1. Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM

The post 21 Best CRM Software first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

14 décembre 2022/par Service comm.

They’Re Live! 10 Great Black Friday 2022 Deals for Designers and Agencies

Looking to save big and make your web design job easier at the same?

This carefully picked list includes top-tier quality items that have already been used by hundreds of thousands of people like you.

From WordPress themes, plugins, web apps, website builders, and illustrations, this list has everything for everyone.

Check all these 10 excellent deals for designers below:

1. Amelia

Amelia is a WordPress booking plugin that saves businesses time and money from the beginning by replacing their manual or semi-automated appointment and event booking operations with a fully automated one.

Amelia is easy to set up and use. Fitness centers, consulting organizations, training institutions, beauty salons and spas, photographers, medical centers, and other businesses that rely heavily on client and customer appointment or event bookings will profit from using it.

Clients can go online to make appointments 24/7, change or cancel appointments, and make payments. They can also purchase tickets for events and add special requirements.
Amelia automatically sends notifications, reminders, and follow-ups by SMS, WhatsApp, and email (reducing no-shows while keeping clients aware of upcoming special sessions or events).
Amelia also manages group appointments, packages of appointments, employees’ schedules, special days, and days offs.
All the above can be managed at one or multiple locations from a single dashboard.

Amelia integrates with Google Calendar, Google Meet, Zoom, and Outlook Calendar. Click on the banner to learn more about what this amazing application could do for your business.

2. wpDataTables

Creating an informative table or chart for your website can be pretty labor-intensive.

You may have to work with and organize copious amounts of data.
You need to avoid compromising your website’s design at the expense of getting the tables or charts you want.
Your tables and charts may need to be responsive, editable, informative, and readable.

wpDataTables plugin does all the above for you and more. It is packed with powerful table and chart-building features that include –

4 chart-building engines: Google Charts, Chart.js, Apex Charts, and Highcharts
The ability to accept data from multiple database sources and in numerous standard formats
The ability to highlight critical data, or color code data using Conditional Formatting
A wealth of powerful data filtering and sorting features
Live data from Google spreadsheets or JSON API

wpDataTables integrates seamlessly with Avada, Divi, Elementor, Gutenberg, and WPBakery. Click on the banner to learn even more about this popular WordPress plugin.

3. Trafft

To automate a booking operation, you might need one tool to book appointments, one to accept payments, another to manage employee schedules, and so on. Of course, if your business provides services at multiple locations, then you would multiply the number of tools times the number of locations, and you’ll be good to go.

Or, you could go with Trafft, a single tool with which you can manage all of the above, at multiple locations, all from a single platform.

Clients can book appointments online 24/7.
They can make payments online using PayPal, Stripe, Mollie, or Authorize .net.
Trafft sends reminders and notifications automatically via email or SMS.
Trafft integrates smoothly with Google Calendar, Google Meet, Outlook, and Zoom.

Click on the banner to learn about all of Trafft’s booking capabilities. You’ll be impressed.

4. WordLift

WordLift helps your website speak the language of Google. This way, your content will be discovered by users, giving you more organic traffic and helping your business website achieve excellent rankings.

WordLift uses AI to transform unstructured content into structured data that search engines can understand.
WordLift creates a knowledge graph, automates SEO tasks, and analyzes search intent.

Other features include automatic schema markup, content recommendation widgets, WooCommerce, and Image SEO, all designed to improve user engagement.

5. Total WordPress Theme

Three words summarize Total: flexible, easy, and complete. This aptly named WordPress theme is WooCommerce compatible and has everything you need to create one-of-a-kind sites.

Total puts excellent selections of demos, templates, and postcards at your fingertips.
The popular Slider Revolution plugin is included, as is Total’s flexible drag-and-drop page builder.

The 50% Black Friday discount is automatically applied when you order.

6. TheGem – Creative Multi-Purpose & WooCommerce Theme

TheGem – the versatile WordPress website builder – offers unlimited customizations, plenty of design & marketing focused features, an extended library of pre-built designs, and the fastest loading times:

You have ready access to a rich selection of 400+ pre-built websites in outstanding design quality
It enables you to build every part of your website right away in Elementor or WPBakery: headers & footers, WooCommerce pages, blogs, mega menus, popups, and much more.
You’ll love the 5-star user support, just as have 60,000 others.

TheGem can be yours at a 40% Black Friday discount.

7. Mobirise Website Builder Software

The best offline website builder for 2022 is free to use. That is in itself a great bargain. Mobirise’s team has sweetened the pot by offering a 33% Black Friday discount for their All-in-One Kit with its 175 premium themes and extensions.

Mobirise is strictly drag-and-drop and features huge selections of blocks, templates, icons, and images.
Your site is yours to host anywhere you want

More than 2 million sites have already been created using Mobirise.

8. Embed Instagram Feed

Instagram offers a terrific way to promote your business’s products or services. Its focus on visual communication makes it an extremely effective marketing tool.

It takes but three simple steps to embed Instagram into your website.
A variety of display options are available.
Your feed will be fully responsive and compatible with mobile devices.

An Instagram feed is yours at a 33% Black Friday discount.

9. Getillustrations Web and App Illustrations Bundle

Getillustrations is loaded with trendy illustrations you can pick and choose from, download once, and use forever.

Selecting one or more of the 13,000 different illustrations in over 100 categories can definitely add spice to your web designs.
Illustrations come in PNG, SVG, Ai, Figma, and Sketch formats and Getillustrations adds new ones every week.

Use the EliteDesigners25 code to get your 25% Black Friday discount.

10. Rey Theme

Rey is an innovative WooCommerce theme that is loaded with WooCommerce-friendly features and is easy to set up and use.

Key WooCommerce features include filtering, search, templating, and navigation.
Rey’s smart search helps site visitors find exactly what they want
Quickview and Ajax search is also available

Headers are customized for eCommerce, and visitors will appreciate Rey’s helpful cart, wish list, and checkout features.

Black Friday is not far off. Before you know it, many producers of WordPress themes, tools, and services will be offering tempting discounts.

Even if you come across a deal that appeals to you, it doesn’t hurt to look around to see if you can find a better one.

Keep in mind that the quality of a product or service is more important than its reduced price. It’s always best to pick and choose carefully. So, we’ve put together this list of the best Black Friday deals for 2022 to help you do just that.

[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of BAW media -]

The post They’Re Live! 10 Great Black Friday 2022 Deals for Designers and Agencies first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

23 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

How to Sell on Pinterest Without a Website

You don’t need an online shop to sell on Pinterest, but owning one can give you the upper hand.

The only problem is that managing an eCommerce store is expensive.

On the other hand, selling on Pinterest has a low entry barrier. So it’s an excellent place to start even if you can’t afford a website.

Plus, Pinterest has many engaged users who are happy to buy your product, craft or offer. This is the only social media network where the most significant users hold the most disposable income in America.

This guide shows you how to sell to these top spenders on Pinterest, whether you own a website or not.

What Pinterest Brings to the Table
Selling On Pinterest Without a Website
Organize Your Products into Boards
Publish Your Products as Pins
Promote Pins on Pinterest
Go Beyond Pinterest
Blog on Medium
Selling On Pinterest With a Website
Set up Your Online Store
Add Your Product Catalog
Create Rich Pins
Stay Organized With Product Groups
Prompt With Shopping Ads
Wrapping It Up

What Pinterest Brings to the Table

Pinterest is not just a visual discovery engine. The social network brings more to the table.

With 433 million monthly active users and over one billion web visits in August 2022, the platform offers businesses new opportunities to reach highly engaged audiences.

Data Source: SimilarWeb

Also, data shows that about 38% of pinners have a college education, whereas Snapchat is 20%, Twitter is 32%, and Reddit stands at 15%, offering you access to a sophisticated market.

The social network enables about two billion monthly searches.

The company’s data revealed that 97% of the searches are unbranded, providing a level playing ground for all competing brands. However, for context, 42% of Google search queries are with branded keywords, meaning many searchers already have a brand in mind before searching.

Also, 80% of pinners said they discovered new products or brands on Pinterest, and 85% buy things they’ve seen from brands. Additionally, pinners are 55% more likely to buy a product after seeing a visual on Pinterest compared to other platforms.

The platform is not all talk and no action.

For instance, nearly nine in ten weekly pinners make buying decisions on Pinterest, and 50% of users have bought after seeing a Promoted Pin.

Pinterest might not be as popular and imposing as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, but the user engagement shows the platform can hold its ground against some perennial favorites.

Its numbers are impressive, making Pinterest too good to pass up.

Selling On Pinterest Without a Website

You can sell on Pinterest without a website.

It’s an excellent option for affiliate marketers. A Pinterest business account will work best since it lets you monitor analytics and run ads. You might also need a Facebook page and a Medium account to further your marketing.

When you’re ready, here’s how to start selling on Pinterest without a website.

Organize Your Products into Boards

Pinterest Board is a collection of pins.

It lets you stay organized. You can create different boards to categorize your products. For example, having boards for televisions, sound systems, video players, and other products in your catalog will make sense if you deal in electronics. You can further classify the boards into sections, like LG, Samsung, and Sony.

Boards make it easy for shoppers to find your products.

To create one, log in to your profile and click the Saved tab.

Click the + icon to reveal a drop-down menu, then select Board from the options.

Enter the product category in the name field to create the Board.

Open the newly created Board, click the ellipsis icon (the three horizontal dots), then the Edit board option to type a befitting description for the Board.

Use the Organize option to create and organize the pins into sections.

Publish Your Products as Pins

Create visually engaging pins to display your products.

One exciting thing about Pinterest is that you can create unlimited pins for the same product using different visuals, titles, and descriptions. And the more pins you create, the greater your chances of increasing your visibility and CTR.

The mistake most brands make is creating a single pin for a product and leaving the rest to fate.

But it doesn’t work that way.

As a visual discovery engine, you’ll need to create a lot of pins to stand out and hold your ground on Pinterest. It also lets you cover most of the keywords pinners use to discover products on the platform, stretching your visibility further.

To create pins, head to your profile and select Create Pin from the Create drop-down to begin.

On the next page, select the Board you wish to have the Pin on from the drop-down, then enter the Pin’s title. Of course. Use the keywords people are likely to search for to target Pinterest searchers.

You can see in this Pin that Cicinia, an online retailer of bridal dresses and accessories, uses searchable keywords in the title. But the Pin doesn’t have a description. Don’t make the same mistake.

Write a compelling description to entice users to click your link.

You can search your keywords on Google to see what other brands have as their descriptions if you don’t know what to write. Then, add a discount code to the description if you have any. It supports up to 500 characters, so make the most of it.

Finally, upload your visuals, add your alt text describing the visual you uploaded, then include the destination link, in this case, your affiliate link, and publish the Pin.

Repeat this step for the rest of your products.

Promote Pins on Pinterest

Pinterest comes with a built-in ad manager.

With this tool, you can promote your pins to the perfect audience. It lets you target people based on demographics like age, gender, and location. You may also run campaigns based on their interests or search terms.

Additionally, Pinterest allows advertisers to upload their customer lists for custom targeting. However, it works best for sellers that own a website.

Running ads means you don’t have to compete with the over 240 billion pins for attention. Instead, promoted pins put you on the spot and in front of the right people.

Dimniko, an online advertising agency, helped a client sell over 22,500 products with Pinterest ad campaigns, generating up to 11-times ROAS.

The brand pivoted to Pinterest after experiencing slow sales from other channels. According to them, the client spent around $15,000 daily on Facebook ads, generating $3 million monthly in Shopify; that’s $6 for every $1 spent on ads.

But with Pinterest, they generated $1.29 million with $116,000—$11.12 per $1.

Dimniko advised Pinterest advertisers to kill assets that didn’t meet the KPI in the first seven days and scale the budget of the top performers by 20% every two to three days.

They admitted that half of their sales were due to their retargeting strategy and suggested that new advertisers should start with their existing buyers and ‘actalikes.’

Go Beyond Pinterest

Several opportunities exist for you outside Pinterest.

Depending solely on the channel to reach prospects is a considerable risk. The platform only controls about 450 million of the estimated 4.7 billion global social media users, so there are always more people to reach.

You can do this organically by publicly sharing your pins or boards using trending and relevant Twitter and TikTok hashtags. Also, brands like Bergdorf Goodman use Facebook to promote their pins.

Like them, you can post your pins’ links as updates on your Facebook page.

Promote the post to reach more people.

Blog on Medium

Nearly 43% of global internet-enabled persons use ad blockers, meaning there’s little future for intrusive marketing.

So, content marketing is a no-brainer.

It lets you reach prospects through organic search when they are most likely to purchase. Also, creating consistent, valuable, and engaging content helps you answer customers’ questions, build trust, and influence buying decisions.

Studies found that content marketing generates three times more leads than traditional marketing channels. Also, brands that create content have a six times higher conversion rate than non-adopters.

Thankfully, you don’t need a website for content marketing with Medium. It’s a free and intuitive online publishing platform that lets anyone create, share and discover content.

Sign up on the platform. Research keywords and create quality content with them. You can repurpose the article into a video with tools like Lumen5.com and share it on YouTube.

Selling On Pinterest With a Website

A website puts your Pinterest marketing on steroids.

At least you won’t have to upload your products manually. Instead, the platform can automatically pull your products from your online store to Pinterest and update your catalog regularly. It also lets you retarget non-converters and upsell existing buyers, improving conversion and customer lifetime value.

Follow these steps to connect your website to Pinterest and sell on the platform.

Set Up Your Online Store

Create an online store if you don’t have one yet.

Pinterest currently supports Shopify and WooCommerce stores and online shops that can integrate with the following:

Lengow
ChannelAdvisor
GoDataFeed
Feedonomics
Products

Next, add the website to your Pinterest business account to claim ownership. Verifying your site allows you to access analytics for the pins you publish from your website and pins other users created from your site and get a verified merchant tag.

You can claim your website by adding a DNS TXT record to your domain host, uploading an HTML file to your website’s web server, or adding an HTML tag to your website code.

Add Your Product Catalog

Upload your catalogs to start selling on the platform.

Catalogs are a feed ingestion tool that lets you connect your eCommerce shop to your Pinterest store. The file lists all your available products and their corresponding attributes, creating a data source for the Pinterest store.

Pinterest ingests the data source every 24 hours to create your product Pins and process up to 20 million products per account. You’ll need to contact Pinterest support if you have more than that number of products.

You can add up to 20 data sources to promote your products across different markets, languages, and currencies. However, uploading your data sources to Pinterest is only available in selected countries. If you’re eligible, the steps here can get you started.

Alternatively, you may use third-party integrations like Shopify’s Pinterest app and Pinterest for WooCommerce plugin to get your products on Pinterest. Tools like Lengow, ChannelAdvisor, GoDataFeed, Feedonomics, and Productsup can also streamline your Pinterest data ingestion.

Create Rich Pins

Rich Pin is a step up for Pinterest pins.

They have extra information like price, product availability, description, and product link, providing pinners with rich shopping experiences. Rich pins encourage higher click-through rates, enabling you to sell more. They also make better ads.

With rich Pins, you don’t need to update your product Pins manually whenever the need arises. Instead, they update automatically each time you change your product titles, description, price, or availability.

Another fantastic thing is that rich Pins require only a one-time, easy setup. Pinterest will convert all your product Pins to rich Pins if you enable the feature for your account, and new Pins will appear as rich Pins.

Shopify natively supports Pinterest product-rich Pins, so it doesn’t require manual setup. Open any product page, copy the link and append .oembed to the URL, then validate with the Pinterest Rich Pins Validator.

If your store runs on WooCommerce, install the Yoast SEO plugin and enable Open Graph in the plugin setting. Next, copy any of your product URLs and validate. It’s that easy.

However, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves for custom sites.

It requires you to manually add rich metadata to the header of all your product pages. Pinterest supports Schema.org properties. Use any product schema generator like Merkel Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD code for each product page.

Next, use Google Tag Manager to add the code to the page’s HTML.

To begin, log in to your account and select Add a new tag under the “New Tag” section.

Choose a name for your tag, then select Custom HTML as the tag type.

Scroll down to Triggering to choose a trigger, then click the + icon.

Name your trigger and select Page View as the trigger type. Next, choose Some Page Views under the “This trigger fires on” section.

Specify your trigger condition, save and then publish your tag.

Repeat the steps for all your product pages, then validate any URLs to apply for rich Pins.

Stay Organized With Product Groups

Product groups help you manage your inventory.

It also lets you promote a product category instead of individual Pins. You can create a product group manually or leave that for Pinterest to handle if you use Shopify. The app can automatically sync your Shopify collections to create relevant Pinterest product groups.

The auto-created product groups include All Products, Top Sellers, Back In Stock, Best Deals, New Arrivals, and Most Popular.

You can add others manually if you need different product groups like brand, custom label, product type, category, or gender. First, ensure the fields exist in your data source and name the products based on your chosen filters.

Follow these steps to create a product group:

First, log in to your Pinterest business account from your desktop.
Click Ads on the top menu and select Catalogs.
Select View product groups, then Create product group.
Apply filters to select the products for the group
Go to the next page and enter a name for the product group.

Prompt With Shopping Ads

A website lets you take your Pinterest ad campaigns to a new level.

For instance, you can retarget non-converting shoppers to recover lost sales or upsell active buyers to improve their lifetime value. You may also create an act alike (equivalent to Facebook’s lookalike) audience to reach your ideal prospects, eliminating guesses from your targeting.

However, the first is to install the Pinterest tracking tag.

It’s a code snippet that lets Pinterest track your store visitors and their actions while on your site. The code helps you measure your campaign performance, optimize your conversion, build a targeting audience and become a verified merchant.

To install the tag, log in to your Pinterest ads account, click the Ads tab on the top menu, select conversion from the drop-down, and follow the rest of the instructions to complete the process.

Create your audience and run shopping and personalized collections ads to promote your products. Also, launch dynamic retargeting campaigns to upsell buyers and retarget shoppers that abandoned their carts. Run these campaigns concurrently for the best results. This resource can guide you in setting up high-converting Pinterest ads.

Also, don’t forget to promote your store outside Pinterest for maximum reach.

Wrapping It Up

So you don’t need to own a website to sell on Pinterest.

With just an affiliate link, you can get started on the platform. That might even change soon. The social network is piloting a feature that lets shoppers checkout and pay for items on Pinterest so that they don’t have to leave the app to complete their purchases.

The in-app checkout will probably redefine social commerce in the coming years, and getting onboard Pinterest and setting up your stores now means you’ll always be ready for the mad rush.

Thankfully, the tips in this article can get you started.

Featured image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

The post How to Sell on Pinterest Without a Website first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

9 novembre 2022/par Service comm.

12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked)

A robust email marketing strategy is a great way to reach your target audience directly.

But your email marketing campaign success rests on whether you used the best email marketing services.

No two email marketing services are equal. So you must choose carefully. We created this guide and ranked the 12 best email marketing services for you.

How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Services

Although we ranked these best email marketing services in this list from number one to eleven, we also understand that everyone’s need is unique. So we identified where each email marketing tool performs best.

Here’s what to keep in mind to find a good email marketing service:

Your business goals
Growth stage of the business
The audience your business targets

Please read on for the best email marketing services in the market today.

1. ActiveCampaign: Best Advanced Email Automation

If your goal is to deliver timely, personalized, and unique email experiences to your customers, try ActiveCampaign. As the best email marketing service for putting your marketing on autopilot, this tool offers a built-in email automation system, a campaign tracker, and a CRM.

Unique Feature: Customer experience automation (CXA)
Target Users: eCommerce, B2B, B2C, SMEs, bloggers, and influencers
Pricing: $29 per month.

Features

ActiveCampaign offers users loads of beginner-friendly advanced automation features. Here are a few:

1. Automated Marketing

You can focus on other important business pursuits and let ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation send welcome emails, track contact tags, monitor sales analytics, and fetch performance reports.

This feature empowers users to launch automatic email marketing campaigns or follow up on customers who abandoned their carts or disengaged from their content.

2. Site and Event Tracking

ActiveCampaign records your site visitors’ consumer behavior and demographic information in real-time. So you can segment your email list better and target your audience with messages that resonate with them.

Gathering visitor data can help you engage with them emotionally or during memorable events like anniversaries, birthdays, and other milestones.

3. Free Migration

ActiveCampaign offers a seamless move from your previous automated marketing service provider.

Best part? Migrating to ActiveCampaign comes at no cost to you.

Simply request for migration by filling out a quick form. And you’re on your way to a better email marketing experience.

4. Segmentation

Image Credit: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign groups your email contacts into different categories to enable you to make sense of the data.

You can segment a contact list by name, date, location, subscription status, tags, and other metadata.

Segmented data helps you target the most conversion-ready audience for the particular campaign.

5. Third-Party Integrations

You’re free to link your favorite apps with ActiveCampaign if it enhances your business growth.

So you can integrate your account with third-party apps like

Facebook to pull ad or public user data
Shopify to pull sales and shop data
Google Sheets for spreadsheet operations
WooCommerce for eCommerce performance data

You don’t need to move contacts across email marketing platforms to access or manage your data. ActiveCampaign lets you keep your data on the platform you wish to use and then use integrations to extract the benefits of having those contacts.

6. Performance Reporting

Get real-time reports on your deals and sales activities using ActiveCampaign. The reports feature lets you know your campaign’s performance across these indicators:

Subscriptions
Subscriber engagement
Automation reports
Sales rep deal pipelines
Revenue generation
Customer attribution reports

ActiveCampaign lets you track your competitors by providing reports of users who switched to competitors.

You also get a funnel report to see how well your email marketing effort converts engaged audiences to buyers.

7. One-on-one Messaging

ActiveCampaign lets you start and manage conversations with current and prospective customers across multiple channels.

Send and receive instant direct messages, which you can also automate in full.

Customers will quickly reach you with questions and orders without losing their messages in your email pile.

More Features

Automation templates
Email Templates
Email drag-and-drop builder
Branded Forms
Tags
Split Automations

Pros

ActiveCampaign is feature rich. You can fully integrate other applications on the platform without losing vital leads and data.

This email marketing software positions itself (and rightly so) as a leading email marketing solution that encompasses other parts of marketing and your CRM needs.

You can enjoy its free email marketing service offering for 14 days.

Cons

Although ActiveCampaign promises many features, most of them are exclusive to users who subscribe to paid plans. Sadly, this email marketing tool doesn’t offer a free plan.

Also, the workflows and features are sophisticated. So this email service provider will demand a learning curve.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign offers four paid plans—Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. The enterprise plan is customizable to meet the peculiar needs of big businesses.

Each plan is billed monthly at:

Lite: $29 per month

Plus: $49 per month

Professional: $149 per month

Enterprise: Customized rate

2. Sendinblue: Best Free Plan and Instant Messaging

Sendinblue provides users with instant messaging features, sales enablement software, and email marketing tools to grow their businesses.

If you’re looking to engage users more instantly through SMS and chats along with your email campaigns, then Sendinblue is the solution. As the best email marketing software for instant messaging, Sendinblue has personalization features to help you engage better with your target audience.

Unique Feature: Email and SMS marketing
Target Users: Retailers and CPG, SaaS, media, publishing, public sector, NGOs, and hospitality industry
Pricing: Starts at $25 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

Sendinblue offers over 40 responsive and professional pre-made email templates from which to choose.

If those are not enough, you can create bespoke email templates. Again, you’ll find the platform intuitive. In addition, you can use templates on multiple devices for the best results.

2. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Modify emails to your taste by simply dragging and dropping items on the campaign template.

Sendinblue is one of the most advanced email marketing services today. For example, it takes personalization seriously. So you can craft the content of your emails to appeal to your target audience better.

3. Email Tracking

If you wish to measure campaign performance rate or monitor engagement on certain emails, Sendinblue provides the option of turning on your Google Analytics tracker.

Google Analytics generates insights by drawing your customer information from all over the internet, including their behavior on social media.

4. Live Chat

Sendinblue lets you initiate instant communication with your site visitors through chat. Live chat is a handy email for engaging your leads at critical moments.

You can install this feature in seconds, assign conversations to your team, and customize the chat feature for your brand.

5. Contact Segmentation

Every contact is different and often has unique preferences.

Target the right audience with the most suitable message by exploring Sendinblue’s segmentation; this categorizes contacts and helps you determine, create and push a tailor-made campaign to a ready market.

6. SMS and Whatsapp Marketing

Sendinblue allows you to send your desired SMS volume to any chosen destination for a token.

You can also reach numerous contacts on your Whatsapp with customized messages about your business.

A recent report says that 69% of internet users use Whatsapp. So, you want to get your message to this audience.

7. Shared Inbox

Does managing all your conversations from a single place appeal to you?

With Sendinblue inbox, you can navigate smoothly between chats from your linked Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook accounts.

Keep your team and customers updated simultaneously with a simple inbox setup.

This Shared Inbox feature enhances organization.

More Features

Schedule send
CRM automation
Editable signup form
Push notifications

Pros

Sendinblue’s free email marketing software offers advanced features for startups and supports unlimited contacts. Except you need to do more, you can function solely on the free plan.

As the best email marketing software for initiating instant communication with leads, this email marketing tool promises a simple user interface and instant account setup.

Also, Sendinblue is relatively cheaper compared to similar email marketing providers.

Cons

You can only send 300 emails daily on the free version of Sendinblue. A paid subscription is required to remove the Sendinblue logo from your emails.

Pricing

Apart from the free plan, Sendinblue offers three other monthly plans—Starter Plan at $25, Business Plan at $65 per month, and Enterprise Plan at $1000 per month.

3. Drip: Best for Pre-Built Email Workflows

Drip is a personalized email, SMS, and automation service provider trusted by thousands of brands globally. It provides a seamless email workflow for businesses of all sizes.

- Unique Feature: pre-built email and SMS workflows

Target Users: eCommerce industry
Pricing: starts at $39 per month

Features

1. Pre-built Playbooks

Handling every marketing operation by yourself is overwhelming.

Save precious business time by using any pre-designed Drip templates.

The playbooks with heart-melting welcome series and abandoned cart reminders are ideal for growing your revenue.

Choose a suitable visual workflow and automate it fully.

2. Email Builder

If you like your emails deeply personalized and right on target, you’ll find Drip’s HTML builder useful.

Create 100 percent original content from scratch.

Personalized emails prove to your customers that you go the extra length and they’re special to you.

3. Drag and Drop Editor

Customize emails to capture your brand image using its ultra-easy drag-and-drop email editor.

People and businesses exchange over 306 billion email messages daily. Your audience is already getting tons of messages. Stand out with branded emails.

The visual interface is vibrant and can help boost your creativity.

4. Pop-up Notifications

Get access to form templates that your on and off-site visitors can easily fill out on Drip.

You can redirect, engage, sponsor specific actions, offer discounts to customers and grow your audience with targeted pop-up notifications and forms.

Pop-ups and signup forms convert about 3.09% of site visitors.

5. Real-Time Business Insights

Gain insights on your growth, audience, revenue, and overall campaign performance with Drip analytics and benchmark.

That’s not all.

Drip supports users with personalized guides to help them make informed decisions using these data that lead to business growth.

6. Marketing Automation

Your emails and SMS can run on autopilot without taking on the stress of maintaining correspondence with new and existing customers.

Simply set up revenue-targeted workflows and relax.

Since Drip comes with pre-built workflows, you don’t have to start your automation process from scratch.

7. Single Click Integration

Are you a new or an existing business owner? Drip supports your business on multiple channels.

Fully merge or connect your online store like Shopify, Magento, and other eCommerce tools to your Drip account with just one click. Easy breezy.

You can start conversations on your e-store and finish in your inbox.

More Features

Segmentation
Email support
A/B testing

Pros

Apart from unlimited email sends, Drip lets you access its advanced features and all the tools on its platform during your 14 days free trial.

Users get tailored assistance and live support when they need them. In addition, Drip simplifies the scaling process for businesses.

Cons

Although you get unlimited emails, this plan doesn’t support unlimited contacts and doesn’t offer a free plan. However, you have unlimited features access. But Drip limits usage by the number of contacts.

Pricing

More than ten paid plans starting at $39 up to more than $1,899 and billed monthly. Email contacts vary by plan, but you can send unlimited emails and email support for all paid plans.

4. Constant Contact: Best for Educators, Small Businesses, and Event Organizers

Constant Contact simplifies email marketing for event marketers and small businesses as one of the best email marketing providers. This email marketing solution helps users benefit from their email marketing effort without the typical steep learning curve of complicated email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Event management tools
Target Users: Small businesses and event organizers
Pricing: Starts at $9.99 per month

Features

1. Marketing Automation

Constant Contact empowers small businesses to put their email marketing on autopilot. You can segment your lists automatically and initiate campaigns without manual effort. You can also set drip campaigns and automation to trigger based on your audience behavior, data, or events.

You can resend messages under different subject lines to contacts who didn’t open them the first time.

2. List Building and Management tools

You can access a range of list-building tools on Constant Contact to help you attract and keep leads. In addition, you can access a landing page builder, form builder, text message signup FTW, and a contact management system.

3. Event Management

One of this email marketing service’s biggest selling points is its event management tools. Users can create signup forms for their events, build unlimited landing pages, create email follow-ups, and collect payments using tools available on Constant Contact.

4. Email Templates

Users can find more than 100 mobile-friendly, drag-and-drop email templates on Constant Contact that match different business types and brands. So you will find the appropriate template for the occasion regardless of industry, market, design preference, holiday, event, or other needs.

5. Surveys and Feedback Tools

Constant Contact understands that customer feedback and extra data can improve your marketing performance. You can consider Constant Contact the best email marketing service for getting feedback through surveys and polls.

You can customize these surveys with your branding and logo on your Constant Contact dashboard.

6. Responsive Email Editor

Constant Contact makes email editing a breeze for users with smart columns, undo-redo, an image library, color customizations, fonts, backgrounds, and more. In addition, its preview function lets you see what your email would look like across devices, so you can adjust your design or message to your heart’s content before sending it out.

7. Marketing Calendar

Unlike most email service providers, Constant Contact offers marketing calendars. The feature helps plan your marketing. Marketers can create their messages, schedule them, send, and track them with the help of a marketing planner.

More Features

Error Checker
A/B testing
Landing page builder
Reporting
Agency tools
Signup Forms

Pros

Constant Contact’s focus on small businesses means they’ve designed this email marketing platform with simplicity in mind. And they haven’t limited users’ who need more advanced email marketing automation features.

Its error checker is a good feature to catch bad links and fix issues that might lower conversion. Constant Contact is a great email marketing software for educators, event organizers, and small businesses.

Cons

Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan. Although it has simple pricing, this email marketing tool overcompensates higher-paying Plus users and leaves its Core plan users with limited functionalities.

Pricing

Constant Contact offers two paid plans to accommodate two audiences:

Getting started — $9.99 per month
Advanced features— $45 per month

However, for more advanced automation features, you’ll need the $449 per month marketing automation offer.

These paid plans come with 30-day money-back guarantees so that any small business can test-drive the tool without commitments.

5. MailChimp: Best Email Design and Marketing AI

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing software available online. It integrates email marketing automation features and creative tools to deliver result-oriented email marketing.

Unique Feature: Email marketing automation features
Target Users: Freelancers, agencies, and developers
Pricing: Starts at $11 per month

Features

1. AI-Powered Design

Mailchimp is an artificial intelligence-enabled creative assistant to automate and personalize your email and newsletter design for your businesses.

The creative assistant uses AI to study your brand and create beautiful, professional designs tailored to your needs.

These AI-powered designs are useful across multiple channels.

2. Subject Line Assistant

Your email subject lines are crucial to your campaign’s success. Barilliance reported that 64% of email recipients open messages based on the subject line.

Thinking and drafting the perfect email subject line to drive customer engagement is often difficult. But not anymore.

Mailchimp’s subject line helper provides real-time feedback and suggestions to guide you.

3. Audience Segmentation

Is your email marketing effort not yielding the desired results? You might be targeting the right audience with the wrong campaign.

Mailchimp helps to categorize your email list according to shared characteristics.

This ensures you send the right message to the right audience for better results.

4. Pre-built Templates

Create professional-looking emails and landing pages in minutes using any of over 100 template designs on Mailchimp.

Campaign templates incorporate content blocks and exciting design elements for your exploration.

5. Smart Predictions

Save yourself the cost of hiring a data analyst using available insight predictions on Mailchimp to analyze data.

Get demographic information about your past, present and prospective customers at your fingertips. These predictions help you make better decisions that affect your brand.

6. Marketing Automation Features

Automate your brand marketing workflows and drip campaigns to get the work done in just a few clicks. Set up the processes new email subscribers will go through before conversion.

Send automated welcome notes, product notifications, abandoned cart reminders, and other vital information about your brand.

7. Image and File Editor

Alter, sync, and save your images or files with Mailchimp’s robust content studio.

8. Website Builder

Create a unique search-engine optimized website with Mailchimp’s free website builder.

No special coding or website design experience is needed. Instead, get right into it with your domain name and a clear idea of what you hope to achieve.

More Features

Pop-up form
Marketing CRM
A/B testing
Analytics
Integrations
Appointment scheduler

Pros

Mailchimp is easy to use, and its creative assistant takes away the mental hassle of creating original content regularly. Apart from its free plan, this email marketing service offers unlimited contacts on its Premium plan.

Cons

The free version only allows 500 contacts, and Mailchimp’s monthly email sends are limited across all paid plans.

Pricing

Apart from MailChimp’s free plan, paid plans start from $11 per month, and the Premium plan starts is $299 per month.

6. Klaviyo: Best eCommerce Marketing Automation

Klaviyo is an eCommerce-centered email marketing platform that pools data to create workflows and enhance business growth.

Klaviyo promises users an experience, a unified database, and a learning platform guaranteed to launch their businesses to new heights.

Unique Feature: Personalized benchmarks
Target Users: eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $45 per month

Features

1. Email Marketing

Develop, personalize and automate your emails to portray your brand essence with Klaviyo.

This email marketing platform promises to help users maximize revenue, improve repeat sales, and increase customer retention using well-timed personalized email messages.

Klaviyo uses customer behaviors like these to target your messages better:

Abandoning carts
Items they ordered
Recently viewed products

And also incorporates group behaviors like these:

Bestsellers
Newest products
Most viewed products

So, whether customers appreciate group behavior or tend to repeat a behavior, Klaviyo picks up on that signal to improve your sales.

2. Precise Segmentation

Klaviyo automatically syncs customers’ data from their first interaction with your brand. Segmentation is swift, specific, and happens in real-time.

Categorize customers in similar demographics or those with shared traits together. This will ensure they get appropriate email messages guaranteed to trigger recipients.

3. In-built Signup Forms

Get to know your customers better and build your email subscriber list with pre-built forms. Klaviyo forms can be embedded in the content or pop up when visitors land on your page.

4. Professional Templates

Klaviyo provides over 100 SMS marketing and email templates to suit your brand. You don’t have to rack your brain trying to come up with authentic messages all the time. Pick expertly crafted

5. Integrations

Klaviyo lets you move data across apps without a hitch.

This email marketing solution supports over 220 platforms that cater to eCommerce functions like payments and order management.

6. Benchmarks

The eCommerce sector is highly competitive. So stay ahead of your peers. Catch market, industry, and emerging trends on time. And compare your growth with businesses selling similar products.

Benchmark helps you know where you stand in the grand scheme and what others are doing differently to achieve better results in your field.

7. SMS Chats

Scale your business with direct SMS messages to old and prospective customers.

SMS makes communication easier, faster, and less formal. So you can talk to customers around the globe on the go.

8. Broadcast Newsletter

Create the perfect newsletters about your brand and distribute them to your audience through their most preferred channel (email or SMS).

Broadcasts are one-off messages you can easily design without professional help. Klaviyo makes the process faster with send time automation.

More Features

Drag and drop email editor
A/B Testing
Multichannel attribution
Custom reporting

Pros

Klaviyo targets eCommerce brands squarely. This targeting helps users of this email marketing platform optimize for result-driven marketing automation. Users can get a free plan on this email software.

Klaviyo is feature packed and specializes in increasing revenues for businesses.

Cons

The free version has limitations. And Klaviyo allows only a few integrations compared to other email marketing service providers. So, this email marketing solution is only good if you won’t be heavy on integrations.

Pricing

Klaviyo offers a free plan for starters. After that, the email plan starts at $45 per month, and you pay $60 per month to access all the tools in the email and SMS marketing plans.

7. Campaign Monitor: Best for Transactional Emails and Autoresponders

Campaign Monitor prioritizes ease and efficiency in delivering email marketing services to businesses.

The platform assures users of helping them to create memorable emails that convert and drive engagement.

Unique Feature: Expert email marketing
Target Users: Tech brands, media agencies, marketers, and charities
Pricing: starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

As a business owner who is always on the go, creating an email from scratch is time-consuming. This email platform offers free brandable email templates.

Freely choose from the stash of professional templates and save yourself the stress and time it takes to design.

2. Custom Emails

This email platform harnesses customers’ data from your website, apps, and eCommerce tools to enable you to craft and deliver personalized emails to them.

A Campaign Monitor report shows marketers record a 20% sales increase and 26% more open rates when they send personalized campaigns.

As the best email marketing software for transactional messages and autoresponder, this tool lets you deliver personalized experiences to your customers for as low as $9.

3. Transactional Emails

Sending messages that trigger specific actions from recipients has never been easier.

This email software allows you to create, modify and enhance your communication with customers using bespoke transactional emails.

4. Actionable Analytics

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this popular email marketing service offers actionable email analytics you can access in just a few clicks. So you can rest assured of practical insights into your business performance.

Popular email marketing services like this email software gives you access to an interactive dashboard to measure results across metrics like these:

Email campaigns
Automated journeys
Transactional emails

And others.

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this email software provides actionable insights from your top-performing campaigns that you can deploy across other campaigns.

5. Email Experts

Enjoy round-the-clock professional support services from one of the best email service providers.

If you run into technical problems, you can count on Campaign Monitor’s expert team at any time. From funnel to deliverability experts, you can get all the helps you need for your email marketing campaign with this feature.

6. Email broken link review

As one of the best email marketing providers, this tool helps you find and fix broken links that might hurt your campaign efforts. The Link Review tools work in this capacity.

This tool scans your messages, flags any missing or broken links, and validates them.

Image Credit: Campaign Monitor

7. Customizable Signup Forms

A signup form is a helpful tool that persuades customers to take the extra step into your business.

Direct the ideal audience to the right section of your business with editable signup forms.

You can also add a subscribe icon on your website’s landing pages.

More Features

SMS marketing
Segmentation tools
A/B testing
Image Gallery
Campaign tags
Email broken link review
Integrations

Pros

Campaign Monitor is easy to use and offers affordable feature-loaded paid plans for all business sizes.

Cons

The SMS feature on Campaign Monitor is only available to contracted customers sending texts to the USA, and it doesn’t offer a free plan.

Pricing

Three paid plans are billed monthly with prices starting as follows:

Basic: $9 per month
Unlimited: $29 per month
Premier: $149 per month

This email service provider’s prices changes per plan as your list grows, but you can send unlimited emails on the Unlimited and Premier plans.

8. Moosend: Best Value for Unlimited Emails

If you’re looking for pocket-friendly email marketing services that deliver results, try Moosend.

Moosend is designed for small and big businesses seeking impressive emails that resonate with their audience.

You can send a limitless amount of emails to suit your business needs.

Unique Feature: Weather-based personalization and evergreen campaigns
Target Users: Saas, publishers, eCommerce, non-profit, travel, and agencies
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Whatever inspiration you have when recreating an email campaign, simply drag and drop it with Moosend’s powerful email builder.

You can also design your email campaigns with HTLM—you have full control over how MooSend works for you.

2. CRM Automation Features

Build lasting and rewarding relationships with customers by automating basic CRM functions.

Handling every customer’s need is tedious and time-consuming. But you must make each customer feel special to ensure continuous patronage.

Automate basic CRM operations and focus on bigger tasks.

3. Landing Pages

Your website landing pages help you convert visitors better—MooSend lets you create responsive and catchy landing pages to increase your site’s conversions.

4. Ready-to-use Templates

MooSend lets you save time with pre-built subscription forms, landing pages, and newsletter templates.

Simply flip, personalize and use your most preferred template from this email marketing service provider.

5. AI-Powered eCommerce

Moosend provides eCommerce email marketing solutions to users, from abandoned cart reminders to product recommendations.

Like other best email marketing services on this list, MooSend uses artificial intelligence to help your business make more sales with email.

6. Forms

Design lead-generating subscription forms for onsite visitors.

When your landing pages receive visitors, they receive your pop-up or embedded forms immediately. Information from these forms goes to segment, retarget, and drive customer engagements.

7. Integrations

You don’t have to let go of your best CRM, CMS, and eCommerce tools when moving to MooSend.

Bring your marketing tools or apps and integrate them into your MooSend account. This email service provider lets you connect your integrations without a developer’s help.

More Features

Custom reports
Site tracking
Segmentation
Product recommendation
Transactional emails

Pros

Moosend affords you access to powerful email marketing tools at a relatively cheaper rate.

Cons

The basic paid plan excludes account managers who provide expert support to users. Moosend also limits the number of email subscribers by payment plan.

Transactional emails are available to pro and enterprise subscribers, and no free plan exists.

Pricing

MooSend offers a 30-day free trial. But its pricing starts from $9 per month.

9. Omnisend: Best Email Marketing Service for Shopify

Omnisend is the best email marketing tool with eCommerce optimizations and pre-designed workflows.

This email marketing service reduces the work involved in running a thriving eCommerce business by relying on automation.

Unique Feature: eCommerce email and SMS automation
Target Users: eCommerce, startups, and SMEs
Pricing: Starts at $16 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Editor for Content Creation

Your emails and campaigns must be consistent with your brand identity and message. The drag-and-drop email content editor lets you modify in-built templates to suit you.

2. Automated Push Notifications

Attract, retarget and convert web visitors with personalized push notifications. Set automated reminders for cart or browse abandonment and transactional emails beyond just offering a basic email marketing service.

3. Audience Synchronization

Integrate contacts into your Facebook and Google for better and on-target ads. Omnisend harmonizes your contact every 5-15 minutes, keeping you up-to-date. It also supports cookie-less advertising, which is good for when Google deactivates cookies on Chrome.

4. SMS Marketing

You want to handle all your SMS and emails on a single email marketing service to keep you abreast of customer conversations.

Also, you can automate SMS by including it in your marketing workflow, so customers get timely and thoughtful messages.

Onmisend boasts a 47.7% higher conversion rate in users who combine SMS and email marketing.

5. Migration

Omnisend makes the switch to their email marketing service easy and seamless for users, specifically eCommerce brands.

As a popular email marketing service, Omnisend integrates with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

6. Hyper Segmentation

Omnisend’s intuitive segmentation helps you understand your audience better to serve them better.

Increase your sales and campaign by targeting an audience based on purchase behavior and their unique journeys on your website.

Also, monitor customer lifecycle phases to develop and execute a better retention strategy.

7. Multichannel eCommerce Marketing

Omnisend engages your eCommerce customers from different channels in one place. All your marketing activities, email campaigns, ads, and sales happen on the Omnisend platform.

You can finally keep an eye on all your important data and audience.

More Features

Live support
Forms
Campaign builder
Sales report
MMS

Pros

Omnisend is purpose-built for eCommerce businesses and integrated with 100+ eCommerce stores like Shopify and wooCommerce. So, you only need one click to start your eCommerce journey.

Plus, you can start exploring this email marketing software on a free plan.

Cons

Omnisend targets eCommerce users and offers limited features for other industries. But you can use the free plan to test drive it.

Pricing

The free plan is available for 250 contacts, but you can upgrade to paid plan starting at $16 per month to enjoy premium offerings.

10. Mailerlite: Best for Email Campaign Tracking

Mailerlite is an affordable email marketing service that offers growth-focused email solutions to customers.

It integrates your e-store with most email marketing tools to increase conversion. Mailerlite also incorporates ultra-tracking technology to deliver the most accurate insights on your marketing campaigns.

Unique Feature: Auto resend campaign
Target Users: Marketers, writers, publishers, eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Newsletter Editor

Newsletters are a great way to keep customers informed and updated about your product and services. Create outstanding newsletters from scratch or touch up existing beautiful designs.

2. Website Designer

Every business needs a responsive and attractive website where prospective customers can interact with their brands—most email signups happen on your website anyway.

Utilize Mailerlite’s drag-and-drop website builder to design your business’s lively and engaging website layout.

3. Email Automation Features

Image Credit: Mailerlite

Monitor email clicks, customer behavior, and response to your emails to enable you to strategize. Automated emails handle follow-ups, email resends, and action prompts based on analyzed data.

4. Email Verifier

Mailerlite performs routine checks and deep cleaning on your email list to weed out inactive subscribers, dormant accounts, and spammy contacts.

Enjoy a fully optimized email list 24/7.

5. Blog Creator

Use its drag-and-drop builder to craft attention-grabbing blog posts to build your audience and share your unique ideas with your community.

Blogs are an important marketing strategy to adopt for your business. According to statistics, 77% of internet users read blogs.

Leverage the power of blogs and increase your site clicks.

6. Landing Page Gallery

Your prospective customers need an online location to interact with your business. This could be a landing page.

Choose from a range of templates for a mobile-friendly landing page. So you have one less thing to worry about in building your email marketing campaign.

7. Digital Products Marketing

Mailerlite offers an avenue for users to sell virtual products like ebooks, online courses, or other digital services.

Set up websites and include a payment gateway for easy patronage.

You can equally promote your digital products on Mailerlite.

More Features

Signup forms
Email automation
Newsletter subscription
Analytics and tracking
Facebook integrations

Pros

Mailerlite is simplified for even beginners to understand. Also, the email marketing service integrates with Shopify.

Pricing is fair, and you can enjoy up to 30 days free trial period for all paid plans to decide if you want to continue or not.

Cons

The free version is only open to one user and has limited functions and features.

Pricing

Free for up to 1000 subscribers. Monthly billing based on their annual plan:

Growing Business: $9 per month
Advanced: $19 per month
Enterprise: Custom pricing

11. ConvertKit: Best for Creators

ConvertKit targets creators and builds its features around their needs to attract, engage and monetize their audience. As a result, users can build, manage, and earn a living from your audience on a single platform.

Unique Feature: Creator pro
Target Users: Creators (authors, musicians, coaches)
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Automated Email Marketing

ConvertKit lets you breeze through the email writing process by automating every stage. For example, schedule email sends, deliver welcome messages, and group subscribers automatically.

2. Advanced Creator

ConvertKit’s creator pro takes the creator business a notch higher. This feature allows subscriber scoring, newsletter referrals, timely support, and teamwork and provides deliverability reports.

This is the best email marketing tool for mainstream creators.

3. Email Design

Create, edit, and optimize your emails to convert faster. ConvertKit makes email designing easy and more fun.

You can choose from previous templates and flawlessly modify the font, color, or body of your emails.

4. Email Opt-In Forms

Whether you want to choose from numerous form templates or create a customized form yourself, ConvertKit got you covered.

Access free signup forms to retarget your audience.

5. Commerce

Turn your passion into a source of income with ConvertKit’s eCommerce channel, which enables you to sell or buy digital products easily.

Package and monetize your knowledge as ebooks, online courses, newsletters, music, or presets and sell to a willing audience.

6. Third-party Integrations

Integrate your ConvertKit to your most preferred third-party apps. You can access eCommerce, lead capture, ads, CRM, and many other third-party integrations.

7. Paid Newsletter

If you have rich content and a list of loyal readers who enjoy them, ConvertKit can help you earn from newsletters.

Create customized newsletters targeted at the right audience and put a price on your knowledge.

Mailerlite provides free newsletter templates.

More Features

Audience tag
Advanced Reporting
Community support
Broadcasts
Automation builder

Pros

ConvertKit promotes the creator business and is positioned to help creatives sell their products.

The free plan supports 300 subscribers with unlimited emails, forms, landing pages, and other email marketing features.

What’s more?

You get two months of free email marketing services when you opt for annual billing.

Cons

Features on ConvertKit are purpose-built specifically for creatives making the email marketing service a poor choice for other industries.

Migration to ConvertKit from any other email marketing tool is unavailable on the free version. Also, the creator plan only allows for a single team member addition.

Pricing

Free for up to 300 subscribers. Monthly billing begins at $9 per month for Creator and $25 per month for Creator Pro.

12. Sendy: Best Low Budget and Self-Hosted Solution

Sendy uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to deliver the best email marketing software for users who would like a solution that’s 100x cheaper than competitors.

Sendy is one of the most affordable email marketing services in the market.

Users don’t need to pay monthly subscriptions as this self-hosted email marketing service bills only the number of emails sent. However, you’ll need to buy, install, and update the Sendy email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Low-budget email sends
Target Users: eCommerce, SMEs
Pricing: Pay as you use

Features

1. Cheap Email Sends

Sendy offers the lowest low-price email send rate in the market. For example, you pay only $1 for every 10,000 email messages.

The affordability doesn’t affect deliverability and speed as it uses the widely trusted Amazon SES. So, you can achieve your email marketing goals on a low budget.

2. Email Campaign Reports

Get timely reports on your campaign performance and other marketing activities on the platform.

Reports give updated insights on your site activities to help you focus your energy on marketing efforts that produce the most results.

Reports are organized into beautiful visual representations like charts to simplify data.

3. Autoresponders

You can’t determine when customers will visit your site or indicate interest in your product.

But with auto response in place, you can rest assured that you’ll miss nothing.

Follow up on email subscribers without being present around the clock. Set marketing automation to answer inquiries, provide feedback, and engage customers while you’re away.

4. Email Clean Up

Sendy’s Housekeeping ensures your email list stays clean and relevant so you can channel your marketing efforts to the right audience.

Prune out redundant contacts, uninterested subscribers, and wrong email addresses, clogging your sales progress wheel.

5. Integrations and Zapier

Image Credit: Sendy

Explore many third-party apps like WordPress and thousands of marketing tools on Zapier by integrating Sendy with them.

The integration process is easy, but if you need expert support, the Sendy community is there to assist you at no cost. However, Sendy may charge a fee if you need them to help you install their email marketing software on your hosting server

6. Personalized Domains and Brands

Create your branded domain to increase brand awareness and customer trust. Let your URL capture your brand.

7. Personalized Fields

Save information about your subscribers on your created custom field. Stored data ranges from names to emails and demography.

Information from Sendy’s custom fields is useful in segmentation and audience tags when designing newsletters.

More Features

Subscription forms
Subscriber segmentation
Webhooks
Google Analytics integration
Personalized tags

Pros

Sendy is feature-rich for a low-budget email marketing platform.

Users only pay for emails sent. And the one-time fee required to use Sendy is refundable if you don’t get desired results—but this is case-by-case.

You can install Sendy on one domain but host emails for multiple domain names.

Cons

Sendy runs on your web server and requires a license to set up. Requires updating to newer versions from time to time. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t support a free plan.

Pricing

No monthly payment plan.

One-off $69 is to buy this email marketing software
Pay $1 for every 10,000 emails sent.

FAQs

What is the best email marketing software to choose?

Choosing an email marketing platform is tough. But you can make it slightly easier with a checklist.

Use this checklist to make your decision easier:

Understand the nature and purpose of the emails you intend to send.
Decide on the most important features your ideal email marketing software must possess.
Prepare your testing team
Develop a shortlist of productive apps.
Carefully assess each shortlisted app with your team.
Start exploring any free email marketing service you can access.

What are the categories of marketing emails?

Email Newsletters: they’re newsletters that contain vital brand information.
Transactional Emails: facilitates or updates commercial transactions, e.g., order confirmation email.
Behavioral Emails: on-target messages based on user behavior to previous messages on your site or third-party tracking sources.

What is B2B email marketing service?

B2B email marketing involves sending messages and email campaigns to businesses rather than individuals.

In a B2B marketing scenario, the communication link is between your business and another business.

Your targeting, product, and marketing activities are channeled toward converting other businesses to loyal customers.

How often should you send out marketing emails?

Frequent emails can turn customers off and make them unsubscribe from your list quickly. Ideally, you should drastically increase emails from twice monthly to once weekly.

Research shows that 33.3% of businesses send out emails weekly.

Whatever you decide, ensure to analyze progress reports and use insight to determine whether to increase or reduce the number of emails sent.

What is the importance of email marketing?

Email marketing helps businesses gather, manage and engage new site visitors. You can also keep existing customers updated on your latest offerings.

It costs 500% more to gain new customers than to retain an existing one. So, use email marketing to keep your loyal customers engaged.

What is the average ROI for email marketing?

Email marketing gives a significantly higher return than other types of marketing, like digital or traditional marketing.

You gain $42 per $1 invested in email marketing campaigns. This makes email marketing the most preferred digital marketing strategy for businesses.

Does email marketing increase sales?

Email marketing is an efficient and cost-effective approach to marketing across different industries.

Consumers who receive email offers are 138% more likely to patronize a business because of email marketing campaigns than those who don’t.

Hence, email marketing increases sales, lead generation, and overall brand engagement.

Summary

The email marketing space is rife with email marketing services built to meet different user needs.

So, choosing the right email marketing service from the pool of options can be tasking.

But we’ve highlighted the top email marketing services and features you should consider when migrating your email service to a different platform. Of course, Active Campaign would be the best email marketing service on this list if we must choose one.

Explore any of the best email marketing software mentioned above, and let us know if you need help.

Featured image by storyset on Freepik

The post 12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

12 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

How to Measure Live Chat Performance

Live chat is one of the most powerful tools for customer experience in the current marketplace.

In a world where customers are constantly connected to the online world, online chat is a reliable way of getting quick solutions to common problems.

Today’s consumers prefer talking to an agent over chat to calling a contact center, and they often feel that live chat is less frustrating than waiting for the right person to answer the phone.

Of course, like any digital tool, live chat is only effective when using it correctly. Today, we’re going to show you the crucial KPIs you need to consider if you want to ensure that your chat strategy is delivering a tangible return on investment.

The Most Important Metrics to Measure for Live Chat

These days, implementing live chat tools is easier than ever.

You don’t necessarily need to hire a professional developer unless you want a specialist widget with specific functions and unique branding. Many plugins and tools for sites built on Shopify and WooCommerce allow you to instantly access chat functions.

However, just because implementing live chat is easy doesn’t mean that there aren’t countless ways for your strategy to go wrong. Keeping an eye on these crucial KPIs and metrics ensures you’re making the right impression with your chat strategy.

1. First Response Time

First response time is a crucial live chat metric. This measures how long customers need to wait before someone responds to them. Technically, this metric only refers to how quickly an actual agent responds to your customer, so automated “thanks for getting in touch” messages don’t count. However, immediately responding with one of those messages can convince your audience to stick around for a little longer.

The faster your agents can respond to messages and solve problems, the better your brand reputation becomes. The good news is that a good live chat strategy can lead to pretty quick response times. The average time for an agent to see a live chat message is around 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

To improve your FRT statistics, make sure you:

Invest in chatbots: AI chatbots can support customers 24/7 with handy, self-service functionality. These tools will also filter out the customers waiting for an agent who can find a solution to their problem on your FAQ page.
Prepare canned responses: Quick responses to common queries can help you to address a problem much faster. In addition, preparing canned responses will ensure that your team members can quickly respond to more customers.
Increase your resources: Ensure you have the right hand and enough agents to handle peak demand.

2. Average Resolution Time

The first response rate only looks at how quickly someone responds to a customer’s message for the first time. However, it doesn’t show how rapidly you deal with client problems. Average Resolution Time is the metric that helps to measure customer satisfaction by seeing how long it takes to get to a point where your customer can close the chat.

If it takes too long for your employees to solve problems, there’s an increased risk of your customers becoming annoyed and frustrated. Additionally, the longer agents take dealing with each individual chat, the more other consumers will have to wait for someone to become available. Finally, the longer it takes to resolve an issue, the more customer satisfaction decreases.

The key to success is ensuring that the right agent deals with the correct customer and that everyone on your team is empowered with the appropriate tools and information. Boost resolution time by:

Giving customers a quick self-service solution: For common questions, make sure that you have an FAQ section that you can direct your customers to. In addition, a chatbot that can offer quick canned responses to regular queries can save time. Plus, they’re great for reducing the pressure on your agents’ shoulders.
Integrate CRM tools with live chat: Make sure your agents have access to information about each customer as soon as they start the conversation. This information should include the customer’s name, what they’ve purchased before, and if they’ve issued any support tickets. Integrating with the CRM makes it easier for agents to jump straight into the action without needing the customer to explain everything first.
Keep resources handy: Your team members should have instant access to all the information they need to answer customer questions. Ensure that searchable data repositories are available for everyone on your live chat team.

Remember, routing tools that automatically send customers to the agent with the proper knowledge or skills will also improve response times and reduce the number of times a customer needs to repeat themselves.

3. Chat to Conversion Rate

Live chat tools aren’t just an avenue for problem resolution. Although customers can get excellent service through live chat, they also look to chat to collect information before a potential purchase. Around 38% of customers say that they end up purchasing a positive live chat experience.

The live chat app on your website can provide real-time assistance for sales queries, converting leads, and maximizing your return on investment. However, to determine how successful your chat system is at encouraging sales, you must look at the chat to conversion rate metric.

Essentially, you measure the number of chats your company has been involved in, then compare that number to the total number of conversions from those customers. It might be helpful to narrow down your results here by using your data and analytics tools to separate your total number of live chats into those intended for sales information and those requiring assistance.

If your chat to conversion rate isn’t as high as you would like, there are lots of things you can do to start making a positive impact:

Automatically launch a chat: As soon as someone comes to your website, launch a chat window with a bot that asks whether you can help your customer. You can even include a list of commonly asked questions so your customer can get help faster.
Follow up on chat conversations: Make sure you follow up on any questions that customers ask on your chat widget with an email. This is a great way to reach out to customers that may have been distracted and ended up abandoning their cart.
Personalize suggestions: Use AI insights and information from your customer management tools to determine which products are most likely to appeal to each customer, then suggest those items. Remember to ensure that your tone of voice in the chat matches your brand too.

Remember, the faster you can answer customer queries and address their concerns with your live chat strategy, the more likely the chat will lead to a sale. Ultimately, customers are convinced to purchase when they believe they can trust your business to deliver excellent experiences.

4. Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score is probably one of the most critical metrics in any customer experience strategy. It directly measures customer satisfaction levels and gives you an insight into how well you’re doing from the perspective of your target audience.

The best way to measure CSAT through live chat is to add a survey to the end of the chat session. For instance, you could ask, “How would you rate this session on a scale of 1 to 10”. Then, based on the score, you’d calculate a “Net Promotion Score.” Each score falls into one of three categories: “Detractors 0-6”, “Passives 6-8,” and “Promotors 9-10”.

The more information you collect about your CSAT score, the easier it will be to determine where you’re going wrong with your live chat strategy. On the other hand, if the score is pretty good after a chat session, you’re probably on the right track. To improve your overall score:

Encourage feedback: Getting people to leave feedback, even on a live chat app, can be difficult. Offering customers the chance to win something in exchange for their insights could help you to get more data.
Follow up: Connect with your “detractors” to find out what you did wrong. Follow up in the live chat session by asking if they’d like to leave a more comprehensive review. Alternatively, you can send an email asking for additional information.
Reach out to promotors: Connect with the people who give you the most favorable scores to ask them for their insights. Find out what they enjoyed most about the experience and request a review that you can place on your website for social proof.

5. Missed Opportunities

The longer someone waits for you to answer their question in a live chat or respond to their initial message, the more likely they’ll give up on the conversation. Unfortunately, this means that your company ends up with missed opportunities. You lose the chance to potentially make a sale, delight a customer, and strengthen your brand reputation.

While you might assume that your customers will know you can’t be available to answer all of their questions immediately, that’s not the case. INC tells us that 51% of consumers believe a business should always be open. So every missed chat is another negative mark against your reputation.

If you discover that your team is missing a lot of chat chances, this could be a sign that you don’t have enough resources available in this area. However, there are a few ways that you can reduce your chances of missed opportunities, such as:

Hiring more team members: If you know that there are times of the year or week when you have peaks in demand, ensure that you have the correct number of staff members available.
Using chatbots: Chatbots won’t be able to answer all customer questions, but they can deliver quick responses to commonly asked queries and reduce the risk of lost opportunities.
Provide alternative forms of communication: if your customer can’t reach you on live chat, make sure that there are other options available, like a phone number and email address or a form where your customer can automatically submit a ticket.

6. Total Number of Chats and Tickets

Keeping track of the total number of tickets your customers submit, alongside the number of chats your employees engage in, will give you helpful information. First, the total number of conversations shows how many customers are taking advantage of your live chat function on the website.

You’ll also be able to compare your total number of chats to the number of resolved problems you deal with for your customers. For example, comparing your total number of chats to an unlimited number of tickets shows you how many customers have been left to rely on other sources of communication. You can also see how good your employees are at following up with tickets issued by customers.

When you’re analyzing your number of tickets and chat sessions, you might notice that many of the queries you dealt with were connected to specific questions or topics. If that’s the case, you might be able to create a new FAQ page for your customers or provide your chatbot with extra information that it can use.

If you’re getting more support tickets through alternative means than live chat, it might be time to ask yourself what’s wrong with your live chat performance and why your customers choose not to use it.

Improving Live Chat CX for Your Business

Live chat can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience and an excellent way to strengthen your relationship with existing and potential clients.

Step into the shoes of your customer and discover what it feels like to walk through the whole live chat experience, from the moment that you send a request to the live chat team to the moment when you close down the chat with a solution to your problem. Other quick tips include:

Getting the software right: Make sure your live chat app is easy for your end customers and your employees. The chat app you use should be convenient and suit your brand. It also needs to collect information effectively without causing problems like GDPR and regulations. Get a developer involved if you think you have a problem with your chat functionality.
Guide your team: Remember that your team needs to know how to use the live chat tools available effectively if they’re going to deliver the best results to your customers. Make sure you give your employees scripts to deal with problems if needed. In addition, chatbots that can quickly grab information from integrated CRM tools and other solutions could make your agents’ lives much more manageable.
Pay attention to feedback: Ask your customers for feedback on their live chat experiences whenever you can. Ensure you pay attention to what they say they like and dislike about the encounter. If you can listen to your customer’s opinions, they’ll give you a lot of helpful information to work with when you’re enhancing and optimizing your live chat strategy. In addition, listening to your audience shows that you have their best interests at heart.

Remember, as well as customer feedback; you might be able to ask your employees for their insights into how you can improve live chat performance too. Employees also work with these tools regularly, so they know which features are more problematic than others.

Measuring and Improving Live Chat

Live chat functionality isn’t something that you implement into your website and forget about. Instead, like any form of customer service or engagement tool, your live chat solution should be something you test regularly and constantly update to suit your customers’ needs.

Knowing which metrics to measure when examining live chat functionality and performance will boost the experience you can give your audience and even open the door for better relationships with clients in the long term.

The post How to Measure Live Chat Performance first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

12 août 2022/par Service comm.

How to Bootstrap a Web Design Business

Starting your own business is a process with a fair share of challenges. Even in the web design world, where you can potentially minimize costs by working from home and collaborating with freelance contractors, many expenses exist.

To run a successful web design business, you need enough money to invest in everything from skilled colleagues to resources (like fonts and themes), software subscriptions, and technology tools. Finding a way to fund your company can be the most complicated part of ensuring its success.

For most new companies, the easiest option to generate opportunities is “bootstrapping.” Learning how to bootstrap a web design business means knowing how to bring your business to life with virtually no starting capital.

Here’s how to get started.

What is Bootstrapping?

Successful bootstrappers take an idea, such as creating a web design company and create a fantastic company without the backing of investors. It takes significant dedication, commitment, and single-mindedness to accomplish your goals, but some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Sam Walton, got their start this way.

The term “bootstrapping” comes from the phrase “to pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” which indicates overcoming challenges on your own without any external support.

The pros and cons of bootstrapping include:

Pros:

Full control: Bootstrapping allows entrepreneurs to retain full ownership over their business. Alternatively, engaging with investors means allowing other professionals to own a portion of your company or make a share of the decisions.
Innovation: Business owners in a bootstrapping model are forced to invest in agile and innovative business models. You must develop processes to produce immediate, lasting cash flow from day one.
Accomplishment: Building something from the ground up creates a powerful sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Ownership: You won’t have to sell any equity in your business to other investors, which means you can benefit fully from the company as it grows.

Cons:

Risks: Self-funded businesses generally run out of funds faster and struggle to scale as quickly as other companies, limiting the brand’s ability to reach its potential.
Limited support: Traditional financing methods (like working with investors) also provide networking opportunities and support from specialists who want to see your company succeed.
Pressure: Bootstrapping businesses need to be meticulous about everything from keeping books to making the right decisions for brand growth.
Hard work: With limited resources, connections, and options, bootstrapping entrepreneurs need to work harder than most and take on more roles.

How to Bootstrap Your Web Design Business: Step by Step

Bootstrapping a web design business can be complicated, but it works for many companies if you follow the right strategy. The good news is web design companies generally don’t require as much initial capital as some other types of companies, like standard retail brands or companies with a need for brick and mortar offices.

However, there are still steps you’ll need to follow to ensure success.

Step 1: Source Some Initial Funds

While you might not work with investors when bootstrapping your web design business, you’ll still need some essential initial funds. To run a web design business, you won’t necessarily need a massive initial investment, but you will need something.

To determine how much capital you need to raise from your income, savings, a line of credit, or other common bootstrapping sources, think about:

Where you’re going to work: The upfront costs of operating your own web design business will be a lot lower if you choose to work from home and with remote specialists. The less you have to pay for office space, the better.
Business fees: You may need to pay fees for registering your business name, hosting your own website for advertising, and dealing with any registration costs.
Equipment and software: Think about what you will use daily for web design. Subscription-based services like Adobe Creative Cloud can cost quite a bit to access. You’ll also need a good computer, and perhaps a tablet for sketching.

Step 2: Find a USP

The easiest way to ensure a bootstrapped web design business is a success is to ensure you are offering specific clients something they genuinely need. In a service-based landscape like web design, you need to know what your customers want and offer something they can’t get elsewhere.

For instance, can you differentiate yourself from other web design companies by helping with modern trends like 360-degree video and XR-ready design? Can you build apps for companies from scratch and provide ongoing maintenance for the websites you make?

An excellent way to find your USP is to examine your competitors. Find out what other companies in your area are offering their customers, and listen to consumers in your industry when they talk about what they need from a website designer.

Step 3: Choose a Cash Flow Optimized Model

Since you’re relying only on your cash and the money you make from your web design business to fuel its growth, choosing a model optimized for consistent cash flow is essential. Bootstrapping a business often means you place most of the profit you gain from your company back into the development of the brand.

With this in mind, consider how you’ll offer services and charge your customers. Are you going to ask for a portion of the fees up-front before starting a web design project? Can you provide your customers with subscription models to improve your revenue consistently?

For instance, you could provide help with ongoing maintenance, development, and support rather than just offering to build websites for companies. Another way to make additional income is with professional services, like consulting.

Make sure there’s a market for the services you’ll offer before launching your business by examining the surrounding environments and services your competitors provide.

Step 4: Keep Costs Low and Profits High

Keeping costs low will be essential to ensuring your success when bootstrapping a business. Fortunately for web designers, it’s relatively easy to cut down on fees. For instance, WordPress is free to use for your development projects, making it an excellent choice for many web design strategies.

You can also look into common free and cheap alternatives to web design tools online, like GIMP. Shop around for the things you will be paying ongoing fees with. For instance, it’s best to check out multiple vendors when looking for web hosting and marketing support.

While keeping your costs low, it’s also essential to accelerate profits as much as possible. You can look for ways to boost customer retention by building stronger relationships with your clients and offering them deals on long-term subscriptions.

If you have time outside of your web design business, you can also try taking on some side hustles. Options include:

Selling web design assets on sites like ThemeForest
Offering your services on a freelance basis with sites like Dribbble and Toptal
Designing and selling NFTs for the metaverse
Teaching web design or selling webinars

Step 5: Grow Cautiously

Finally, while the goal of successfully bootstrapping your web design business will be to grow as rapidly and consistently as possible, it’s important to be cautious. For instance, you’ll need to be able to afford the fees of every new designer you bring onto your team, so consider looking for freelancers and contractors rather than permanent hires.

Use organic channels for marketing your services, like blogging and content marketing which can help improve your SEO standing and attract attention among clients. Plus, encourage your customers to recommend your services to other brands.

As new clients approach your business, ensure you only take on as many customers as you can reasonably handle. Compromising on quality will damage your relationships with customers and harm your reputation.

Good Luck Bootstrapping Your Business

When you’re bootstrapping a business, you get the benefit of being able to eliminate any outside influences from your growth. You’re free to focus on building relationships with companies of your choice, and you get to make decisions about your growth. However, there are downsides, too, like significant stress and limited financial opportunities.

While bootstrapping your business is tough, if you manage to complete the process successfully, the results can be fantastic.

Featured image via Unsplash.

The post How to Bootstrap a Web Design Business first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

22 juin 2022/par Service comm.

Understanding Cross Browser Testing and Responsive Testing

Introduction

The Internet is inevitable in the current time. It is everywhere, and the entire world depends on it to function, perform day-to-day activities and stay connected with people from different corners. Gone are the days when testers only chose to create websites for selected browsers and hardly faced issues maintaining a website on a few browsers. As the technology matured, many significant players entered the browser market. Even the users evolved, became tech-savvy, and improved their browsing habits. Now was a time when businesses were in critical need of cross-browser testing and responsive testing to stay ahead of the competition. Cross-browser testing focuses on the website’s overall functionality; responsive web testing verifies the look and feel of the web application. Cross-browser testing deals with the analysis of the web browsers that their users use, and responsive testing deals with the devices where the company’s user base visits the websites. Let us shed some light and understand cross-browser and responsive testing in detail.

What Is Cross Browser Testing?

We all know that testing cross-browser compatibility of websites « is of utmost importance. It helps understand how stable your web application is across various technologies, browsers, operating systems, and devices. The adoption of cross-browser testing is to provide a better user experience irrespective of which browser-OS-device combination your users use to access your website. In cross-browser testing, the testers generally validate the web application’s functionality and ensure its user-friendliness and performance are up to the mark across the web browsers. Businesses can also take the help of cloud-based automated cross-browser testing tools to have access to a wide range of real devices to test their web and mobile applications. Different browser engines render websites differently; even the version of each browser causes the code uniquely. It means the code behind the websites is read differently by every browser. So, various cross-browser testing strategies are critical for website accessibility. It is how different browsers render a web page:

Source de l’article sur DZONE

12 avril 2022/par Service comm.

What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product?

“Minimum Viable Product,” or “MVP,” is a concept of agile development and business growth. With a minimum viable product, you focus on creating the simplest, most basic version of your product, web application, or code possible.

Minimum viable products include just enough features to attract early adopters and validate your idea in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Choosing an MVP workflow can be particularly valuable in the software environment because it helps teams receive, learn from, and respond to feedback as quickly as possible.

The question is, how exactly do you define the “minimum” in MVP? How do you know if your MVP creation is basic enough while still being “viable”?

Defining the Minimum Viable Product: An Introduction

The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” comes from the Lean Start-up Methodology, introduced by Eric Ries. The purpose of MVP is to help companies quickly create versions of a product while collecting validated insights from customers for each iteration. Companies may choose to develop and release minimum viable products because they want to:

Introduce new products into the market as quickly as possible;
Test an idea with real users before committing a large budget to product development;
Create a competitive product with the use of frequent upgrades;
Learn what resonates with the target market of the company;
Explore different versions of the same product.

Aside from allowing your company to validate an idea for a product without building the entire concept from scratch, an MVP can also reduce the demand on a company’s time and resources. This is why so many smaller start-ups with limited budgets use the MVP and lean production strategy to keep costs as low as possible.

Defining an MVP: What your Minimum Viable Product Isn’t

When you’re building a Minimum Viable Product, you’re concentrating on developing only the most “essential” features that need to be in that product. For instance, you might be building a shopping app for a website. For the app to be “viable,” it would need to allow customers to search through products and add them to a basket or shopping cart. The app would also need a checkout feature and security components.

However, additional functionality, like the ability to send questions about an item to a customer service team or features that allow clients to add products to a “wish list,” may not be necessary straight away. Part of defining a minimum viable product is understanding what it isn’t. For instance, an MVP is not:

A prototype: Prototypes are often mentioned alongside MVPs because they can help with early-stage product validation. However, prototypes are generally not intended for customers to use. The “minimum” version of a viable product still needs to be developed enough for clients and users to put it to the test and provide feedback.
A minimum marketable product: An MVP is a learning vehicle that allows companies to create various iterations of an item over time. However, a minimum marketable product is a complete item, ready to sell, with features or “selling points” the company can highlight to differentiate the item from the competition.
Proof of concept: This is another similar but distinct idea from MVP. Proof of concept items test an idea you have to determine whether it’s attainable. There usually aren’t any customers involved in this process. Instead, companies create small projects to assess business solutions’ technical capabilities and feasibility. You can sometimes use a proof of concept before moving on to an MVP.

Finding the Minimum in your MVP

When finding the “minimum” in a minimum viable product, the primary challenge is ensuring the right balance. Ideally, you need your MVP to be as essential, cost-effective, and straightforward as possible so that you can create several iterations in a short space of time. The simpler the product, the easier it is to adapt it, roll it out to your customers, and learn from their feedback.

However, developers and business leaders shouldn’t get so caught up focusing on the “Minimum” part of Minimum Viable Product that they forget the central segment: “Viable”; your product still needs to achieve a specific purpose.

So, how do you find the minimum in your MVP?

1. Decide on Your Goal or Purpose

First, you’ll need to determine what your product needs to do to be deemed viable. What goal or target do you hope to achieve with your new product? For instance, in the example we mentioned above, where you’re creating an ecommerce shopping app, the most basic thing the app needs to do is allow customers to shop for and purchase items on a smartphone.

Consider the overall selling point of your product or service and decide what the “nice to haves” are, compared to the essential features. For instance, your AR app needs to allow people to interact with augmented digital content on a smartphone, but it may not need to work with all versions of the latest AR smart glasses.

2. Make a List of Features

Once you know the goal or purpose of your product, the next step is to make a list of features or capabilities you can rank according to importance. You can base your knowledge of what’s “most important” for your customers by looking at things like:

Competitor analysis: What do your competitors already offer in this category, and where are the gaps in their service or product?
User research: Which features or functionalities are most important to your target audience? How can you make your solution stand out from the crowd?
Industry knowledge: As an expert in your industry, you should have some basic understanding of what it will take to make your product “usable.”

3. Create Your Iterations

Once you’ve defined your most important features, the next stage is simply building the simplest version of your product. Build the item according to what you consider to be its most essential features and ask yourself whether it’s serving its purpose.

If your solution seems to be “viable,” you can roll it out to your target audience or a small group of beta testers to get their feedback and validate the offering. Use focus groups and market interviews to collect as much information as possible about what people like or dislike.

Using your feedback, you can begin to implement changes to your “minimum” viable product to add more essential features or functionality.

Understanding the “Minimum Viable Product”

Minimum viable products are evident throughout multiple industries and markets today – particularly in the digitally transforming world. For instance, Amazon might be one of the world’s most popular online marketplaces today, but it didn’t start that way. Instead, Jeff Bezos began purchasing books from distributors and shipping them to customers every time his online store received an order to determine whether the book-selling landscape would work.

When Foursquare first began, it had only one feature. People could check-in at different locations and win badges. The gamification factor was what made people so excited about using the service. Other examples include:

Groupon: Groupon is a pretty huge discount and voucher platform today, operating in companies all around the world. However, it started life as a simple minimum viable product promoting the services of local businesses and offering exclusive deals for a short time. Now Groupon is constantly evolving and updating its offerings.
Airbnb: Beginning with the use of the founders’ own apartment, Airbnb became a unicorn company giving people the opportunity to list places for short-term rental worldwide. The founders rented out their own apartment to determine whether people would consider staying in someone else’s home before eventually expanding.
Facebook: Upon release, Facebook was a simple social media tool used for connecting with friends. Profiles were basic, and all members were students of Harvard University. The idea quickly grew and evolved into a global social network. Facebook continues to learn from the feedback of its users and implement new features today.

Creating Your Minimum Viable Product

Your definition of a “minimum viable product” may not be the same as the definition chosen by another developer or business leader. The key to success is finding the right balance between viability – and the purpose of your product, and simplicity – or minimizing your features.

Start by figuring out what your product simply can’t be without, and gradually add more features as you learn and gain feedback from your audience. While it can be challenging to produce something so “minimalistic” at first, you need to be willing to release those small and consistent iterations if you want to leverage all the benefits of an MVP.

Suppose you can successfully define the meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable” simultaneously with your new product creations. In that case, the result should be an agile business, lean workflows, and better development processes for your entire team.

Featured image via Pexels.

The post What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

18 février 2022/par Service comm.

Quiz: Are You Prepped For Meeting Design Clients?

Walking into an initial meeting with a new client can be nerve-wracking. If you’re a freelancer, your income could depend on the outcome; if you’re part of an agency, then your colleagues’ incomes could rely on it too.

More often than not, you’re meeting someone successful enough at negotiating to own a company. The time you spent learning code, or a design system, they spent brokering deals.

So how do you know that you’re ready for the meeting? What questions should you ask? What answers should you provide? Check you’re prepared for meetings by bookmarking this week’s quiz and testing yourself in advance.

We’ll get started with an easy one about anatomy…

Featured image via Pexels.

The post Quiz: Are You Prepped For Meeting Design Clients? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

14 janvier 2022/par Service comm.

15 Best New Fonts, January 2022

With a new year here, it’s time to try out some new fonts.

Whether you’re designing a brand new website or redesigning an existing one, the following list of fonts has you covered. In addition to the dependable serifs and sans serifs we use to create attractive and readable content, this roundup also has some fun additions, including one you can use for websites advertising Valentine’s Day deals next month.

Antona

Antona is a geometric sans serif font family with 16 different styles. The solid structures and ample white space within the characters give off a safe and friendly vibe.

Aromanis

Aromanis is a small font family with just two variations: Regular and Shadow. This new font supports nearly 70 languages and has an extensive Latin character set with localized forms. This font works best in branding for youthful companies with a playful vibe — from logos to posters and everything in between.

Black Coopy

Black Coopy is an edgy display typeface that would work well for sporty brands. In addition to the standard alpha, numeric, and punctuation sets, the font also comes with a variety of “swash” characters that can be used to frame your bold headlines.

Cimory Love

Don’t wait until February to start thinking about how to infuse a little romance into your designs. Cimory Love is a script font that comes in two styles: Regular and Italic. In addition to using it to promote Valentine’s Day sales, this could also be a cute font to use on websites for small gift shops, bakeries, and so on.

Cotford

Cotford is a contemporary serif font with a ton of flexibility built into it. It comes with eight variations — three text and five display weights. Designers can use one of the many pre-designed styles or they can modify this dynamic font set to make it suit their specific needs.

Digno

Digno is a beautiful, informal serif font that’s easy on the eyes. The font family comes with 14 weights covering a wide spectrum — lights, mediums, heavies, and even a couple of “Book” weights are thrown in if you want to add some personality to those text-dense pages of yours.

Dogly Comika

Dogly Comika is a rounded display font with two styles: Regular and outline. While it’s promoted as a font for animals and pets, you could use it for any type of website hero image, mobile app splash screen, video game, or social media graphic for brands with a fun vibe.

Guzzo

Guzzo is a nostalgic typeface inspired by mid-century grotesques. With 24 styles ranging from Condensed Thin to Extended Black and unexpected character variations (like the random cursives in the italics), you could realistically create interesting font pairings right from within this family.

Idem

Idem is a contemporary serif with nine wide-ranging styles that would work well for headers and text alike. Inspired by literary publications and commercial artists from the earlier part of the 20th century, this font family has a highly legible structure with a bold flare.

Jantur Type

Jantur Type is a geometric sans font that supports over 200 Latin-based languages. While you could use one of the Thin or Regular weights for editorial content, this font will be most effective in shorter headers and paragraphs where it can make a greater impact on messaging.

Loretta

Loretta is an elegant serif designed specifically for the body of your web pages. Because of its calligraphic roots, this particular font would work great for high-end digital publications or blogs that promote luxury lifestyles and goods.

Rebrand

Rebrand is an exciting take on geometric sans. There are two sub-families in Rebrand: Display comes with nine weights as well as alternative characters and dingbats; Text comes with seven weights that cover a broad spectrum of styles. Because of the size and variety of this font family, you could easily make this the go-to font for a company’s branding, headers, and body type.

Royal Grotesque

Royal Grotesque is a resurrection of a 1914 sans serif font called Wotan. Only one version of this font is available (Regular) and it would work great pretty much anywhere on the web with its clean and neutral design.

Selva

Selva is an attractive Scotch typeface that has a traditional Roman serif family, an italicized version of each Roman, as well as a script family. If you’re considering using a script font for branding or headlines, the classic and delicate details of this particular font would make for an interesting choice.

Sunset Gothic

Sunset Gothic is a sans serif inspired by signage found near and around Los Angeles. Because this signage was often painted directly onto shop windows and building facades, the letterforms had to be extremely legible for passersby and drivers alike. This font draws upon the hand-painted, vector-based styling of those painted promotions.

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