Photoshop to Premiere Pro, your team lives in these programs—and every time they navigate away to answer an email, upload a file, or update a spreadsheet, it pulls them out of the creative zone.

About 25% of creatives spend less than two hours a day actually doing creative work, according to an iStock-commissioned survey of 400 creatives across the US and UK. Don’t let this happen to your team!

Choose a work management tool that integrates with Adobe’s Creative Cloud® Suite. This allows creative marketers to view creative briefs, leave comments, upload documents, and more from directly within Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, and Illustrator. Keeping creatives in the tools they love helps improve their concentration and gets work done faster.





Real-Life Recap: Seconds spent switching between tabs, exporting files, and completing other administrative tasks add up when you manage up to 400 creative requests each month. The OSF HealthCare creative team was struggling to keep its head above water before they found Wrike’s Adobe Creative Cloud® Extension.

“It’s so nice,” says Heidi Wessler, Graphic Design Coordinator at OSF. “From InDesign, I just go into the Wrike extension, see what changes need to be made, and then upload a new proof until we land on a final version. I no longer have to adjust my PDF settings, export to desktop, start an email, attach the asset, and send it. I just click the add button in Wrike directly from within InDesign and it's out there.”

3. Dropbox (or other file storage tool)

How many times have you searched for a final file...only to find you have five? Few marketing tasks cause as much frustration as file management.

Using a file storage tool like Dropbox is a step in the right direction. But organizing assets and making sure your team can find the latest version is tricky. Distributing assets to stakeholders is another hurdle: First you must locate the right “final” file, then draft a lengthy email describing its use case.

The ability to pull files directly from Dropbox into your work management system saves marketers many headaches. First, it eliminates the need to search through Dropbox for the correct file. Once an asset is attached to a task, it can easily be found by all collaborators.

Second, it minimizes version control issues. The latest files are always displayed front and center. Lastly, it keeps documents in context, allowing marketers to look back through earlier task comments and follow the evolution of a file.

4. Slack

Less than 30 years ago, workers had to take the stairs to ask a colleague a “quick question.” Today, you send them a “ping.”

Slack is one of the most popular chat apps in the tech industry, and users spend an average 10 hours each weekday plugged into the application. Reducing the time and effort it takes to share ideas and get answers is extremely valuable.

But problems arise when project details and requests get lost in a long string of short, unrelated messages. Rather than digging through conversations or racking your brain for missing ideas and requests, choose a platform that uses Slack’s Dialogs feature.

Dialogs can allow users to fill out a short form to create tasks in their work management system from directly within Slack. Some work management solutions also send real-time project notifications directly to Slack, where users can view task previews inside chat windows.



Real-Life Recap: In two short years, Unbounce’s lean eight-person marketing team tripled in size. To help manage its increasing volume of work and improve communication across the growing team, Unbounce implemented Wrike.

“We love the Slack integration!” says Chelsea Scholz, Marketing Manager of Brand Promotion at Unbounce. “My team is pretty large, and sometimes I'm in meetings all day, so I don't get to be in Wrike as much as I'd like. It’s so convenient for me to quickly open my unread Slack messages and see, ‘Okay, Tania completed this; Rebecca's working on that mood board; there's a brief coming to me in five days.’"

5. Marketo

A single marketing campaign has many moving parts, from ebooks and emails to ads and landing pages. Getting the go-live greenlight depends on more than a few cooks in the kitchen.

Forwarding test emails to key stakeholders and sending out landing page links is a hassle. Navigating back and forth between email chains of revisions and your marketing automation platform is even worse.

What if you could quickly capture and easily share emails, forms, or landing pages with multiple stakeholders at once? It’s possible with the right work management platform!

A simple Chrome extension allows marketers to take a snapshot of any Marketo page and quickly create a task requesting review and approval. All comments and edits are then made and centralized directly within the project management tool.

When you return to the email or landing page in Marketo, the extension reminds you there is a task associated with this page. A simple click takes you directly to the task in the work management platform so you can make any necessary changes. There’s an Integration for That

Today’s proliferation of marketing tools is a double-edged sword. While using dedicated, state-of-the-art systems gives marketers a competitive edge, more isn’t always better.

Work quality and team productivity suffer when information gets lost and employees spend more time switching tabs than completing tasks. Don’t let your marketing team become a slave to technology!

Choose a work management platform that helps break down marketing silos and works well with the tools your team already uses. Make centralizing information and streamlining workflows a priority and watch your team achieve far more in less time.

Integration with Gmail, Slack, Adobe Creative Suite, and other leading tools is only one of the reasons why marketers choose Wrike. But don’t take our word for it! Download our new ebook and see why marketing teams from companies like Airbnb, Umpqua Bank, and Stitch Fix love Wrike.x

Key Takeaways from the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence 2018 Report (infographic)

We teamed up with Smart Insights to publish the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence 2018 report last month – our annual global benchmarking research. Its goal is to show the current state of email marketing and marketing automation and help marketers take full advantage of the options they have and optimize their strategy.



We also created an infographic to highlight the key report takeaways. Read on to find what they are!

Key takeaways from the report:

The report shows both great news and some warning signs for marketers.

Email’s topping the charts.

The great news is – email marketing is still the most effective channel of all! Marketers rate it as the best for ROI – 29% say it’s good, and 18% describe it as excellent.

The return on investment encourages marketers to spend more budget on email marketing – 47% businesses plan to do so!

But, while increasing the budget, we need to use it to its full potential to keep the campaigns effective. And that’s where there’s still room to grow.

There’s still more potential to automation.

As many as 28% of businesses use only basic marketing automation features, while less than one-tenth uses all of them to get the best results. When it comes to experience, only 5% of marketers call themselves experts. If you’re not one of them but would like to be – we’ve got the right resources to help you. You can check out the Marketing Automation Hub on our blog, enroll in a free Mastering Marketing Automation email course from GetResponse University, or turn to our Help Center for some answers to your questions.

Landing pages need more love.

It’s surprising that only 20% of businesses never create dedicated landing pages. Landing pages can do wonders for your conversion rates and are undeniable lead magnets. They minimize distractions while focusing on a single goal. Let’s hope that in the future more marketers appreciate the importance of landing pages! Meanwhile, if you don’t feel ready to start creating your own, feel free to read more about them here:

• What’s the point of landing pages?
• Why not drive traffic to your homepage?
• Essential Landing Page Course
• Getting Started with Landing Page Analytics – free guide
• Landing Page Optimization Course
• How to Split-Test Your Landing Pages for Better Results

Test, analyze, optimize.

Have you maximized the relevance of your email campaigns by segmenting your list? If you did, congratulations! You’re among the 47% of marketers that don’t send the same message to everyone. If your answer was no: don’t worry. There’s always time to learn and improve your business strategy. See how to get started with your email segmentation, and personalize your emails, so your subscribers know you care.
Also, 60% percent of businesses don’t proactively test their email marketing. Don’t work on your emails in the dark! Find out what works best for your audience, then implement it.
When it comes to analyzing, 28% don’t focus on any specific metrics. That’s not that high of a percentage, but we expect it to lower over time. So, track your metrics and set your goals!

Infographic

What are the top three automated emails? How many emails do businesses send monthly? See all the key takeaways in our infographic below!

6 Things a Quality Email Marketing Campaign Can Do for You

Just like old-fashioned letters, emails are a channel for conversational, interactive, and personalized communications. Businesses have been using it as a customer relationship building tool for years, with a successful email marketing campaign yielding an ROI of up to $38 for every $1 spent.

In fact, a whopping 66% of customers make a purchase as a result of a clicked-through email. But, there are so many other benefits that emails can bring.

Here’s everything that a quality email marketing campaign can do for your business:

1. Improved branding.
2. Better targeting.
3. Personalized approach.
4. Improved engagement.
5. Provide additional metrics.
6. Great testing opportunities.

1. Improved branding

Email is a valuable brand building tool.
Together with your website and social media presence, email creates a set of specific associations recognized by your leads and customers. It adds value to your brand message and the products or services you offer. They speak of all three pillars of a brand – purpose, identity, and trust.

Brand-wise, a quality email marketing campaign can:

• Provide businesses with a direct communication channel to their customers.
• Establish a reliable reference point between brands and consumers.
• Open and maintain a dialogue with all segments of your target audience.
• Build strong and long-lasting relationships with regular customers.
• Foster customer loyalty and weave a network of dedicated followers.

Since a brand is defined as a “unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these, employed in creating an image that identifies a product and differentiates it from its competitors”, the email service must work hand in hand with other touch points to achieve a uniform level of consistency and coherence.

As a part of the experience marketing, email strengthens the overall brand image.
Over time, this image becomes associated with credibility, quality and customer satisfaction.
Here’s how to use email to build brand awareness:

Personality & voice

To be successful, an email marketing campaign has to reflect the same personality and tone of voice used for other points of contact with the customer. Whatever tone of voice you choose – be it professional and serious or friendly and informal – your brand personality must always evoke trust.

Pro tip: Be as colloquial as you can without damaging your professional image.

Consistent templates

Let the best logo identify your visual scheme (the combination of colors, shapes, and text that embodies your brand message), and use it to build an email template of consistent style and design. Also, pay attention to positioning and make sure to emphasize your logo, brand name, and CTA.

Pro tip: If you need something fresh, check out custom logo design contests.

Focus on relationships

Instead of constant sales pitches (this strategy will only qualify your emails as spam), focus on building relationships with your subscribers. Use this opportunity to learn more about your customers, and to give them a chance to learn more about you. Show your genuine care and empathy.

Pro tip: Show your appreciation by sending a welcome email to every new subscriber.

2. Better targeting

Successful email marketing requires a reliable set of automation tools.
Don’t try to avoid them, since they boast powerful capabilities for audience segmentation. Email and targeting are inseparably intertwined – a subscription list typically includes every person from a brand’s CRM database, providing a direct link for nurturing relationships with existing customers.
But that’s not all.

Email-based customer relationships let you generate a lot of knowledge about modern-day consumers in general. From previous interactions, you can learn a lot about their needs and pain points, preferred solutions and common behavior, and use that data when targeting new customers.

Use email automation tools to answers these questions:

• At what point do customers decide to make a purchase, and what is the decisive factor?
• What kind of message or offer do they respond to the best?
• What is their preferred purchase platform, a website or social media?

That way, email can serve as a potent tool for testing marketing and conversion techniques, pinpointing current behavior, and predicting future trends. Segment your subscribers according to their needs and habits, and you’ll have a solid overview of how your leads think and what they expect.

3. Personalized approach

Being defined as a consumerist climate that values journey more than a destination, the experience economy heavily relies on email marketing to personalize B2C interactions. In this context, email can help your brand develop a 360-degree customer view and custom-tailor individual brand experiences.

Also, personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14%.

Translated to sales, this guarantees up to 10% more conversions.

Experience economy or not, consumers want to be treated as individuals with highly specific needs and problems. They don’t want to waste their time on products and services they don’t need. Also, they expect the experience to be customized across all touch points. Naturally, this includes email as well.

Here’s how to develop a personalized approach with email:

Ask the right questions

Use welcome emails to ask new subscribers what they expect of your future relationship. Are they just browsing for solutions, or are they looking for a quick buy option? What platforms and payment systems do they prefer? Are they interested in receiving your emails, and what do they want to read?

Pro tip: Create a short quiz and ask them basic questions about what they like.

Segment your subscribers

When you ask them the right questions, new subscribers can help you create different customer personas and establish a unique approach for each audience segment. You’ll know what every group wants to see (announcements, special offers, or buyers’ guides), and when they want to receive them.

Pro tip: Use email marketing automation tools for super-segmentation. 

4. Improved engagement

In the long run, email marketing campaigns can help you nurture relationships, retarget old customers, and inspire loyalty. But they can also accelerate the conversion process, and serve as an immediate touch point that tips potential customers over the edge of a sales funnel and directly to the CRM base.

This is achieved with automated behavioral trigger emails and convincing CTAs.

Behavior-triggered emails elicit a real-time action by providing a direct link to your offer. 

There’s a newly launched product that’s yet to be presented to your audience? Simply send an announcement, create a compelling call-to-action, and offer a pre-sale discount to a certain number of fastest buyers.

Email can be used for improved customer engagement in a couple of other ways:

• Announcements and newsletters raise brand awareness and keep customers in the loop.
• Special offers and loyalty prices create a sense of urgency that drives smooth conversions.
• Helpful articles and relevant buyers’ guides intensify subscribers’ interest in your offer.

5. Provided additional metrics

I’ve already hinted that email automation tools can help brands learn more about existing customers and modern-day consumers, but their built-in analytics can do so much more for marketing and conversion strategies. For starters, they can tell you how to plan further growth and development.

These are the email metrics that every brand should track:

• Click-through rate

The percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link attached to an email is traditionally used in A/B testing, as it provides insight into how engaging a campaign is. This is especially important when you’re sending behavior-triggered messages with the intention of inspiring a direct response or conversion.

• Conversion rate

While click-through rates pertain to any action elicited with email, conversion rates give a clear overview of how many sales an email marketing campaign has managed to make. Since conversions are the end-goal of every marketing strategy, this metric is crucial for determining the overall success.

• List growth rate

Your email list will naturally shrink and expand over time, therefore measure the growth rate to establish whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. Email sharing rate can also help you with this, and all with a clear purpose – to let you know how your campaign contributes to lead acquisition.

• Email marketing ROI

Finally, track your overall email marketing ROI rate to find out whether or not this technique pays off in the context of your general sales strategy. How many leads do you generate via email marketing, and how does this number translate to potential revenue? To track these leads, set up an SLA system.

See the new Email Marketing Benchmarks report for loads of useful data.

  

6. Great testing opportunities

Email marketing can promote virtually everything, but it can also help you test your strategies before you put them in place. Thanks to the metrics above, you can see exactly where you stand with your blog promotion, product launch, or service improvement, not to mention your relationships.

Time and time again, email marketing has proved itself as the best customer conversion technique.

Its impact on modern-day businesses is invaluable, primarily thanks to its relationship-building potential and audience targeting capabilities. When you add to that a personalized approach, improved engagement, and insightful metrics, you get a well-oiled automated growth hack machine.

Do you have some more insights on what a good email marketing campaign did for your business? Feel free to share it in the comment section below!

Whenever there’s a fresh idea that must be vetted, create a new email template and send it to your brand’s most loyal customers for feedback. Not only does this ensure a direct response, but it can also save you from wasting your time, money, and energy on something that won’t improve your ROI.

Grow Your List from Day One with the GetResponse List Building Program

Growing your contact list got you stumped? Maybe you have an email list already, but it’s getting stale, and you’re losing contacts through unsubscribes and bounces? No matter your level of list building or online marketing experience, establishing and then continuing to grow your contact list is an unavoidable factor in growing and maintaining your business.

List growth + key online marketing skills = a win-win combination

Specialists at GetResponse are familiar with the struggle and effort marketers face when first establishing their online business and email list. They also know how to keep the list growing with new contacts as the natural list depredation process sets in.

They’ve created the GetResponse List Building Program to help marketers deal with just that.

90 free video lessons and complementary downloads

They designed the program to help you build an engaged email list and increase your sales – in just 90 days. The program is available for free for all GetResponse customers. You just need an account to get started.

Throughout the program you’ll learn how to:

• develop an email marketing strategy

• optimize your site to increase signups

• find new traffic sources

• write and maintain an engaging blog

• create strategic partnerships

• plan and host webinars

• pump up your social media presence

• create marketing videos and more.

Want a sneak peek? Visit GetResponse website to check out a sample lesson!

But wait... There's more: after completing the program, you’ll receive a certificate of completion that acknowledges you as a list building expert.

Ready to go?

Let’s get started! Join the program today and start building that list.

Complete Guide to Marketing Automation for Ecommerce [New Ebook]

Want to sell more products and get new customers without expanding your team or stretching your marketing budget? Then consider making an investment in marketing automation.

Unlike with many other marketing initiatives, automating your marketing processes and using workflows have one major benefit – they save you time.

And believe it or not, it’s not going to make your communication look any less human.

In fact, if you do it right, your ecommerce business will grow, and you’ll keep your customers for longer.

Want more proof?

Check out this case study on how a domain name registrar and web hosting company Rebel.com uses marketing automation to tag and personalize their emails when communicating with shopping cart abandoners.

So, are you ready to get started?

Then download our latest ebook, the Complete Guide to Marketing Automation for Ecommerce.

What you’ll find in this ebook

You know what they say – Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

The same applies when you choose the right marketing channels for your business.

Unless you want to live in constant fear of any new developments made by Facebook or Google, you’ll want to have a strategy that oversees all your marketing channels.

With this in mind, we decided to look beyond email and also discuss how SEO and paid advertising can help you grow your customer base.

Featuring comments from industry experts from Shopify, Shoplo, and Omniconvert, this 60-page long ebook, will guide you through everything you need to know about using marketing automation to sell more products and save time.

So that you can focus on other important things.

Why marketing automation?

If I asked you: As an ecommerce business, what do you do to sell more products? – you’d probably talk to me about running sales promotions, optimizing your website for search engines, or doing paid ad campaigns in social media.

Less likely, you’d mention that you’re trying to reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive tasks, like running email marketing campaigns.

Which is a shame, because you could easily reduce costs and save time by automating even just one of the following processes:

• onboarding new customers
• segmenting leads and customers based on their preferences or actions
• reactivating inactive contacts for better deliverability
• following up with your recent customers with related offers
• or asking them to leave a review of the product they’ve bought.

And that's not all. There are at least 20+ ways you could automate your email communication.

 It’s not too late to start using marketing automation

In one of our previous articles, marketing experts including Dr. Dave Chaffey, Michael Brenner, Kath Pay, and Daniel Brzezinski shared their tips on how to overcome the most critical challenges to adopting marketing automation.

But you might still be thinking it’s too late for you.

But believe it or not, there’s an advantage in launching automated campaigns at a later stage.

If your business has already been running for a decent amount of time, and you’ve gone so far without proper marketing automation, there’s much more to be achieved.

Each additional process you automate can generate a higher return.

And you’ve probably already got a lot of content to fill your automated workflows with, which isn’t the case for businesses that are just starting out.

In other words, don’t let common misconceptions distract you from the value you can achieve by automating your marketing communication.

Download the ebook and let us know what you think

We really hope it’ll help you improve how you run your future marketing campaigns.

Regardless if it’s saving you time or making you less vulnerable to changes made by Facebook or Google.

Top Metrics to Quantify Your Blog’s Success

You’ve probably heard countless times that having a blog for your business is a great way to increase web traffic, raise brand awareness, and bring in those leads. But, do you know how to measure the success of your blog? Too many marketing teams focus solely on vanity metrics like social media and page views. And, while these can help guide your content strategy, they’re not the be all and end all. 

Much more important metrics to consider are the ones that directly link to your bottom line. Statistics like conversion rates, subscriber counts, and inbound links are much more likely to affect your blog’s success in the long run.

Let’s delve a little deeper into the top metrics you can use to quantify your blogs’ success.

1. Blog traffic

It may seem like an obvious metric to track, but the number of visitors to your blog, as well as where they come from, is the best place to start when measuring success. If nobody is reading your blog, then none of the other metrics we discuss will come your way either.

But, it’s so much more than simple page views. You need to consider where those views are coming from, and where they are going next. Are the majority of your views coming from organic searches? If so, what keywords are bringing people in? Or maybe your traffic is mainly from social media? But, which platforms? Knowing these metrics allows you to adjust your marketing strategy for each post based on what’s working and not working already.

One thing to bear in mind is that you don’t want to be focusing only on one source of traffic to your blog. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good strategy. Work on diversifying where your readers are coming from, and you’ll be better positioned for success.

But, more than just simple page views, you should be focusing on metrics like pages per session, bounce rates, and average visit duration. Having a load of people visit your site just to have a quick peek and then leave, is not going to bring in the kind of revenue you’re looking for.

Increasing the number of pages per session on your site doesn’t have to be a difficult task. There’s a multitude of plugins and strategies that can work for your blog. Let’s take a look at some of the top methods:

• Making your blog mobile friendly. Yes, we know this is a fairly obvious point to make, but it’s an important one. You’d be surprised how many blogs are not optimized for mobile traffic, despite the fact that over half of internet users are accessing the web from their mobile devices.
• Make it easy. Don’t make navigating your blog too tricky, or people will never want to stick around. Install related posts widgets in your sidebar, add in banners linking to other content, and be sure to include an easy way to sign up to be an email subscriber.

And finally, how many of your viewers are sticking around for more, and how many are jumping ship? If your blog posts are generating high bounce rates, you might want to reassess your content strategy. Ideally, you want your readers to move on to other blog posts, product pages, and those all-important sales funnels.

2. Post engagement

So, people are viewing your content, and that’s great. But if nobody is engaging with it, you might as well be talking to yourself. Let’s look first at social media. The more that your content is shared on social media, the more people are going to be talking about it – and that’s exactly what you want. Likes, comments, and shares on social media all add up to more traffic, and increased brand awareness.

But, you should also be encouraging visitors to engage with your blog posts themselves. Giving readers the ability to comment and encouraging them to do so, will help to continue the conversation. It will also show your business’ expert knowledge on whatever subject it is that you’re blogging about. Ensuring your content is personalized for your target reader will make them feel valued, and encourage them to get the conversation started.

If you really want to get the conversation going, start by putting out some polarizing content. Something that people will either love or hate. These kinds of posts spark conversations and allow people to passionately discuss what really matters to them.

3. Inbound links

Search engine optimization is an integral cog in any content marketing machine. One of the best ways to impress Google is by accumulating a good collection of inbound links to your blog posts. If you’re posting high quality, informative posts, then this should start to happen naturally.

If you’re not receiving any inbound links – take a long hard look at the content you’re putting out there. Sure, blogging is important, but only if you’re doing it right. If your content is pure clickbait, people won’t be enticed to come back for more, and they definitely won’t feel encouraged to link back to you in their own content.

While you may be under the impression that internet users all have the attention span of a goldfish, blog posts that are longer are actually much more likely to be successful – especially when it comes to attracting inbound links. Blog posts that surpass the 2000-word mark are doing so much for the reader than just scratching the surface. These posts are providing real value and are much more likely to be visited time and again. So, start focusing on long-form, evergreen content, and see those inbound links roll in.

On a related note, including outbound links in your own content is a great way to show your own knowledge of the field, and will also help your chances with search engine rankings. And don’t be afraid to create a network of links within your own posts to the rest of your blog. Not only will Google love it, but you’ll also be encouraging readers to engage with even more of your content.

4. Subscribers

Subscribers are like gold for blogs – these are the people who love your content enough to want to hear every time you have something new to say. Your subscribers generally come in two forms – RSS and email.

With RSS subscribers, you’ll not only want to keep an eye on how many people are subscribed but also how many of those are actively checking your feed. This is a great indicator of how many readers you’re retaining. Comparing your subscriber number to your active subscriber number will reveal how many people are dropping off, and not engaging with your content anymore.

Email subscribers are a step up from RSS subscribers. These readers have given you access to their inbox to tout your wares. They enjoyed your content so much that they no longer want to go searching for it – they want it to pop up in their emails all by itself. Be very aware of which pages are landing you the highest number of subscribers. Then use these as templates for future posts to further your email lists.

But, how do you attract these fabled subscribers? With personalized content that shows off your brand voice. If you have a distinctive way of communicating with your readers, they’re much more likely to keep reading your content than if you sound just like every other blog out there. Inject some personality into your posts, and don’t talk down to your readers. You want them to feel like you’re talking to them in real life – they’ll be much more likely to trust you if you do this.

5. Leads and conversion rates

Last but by no means least are your lead generation and conversion rates. Blogs can be a great source of visit-to-lead, and lead-to-customer conversions – so keeping track of these is essential. You’ll most likely find that certain blog posts or topics will be your biggest source of leads. This kind of information should then be applied to future content plans.

Blogs can be great ways to drive sales to your ecommerce site. You can tease new products, offer user guides, and use other similar psychological tricks to encourage readers to convert for you. Once you’ve determined which posts are already bringing you the highest conversion rates, go back and assess what calls to action you’re using. Start adding in more and more CTA’s across your blog posts. This makes it as easy as possible for readers to continue on to your store.

And, always remember to keep the buying cycle in mind when crafting your content. Ideally, you should be targeting readers who are at the “initial research” stage. You should be giving them the relevant information they need to move on to a purchase. Fill your posts with persuasive writing and instill trust and confidence in your readers.

Take this a step further and see where these leads are starting out. Are they originating on social media? Email marketing? Direct searches? Knowing where they came from in the first place will help you to see where your most effective marketing is currently happening. You may even find you have blog posts that are not attracting a large number of views but are home to your strongest lead conversion rates. Look at how you’re marketing these posts and try some split testing to really make the most of them – leads are what you’re looking for, after all.

Plan, measure, be patient.

When it comes to measuring the success of your blog, there can be many aspects to consider. But, one thing you need to keep in mind is that content marketing like this is usually more of a “slow burner” kind of ROI. You’re unlikely to see instant results. In fact, the longer a blog post has been around, the more helpful it becomes. As with any marketing strategy, without clear goals and effective tracking – your blog posts won’t bring in the results you really want. So, be sure you have all these things in place before setting out on making your blog a lead conversion machine.

The article is taken from blog.getresponse.com/