Topic:

email marketing

5 Easy Steps to Create an Email Newsletter

2 min read

What is an email newsletter? How does it benefit businesses? And how can you start building a newsletter subscription? Read on to find out.

There’s a reason why 81% of B2B marketers use email newsletters the most for content marketing. It’s one of the best ways out there to establish an instant connection with your target customers, establish long-term relationships by providing value, and drive sales by encouraging them to make a purchase. 

But if you don’t know how to get started, then this guide is for you. Here, we’ll explain how you can create an email newsletter in five easy steps:

1. Have an email newsletter tool ready

When creating a newsletter, we highly recommend having an email newsletter tool as this makes the job a lot easier.

Saphyte, for example, lets you automate tasks such as the gathering of contact details such as email addresses through your landing pages, or scoring leads depending on the conditions that you’ve set. 

Learn more about email marketing here.

2. Identify your business goal(s)

The next important step is to identify your business goal and how the newsletter fits that goal. 

Many companies launch a newsletter strategy to achieve the following goals:

  • Drive more traffic to the blog
  • Generate leads
  • Drive more traffic to the website
  • Promote new products and services

It’s also important to have KPIs and metrics ready to assess your performance. But make sure these metrics can meaningfully assess the impact of your newsletter efforts. For example, open rates do not necessarily mean you are already generating leads. Some metrics can better assess that like clickthrough rates or conversion rates.

3. Prepare your design and content

Next, using your chosen newsletter tool, select a template for your email newsletter. Then add in your chosen content.

Make sure your content is intentional, responsive to customer needs and preferences, and timely. These criteria increase the chance that your target customer will open and click on your email. 

You can also allow your target audience to only subscribe to certain themes or topics to limit the type of content they will receive.

4. Hit send

The next thing to do is to send your email, monitor your performance, and make decisions based on the results. Don’t forget to test your email first on how they’re going to appear on different browsers and different devices before sending.

5. Assess and Evaluate

The last thing to do when having a newsletter is to assess and evaluate its impact and effectiveness. Identify how it contributes to your brand and determine what needs to be done to improve its performance.

Having a tool that prepares the analytics for you would be extremely helpful so that all your sales and marketing will have to do is focus on more important tasks such as interpreting the results and making strategic business decisions based on them.

Have a Newsletter Today

Excited to find out how a newsletter is going to impact your organization? Talk to our experts at Saphyte and try having one today! Book a demo here for FREE.

Best Examples of Abandoned Cart Emails to Encourage Purchase Decisions

3 min read

Abandoned cart emails are a great way to encourage customers who have abandoned carts to make an actual purchase. Learn how to best do it from these great examples.

There are more abandoned carts online than you think. Research found that an average of 69% of online carts are being abandoned. But with abandoned cart emails, customers are enticed to visit their carts again and make an actual purchase.

To learn how you can craft an email to encourage customers to pick up their abandoned carts and make a purchase, we’ve curated a list of the best examples of abandoned cart emails for you:

1. 23andMe

This biotechnology company has become known for its comprehensive ancestry breakdown and personalized health insights over the internet.

The company’s abandoned cart email is simple and straightforward. It integrated its brand’s color palette into the email, proposed its value, and its CTA button revealed a sense of urgency.

2. Google

One of the most successful companies in the world is successful for a reason— and this extends to their sales and marketing efforts.

Here, you’ll notice a great copy from Google. The texts “Going, going, (almost) gone” is not only engaging and compelling, but it also has a sense of urgency that makes customers want to make a purchase right away.

The email also contains the actual product of the abandoned cart and the CTA redirects the recipient to the cart.

3. Moschino

A visual company needs a visual email and Moschino does it so well with their abandoned cart email.

The email contains the products that the customer added to the cart. It prompts the customer to check out what they’re missing. The CTA button is simple and straightforward. Visual cues such as “secure payments” and “easy returns” also help improve customer trust and experience during checkout.

4. Warby Parker

This New York-based online retailer of prescription glasses, contact lenses, and sunglasses starts its abandoned cart email with a catchy subject line: 

The email also includes a call to action to complete the checkout plus customer testimonials that make it easy for customers to make the purchase through social proofing.

5. Zalando

This Germany-based online retailer of shoes, fashion, and beauty has mastered the art of abandoned cart emails. Its subject line is timely and compelling, making it highly likely for customers to click on the email and proceed to checkout.

Zalando also displays the item that is on sale, showing the original price and the discounted price.

6. Esqido

This beauty company also does so well with its abandoned cart emails. It contains critical elements that make an abandoned cart email successful such as urgency, simplicity, and social proofing.

The CTA is simple and straightforward. It also imposes a sense of urgency. 

The email also contains positive 5-star reviews, making it easier to convince customers who abandoned their carts to proceed to make a purchase.

Effortless Email Marketing

Email marketing can now be done easily. With a digital ecosystem like Saphyte, you can now automatically create a list of customers and send targeted emails based on specific criteria. This helps you achieve marketing objectives in no time. 

Want to know more about how you can send abandoned cart emails without breaking a sweat? Learn from our experts at Saphyte. Book a FREE demo now.

How to Segment Audiences for Email Marketing

3 min read

Want to know how you can segment your audience for your email marketing campaigns? Learn how to do it in seven easy steps.

Sending an email blast to a list of customers without understanding their needs and priorities is not only wasteful of time, energy, and resources, but it also risks customers having a bad impression of your brand.

To make sure you’re only sending relevant information, it’s important to segment customers based on commonalities.

Some of the common factors that bind customers together are their interests, age, gender, and company industry. When you segment customers together based on these commonalities, it helps you understand customers’ challenges better.

You’re also 130% more likely to know their intentions, according to research, which helps you launch a more responsive sales and marketing strategy.

How Does Email Segmentation Work

Email segmentation works by dividing your email lists into smaller “segments” based on certain criteria such as age, sex, interests, buying intention, etc.

No two customers are the same. That’s why it’s important to understand why a customer subscribed to your email list and what type of information they want to get in the future.

One of your subscribers may find promotional offers and discounts helpful, while others may only want guides or expert advice coming from you.

By separating these two apart, you ensure that you only send information that is relevant to a target segment— promotional offers to the audience that actively looks for promos, and expert advice to the audience that only wants to get advice from you.

What is the Best Way to Segment Customers

Here’s how you can start segmenting your audience:

1. Gather as much information about your customers as possible

The first step to segmenting customers is to identify first who they are. Gathering as much information about them as possible. More data can help you in your analysis. 

Through surveys, you can gather details like location, interests, buying habits, and your customers’ demographics. The information you get from your customers will help you learn how to improve your products and services, and how best to provide value to the market. 

Tools like digital ecosystems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help you massively when doing this. 

2. Divide your audience based on commonalities

After gathering important data about your customers, the next step is to divide your audience into segments, based on commonalities. Find the common features among your audience. And be sure to keep each segment distinct from the others.

3. Create customer personas

Customer personas are more accurate representations of your customers based on data and information you’ve gathered from them and the market. It helps you design content that is responsive and relevant to them and their values.

When creating personas, try to identify the friction points between your business and your target customers. Address the objections that they may have to your product or service and prepare to address future concerns. Match your brand’s voice to your customer personas’ preferred communication styles.

4. Explore customer needs

After crafting your customer personas, the next step is to understand your customers’ needs at a deeper level. This includes digging deeper into your audience’s desires, value systems, and even needs that your customers do not know themselves.

This can be done through surveys at stages through progressive profiling. You can also include a customer feedback loop to know more about your customers’ thoughts and experiences with your brand. You can also delve deeper into what your customers think about your competitors’ products and services.

Another thing to note about customer needs is that you can identify them by determining research keywords, search terms, and frequently asked questions (FAQs) related to your product. This helps you know more about your customers’ needs without asking them directly about these needs.

5. Link your product and service value to customer needs

The next step is to connect the needs of your consumers with your brand’s product or service. 

This is where sales and marketing step in. Try to highlight how your products and services address the pain points of your customers. And how it can deliver value over time.

6. Prioritize high-value segments 

Some segments offer higher value than others— meaning, that in terms of sales, they generate higher value than other segments. Channel your focus on these segments. And prioritize these groups when you have to invest in sales and marketing efforts.

7. Evaluate your strategies

All strategies have to be evaluated at the end to ensure they work. Strategies cost companies resources to run, so make sure they’re delivering results. 

Start Segmenting Your Email List

Want to know how you can effortlessly gather data about your customers to segment them effectively? Talk to our experts and book a demo now for FREE.

Top 6 Email Metrics to Improve Your Lead Conversion

2 min read

Email metrics are important to assess whether your email campaigns are working to your advantage. Read on to find out more about email metrics and how you can improve your lead conversion with them.

Email marketing is one of the most used strategies nowadays. It helps businesses engage customers and keep the brand on top of mind. The problem is: many businesses don’t know what to look for to know if their emails are working.

That’s why in this article, we’ll list the most important email marketing KPIs you need to watch out for and how you can improve them.

1. Open Rate

The email open rate refers to how many people opened your email out of the total number of recipients. This metric is important in determining whether your subject line is catchy enough to capture the attention of your target audience or whether your brand is trusted by your target audience to open your email.

According to a study, the average email open rate for all industries is 21.33%, so if you score a better rate, that means your campaign performance is above average.

To improve your email open rates, we suggest A/B testing your subject lines, determining the best time to send emails according to your target audience, or conducting email segmentation for your customers.

2. Click Rate

Click rates refer to how many of your delivered emails resulted in a click. This metric is important in determining the number of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email.

The average click rate globally is 1.27%, so if your result is lower than that, then you might want to try the following:

  • Optimize your email content by making them more timely, relevant, and responsive to your target audience’s needs and interests. 
  • Testing a more catchy and responsive headline.
  • Segmenting your audience
  • Changing your lead generation strategy to attract more qualified leads— those interested in engaging with your brand.

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the number of recipients who have completed the desired action in your email— clicking on a call-to-action (CTA) button, making a purchase, etc.

There are a number of ways to improve your conversion rate, which include improving your mailing list, making your email content more targeted, or designing a more appealing landing page, as mentioned above.

4. Email Open Time

Email open times refer to how long your audience is taking to open your emails. The shorter the time, the better. This metric allows you to understand if your audience is eager to interact with your email.

To improve your email open times, try determining the best times for a particular segment (ex: customers segmented based on location or job positions).

5. Email Read Time

Email read times refer to how much time your recipients are spending reading your email content. This is important in determining the relevance of your content to your target audience. The longer the time, the better. 

Improving this may require some time and effort (trial and error). But you can start by experimenting with email structures and content types, and by integrating personalization.

6. Email Marketing ROI

Email marketing ROI refers to how much your business is getting from the resources it spent on email marketing like ad spending, manpower, etc. This metric is important to determine whether you should continue with email marketing as a marketing strategy in general.

To improve your email marketing ROI, you need to improve your other email marketing metrics as well. You can also use tools that allow you to implement smart automation. 

This means that the tools will handle the email marketing for you such as sending emails based on schedule or when certain conditions are triggered (e.g. a new subscriber).

This reduces the resources necessary to run email campaigns (i.e. you don’t need to hire additional manpower to perform email marketing tasks), which leads to better email marketing ROI.

Better email marketing with Saphyte

Want to learn more about tools to improve your email marketing performance? Talk to our experts now. Book a FREE demo here.

How to Organically Grow Your Email Subscription List

3 min read

Learn more about how to organically grow your email subscription list, a crucial part of running a meaningful email marketing strategy.

Many companies do not know how to organically grow their email subscription list. This makes it hard for them to run their email marketing strategy and achieve meaningful sales and marketing objectives.

To make your job easier for you, we’ve listed down tips on how you can grow your email list without buying them off the internet. Let’s get started.

1. Offer value in exchange for subscription

One of the most effective ways to get someone to subscribe to your email list is to offer something that the customer would find valuable. This can be information that they’re interested in or are actively looking for or tools that can help them work easily. 

Many companies offer lead magnets such as an eBook, a PDF report, an inspiring or motivational video series, an infographic, or even a discount on a product or service.

Find something that your target customers would find valuable and offer that as your lead magnet.

Companies like HubSpot offer guides to get leads’ contact details for their email campaigns.

Learn more about developing a content marketing strategy here.

2. Personalize your offers

Customers have different needs and priorities at every stage of the sales process. You may even be able to predict what they need depending on the sales channel they’re using. 

Because of this, it’s important to personalize your offers depending on what they need. Offering them discounts at the first stage of the sales process may not be needed as the customer is still looking for information about your product. 

Offering detailed product information may no longer be needed if the customer has already gone through many steps after discovering your brand and is close to purchasing your product.

Making sure your offers are personalized ensures a high level of success in closing the deal.

3. Differentiate yourselves from competition

When offering lead magnets, it’s important to identify and communicate to customers what you can do that your competition isn’t able to do. This guarantees that the customer understands your unique value proposition, and will make it likely for the customer to avoid scanning the market for alternatives.

4. Have a straightforward CTA button

Your CTA button should also be simple and straightforward and redirect the customer to a landing page where they need to be. This must be sensitive to their stage of the sales process. 

Do not redirect customers that still need a lot of convincing to a page where they would make a purchase. It’s important to note that the CTA button must communicate clearly what value the customer will get after clicking the button.

5. Make your content shareable

If you’re trying to grow your email list, make sure your content is shareable. Those that have subscribed to your email campaigns may find it valuable enough to share it with friends and family. This makes the spread of your content through word-of-mouth communication easier to do. 

6. Connect through social media

Social media is one of the best places to get customers to sign up for email campaigns. Not only are most people active on social media platforms, but these social media platforms can deliver and spread information fast.

It’s also easy to promote your brand on social media organically or through paid content. This allows you to instantly connect with a massive target audience and get them to sign up for your email campaign.

Check out our list of the best social media campaigns here.

7. Conduct A/B testing

A/B testing is an important way of assessing the effectiveness of the elements of your sales and marketing strategy. This type of testing will tell your subscribers’ preferences over things such as:

  • Subject line
  • Type of Content
  • Color or Style
  • Schedule When Email is Sent

8. Engage through your employees

Get more people to sign up by making your messages sound more personal by coursing them through your employees. Have a “human tone” by signing off using your employees’ signatures. 

Below is an example of how Semrush, an American SEM company, uses a “human face” to communicate with target audiences.

You can also add customer reviews or feedback to social proof— making it easier to convince your target audience to sign up to be part of your email list.

Easier Email Marketing

Get access to a complete set of tools to easily gather customer data and grow your audience now with Saphyte. 

Saphyte provides a powerful digital ecosystem that can help you boost your sales, marketing, and support functions. Learn more from our experts and book a demo now for FREE.

Amazon and Email Marketing: Tips to Get You Started for 2023

2 min read

As Amazon now allows businesses on the platform to send free emails to shoppers, how can you maximize this feature for the holidays? Learn how to get started.

Amazon recently announced that it will let brands and merchants send marketing emails to shoppers for free, a feature that may help boost sales for brands on the platform amidst slowing sales.

The “Tailored Audiences” tool allows sellers to send emails to shoppers who purchased recently, those who made repeated purchases, and those who spent the most. The sellers may also reportedly monitor their results using the platform.

With this new feature, what are the things to keep in mind to help you get started? Check out our tips for Amazon email marketing for 2023.

1. Avoid spamming your customers with non-personalized, zero-value emails

After the announcement of the feature’s release (which will be early next year), many of the concerns revolved around how it could spam the inbox of Amazon users with useless emails.

Although customers can opt-out of marketing emails anytime, it’s still important to consider the power of email marketing and the importance of keeping your target customers connected. 

You can prevent customers from unsubscribing by providing emails with value— those that are not only responsive to their needs and preferences but also those that educate customers and allow them to participate in.

2. Gather data and experiment with results for each category

Data is extremely important when it comes to email marketing. The data and information that you’ve gathered from your target market help you decide what content to send and to whom.

But gathering data isn’t enough. You also have to determine whether your email marketing strategy is working for each customer.

For example, some repeat customers may want variety, while others may prefer information related to their past purchases. Or discounts may work for some high-value customers (those who made above-average purchases), but they may not work for some.

That’s why experimenting with results is important. It helps you understand your customers better as one trick may not work for all. 

3. Reward those who stay

With customers able to opt out of your email list, it’s important to remind them that it’s good to stay connected as they will be rewarded for it.

Email marketing has been proven to help increase brand loyalty and drive sales. But it will only work if your customers are convinced that it’s beneficial for them. 

Make your emails catchy. Reward them for opening them. Offer email-exclusive promos or discounts. Determine the most effective ways to get them to stay.

4. Take advantage of events and seasons

Emails should not just be responsive to needs and preferences, they should also be timely. 

Seasonal email campaigns help you take advantage of seasons and calendar events and offer time-limited promos. These emails also help you provide a sense of urgency to customers to take an action within the specified time.

5. Promote your business values

One thing to help you set yourself apart from the competition, especially when you’re competing for attention in your target customer’s inbox, is by promoting your business values. 

Values like transparency, integrity, and social responsibility help you stand out and be remembered by your audience. You can demonstrate these values through your content like blogs, videos, and newsletters.

Learn how you can improve your email marketing

Discover how you can do email marketing outside Amazon with a complete digital ecosystem like Saphyte. 

Saphyte is built to provide you with all the tools and features you need to upgrade your sales, marketing, customer support, and team connectivity. Talk to our experts now and book a demo for free.


What is Content Marketing and Why Does it Matter in 2022?

3 min read

Content marketing is a way for businesses to attract leads, convert them, and keep them engaged. Read on to find out why it’s important to do it in 2022.

Articles, e-books, videos, and any information you get from a brand— whether entertaining or educational— can be called content and it’s designed to make you aware of the brand and keep you engaged.

Some forms of content remind you that the brand is there on the market. Other forms of content motivate you to make an on-the-spot purchase.

So what is content marketing and why is it important in 2022?

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves the use of articles, videos, and other forms of content to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers, and retain them.

This approach helps the brand do the following:

Promote brand awareness and top-of-mind awareness

Establish credibility in the market

Encourage purchases to drive sales

Motivate leads to make their first purchases

Businesses often use search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and email marketing to forward their content to their target audience.

Talk to us to know more about content marketing and what tools to use here.

Why Is It Important?

The following are reasons why content marketing is an important strategy that businesses should use in 2022:

Content marketing works. According to 42% of B2B marketers, content marketing works and they’re effective in producing results.

They bring in necessary traffic. According to content marketing leaders, they experienced a 7.8x higher year-over-year growth in unique site traffic when content marketing is done right.

They help you get more leads. Businesses with blogs report getting 67% more leads than other companies.

Content determines buyers’ next steps. According to a report, 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content first before engaging with a brand’s sales rep.

Content helps build loyalty, nurture audiences, and drive sales. According to a report, 78% of successful organizations use content marketing to build loyalty, nurture leads and audiences (64%), and generate sales and revenue (57%).

Content marketing can help you establish and nurture your relationships with your prospective and existing customers. When the recipient of your content thinks of your company as credible, trustworthy, and responsive to their needs and interests, they’re more likely to choose you among your competitors when it’s time to buy.

How Content Marketing Works

Every buyer has a different set of needs and expectations at every stage of the buying process. Knowing the right content to send helps you nudge them to move forward to the next stages.

For example, a buyer at an awareness stage may need to know more about how your brand’s products and services can address their pain points, challenges, and questions. A buyer at a consideration stage may need to know more about the specific features or functions of your products and services and how they differ from what’s available on the market. A buyer at the closing stage may need to know how choosing you can benefit them in the long run.

Sending them the right content at the right time is crucial in closing these deals. Some tools are built and designed to help businesses automate this process.

Here’s an example of how you can engage your leads and customers through email with ease:

How to Get Started

To make content marketing easier, here are things to take note of:

Know your audience. The first step to making a content marketing strategy is to know who you want to reach and how to reach and engage them effectively. This requires you to determine their needs, preferences, and interests, among others, so you’d know what type of content to send them.

Get a team. Hire professional writers and editors to make your content for you. Remember, a small error in content, typography, or grammar can make you lose your credibility and discourage prospective customers.

Determine your distribution strategy. Know where your target audience is hanging around, when they’ll be most active, where they’re more likely to click on your content, and what type of content works best for them.

Use tools. To make the entire content marketing process easier, use tools and technologies designed for it. Some can help you distribute your content automatically with just a few clicks.

Automate your content marketing now

Want to know more about content marketing and how you can automate it? Talk to us and click here to get started.

Curious how digital ecosystems can help improve your business?

Check out how digital ecosystems can boost your company performance by getting started here.

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How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

4 min read

To achieve business goals, marketers need to develop a content marketing strategy that is designed for their organization’s needs, as well as their audiences’. Read on to find out how to start making yours.

Many businesses plan to write some blogs, post on social media and send bulk emails to their target audience. But many also don’t know where to begin.

It’s understandable. According to a report, 74% of companies observed that content marketing increased their lead generation results. Those with a content strategy also achieved 27.1% higher win rates and 18.1% higher quota attainment. That’s why, in 2022, 90% of marketers continue investing in the channels they focus on using a content marketing plan.

In this post, we’ll talk about what content strategy is, why it’s important, and how you can develop your own content strategy that is designed for your unique business needs and your target audience. So let’s get started.

Learn more about what content marketing is and why it’s important in 2022 here.[1] 

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan of action or policy that uses content (blogs, articles, videos, among others) designed to help organizations achieve their business goals.

Most business organizations use the content for the following:

To increase brand awareness in the market

To attract and generate more leads

To engage leads, nurture them, and convert them into customers

To remind customers of the brand and make a repeat purchase

To retain customers and reduce customer churn

A successful content marketing strategy will help businesses achieve their targets and goals, like those mentioned above.

Why is it important?

A content marketing strategy is important because it ensures that the content that you’re sending out is doing work. Remember, it’s not free to produce content. It requires time, energy, and company resources to write articles or publish videos. That’s why a strategy is important to make sure that they work.

It’s also important to note that your competition is sending out content too. Your strategy should take this into account because the first content the customer receives may lead that customer to ignore all other options and make their first purchase.

7 Essential Parts of a Content Marketing Strategy

What should your content marketing strategy be made of? Here are seven essential elements to take note of:


Your target audience

Their needs and preference

Your competitive edge (USP)

Your content format

The channels to focus on

Your team

The evaluation


1.   Your target audience

The most important element of your content marketing strategy is understanding your target audience. Who are they? How do they behave? Getting the right idea about your target customers lets you decide what to do in the next steps so you can get your message across effectively.

2.   Their needs and preference

Of course, each customer has a need that they have to address. Understanding each customer’s needs and preferences lets you provide an offer that is relevant and responsive to their unique situation.

3.   Your competitive edge

You need to know how to market your unique selling proposition (USP). What makes you different from the rest? Why should the customer choose you among the competition? Knowing your competitive edge allows you to drive your message home— telling the customer to ignore all other options and just focus on your brand.

4.   Your content format

Not all customers respond positively to blogs and articles, some prefer the video format. Choosing the right content format for the right customer is critical to getting them to consume your content.

5.   The channels to focus on

This is extremely important especially when you market on social media. Understanding which platforms your target customers is likely to use lets you optimize your content performance, especially when you choose to run paid ads.

6.   Your team

The success of your content marketing strategy depends on the team executing it. Choosing the right people to implement tasks and run workflows is an important part of the strategy.

7.   The evaluation

Last but not least, evaluating your performance lets you spot what needs to be corrected in your strategy and what needs to be retained. Use the right tools and metrics. Learn from industry peers and be ready to adapt.

5 Steps to Develop a Content Strategy

Now that you know what elements to focus on when developing your content strategy, it’s time to make one! Let’s dive in.


Set a goal

Know more about your customers

Choose your tools

Determine your content

Explore and experiment


1.   Set a goal

Goals are what would determine what your plan is going to look like and how it’s going to be implemented.

There are many goals to choose from. When planning their content marketing strategy, many businesses aim to:

Generate more leads

Establish brand awareness

Drive sales

Retain more customers

2.   Know more about your customers

Clearly defining your content’s target audience also allows you to be more specific about your content marketing strategy.

It lets you produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to consume and which will, later on, push them to become customers.

Customer profiling helps you know more about your customers:

3.   Choose your tools

It’s going to be hard to run a content marketing strategy, especially if it’s your first time. Choosing the right tool makes the job easy and also helps you become more efficient in your tasks.

Tools like Saphyte’s Drip Marketing lets you send emails automatically on schedule to your target customers.

4.   Determine your content

There are several content formats to choose from and your content will largely depend on your target audience. Among them are:

Blogs.

Videos

Podcasts

Infographics

Emails

Case Studies

Ebooks

Lead magnets

How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

5.   Explore and experiment

The success of many content marketing strategies today can be attributed to their willingness to explore and experiment. Evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Try something new and see how far it goes. The sky’s the limit.

Want to know more about content marketing tools?

See how Saphyte’s tools can reinvent the way you engage with your leads and customers. Talk to us and get started here.


Curious how digital ecosystems can help improve your business?

Check out how digital ecosystems can boost your company performance by getting started here.

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6 Things You Should Know About Relationship Marketing

4 min read

Relationship marketing plays a crucial role in increasing customer lifetime value, the amount of value a customer contributes to your business from their first purchase towards their last. Read on to find out the things you should know about relationship marketing and why you should consider this approach.

Focusing on building valuable and lasting relationships with customers improves retention. And customer retention is becoming more important these days, especially when businesses aspire to grow.

Multiple studies found that improving customer retention by at least 5% helps in increasing revenue by 25% to 95%. It’s also more cost-effective. Engaging existing customers for retention has been shown to be at least 6-7x cheaper than acquiring new ones.

What do these numbers mean? All of these mean that in order for companies to increase their sales, cut their expenses, and grow their profits, they should find ways to build customer loyalty and reduce customer churn. And one proven way to do this is through relationship marketing.

What is Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is the process of building long-term personal, individualized connections with customers. It focuses on providing value and relevance through content, product, and services for a continuing, lasting relationship.

Companies that implement relationship marketing seek to get to know a customer better to improve their experiences with the company. They do not stop after a deal is closed.

In fact, they continue to reach out to the said customer by sending relevant content, personalized offers, and discounts to encourage repeat purchases and consequently increase the chances of customer retention.

The way relationship marketing works is often illustrated with customers going through a lifecycle process. They start by discovering the brand and end up becoming advocates of that brand.

Learn more about relationship marketing here: ​​What is Relationship Marketing and Why is it Important?[1] 

Examples of Relationship Marketing

The following are examples of how relationship marketing works:

1.   IKEA

IKEA is one of the few companies that focus on relationship marketing as a primary means of growth. It is considered the world’s largest home furnishing retailer and has more than 400 stores worldwide.

The company is famous for using demographic, psychographic & geographic segmentation to provide personalized experiences to customers and offering value at every stage of the buyer’s journey. It gives importance to customer retention, establishing loyalty, and building long-term relationships with its customers.

To “deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its product,” IKEA uses a combination of experimental marketing, customer engagement and content marketing, and digital marketing and social media engagement, among others.

2.   Starbucks

Starbucks didn’t just rise to the top because of good coffee. The company has been known to provide excellent customer experiences that make it easy for them to be the topic of conversation.

Starbucks starts with providing customers with comfort and peace at their stores— a different feeling that customers don’t commonly get elsewhere. A personalized product option is then offered to every customer— whether they want 2 pumps of syrup, soy milk to replace dairy milk, a scoop of java chips, or anything else added to their drink.

Starbucks communicates with its customers via text, email, and direct mail. There, they provide content to customers and also open accessibility for purchase. Starbucks also allows customers to turn their mobile phones into electronic rewards cards to redeem free drinks, a birthday gift, or a free sample menu item.

3.   Amazon

Amazon’s success story rests primarily on its ability to provide a customer-centric experience to its over 300 million customers.

The company built its own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to collect customer data, such as location, searched items, and previous purchases, to instantly modify and personalize users’ on-site experience.

Amazon uses email to connect with customers and keep them purchasing. They also have the ​​Prime customer loyalty program where customers get free and fast shipping, free cloud storage, and free streaming services, among others, by paying extra for membership.

6 Things You Should Know About Relationship Marketing

When talking about relationship marketing, here are six things that you should know about:

1.   Personalization is key

Personalization is the process of crafting an experience or message to match a recipient’s needs, interests, and other factors, based on the data the company has gathered.

For example, if the customer has searched for hair products in the past few minutes, it’s likely that the customer needs a hair product or is interested in buying one. Having this data allows companies to offer relevant product recommendations which increase the chances of the said customer making a purchase.

Personalization is key to a relationship marketing’s success. Companies need to be able to offer relevant and valuable information for customers to continue to interact with them. When a brand’s product and services do not match the customer’s needs, interests, or preferences, it’s likely for a churn to occur.

2.   Repeat customers are more likely to spend more

A study found that repeat customers spend three times more per transaction compared to non-repeat customers. They’re also easier to sell to, which means that in relationship marketing, retaining customers is more important than anything else.

When repeat customers become advocates of your brand, they’re not just there to make repeat purchases. They’re also there to influence others to make a purchase, spreading good word-of-mouth marketing to promote your brand and increase your sales revenue.

3.   Technology is an advantage

Improving customer relationships through personalization would be impossible without technology. Technologies like CRM software allow companies to seamlessly collect and sort customer data for instant use.

CRMs help inform sales and marketing teams what a customer needs, what they’re likely to purchase, and what to do to encourage them to make a purchase. With CRM tools and features, companies can also automate tasks involving personalization such as email marketing, catalog offering, and customer profiling, among others.

4.   Everybody loves incentives

To keep customers engaged, companies need to keep sending content that helps customers maximize the use of their purchased products or encourage them to browse for other products for enhanced use and experience.

But nothing engages customers more than incentives. Incentives can take the form of discounts and freebies.

Many companies incentivize their customers through a loyalty program, where customers gain points with every purchase. These points can be exchanged for free items and products.

Each purchase allows the company to gain more details about the customer— their needs, preferences, and other information that can be used to provide a more personalized experience to the said customer.

5.   Customer feedback and insights are game-changers

Building a good relationship is a two-way street. Companies guestimating what customers need wouldn’t suffice. Customers also have to contribute and inform companies what they think, feel, and experience when using their products and services.

To encourage customers to provide real feedback, companies have to find ways to reward honesty, make providing feedback accessible and convenient, and be transparent about how the feedback would benefit the customer.

6.   Provide a multi-channel experience for every type of customer

For companies to truly capture every type of customer’s interest, they need to be sensitive about their marketing channels— how the customers found out about them and how these customers interact with them.

This way, the company can map the whole experience of the customer and look for ways to improve this experience. A different journey may then be provided for a customer that used online marketing channels compared to traditional marketing channels.

Because customers nowadays use more than one marketing channel, companies have to provide a consistent multi-channel experience (omnichannel marketing) to all customers.

Customers expect a consistent, quality experience throughout and that’s why the brand’s identity and values should be unified and consistent as well across these channels.

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How Customer Relationship Transformed Marketing

3 min read

Companies that value customer experience gain 4-8% higher revenue than their competitors in their industries. They are found to be 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers. Find out what customer relationship is all about and how it transformed the way companies deal with their customers.

When companies talk about customer relationships, they usually refer to the marketing strategies a company implements to encourage customers to stay for the long haul. Customer relationship strategies aim to build loyalty and they typically require determining what customers uniquely need and want first before anything else.

However, right now, companies face roadblocks in identifying these needs and preferences. The global pandemic caused a shift in consumer preferences and changes in consumer behavior, which means that the consumer data that companies have gathered in the previous years may be rendered irrelevant.

Without the right data about your target customers, it would be hard to offer the right solutions. This puts a strain on the customer relationship. Some customers may avoid coming in contact with the business again after the business failed to address their needs and preferences.

How Customer Relationship Works

All customers start from a point where they had zero knowledge about the brand. Along the way, they come into contact with the brand via advertisements, word-of-mouth communication, or other promotional activity of the business.

This is where brand awareness starts. When the brand messaging piques their interest, they may seek more knowledge about the brand. And after weighing options, or when a need arises, they may proceed to select the brand’s product and services out from the competition.

They will then use the product. Here, an experience will be formed. If it’s a good experience, the customer may consider buying the product again in the future. In fact, they may even act as brand ambassadors, actively promoting the product and the brand to other people.

If it’s a bad experience, the customer may no longer choose the product in the future and may even discourage others from buying the product.

Customer relationship then aims to keep the customer moving from the first stage (awareness) to the last stage (advocacy). It seeks to keep customers loyal to the brand (and promote the brand to their social circles) by identifying the customer’s specific needs, offering the right solutions, and consistently offering a positive experience throughout their journey.

How Customer Relationship Transformed Marketing

Many marketers began to prioritize customer relationships after seeing successful companies implement a customer-centric model.

According to a report, 45.9% of business professionals would consider customer experience as their #1 priority for the next 5 years.

And this is because many customers now would prefer experience over anything else. In fact, according to research, 86% of customers claim that they are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

It’s not stopping anytime. At the end of 2020, a study expects customer experience to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

How to Integrate Customer Relationship in Marketing

To emphasize the concept of customer relationship when engaging customers, take note of the following:

1.      Prioritize gaining customer trust

You can never build loyalty without gaining customers’ trust first. That’s why, in all things you do, always ensure that you will be able to gain the customer’s trust at the end of the day.

To do this, your products and services must be reliable. They must create a positive experience for your customers. They should be able to fix a problem or provide a solution to a challenge.

2.      Understand customer’s intent

Understanding why your customers became your customers is essential in running a customer relationship marketing strategy. It helps you predict intent and anticipate the needs of your customers before they even say it.

Here, you can create a roadmap that leads to a smooth journey for the customer, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Integrating technology may be necessary to speed up processes and increase service accuracy and reliability.

3.      Identify opportunities through customer data

Throughout the journey of the customer, sales opportunities may arise for the business. Identifying these opportunities will not just increase revenue but may also enhance the experience for the customer.

Sending personalized offers or promotions, for example, is a way to enhance the customer experience and exceed their expectations. Gathering customer data through tools and technology is an effective way to personalize offers.

Customer Profiling with Saphyte Forms – YouTube

4.      Management must agree

To enhance the customer experience, the management must first agree that this is top priority. Drafting customer-centric company policies are, therefore, necessary to ensure that employees collectively follow protocols that aim to give customers a positive experience.

These policies must also align with company goals, mission, and vision. To build genuine relationships with customers, those at the top of the organization must lead in doing so.

Transform Your Marketing

Learn more about how to use tools and technology to gather customer data and provide a personalized experience. Get in touch with our experts here at Saphyte. Click here to get started.

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