Category: Marketing

How would you feel if you got replies for your cold emails every single time? Certainly wonderful. Here are 5 secrets to produce responses to cold emails

The greatest taboo in marketing is cold emailing. The word ‘spammer’ scares everyone. The success rates of cold emails make people wonder ‘why is cold emailing even a part of marketing in the first place?’

The unbelievable fact is that cold emails have always been one of the best strategies that help you connect with the influencers in your business. Of course you need to put in more time and effort for a good email. A suitable formula and an effective software will surely make you successful. 

Incorporate these 5 effective ways in your outreach campaigns and enjoy the pouring responses. 

1. Connection creation

A ‘cold email’ should never be an ice cold email. Establishing a connection with the receiver is very important even though this is the first time you are contacting them. One of the best and easiest connection would be the same industry. 

For example, you could write to an influencer about how much of involvement you both have in your industry. You could also name a mutual friend. You could also mention about a recent blog that you both had contributed to. These are ways to change the viewpoint of the influencer from a stranger to an acquaintance. 

You would have definitely scored more than the other generic emails in the influencer’s inbox!

2. Evidence of value 

Let your receiver know first-hand about the benefits. What’s in it for them? Rekindle the interest so that they read and reply. You do not want them to just delete your email, do you? Give them a concrete reason to continue reading and you are sure to get a positive result! You can do a mail merge for cold emails, there are awesome cold email guides out there.

Offer them something that they just can’t overlook. That something should have a value. It can be a complimentary access to your service, a live demo of one of your products, or you can even commit to give some assistance on a future date.

Offer to fix a recipient’s website by pointing out the broken links on the page. You are offering to improve his/her website. Who would say no to that?

The main idea is to offer a value or else you have nothing extra ordinary compared to other ‘spammers’!

3. Create reliability 

Another vital feature of an excellent cold email that would get responses is reliability. You need to prove that you are worth connecting with. 

A typical cold email would be seen as one where the sender hardly takes time to say who they are and why you should connect with them. All you see is a general salutation, name of the company and the name of the sender. 

You can talk about your expertise in the industry or even give reasons for the influencer to collaborate with you on a project. Highlight your unique insights and data too. Make it a memorable email with a lot of credibility. You can avoid any kind of perception by clearly establishing your expertise and authority in the business. 

Use different ways like –

• Mention publications that you have been featured in
• Cite relevant data and research that involves your company
• State about the audience that you can reach and the type of exposure you have

This will prove your credibility and authority in your industry to the recipient. 

If you are still new in the industry, you can talk about your value on a personal level. Talk about your passion to become a prominent person in the industry. This has to be written clearly.

4. No harm in a bit of flattery 

Many would say flattery is bad when you are reaching out to someone. If they feel that you are not true about what you are saying they would not consider doing business with you. However flattery in moderation causes no harm!

Do it right and the first impression would definitely be a positive one that will create a long-lasting perception in the mind of the influencer. The email will be in trash in no time if this is overdone! When you flatter be specific and not over enthusiastic. You are sure to see a reply when you keep this in mind. 

5. Call-to-action

Make sure to be clear at what action you want from the recipient. This is the real reason for the email. Apart from establishing networks and connections, you want some benefit for yourself and your company. 

Call-to-action may be the most difficult part to develop in your email. You need to be confident yet not too pushy in your request. Make this process easy for the influencer by sharing links (links to your blog) that they can simply copy and paste in their social media. 

You can streamline a demo of your new product and ask them for a feedback. Make sure to be available when they are. 

Be confident in your cold email

The mindset is always important in whatever you do. Have a positive and confident approach while sending cold emails. The successful attitude will ensure that you do get the success desired! People can feel the confidence from emails. 

Watch your response rate soar high when you follow these successful tips on sending cold emails. Be confident and positive too!

Starting a business and not sure how to approach email marketing? Well, this guide is for you then! Email marketing is about building good relationships with prospective clients and sending them relevant information so that they convert and go deeper through the sales funnel.

People who want to learn about your products can join your mailing list through which you send them useful content. Over time, these readers become your loyal customers and keep returning for more, making them a significant part of revenue generation every month.

There’s a good reason email marketing has been around for quite some time. From higher ROI and low-cost of investments to organic brand growth and ease of use, successful email marketing campaigns get the basics right!

Here are some tips and strategies to help you out with your email marketing workflow and design.

1. Learn About Your Audience

When you’re first starting out, it’s important to get your brand’s tone right. Study your audience base and learn about what they’re looking for as well.

Good businesses sell to clients what they want. Most email marketing platforms have an audience segmentation feature that lets you target specific groups and send personalized emails accordingly. Look for this, and it will help you generate greater ROI.

2. Offer Value & Write Good Headlines

Nobody is going to read your emails if they’re not of substance. Before sending out emails and asking people to subscribe, write a copy explaining what your email series will be for. Be thoughtful, polite, and get into the details. Remember, email is personal, so you can’t treat it like other social media mediums.

As for the content, you can keep your readers interested by providing them with interesting content – be it every week or a few times a month. Examples of good content to include in your emails are:

• Free downloads and coupon codes
• Whitepapers and case studies
• Tips and tricks and a sneak peek into your business
• Product demos, news about upcoming releases and events, product buying guides, etc.

3. Keep It Short & Crisp

Don’t write lengthy emails but make them short and sweet. Chances are, your email subscribers can’t spend more than a few minutes to read. And they won’t read every email you send them.

Keep that in mind and consider the mailing frequency. If you find that you’re getting better engagement by just sending emails once a week, stick to that. Don’t go overboard and keep it simple. Work with a copywriter to help you write engaging headlines for your emails. 

4. Try HubSpot Video Marketing For Email Communications 

Hubspot offers great email marketing software for entrepreneurs that’s simple and easy to use. They have fantastic templates, various personalization options, a drag-and-drop editor, and different scheduling features. The HubSpot video integration just makes it easier to record and edit your videos directly on your CRM platform. If you haven’t tried it out already, you should. 

Videos add a new dimension to your emails since you get face-to-face and personal with your readers. And it takes only a few minutes to record and send. If you want to redirect your readers onto your website or make your video content exclusive, you can just put a thumbnail with the play button and link it to your landing pages.

5. Use Autoresponders

There will be a time when your email campaigns start rolling in new leads, and you just don’t get enough time to respond. How do successful businesses keep up with this?

By using autoresponders.

Autoresponders are scheduled emails you write in advance that are sent automatically to your readers when they ask a question. When you are about to announce a new product or release updates, the customers who have signed up on your mailing list will get an immediate response. 

6. Understand Email Analytics

Your open-rates indicate how much of your audience is actually opening up your emails. Click-through rates refer to how many readers click on the links you include in them. And your unsubscribe rate, that tells if your content is engaging enough or not.

Learn how to analyze these metrics and figure out if what you’re sharing is working. Email analytics will give a deeper insight into your audience and help you improve on your content. If you’re thinking of expanding into video email, don’t neglect your video analytics either. They go hand-in-hand.

7. Whitelisting, Domain Verification & Other Bonus Tips

Ask your subscribers to whitelist you and make sure your emails don’t get marked by the spam filter. Don’t use too much sales-y language and clean up your email template code. 

This might be an underrated tip but make sure your emails are being sent from a verified domain so that they don’t land in the spam folder. Use a reliable IP address to send your emails from, especially one that hasn’t been used before when starting out. This will ensure your emails are genuine and not sent by bots. 

If there are any inactive subscribers on your mailing list, remove them and refresh the list. This will ensure you stay on track and actually foster engagement. A good rule of thumb is to remove anyone who hasn’t engaged with your emails for over 6 months. Also, when it comes to formatting and design, make sure you optimize your emails for mobile viewing. 

Conclusion

If you’ve been ignoring email marketing or haven’t really put any time into it, it’s time you start looking. Email marketing is giving businesses huge returns when done right, and it’s not that complicated. Make sure you ask for permission before letting your readers sign up for your mailing list because remember, you’re a guest in their inbox.

As long as your emails are helpful, not too intrusive, and deliver solid value, you will do great. Finally, if you’re running multiple marketing campaigns, it’s a good idea to segment your emails and send them separately. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all formula to this, which means you have to take an adaptive approach and improvise along the way. That’s literally all you need to know for now.

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Over the last years, email marketing hasn’t undergone much visible change: we still receive emails in the format we did 5 years ago. However, don’t be fooled by the seeming stagnancy of the channel, as the technology behind it has also adopted many new approaches. And while targeted segmentation and personalization remain the holy grail of the digital marketing, their concept has broadened a lot.

Now, a customer’s name put in the email is no longer enough to make it personalized. To come up with offers relevant for particular audience, companies need to collect as many data, segment their contact base, use as many communication channels, and constantly update the email design.

Below, we’ll take a look at the recent email marketing practices that can help achieve these goals in 2020. They are not the ultimate success recipe though, and each brand will have to learn to tailor them to their own business needs. But when approached in a smart way, these email marketing tools can give you a big advantage over competitors.

AMP for Email

Google announced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for email back in 2018, but it was only May 2019, when the technology became available for all email marketers beyond the beta group. It allows to insert in emails different AMPHTML components (form, carousel, accordion, selector, bind, list as for now) that would help recipients dynamically interact with the message. But to start sending AMP emails, you first need to register with Google and get whitelisted as a dynamic sender.

However, it looks like the juice is worth the squeeze, as with AMP support, people can perform certain actions (RSVP to an event, leave a feedback, browse through extensive catalog information, etc) straight in the email without downloading and switching to extra pages. This kills two birds at once: provides more dynamic content and retains the customers who now won’t get lost on the way from the email to the website.

As for email clients, by far only Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Mail.ru. support AMP content. Microsoft has also announced that this option will be available for Outlook.com, and we’re waiting for an official release. Not all email providers can also offer this functionality – Litmus, eSputnik, SparkPost, and Stripo were the first to implement the technology in their systems; so for today they probably have the most ready-made solutions for the AMP design.

Although the AMP technology has only recently started making its way to Inboxes, it has great potential. How companies can take advantage of it will determine how competitive they’d be in the upcoming digital era. 

Multilanguage

As email market has been turning into international email market, many brands have opted for multilingual approaches to reach customers in their own language. Major companies have started optimizing their websites, landing pages, apps and email campaigns for a global audience. Numerous research suggest that people would rather respond to an offer in their native language, which means the preferred language should become an important condition for segmentation.

Most professional and proven email automation providers have quickly updated their functionality, and now allow composing multilingual campaigns without extra strain. All you need to do is to come up with the copy and insert it into the template. Those not ready for such big shifts, may run a split test for one or two emails that don’t have much text, and require minimum linguistic editing. A subscription confirmation or welcome email is where you can get started. Due to short text and easy editing, web pushes also make good starters for multilingual experiments.  

AI Support

Artificial Intelligence is another big trend for the whole digital world, and email marketing is no exception. Machine algorithms are used to determine the optimal campaign delivery time and frequency, pick up most relevant product recommendations, and even assess potential VIP priority.

Based on the user behavior analysis, such advanced segmentation allows to create targeted campaigns and send them to people at the time when they’re most likely to consider them. Email marketers also favor AI because it operates automatically, and doesn’t require additional segments or workflows.

If you send, let’s say, a promo to a segment of 500,000 contacts, AI would automatically split it into groups based on the last purchase, browsed items, average purchase value, etc, of each contact. Correspondingly, product recommendations for such categories as Recommended for you, You may also like, Staff pick, etc. would be set up individually for each customer, increasing the click and eventual conversion rate.   

Geotargeting

Although geotargeting is thought to be employed by local businesses only, any company can benefit from it, if used wisely. The idea of geotargeting is to deliver more relevant campaigns to people based on their geographical location, which is determined by their desktop’s IP or app data. 

To put it short, it’s more relevant to offer sales for the tickets London – Birmingham to London or Birmingham residents, or at least to England residents, than to the residents of Italy or Morocco. 

As for sales in brick and mortar stores or local events, it’s also good to know whether the recipients of your message would be physically able to respond to the offer. For example, you run a one-day garage sales in one of your New York shops. Chances that people from different states or even countries would be able to commit are rather scarce, so it’s better to focus on people who currently reside in New Your, or are visiting the city.  

If you’re afraid of losing a part of prospects, consider combining different channels for better coverage. A location-targeted web push can make a perfect partner for a more general promo email. Send all your customers a campaign with your new products or services, and complement it with a more specific push notification, describing its onsite advantages.     

No doubt, 2020 would be an interesting year in terms of email design solutions. Companies will have to find new ways to reach their customers, many of which have already become immune to constant Inbox flooding. To stand out against numerous competitors, bands need to take advantage of the recent technologies, making their campaigns even more personalized and relevant and at the same time dynamic and entertaining.

Iuliia Nesterenko is a contributing writer at eSputnik. Her focus is on exploring current digital marketing trends and describing new strategies for email marketers.

‘Content is king’ has been a slogan for SEO enabled digital marketing efforts. Well, true to it, content has had a significant role to play in digital marketing. Many companies can testify on how quality content has been able to drive impressive and quality traffic to their sites boosting both the brand awareness and sales. There is, however, something that you need to realize, times are changing and so does SEO.

There was a time that businesses were entirely dependent on billboards, television and magazine commercials. Thanks to the information age that has changed: a lot has. Digital marketing has taken over. Social media campaigns, SEO and video marketing, to mention a few seem to be what to go for. Video marketing appears to be on the rise than any other form of digital marketing. Bet businesses have learned the trick. Statistics show that using videos on landing platforms is responsible for an 86 percent increase in conversion rates. Unfortunately, not so many businesses have been able to tap the potential of video marketing.

The big brands that are steps ahead in this form of digital marketing have a story. Some case studies show just how much video marketing has done for the brands. If you create an excellent video marketing strategy, you will have the same story to tell. To create a good video marketing strategy, you need to put the following into consideration.

1. An objective

Well, it is always about increasing sales. However, when creating a winning video marketing strategy, sales are not the only things that should be in mind. What does that mean? Yes, increasing sales is the end goal, but what do you intend to achieve with video marketing? Are you doing it to entertain your audience? Are you using it to educate the consumers or is it to inspire them/ to have a winning strategy, you need to be able to have clearly defined objectives before you even come up with a plan.

It is also important to note that people will stop paying attention to your video the moment they realize that you are trying to ‘sell.’ The focus should be directed more on adding value to your audience.

2. Understanding your target audience

You do not want to go on a wild goose chase. For one, the marketing strategies will not give you the results you anticipate, and you will go at a loss: time and money invested. You, therefore, need to carry out some research and know what your audience needs and how you can present them with a solution. At this point, you need to understand their online activities. For instance, if your audience is the millennials, you are more likely to find them on Instagram. That, therefore, tells you your focus should be on creating videos for the particular platform. Understand the video content that will engage them most.

3. The topic and formatting should be in line with what your brand intends to present

Depending on the product you offer, you need to understand that for your video marketing efforts to be successful, it needs to be inclined to your brand’s voice. You should, therefore, put that into consideration as much as you can. The topic should be about how the product will be able to counter the consumer’s problem at the time. When it comes to formatting, you also need to communicate as a brand. Ensure that the audience will be able to identify the brand after the engagement.

4. Create a story

You need to create a story for your video if you are to make your audience remember it after an interaction. Remember to make it interesting though.

5. Do promotions

After defining an objective, researching on your audience and creating a story for your video, you are not yet done. There is still something essential that you need to do: promoting your video content. Try out effective promotional strategies. You need to get your video out there lest your efforts may not pay off as you would have wanted them to.

You can use paid ads to promote your videos. You also have the option of partnering with social media influencers who can help you reach to as much audience as you can. The promotion strategy needs to be on point. If you are working with a handsome budget, you can ask authority companies to link it or publish it for you.

6. Make your video content mobile responsive

Again, the world is going mobile. If someone is visiting your page, he is probably doing it from either a tablet or mobile phone. Sixty percent of the Google searches originate from mobile devices. You might want to capture that audience too. You are not, however going to succeed if your video content is not perfect for mobile. More so, it is much easier to share video content on mobile phones than on desktops. One great way of making videos suitable for mobile viewers is making them a little bit shorter. The quality cannot even be debatable.

Your first step to success in video marketing has quality videos. What that means is that you should be particular about the video creators you are working with. As you use video content, you also need to see to it that the engagement is high. With the strategies above, you can never go wrong!

Aside from the existence of common branding elements – logo, brand name, and guidelines – each industry comes with its specs. An airline logo will always lay on both sides of the communication, whether it’s mainly digital or analog. These logos still stand out on the brands’ social media pages and airplanes. They integrate with online geolocated campaigns and stand as design pieces of personnel’s clothing.

The Lufthansa Airline logo was first designed in 1918, so this year it celebrates a hundred years of existence. The emblem had undergone some slight updates until the beginning of 2018 when it was part of a rebranding campaign.

Evolution of an airline logo: The Lufthansa case study

Lufthansa’s current logo contains a crane symbol and the company’s name. Both are shown in dark-blue on a white background. The color and font are essential and mostly remained unchanged over time. There are plenty of resources available to help you discover what made designers choose bold and dark blue. However, if you check this article, you can also see what influenced or inspired Lufthansa branding managers to make specific choices.

Another airline company compiled the first version of the signature logo in 1918. Lufthansa’s founders purchased the logo and the company in 1926 and used the logo as its own. The brand’s version of the logo hand elongated tail and head and a curved body compared with today’s logo. Lufthansa shortened the silhouette and gave it a more geometric design. Moreover, the crane was placed in a rectangle, as opposed to its original circle. The first update occurred in the 1960s when the airline logo returned to its signature circle. You can have a look at creative free plane logo designs for inspiration.

Lufthansa’s preferred colors were dark blue, gold and white – out of which the bright gold disappeared due to the latest update. The airline has a German company it never forgets about, so it always used fonts that resemble Helvetica and Normal-Grotesk. Letter are straight capitals. The latest logo version contains a bolded font than the previous ones.

Meaning of the Lufthansa logo

Otto Firle is the author of the original Lufthansa logo. The designer is now among the top specialists that marketers look up to. Given the times when the airline appeared, the crane bird symbol placed on an airplane had a deeper meaning than today. Back then, such a logo symbolized the power of planes to fly as efficient as birds. Today, the iconic crane sends a premium message regarding the company’s services.

By the way, Hansa means crane in German, while Luft means air. The meaning behind the brand’s name is clear and straightforward for Germans, while those from other countries can see it as complex, yet easy to remember. The crane bird also symbolizes good luck, stability, and strength. Hansa is also the abbreviation for a medieval trading group called the Hanseatic League.

Five branding lessons any airline logo should write down

Given the above facts, the 2018 logo update featuring the removal of yellow raised intense debate among graphic designers and marketers. Expert Robert Lisovskiy designed the current version of the logo. He became famous after created the symbol of radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Let’s check which of these might work for your brand!

1. Build a cult, not a brand

Any airline is above all a service provider. It might contain products – such as travels to specific destinations at certain times – and means to offer them as are airplanes. The Lufthansa logo is visible together with the wordmark or in its absence. By splitting the logo in two, the company managed to improve the regular appearance of the airline, adding them a stylish value.

However, branding goes beyond the logo. Lufthansa managed to create a brand which focused on its clients, instead of its products or services. Flying with an airplane accomplished the traveler’s dreams to see the world. The wish to fly would be the core point of Lufthansa which even released printed versions of ads back in the days. The ads targeted both families who planned to travel as much as possible and flight enthusiasts who wanted to become pilots.
Building a cult instead of a brand targets more areas such as brand loyalty and brand recognition. Satisfied customers are long-lasting and useful sources of word-of-mouth marketing. The cult constructed around your brand helps it become more popular even than its products/services. By creating experiences out of products/services, you send out a coherent message that strengthens your connection with customers. Other said it helps you build a killer brand, instead of a killer product/service.

2. Make a priority out of consistency

An airline logo needs to stand out among others literally. The audience should instantly recognize it when placed next to other logos in real life situations – such as waiting at the airport for the plane to arrive. Throughout its activity years, Lufthansa hasn’t wholly changed its logo at all. All the updates were slight adjustments which either bolded the circle, moved the focus to another color, or improves the margins of the crane bird.

Brand consistency makes your logo recognizable in all circumstances. Most adjustments aren’t usually visible for the end customer. However, if an update causes an emblem to be unrecognizable, the change involves an adaptation period that buyers must go through and an entirely different branding campaign.

The Lufthansa airline logo is one of the proofs that branding can be improved far from the eye of end customers. While graphic designers notice any change, buyers receive a coherent message from your brand.

3. Initiate a rebranding campaign

Whenever a line of products expands, customers usually receive it as improvements. However, if a brand has more product lines, they cause unnecessary headaches. Keeping more product lines under the umbrella of a single brand might become confusing for the end customers.

Lufthansa’s latest logo update occurred as a rebranding campaign initiated to update the essential elements of the company. The company released its rebranding campaign together with other factors, including the design of the personnel’s outfit design and explanations about the change. Lufthansa wanted its message to become even more premium and update to times. If millennials would be the company’s next customers, then the news should fit them. In-house designer Ronal Wild handled the rebranding task.

Start rebranding from the top down and ask why such an initiative would be necessary. It may have educational purposes, sending a more explicit message or targeting a wider audience. Either way, rebranding should follow the path induced by the initial branding campaign and only necessary target changes to elements. The rebranding campaign of Lufthansa was minimal to its logo. Interventions were calculated and focused on sending an even more simple and straightforward message.

Lufthansa managed to raise discussions by eliminating yellow from planes. Some influencers noticed that airline brands might begin to look the same as there’s no intense color to differentiate them. Yet, this elimination allowed the airline to also adjust its visuals and user experience to small smartphone and smartwatch screen. The yellow is still visible on personnel’s outfit.

4. Don’t get into debates

Marketers were expecting a significant change to the airline logo. However, it only featured adjustments and the removal of gold or yellow as a background. The move has been subject to so many discussions that it even generated press articles about the importance of specific colors in a design. Lufthansa’s presentation prevented a debate with graphic designers by explaining why brand leaders have chosen the changes.

Whenever a strong brand initiates a campaign, it generates reactions. Responding them (unless necessary, of course) begins a discussion which might draw attention from your campaigns or initiatives. Official brand responses lead to chain reactions from the press and specialized websites.

Rebranding campaigns and officially announced logo updates are usually followed by campaigns that promote the new logo and the changes. Engaging in a discussion regarding the variations will confuse the end who accidentally get involved in the campaign. Since responses and accusations mostly involve branding experts, they have low chances to obtain good reactions.

There’s been a debate about the new Lufthansa airline logo. Experts stated that the change was too dull, and the emblem lost some of its charms when it gave up on its signature yellow. However, the color was no longer necessary in the context of turning into a premium service provider.

5. Cover the entire customer journey map

Lufthansa already has the reputation of a high-end company which provides its audience with premium service and products. There was just a matter of time until the company would rebrand and respond to the audience’s demand to visually reflect its quality. However, rebranding didn’t stop here. Lufthansa improved the customer experience by also enhancing its customer service department which already had positive feedback.

The customer journey map or user experience involves a coherence between the airline logo and all of the other elements that connect the user to your brand. Each step of the buying and usage process should be covered. That’s why Lufthansa has insignificant complains regarding its customer support.

Attention to details can boost or lower a brand’s popularity. An airline logo campaign cannot go through the same creativity as mainstream retail or food brands can. However, there’s a lot you can synchronize a rebranding idea with. Lufthansa decided to reveal the logo update when the brand turned 100 years. Having such a moment to connect with your campaign increases its impact and the emotional side of your brand.

What else matters aside from a fresh airline logo?

Sticking to your brand’s message in almost mandatory for an airline with a reputation to protect. Our today case study has initiated an environmental campaign with long-term partner NABU (Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V.). Lufthansa gets involved in the protection of endangered bird species – the crane, of course. The airline initiated such campaigns in the 1980s and continued to do so by announcing each new initiative. Such an idea increases the strength of a brand’s core values and consideration towards them.

Some campaigns also need to connect with your services. The airline announced its rebranding campaign with #LufthansaBlue. It was an educational campaign that targeted those who want to know more about the company and what lies behind the scenes of the color-change initiative.

Lufthansa offers more than the possibility to fly to new destinations. It’s about the experience of flight and travel. That’s why the airline supports its long-term campaign #SayYestotheWorld and promotes it based on a geographic criterion. In March 2018, the campaign entered India two ways.

One side of the campaign showed locals that the airline is More Indian than you think by introducing local cuisine, hospitality and entertainment services to tradition-oriented locals.

Meanwhile, millennials were encouraged to explore the world, discover new sites and wonders and have an open mind regarding what travel can offer them.

The two-in-one campaign carries the fame of its correspondent ideas from other countries. While it’s still ongoing, we might say it has high chances to increase Lufthansa’s sales in India.

Wrapping Up

Lufthansa is a global airline company which remains among the top ten of its kind for years. Brand managers know what they need to promote and focus on. Its services are flawless, and so the logo should be. Even though Lufthansa may seem to have disappointed a side of the public with the latest logo update, those who had negative responses might not be the airline’s buyers, but rather a section of the vast audience who enjoys seeing colorful logos.
An airline logo needs to look appealing on digital and analog form, on personnel’s outfit and – above all – in the sky. As a travel service provider, Lufthansa emphasized its premium side and lifted its standards regarding design. This is a lesson to learn from. In the end, an airline logo might never go through radical changes without raising questions in customers’ minds. However, it can and should closely communicate to what the company itself has to offer.

Images Source: Depositphotos.com.

You know that blogging is an excellent way to connect with your audience and persuade them to give your products or services a try. And, you also know that email marketing can help you nurture that relationship and turn it into something profitable.

After all, the numbers paint an accurate picture. Websites with a blog have about 434% more indexed pages, and consumers tend to read five articles before making purchasing decisions. Moreover, personalized emails have a higher click-through rate than generic ones.

But, have you ever thought about combining the two and what it can do for your marketing goals? If not, here are five clever ways you can mix blogging with email marketing.

Integrate Blog Posts into Emails

Sharing your blog content with your email subscribers is one of the best ways to ensure they’re up to date with your latest articles. Be sure to consider various factors, such as your content calendar or your audience engagement before deciding the frequency of your emails. For some, a weekly newsletter might be too frequent while for others, a monthly one could feel a bit overwhelming, especially if you plan to cram everything into one message.

Find the right balance between your blog posts and your newsletter. You could even do a survey, and ask how often your audience would like to see new content and receive updates. Or, you could use this email marketing guide to get an idea of how you could leverage this medium and reap its benefits.

Share Your Guest Blog Posts

If you regularly write guest blog posts, then don’t keep them to yourself. Whether they approach different subjects or not, they still have your unique style and signature, and you might have many readers that would love to see your point of view on something else than usually. Feature these guest blog posts in an email and introduce your audience to different blogs – you might be surprised how much they’ll appreciate it!

Take Advantage of Social Media

You already know that social media has become a powerhouse when it comes to researching and engaging with brands, and it would be insane not to include it in your marketing strategy. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other platform relevant to your niche, social networks are essential to spreading the word about your blog and attracting more readers. Make sure to include social media buttons both on your blog and your emails so that your subscribers can easily check out your social media accounts, should they want to.

Answer FAQs through Email

You probably have a list of questions that your prospects tend to ask frequently. How do you go about addressing them? If you still respond individually to each person, then that’s a huge waste of time and resources.
Instead, you should create a list of some of the most common questions and use them as inspiration for future blog posts. Or, you can put the answers together in a series of articles.

After you make sure you have all the necessary information on your blog, you can then create an email autoresponder series – a sequence of email marketing messages your subscribers will get that will include links back to your blog.

Consistency Is Key

In this day and age, when we are bombarded with information from a multitude of sources, it can become a bit difficult to find the optimal solution to a problem. That’s why consistency is paramount if you want to reach out to a wide audience, increase subscriber numbers and build a meaningful relationship with them. Your purpose should be to inform and educate your audience, not confuse them.

Here’s an example. Let’s imagine that you’re running a photography blog and this month you plan to write about gadgets and talk about your favorite cameras, the best gadgets for different types of photography styles, and so on. You’ll need to make sure your newsletter stays on the same page and talks about the same topics you will feature in your blog posts. The goal here is to create one clear message for your audience that they can quickly understand and explore.

A blogging and email marketing mix can bring in excellent results if you find the right ratio between the two. Make sure you understand who your audience is and tailor the mix according to their needs and preferences. Also, don’t forget to use only the latest blogging and email marketing practices if you want to reach your goals and avoid any step backs in your effort.

John Zakaria is the founder of johnnreviews.com with more than 7 years of experience in internet marketing business. Johnnreviews site provides brands with the latest strategies top internet marketing experts use to increase their website & eCom store’s traffic via Social Media, SEO, video marketing, Email Marketing and more.

Do you have the key to sign up more subscribers, enhance the engagement, optimize deliverability, and boost the opens, conversions, and clicks of your email campaigns? Here is a list of the best practices listed below that you can follow for email marketing best practices 2018. Emails continue to generate a potential return on the investment (ROI) as compared to that of the other marketing channels.

Top 5 Email Marketing Best Practices 2018

What are the strategies that companies follow for email marketing campaigns to get such outstanding ROI? Here are top 5 tips and tricks that can help you develop the best email marketing campaigns to achieve your company’s sales and goals.

1. Do Not Forget About The Mobile Users While In Process

Using mobile devices to read and interact with the emails is nowadays on the rise. This is the reason why it is so important to make sure that you have the best email marketing designs that can also be used by the mobile users. With the help of responsive designs, you can ensure that the mobile users are the target audience and that they are getting the optimum experience while reading your emails.

2. Incorporate Your Email Marketing Strategies With Social Media Platforms

Incorporating your social media accounts for marketing along with the email marketing strategies can turn out to be the best way to grow the email list and at the same time also extend the reach of your email campaigns. Adding a short video to your emails can show a dramatically out bursting growth in boosting your engagement and also in increasing the open rates by 19% and click-through rates by almost 65%.

3. Try Optimizing Your Email Sending Frequency And Cadence

When you look at the correlation between email frequency and revenue, you will find out that there is a positive bond between them. This is why the companies keep increasing their volume of email sent. But, this practice can backfire anytime resulting in the customers to unsubscribe and even at times marking your emails as trash because of getting a list of useless emails from a specific brand.

Research says when a customer receives too many emails from a specific brand or company, he or she tends to unsubscribe the website or mark the emails as spam. Make sure your emails are sent at the right time and that have something beneficial for the customers to grab their attention at first.

4. Creating And Maintaining A Top-Quality Email List

Do you have any idea what a typical email list reduces almost 25% of its subscribers every year? This means that you need to continuously work hard in attracting the new users who will be interested in your products and services and might become your potential subscribers in the future. Maintaining the high-quality list is not easy as it requires a lot of research and is time taking but at the same time, it also gives you the potential customers who will become your trusted subscribers shortly.

5. Personalizing The Emails

Using the names of the subscribers in the subject line is among the best ways to capture the customer’s attention as they continuously scan their inboxes. Personalizing the emails does not only ends at adding the user’s name in the emails, but it also makes sure that the right type of information and offers are displayed to the particular users that you know they will show interest upon.

There are numerous predictive platforms and tools with the help of which one can easily create more personalized messages for different customers segments than before. You can take the help of the best tool for email marketing and use them to enhance your email sending ways. This tool not only makes you reach your potential customers but also gets your business into higher altitudes regarding popularity and business growth.

Most marketers want to launch, expand and strengthen their business’ position on the market – they invest in promotion, distribution, awareness and information campaigns and so on. However, a growth hacker is a person who goes the extra mile, someone who strategically designs a time-efficient plan with a single goal in mind – to achieve growth. Hence the name.

Basically, when you’re thinking about growth hacking tactics, you are building every strategy, tactic or action with that specific goal in mind. Everything you do must be oriented towards growing your business – marketers also care about this aspect, but certainly not to the same extent.

When it comes to ICOs, growth is key for obvious reasons. Whether you just launched an Initial Coin Offering or you plan on doing that soon, no matter how good it is, if you don’t come up with convincing, targeted messages, you won’t gain the attention or support from your most important audiences.

If you want your project to gain the buzz it deserves and raise the capital you need, growth-hacking strategies are the way to go.

ICO marketing – what do I need to know?

If you want your ICO to gain credibility and massive attention, it’s not enough to just shout it from the rooftops. You want to first establish yourself as a believable source, use public relations to your advantage and look for ways to build yourself as trustworthy in the eyes of potential investors.

You can have the best white paper in the world and a good social media strategy, and it still might not be enough. Your marketing strategy should be more complex than that and include aspects such as leadership and research. You have to know who your potential buyers are; who would want to take part in your token sale, as well as the profile of your investors, what their expectations are and how can your project meet them.

Secondly, you need to build a good website with quality content that explains the key components of your ICO. Remember, you might get visitors who have never heard of you until then, so you want to spark their interest and keep it. You want a potential investor to choose your project out of a dozen others, you want them to visit your website and say “This is what I’ve been looking for.”

One way to help your cryptocurrency gain traction is via WordPress. The great advantage of this platform is that you can choose custom solutions for your specific business needs – just pick a Bitcoin WordPress theme and your website is set. It will communicate to the interested parties that you have something of value to offer – think of your website as your business calling card.

Growth hacking techniques to try

1. Create a positive perception

You want the intended audience to gain a positive perception of your product. You want them to relate to it, to believe in your project and by extension, in you and your team. First impressions are crucial when it comes to ICOs, so you should channel all of your marketing efforts into creating and maintaining that perception. This is why you should have a well documented ICO marketing strategy right from the start.

2. Be transparent

You can’t possibly establish trust if your project has an anonymous team if you consciously choose not to disclose their names. You might not think it’s important, but think of it this way – would you buy groceries from an anonymous producer? We believe not because you don’t know anything about the source of the products or their business practices.

Same is the deal with ICOs. An anonymous team makes potential investors think your project is a scam. So, be transparent, make your list of team members, associates, partners or even sponsors public.

3. Build a community

You want to get as many people as possible to talk about your project, whether it’s on social media or cryptocurrency threads and forums. Just like an online store or a coffee shop, you want to achieve brand awareness; you want to be as active as possible by replying to interested buyers and keeping in touch with potential investors.

4. Don’t forget about SEO

Whether you’ve chosen WordPress or a custom website to get your business started, it’s important to improve your rankings in Google, Bing or other search engines. You want people to find you, so use specific keywords, improve your website’s speed and come up with quality content.

These are just a few growth hacking strategies you can try. Do your research, find as much information as you can and come up with actions that will benefit your unique project.

You can receive adequate funding for your cryptocurrency, get your ICO up and run and gain the attention of the right audiences if you’re consistent in your strategy and you target all the proper channels. Good luck!

Modern day businesses must have a strong online marketing strategy to survive. However, online marketing can be very challenging, especially if you are a small business with a limited budget. The good news is that there are numerous free/affordable tools that can boost your strategy.

Here are 5 must-have tools for online marketers:

1. UberSuggest

Keyword research is an essential element of search engine optimization (SEO) and paid per click (PPC) strategy. Using the right keywords in your content will enhance your search ranking and attract more traffic to your site. UberSuggest is a free-to-use keyword suggestion tool that can be very useful for brainstorming keywords in your niche. It also displays keyword suggestions from Google Suggest and Google Keyword Planner. The results will reveal how expensive each keyword is, how difficult it is to rank organically and which competitors are ranking for the same keyword. This will help you decide if a specific keyword is worth targeting.

2. HootSuite

Social media plays a major role in the success of any online marketing strategy. HootSuite is one of the most effective tools for social media marketing. It allows users to schedule and manage posts to platforms such as Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. All this is done within the HootSuite dashboard, thus saving you the trouble of signing in to each individual platform. Premium account users get access to advanced features for security, team collaboration, audience engagement and social analytics.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very useful tool for monitoring the performance of a website. Once you’ve added the Analytics code to your site, you will then be able to keep track of your sources of traffic, choose goals for your website, analyze audience demographics and create custom reports. If you realize certain keywords are attracting lots of traffic to your site, you could focus on the same keywords when creating content in future. In case the source of traffic is a specific social media campaign, it would be advisable to replicate the same campaign to capture similar results. Google Analytics comes with great features such as event tracking, channel grouping, calculated metrics, custom alerts, attribution, real-time reporting, and annotations.

4. Narrow.io

Narrow.io is a marketing automation tool that allows you to engage with Twitter users that are discussing topics relevant to your target audience. It comes with a simple dashboard where you can set your targeting criteria using locations, hashtags, and keywords. For example, if you want to attract followers interested in online marketing, you could use the phrase ‘Neil Patel’. Using your targeting criteria, Narrow automatically follows accounts and favorites tweets on your behalf. If these accounts do not follow you back within 24 hours, Narrow automatically unfollows and unfavorites for you. The downside of this tool is that it doesn’t give you much control over your audience. As a result, you are likely to end up with some followers that are not valuable to your business.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a tool that allows users to see what topics have been trending on social media in the past months. All you need to do is type in a relevant term and click on ‘search’. The results will reveal the posts have been shared most of the leading social media networks. This will give you an idea of what kind of topics would resonate with your audience. The advanced search feature allows you to exclude words from a query, find an exact phrase, find content using author name and search by domain or URL. BuzzSumo will also help you find influencers that can share your content.

Does anyone know the reason why Powerpoint boomed ferociously in mid-2017?

Did marketing crowd start making more presentations? Don’t you think that all this fuss about PP presentations is a bubble that is about to pop?

Who else but Google can know if this is true, let’s see what Google trends can show us.

Over the period of the last 5 years, there doesn’t seem to be any rapid popularity increase like this one.

Anyways, the Powerpoint fuss is all around us, and even those guys who have never used it before seem to be trying to ride the popularity wave.

In view of the fact that I mix in with the marketers’ crowd who are making various presentations using the so popular Powerpoint, it turns out that 60% of those speakers aren’t able to make a decent presentation.

10% out of those 60, make me feel like…

“Why didn’t he google a tutorial or something?”

Source Giphy

So this piece of writing is for you, my friends, who ride the Powerpoint popularity wave but can’t make a decent presentation. And it feels like this is on a global scale.

In case you know someone fitting this profile, please share with them the link to this page, thank you.

Let’s get to the juice.

The Signs of an Effective Presentation

Prepared to Win: Researched, planned, and prepared professionally so you can deliver the right message to your target audience effectively.

Designed Correctly: With points that are illustrated, and visually stand-out, without overwhelming your audience or unnecessarily complicating your message.

Practiced to Perfection: Rehearsed and timed so your points land as practiced with your live audience.

Delivered With Poise: Presented with a relaxed inner-calm and confident outward projection, while communicating warmth, excitement, and energy.

Free From Mistakes: Devoid of cheesy clipart, nonessential flashiness, miscues like reading directly from promoters, and other easy to avoid problems.

Now I would like to share with you 40 something tips on how to create a Powerpoint presentation, which I’ve learned the hard way.

Basic Presentation Tips

The first presentation I made publicly reminds of the way I learned to drive a car.

My first ride made me sweat so hard that after my first driving lesson instructor had to wait until the seat back dries out, later we laughed really hard remembering this case.

Here come the first tips, and let’s begins with some basic don’ts.

1. Don’t sweat

When you come to face the public all sweaty, as if you just ran a marathon, people will already hate you, because no one likes watching sweaty guys, even if your presentation rocks.

2. Don’t read

Who wrote the speech for you? You, or someone else? It doesn’t matter because if you’re going to read from a sheet of paper you’re about to make it extremely monotonous, and your listeners will start yawning 40 seconds after you read the first line.

3. Don’t sit

The only man who can sit while making a presentation is Stephen Hawking. If it’s not your name why are you sitting then?

5. Don’t talk with your hands

If you are an Italian you can pass to the tip #6, everyone else holds still.

Let’s start with an interesting fact. In her study behavioral researcher, Vanessa Van Edwards compared the most popular versus the least popular TED speakers in terms of their gesture use.

The results are quite surprising.

During the 18-minute talk, the least popular TED Talkers used an average of 272 hand gestures.
The most popular ones used around 465 hand gestures—that’s almost twice as more!
This doesn’t mean that you should dance hokey pokey in front of your listeners, just try to make gestures authentic.

Preparation of the Presentation

6. Make sure you’re good at your subject

Now imagine this situation, you were made to prepare some presentation that is not your purview. You’ve asked someone good at your topic write a speech and make a presentation. But when you start it, it will be a complete failure because the first question from the audience will let them know that your knowledge of the subject equals zero.

7. Write the speech on your own

Who else but you knows your subject matters. Writing something can be really hard especially when you have a creative block that makes you want to do something like this.

Illustration by @crispegram

They say “Writing a small text a day keeps the creative block away” even if you’re not a copywriter but a marketer, developer, or anyone else you CAN and SHOULD write.

The writing process makes your brain work harder thus keeping it fit. When you have enough writing practice you can write the whole speech of your presentation in “one bite”.

“Writing a small text a day keeps the creative block away.”

8. Talk only about important things

Some people start their presentation describing the background which routes back to the Roman Empire… If it turns out that there’s not much you’ve got to say, you’d better keep it short than talk about things non-related to your presentation.

9. Think about your audience

Who are the people you age going to make a presentation to? Make sure you understand who are these guys. Never talk about things not related to them, making them yawn from the first minutes of your speech is not a good thing, unless your presentation is about yawning.

Writing Your Speech

10. Making a research

No matter how good you’re at some topic you MUST make a research. The research stage will not only help you write a decent speech but will also help you find additional information or facts that will make your presentation a lot more trustworthy.

11. Write a lead sentence

The lead sentence should:

• Grab the attention of your listeners.
• Establish the tone and the mood of your presentation.
• Set the main idea and motion.

That’s why never start a presentation like this:

– Hey! I’m Bill…and I’m an accountant..ehm…manager. And I’m gonna talk about…ehm…digits… (crickets chirping).

Next moment 75% of your listeners will take their phones out and will start scrolling their Instagram feeds.

12. Writing the first draft

Did your stomach just take a dive? No worries all we need right now is some groundwork, no perfection is required here. The first draft will serve as a foundation for your final speech, making a few revisions of your draft #1 is essential. Imagine you’re trying to explain your subject to a friend while you were having a beer, or two, just start writing.

13. Don’t forget that your presentation is a story and it means that…

…it should have a structure of a story, i.e. the plot and the setting.

Since everyone these days is crazy about storytelling you can start your presentation with a short (a very short) story that somehow relates to your subject, if you don’t know stories, use someone else’s. This is what storytelling is all about, you’re supposed to tell stories even if they are not yours.

14. When reaching the end of the draft

Just like in any other story the end of your speech should be not just a summary of what you have said, but a resolution of the problems or issues you have depicted.

Designing Your Presentation

15. Clean VS Cluttered

For some reason, certain individuals think that adding lots of visuals to the slides of their presentation will make it look awesome. Probably they are thinking that audience will perceive it as a super researched, or a super important one. As a rule the effect is quite opposite, people hate cluttered slides, and what’s more important they hate them!

16. Reduce the wording on your slides

Just like the one above, there should be no more than 20-25 words on every slide, otherwise, your presentation will look crammed and non-attractive.

17. Use lists

Don’t forget to arrange your texts into sleek lists, they are perceived much easier than full-length sentences.

18. Choose the right font

Regarding the fonts, there’s a thing you need to know about. There are several categories of fonts, most widely used ones are Serif and Sans Serif fonts. For presentation like yours, Serif Fonts are not recommended because all those tiny elements i.e. serifs can disappear or become too blurry due to the brightness and resolution of an image on a projection screen. So you can freely take a font like Gill Sans or PT Sans and use it for your presentation.

19. The choice of colors

Imagine your presentation is made with these color, how will your audience react to this palette? Their eyes will literally start bleeding. When you’re choosing the colors you can either pick your corporate colors or stick to some nice palette that you can generate using a tool like colormind.io.

This color scheme generator provides you with unlimited color palettes, so you can literally click forever trying to find the one.

20. Choice of images

Another weak spot is the images, for some reason certain individuals choose cheezy clipart that looks like crap. Even though there’s a huge number of website where one can get amazing free stock images for commercial use, some guys tend to choose awful stocks. Here’s a short list of websites where you can get amazing photographs for free.

Unsplash

Realistic Shots

Pixabay

Life of Pix

21. Don’t overuse memes

There’s a lot of people who love memes, and the same number of those who hate them. Here you need to keep up to the middle ground and have no more than two memes for a whole number of slides.

22. Don’t make them seasick

Those days when people were not fed up with CSS effects, the ones offered by Powerpoint seemed to be quite cool. But these days all those fade-ins, flips, fly-ins, wipes and so on, look really strange. Make sure your presentation is clean and doesn’t have all those transitions.

23. Use charts, graphs, infographics

There’s a number of scientifically backed reasons why we love graphics and visuals.

No matter what you say, if back it up with a chart you will sound more persuasive.

Charts are easier to recall than words.

Color visuals increase willingness to read and listen by 80%.

1. Apply the 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint

Guy Kawasaki introduced his 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint. The essence is quite simple 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font. That’s it.

25. Making sexy slides

In case you don’t have a design background and you’ve never created visuals of any sort, you can steal like an artist. Feel free to visit places like Dribbble or Behance where you can get some ideas how to present information in a sexy manner.

26. Using the blank template

Still, you can opt for minimalism and stick to the blank Powerpoint document, but this promises nothing in terms if sexiness.

27. Opting for the premium theme

Along with blank document, there’s a choice of premium Powerpoint templates you can use to arrange any information using a set of predefined slides. Here’re few examples.

Pitch Deck template – 230 slides

Business Plan Powerpoint presentation – 200 slides

Business Infographic Powerpoint template – 5628 slide variations

All these templates are in $20-23 price range, it’s not a big cost for such a vast array of slides.

The Day Before the Presentation

28. The rehearsal

Even though you may consider yourself an awesome public speaker you need to rehearse your speech. I’m serious right now, or you need to read your speech aloud. This will help you to understand if it needs to be improved or it’s good to go.

29. Speaking publicly “Take 1. Episode 1”

This is another thing that may seem funny to you, ask your wife to take the role of your audience and speak “publicly” to her.

30. Speaking publicly “Take 2. Episode 1”

Open your camera app on your smartphone and make a video recording of your speech. This is another thing that will help you improve your speech or presentation in general, a video may help you find any flaws in your acting or speech.

31. Keep an eye on your watch

Don’t forget the rule 10/20/30, you have only 20 minutes for your presentation, otherwise, your listeners will get bored and will no longer perceive your information.

32. Make pauses while you’re talking

Even though you have around 20 minutes for your speech this doesn’t mean that you should talk really fast, keep to the middle pace and make logical pauses when needed.

33. Watch their reaction

Your listeners will definitely react to your speech, which is why you need to keep an eye on your audience watching their reactions.

34. Interact with your listeners

In case something goes wrong you need to have a backup plan, some sort of a game that can increase interaction between you and your listeners or a funny story that somehow relates to the topic of your speech.

35. Record yourself, just for lols

Ask someone to record your speech for your home video archive, later you can watch it and cry.

36. Choose focal points in the crowd

Just as in any other “crowd” among your audience there will be some strong personalities like your bosses or some other influential guys. Make sure that you focus your eyes on them, this will make them feel as if you’re making this presentation for them.

Your Presentation Starts in 5 Minutes…

37. Don’t panic

If you started panicking here’s what you can do to stay calm:

• Use deep breathing.
• Recognize that you’re panicking.
• Close your eyes.
• Find a focus object.
• Use muscle relaxation techniques.
• Picture your happy place.

38. Don’t forget your notecards

3 minutes…

Where are your notecards?

39. Stop sweating like a pig!

2 minutes…

You’re panicking again and getting all sweaty, repeat step #37.

40. Knock ‘em dead!

30 seconds…

You’re awesome, you’re good at what you do. Go get ’em, tiger…

Over to You

Since I’ve been a speaker few times I know what it feels like making a presentation, this is why I tried to be as detailed as it’s possible. I hope you enjoyed this piece. Don’t forget to share it with your friends.