In fact, more people are using email than ever before (close to 3.8 billion worldwide). Fronetics works with supply chain and logistics businesses every day, so we have a first-hand understanding of how email marketing can be successful in these industries.
That being said, it’s true that email is changing. Marketers need to be on top of these latest changes to keep pace and stay relevant. Here are 5 email marketing trends supply chain and logistics marketers should be ready for in 2018.
5 email marketing trends
1) Interactive emails
According to a recent survey by Litmus, more than 27% of marketers believe interactive emails make a big impact in email marketing. Making your emails engaging to read will reduce bounce rates and capture your target audience’s attention span for longer. A few ideas to make your content interactive: image galleries, sliders, buttons, quizzes, search bars, surveys, and, of course, an “Add to Cart” button.
2) List segmentation
If you’re not segmenting your email lists, you’re shortchanging your email marketing campaigns. MailChimp found that businesses who use list segmentation generate more than 14% more email opens and get 100.95% more clicks from email campaigns.
[bctt tweet=”Businesses who use list segmentation generate more than 14% more email opens and get 100% more clicks from email campaigns” username=”Fronetics”]
Effective email list segmentation is about collecting adequate data to create and target optimal email content based on audience preferences. A simple way to collect this type of data: email opt-in forms that collect more information than simply name and email.
3) Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies will shape the future of email marketing. For example, Adobe has invested in AI-powered marketing, including features with the ability to suggest the best subject line for an email based on what it has learned about users. Machine learning can make email marketing easier, suggesting ways to segment email lists, send more personalized emails to key individuals, and generate product recommendations.
4) Plain-text emails
This one may seem counter-intuitive. While high-quality email design filled with images used to be a trend, marketers are increasingly finding that plain-text emails are more effective. This is largely because plain-text renders the same across all devices, and it has the added benefit of seeming more personal.
5) The rise of mobile-first
It’s not news that most emails are now opened on mobile devices. This means that it makes sense to start designing emails mobile-first. In addition, email subscription forms will start becoming more mobile-friendly, and content, such as articles and blog posts, should end with an email sign-up form to increase conversions.
What email marketing trends are you paying attention to?
Focus on what you do best — and save time and money — by parceling off these 6 marketing tasks to outsource.
If you’re anything like me, you’re busy — not-enough-hours-in-the-day busy. We find that supply chain and logistics marketers are some of the most overworked professionals in the industry. One person (or a very small team) is often responsible for all marketing and sales efforts for an organization. So I want to let you in on a little secret: Outsourcing is your solution to being too busy.
[bctt tweet=”Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies.” username=”Fronetics”]
Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies. In other words, you can start focusing on what you do best and delegate specified tasks to external experts.
The content marketing landscape is constantly changing. There are more and more marketing tasks to cover: social media, videos, blogs, emails, etc. How can you truly focus your attention on any one area when you have so many balls in the air?
Don’t work harder. Work smarter.
Outsourcing marketing gives you the opportunity to remove some of the time-consuming and laborious tasks from your desk, so you can get back to the core of your marketing efforts.
That doesn’t mean you have to outsource all your marketing tasks, or even half of them. Choosing several areas beyond your staff’s expertise, or tasks that are particularly tedious, can help you improve your marketing efforts and take stress off an overworked internal team.
Here are six areas you should consider outsourcing.
Video: 6 marketing tasks to outsource
Final thoughts
Finding the right partner is key when you choose to outsource marketing tasks. You have to trust the people to whom you are delegating tasks, so that you know the work is getting done the way you want while you focus your attention on other tasks.
The right partner will work with you to develop a strategy that closely aligns with your business goals. Your partner can even execute the strategy for you and provide regular updates on how it’s working. This kind of results-driven approach will ensure you’re stretching your marketing dollars to the fullest extent and getting the kind of results that will grow your bottom line.
If you’re looking to grow brand awareness fast, here are 8 tricks to boost your efforts.
Have you ever noticed how some brands seem to have crept into popularity overnight? You’ve never heard of them, and then, all of sudden, they’re everywhere.
Their brand awareness has sky rocketed, and they’re achieving every company’s ultimate goal: Customers know about them. So what’s their secret?
Here at Fronetics, we don’t believe they have a secret. We believe that they took advantage of content marketing and its many benefits — growing brand awareness included. They were able to scale their growth in a short amount of time, a true success story for the digital era. Companies like Uber and Yelp have used these tips to implement small changes that yielded large results.
Remember, in order to grow brand awareness, you need to be proactive. It’s time to steer away from some of the traditional marketing methods, which don’t take into account how modern B2B buyers research vendors. Start putting your content marketing strategy to the test.
[bctt tweet=”To grow brand awareness fast, it’s time to steer away from some of the traditional marketing methods, which don’t take into account how modern B2B buyers research vendors. ” username=”Fronetics”]
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness fast, there’s no better place to start than with content marketing. Check out these 8 tips for using content marketing to grow your brand awareness fast.
A new study shows that businesses that reply to customer reviews receive better ratings overall than those that do not respond.
I’ve written before about the rising popularity of B2B user review sites and how supply chain and logistics businesses can use them to increase organic traffic and lead-to-sale conversion rates. B2B buyers are increasingly considering user reviews when making purchasing decisions. That’s great for business — when the reviews are good.
But what if you get bad reviews?
[bctt tweet=”Bad reviews don’t necessarily spell disaster — but they do mean that you should incorporate a response plan into your overall marketing strategy. ” username=”Fronetics”]
A brand new study published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) shows that businesses that reply to customer reviews get better ratings overall. This means that bad reviews don’t necessarily spell disaster — but they do mean that you should incorporate a response plan into your overall marketing strategy.
Replying to reviews is an important part of online reputation management — which is especially crucial in the B2B space, where companies live and die by their reputation. So how does responding to reviews improve your online reputation?
A study in why to reply to customer reviews
To examine this question, Professors Davide Proserpio and Giorgos Zervas looked at tens of thousands of hotel reviews and responses from TripAdvisor. What they found was that “when hotels start responding, they receive 12% more reviews and their ratings increase, on average, by 0.12 stars.”
While 0.12 may not seem like a lot, in the scale of TripAdvisor’s 5 star system, where ratings are rounded to the nearest half star, it has a significant impact on customers’ perceptions.
Proserpio and Zervas found that “approximately one-third of the hotels we studied increased their rounded ratings by half a star or more within six months of their first management response.”
Improved ratings are related to management response
So why is it that the hotels started to get more and better reviews when management started responding?
The researchers examined every facet of the data to rule out other factors that would undermine causality, and found that in fact “improved ratings can be directly linked to management responses,” rather than improvements made to facilities or services.
To explain it, the researchers make the analogy of eating at your favorite restaurant and your meal arrives late. You complain to your dinner companions, but when the manager checks in seconds later and asks how everything is, “for a moment, you consider complaining, but instead choose to avoid confrontation and focus on enjoying the rest of your meal.”
Essentially, by humanizing your presence on review sites, you discourage potentially awkward online interactions.
The researchers conclude, “While negative reviews are unavoidable, our work shows that managers can actively participate in shaping their firms’ online reputations. By monitoring and responding to reviews, a manager can make sure that when negative reviews come in — as they inevitably will — they can respond constructively and maybe even raise their firm’s rating along the way.”
Do you always reply to customer reviews on user review sites?
Use these three steps to calculate content marketing ROI to show the value of your investment.
As supply chain and logistics businesses are finally recognizing the merits of content marketing, many are looking into it. But it doesn’t take much research to realize what an enormous investment it is. And how difficult it can be to calculate content marketing ROI.
[bctt tweet=”A data-driven approach to calculating Content Marketing ROI lets you continually adapt to the needs of your audience, ensuring an ongoing, robust ROI.” username=”Fronetics”]
Many companies we talk to need help convincing management that it’s a worthwhile investment. To that we say, use data!
But what data should you use? How do you quantify certain benefits, like growth in brand awareness? And do you really have to keep track of all the hours you spend writing blog posts, managing social media, etc.?
Here arethree basic steps for how to calculate content marketing ROI.
3 steps to calculate content marketing ROI
1) Set up your ROI measurement.
It’s important that you measure content marketing ROI at the initiative level. This means calculating the ROI of your blog, your webinar series, your Facebook marketing, etc. individually.
After calculating the ROI of each initiative, you can aggregate that data to determine your overall content marketing ROI for your business.
2) Know as much detail as possible.
“To measure ROI, you have to know, in as much detail as possible, the R (return) and the I (investment) of your content initiative,” says Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert. Baer walks his readers through the example of figuring out ROI for a podcast, including calculating total investment in the project (including preparation and execution), and calculating total return.
Content marketing is about creativity. By the same token, think creatively about every measurable avenue of return in each of your initiatives.
3) Calculate your ROI.
The formula for ROI is universal: return minus investment, divided by investment, expressed as a percentage.
And there’s some good news for supply chain and logistics content marketing: “Content marketing ROI calculations are indeed easier for B2B companies because they almost always have visibility at the transaction layer,” writes Baer.
Once you’ve calculated ROI for each of your major initiatives, it’s time to think strategically about optimizing your content marketing resources, in terms of allocation and timing. Having hard data helps you answer questions about which initiatives are most fruitful, what language engages your audience best, when your efforts are most likely to pay off.
Ultimately, this data-driven approach lets you continually adapt to the needs of your audience, ensuring an ongoing, robust ROI.
With the rising demand for professionals in Supply Chain Management and Procurement, there’s a lot of employment activity, especially in short-term contracts.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
As a boutique recruitment agency, we at Argentus are on the front-lines of the churn in the job market. We speak with potential job candidates every day. Some of them are passive, interested in moving into new opportunities when we reach out to them. Some of them are active, reaching out to us because they want to make a move. With the economy experiencing a prolonged growth spurt, and demand for professionals in Supply Chain Management and Procurement – our area of specialty – going up, there’s a lot of activity, especially in short-term contracts where companies are onboarding talent for their change management and business transformation expertise.
There are so many reasons why people seek out a new job. Sometimes it’s based on major life changes: a geographical move, say, or someone getting back into the workforce after a maternity leave. But why do passive candidates seek out new jobs, particularly in Supply Chain and Procurement?
We speak to a lot of candidates, so we have our ears to the ground in terms of the subtler reasons that star performers in these functions get the desire to make a move. It’s not out of a desire for more money as often as you might think. More often than not, it’s the more intangible factors.
Because employee retention is so important from a cost-saving and culture standpoint, we thought it would be useful to lay out some of the most common reasons why Supply Chain and Procurement professionals become passive candidates:
1. They’re siloed
We hear this reason a lot from candidates, but it still isn’t considered by companies as much as it should be. We know that one of the best ways to grow your Supply Chain career is to gain exposure to diverse parts of the function – from Logistics and Distribution, to Procurement, to Inventory Management, to Planning.
In too many organizations, these functions are siloed off from each-other, and that stops candidates from getting the experience they want to move up into more senior roles. It also stops the Supply Chain from being as effective as it would be if it was fully integrated. Next thing you know, your top performers are taking calls because they don’t want to be pigeonholed.
2. They’re tired of working with outdated technology
Supply Chain and Procurement technology is becoming more digital, just like the rest of the economy. And updating your technological profile can be a massive undertaking, with lots of risks. But the most forward-looking and high-potential candidates want to be working with the latest Supply Chain technology, keeping their skills relevant for the future. If you’re still working only with Excel, you might risk losing candidates to companies that have taken the plunge and invested in continuing technological improvement.
3. They’re not getting support from senior leadership
As we wrote about recently – and we received a ton of feedback on that piece – ineffective leadership in Procurement and Supply Chain can have huge ramifications all the way down a business. If leadership doesn’t have the people skills to help build buy-in for the function across the business, if they micromanage instead of letting managers and sole contributors shine, those people are going to start picking up the phone when a recruiter calls. But it goes upward too: effective leaders in Procurement and Supply Chain will get the itch to move if they don’t have support from C-level executives in a business.
4. Work/life balance isn’t up to snuff
Work/life balance is a hot topic in the talent world, to the point of being a cliché, but it’s worth mentioning: people who don’t have support from a work/life balance perspective will start to seek companies that have work from home policies, flexible schedules, educational opportunities, and other benefits. In 2018, companies can no longer see these programs as “perks” or “throw-ins.” Having solid, articulated work/life balance policies is vital to winning the war for talent.
5. They’re uninspired in the workplace
While Supply Chain and Procurement have historically been seen as “dry” functions, this reputation is changing fast. With the rise of digitization and globalization, they’re becoming more fast-paced, with more strategic potential and impact on a business’ long-term structure and profitability. But some companies still treat their Supply Chain and Procurement employees as purely transactional workers whose jobs are only to fill out orders and put out day-to-day fires. If you’re not being strategic, or not offering opportunities for advancement into more strategic positions, your best Supply Chain employees will, quite frankly, get bored and leave.
6. They’re realizing how indemand they are
As we’ve written about a lot, the retirement of the baby boomer generation as well as greater expectations placed on Procurement and Supply Chain are creating a deficit of talent in the marketplace. With the economy approaching full employment in 2018, this is even truer than it was before. But many companies still aren’t realizing the huge demand for Supply Chain and Procurement talent in this marketplace. Too many companies still have assume their employees are “just happy to have a job,” but take it from us as a company that speaks with dozens of candidates in the field every day: they’re realizing their worth, and fielding opportunities to meet their full potential. If your company isn’t providing those opportunities, they’ll go somewhere that does.
Sometimes it’s a combination of the above factors that causes a top performer to want to leave, and sometimes it’s even other factors we haven’t mentioned. So what does your organization do to retain star performers? As a candidate, have you ever left a role for one of the above reasons, or another that we missed? Let us know in the comments!
