What To Look For in a Website Builder

The post 10 Best Website Builders for 2023 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

24 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

Why Do WordPress Theme Backends Have to Suck? (Hint: They Don’t!)

Whether you’ve worked with a few WordPress themes to design websites or worked with many of them, you’ll no doubt agree that plenty of WordPress themes that are visually gorgeous on the front end can be terribly unattractive and extremely awkward to use on the backend.

Working with a WordPress theme can sometimes be difficult, but it can be different.

Want proof? Look no further than with BeTheme.

BeTheme, with 260,000+ sales and counting and a 4.83-star user rating, is one of the top 5 best-selling WordPress themes of all time.

In this article, we’ll show you one of the many reasons why this is the case by focusing on how BeTheme’s backend is designed to make web design tasks more manageable.

Enhance your workflow experience with a WordPress theme backend that won’t stress you out

Once you install BeTheme, you’ll almost immediately notice it’s different. Instead of a drab and often unintuitive WordPress backend, you’ll suddenly be confronted with a clean, well-organized dashboard and toolset.

You haven’t actually lost anything. WordPress, with its impressive assortment of content management tools, is still there. Be’s backend is a visually appealing space in which you will take pleasure to work.

If only the rest of WordPress could follow suit.

If you haven’t worked with BeTheme recently (or at all), why not let us walk you through several of its most helpful backend features.

Starting with:

1. Dashboard Design

BeTheme’s dashboard is conveniently located directly beneath the main WordPress Dashboard link. So you won’t waste time sifting through the sidebar trying to find your theme’s settings, and everything displayed in the dashboard is designed to help you get the most out of your WordPress theme.

Clicking on the BeTheme or the Dashboard link gives you immediate access to the following:

Theme registration information
BeTheme’s step-by-step website creator
A Navigation bar that directs you to BeTheme’s frequently used tools
Plugin status and updates and new features announcements
The latest additions to BeTheme’s ever-growing library of pre-built websites
Beloved BeTheme integrations

It takes a minute to fully appreciate how helpful this dashboard will be.

2. Dark/Light Mode

Research on dark mode benefits is inconclusive. But since so many people seem to like it, it is offered as an option in many popular apps and devices.

Dark mode users will tell you that they experience less eye strain, they sleep better, and their device’s batteries last longer than is the case with light mode.

BeTheme’s backend offers a dark mode option, and you are encouraged to try it.

If you feel it beneficial, so much the better, and you needn’t concern yourself with what the research indicated, or didn’t indicate.

3. Step-by-Step Website Creator

When you first install a WordPress theme, it’s not uncommon to spend some time trying to figure out what to do next. The theme’s advertisements may highlight a selection of impressive demos, but where are they more exactly?

Of course, you’ll eventually find them, but is whatever difficulty you may have encountered necessary?

BeTheme removes that impediment.

You will notice the Setup Wizard under BeTheme (and in the dashboard as well.) Click on the wizard, and with its step-by-step website, you can:

Give your website a name.
Select the page builder you want to work with and choose your preferred editing mode.
Pick an ideal pre-built website based on your new website’s industry or niche.
Easily replace existing content with your own.

The entire process of loading your brand-new site and page builder into WordPress takes a minute (or more like 30 seconds once you are used to it).

4. Pre-Built Site Previews

With BeTheme, you can choose from more than 650 pre-built websites. New ones are being added as we speak, and they’re delightfully easy to find. Just look under the dashboard’s Websites link or Pre-built Websites in BeTheme’s sidebar menu, and there they are!

You’ll be familiarized with the available design aids and options in no time, and you’ll find it easy to incorporate the latest design trends into your websites. BeTheme has even placed previews of its newest pre-built websites in your dashboard to help you along.

You may choose one of the latest pre-built websites to work with, or you might find one or more others you particularly like. Pre-built sites you do not plan to work with can still be sources of inspiration.

Whatever your choices, you’ll find it easy to incorporate the latest trends into website designs.

5. Plugin Manager

BeTheme’s Plugins area differs from what you see in the WordPress plugins area. You’ll find several of these differences to be particularly helpful in that BeTheme’s plugins manager enables you to:

View the active plugins you’ve installed.
Update plugins when necessary.
Install and activate plugins only when it’s required.

The last item is essential in that plugins do not appear in the WordPress plugin manager until you have installed them. Not having to install plugins you will not need will help keep your website operating at a high level of performance.

6. BeTheme Support

WordPress is a powerful content management system and an extremely popular one. It may, in fact, be the most powerful and popular system of its type.

WordPress is also community-driven to a considerable extent, which can sometimes create user inconvenience. As a user, you might sometimes have to dig to find answers to your questions or get help when needed.

You don’t have to experience that inconvenience to get support from BeTheme.

To gain access to BeTheme’s support center, you need go no further than BeTheme’s sidebar or dashboard to access self-support options or open a ticket for direct assistance.

7. Theme Options

Plenty of well-known WordPress themes have theme settings customization capabilities. With BeTheme, it’s easy to set brand colors, choose custom fonts, and establish global layouts. The same holds for configuring responsiveness, performance, and accessibility, all of which are essential for optimizing UX and search engine functionalities.

The problem with most theme options is that they can only be modified from the main WordPress dashboard. So if, while designing on a page, you suddenly realize a portion of its design hasn’t been configured correctly, or you’re dissatisfied with any design segment, you’ll have to save your changes and go to your theme’s backend to make the necessary fixes.

From the BeTheme dashboard inside the BeBuilder BeTheme, you can modify your Theme Options without having to interrupt your workflow.

8. White-Label Mode

A final feature of the BeTheme WordPress theme’s backend you should become familiar with is BeCustom. This critical feature is located under BeTheme in the sidebar.

BeCustom enables you to access some white-label regions in BeTheme.

You can use BeCustom to:

Substitute Be’s branding with your business’s branding to reinforce your name with your clients.
Disable any features your clients have no use for and deny access to any features you do not want them to modify while at the same time making the WordPress theme’s backend easier to work with.
Create an extra user-friendly and secure WordPress login.
Customize the dashboard’s “Welcome” message.

Make Your WordPress Design Projects Simple to Handle With BeTheme

Is there anything BeTheme doesn’t do?

Most likely, but nothing that would adversely impact your design effort.

This multipurpose WordPress theme’s hundreds of pre-built websites will help you get virtually any website project off to a rapid start and headed in the right direction.

BeTheme features the fastest and most powerful page builder for WordPress.

You will have total control over every feature and facet of your website’s UI.

In short, BeTheme offers the finest way to manage any web design project within WordPress.

[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of BeTheme -]

The post Why Do WordPress Theme Backends Have to Suck? (Hint: They Don’t!) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

18 octobre 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.

Ridiculously Challenging WordPress Quiz

I bet you didn’t know that WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder and content management system (CMS).

Just kidding…of course, you did! But that’s not all there is to know about WordPress, so take our ridiculously challenging WordPress quiz and see how much of an expert you are…

(Scroll to the bottom for the correct answers.)

1. What is WordPress?

SEO plugin to check your keyword density
AI tool to create illustrations
Online software to create websites
A coffee shop in Canada

2. What is the number of websites using WordPress?

75 million
1.3 billion
2 thousand
7.1 billion

3. WordPress has a tradition of naming its major releases after:

American presidents
Famous jazz musicians
British kings
Heavy metal bands

4. How many websites are created on WordPress per day?

Two websites
20,040 websites
Over 500 websites
60-80 websites

5. What is the correct WordPress website address?

WordPress.org
WordPress.us
WordPress.com
WordPress.au

6. Who is the WordPress CEO?

Elon Mask
Bill Gates
Leonardo DiCaprio
No CEO

7. Which US government website is using WordPress?

WhiteHouse.gov
U.S. Embassy Websites
State.gov
All of them

8. How many languages is WordPress available in?

9. What is the most downloaded WordPress theme of all time?

Divi
Gutenberg
WoodMart
Astra

10. How many Fortune websites are using WordPress?

11. What is the average salary of a WordPress developer per year?

$100k
$56k
$24k
$201k

12. When was the first WordPress version released?

1999
2010
2007
2003

Answers

1. What is WordPress? – 3. WordPress is online, open-source software that you can use to create websites.

2. What is the number of websites using WordPress? – 2. In 2021, WordPress powers over 1.3 billion websites all over the web, and this number continues to grow.

3. WordPress has a tradition of naming major releases after – 2. WordPress has a habit of naming its big releases after famous jazz musicians. For example, in the first version of January 2004, they called 1.0 (Davis), named after American trumpeter Miles Davis. Another version of May 2004 was named 1.2 (Mingus).

4. How many websites are created on WordPress per day? – 3. Over 500 websites are created on WordPress every day. At the same time, only 60-80 sites are built on popular platforms like Squarespace and Shopify. Besides, every second, 17 new blog posts are published on WordPress!

5. What is the correct WordPress website address? – 1. The fact that always confuses beginners is that WordPress.org and WordPress.com are entirely different companies that provide separate services. WordPress.org is the real WordPress everyone talks about that helps you to build websites. While WordPress.com is a hosting provider created by Automattic, the co-founder of WordPress.

6. Who is the WordPress CEO? – 4. WordPress is a free, open-source project. That’s why it does not have a CEO; volunteer developers run the project from all over the globe. This is the reason anyone can submit a report about a bug or suggest features.

7. Which US government website is using WordPress? – 4. The correct answer is all of them. All major websites of the US federal government use WordPress for their websites. The list includes all government sites of big and small cities, counties, universities, and high schools.

8. How many languages is WordPress available in? – 2. The Default WordPress language is English; however, the platform provides a fully translated platform with plugins that allow you to change your site’s language in seconds. The software has been successfully used in over 72 languages and can be modified for more!

9. What is the most downloaded WordPress theme of all time? – 4. Astra is the most downloaded WordPress theme of all time. Astra is claimed to be the most potent and fast theme trusted by many popular brands. Besides, the theme earned over $30M.

10. How many Fortune 500 websites use WordPress? – 1. 11 Fortune websites, such as Walt Disney Company, ABM Industries, and 21st Century Fox, use WordPress.

11. What is the average salary of a WordPress developer per year? – 2. The average WordPress developer earns $56,000 per year, according to Payscale.

12. When was the first WordPress version released? – 4. The first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, which makes WordPress much older than Twitter and Facebook.

Featured image via upklyak on Freepik

The post Ridiculously Challenging WordPress Quiz first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

26 août 2022/par Service comm.

How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Three

Two weeks ago, you started a web design agency. Last week you began to define your agency by choosing clients, setting red lines, and writing your elevator pitch.

This week, we will implement some practical solutions before problems occur. Remember one task per day; it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Day Fifteen: Terms of Service

In the rush of excitement surrounding a new project, it’s too easy to skip the preliminaries and jump into work. Before you know it, you’re halfway through the job, and it’s too late to set terms.

Your terms of service document is a formal statement of the terms under which you agree to work. This document is best prepared by a legal professional with experience in your jurisdiction, but you can write it yourself with a bit of guidance. Fortunately, as a web design agency, you’re not supplying physical products, which simplifies the document considerably.

You should include a statement limiting your liability. You need to assert your intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, you also need to include details of what happens when a client fails to pay an invoice.

Write the document in clear, friendly language. Don’t use marketing speak, and do not try to disguise anything onerous. A good client will respect you for being upfront in a professional manner.

Your terms of service should be on your website and sent to potential clients alongside any quote — I know some people who send their terms in the same PDF as the quote, so the client can’t overlook them.

Day Sixteen: Project Management

Project management is probably the most crucial skill you’ll have to master. Meeting deadlines, bringing in enough work to cover the bills, and not pulling all-nighters depend on effective project management.

A huge and ever-growing number of apps promise to help you with project management. We have a list here of some of the best. However, if you already have a tool you use to manage your work that you’re comfortable with, consider sticking with it. Do not fall back on a notes app or a pen and paper.

Remember: organizing your work days is not billable. The more you can automate this process, the better.

Day Seventeen: Quotes & Invoices

Up until now, we’ve deliberately done one thing per day. Today, we will do two because they’re so closely related.

There are all kinds of business documents that pass money back and forth between companies, for example, purchase orders or credit notes. For a small web design agency, you’ll need two: a quote document and an invoice document.

Invoices are documents requesting payment and providing the details for payment. Quotes are previews of an expected invoice.

Some people like to have a receipt document that they send out to acknowledge payment. However, in my experience, sending a hand-written email is better; it’s an excellent opportunity to personalize your communication and foster a good relationship.

There are legal requirements that vary by jurisdiction, but an invoice typically includes: your trading name; the invoice number — an incrementing number code; your tax code if you have one; your address; the time the client has to pay — “Net 14,” meaning the total amount within 14 days is standard; the date issued; the client’s name and address; a list of services provided together with the rate for each service and the total; the pre-tax total; the total amount of tax; the total; and most importantly a way of paying.

Back on day two, you contacted your tax department to determine your liabilities. You may or may not have to charge sales tax or VAT. Always include the amount of tax on your invoice, even if the total is $0, so it’s clear whether or not it has been charged.

A quote document is virtually identical to an invoice, except that you remove the payment requests. You should also add a note stipulating how long the quote is valid — 3 months is standard.

Plenty of services will create these documents for you as part of an accounting system. For example, Xero, FreshBooks, or Bloom. Even PayPal will allow you to send invoices. If you prefer, you can create your own quotes and invoices and send them as PDFs — this option is best if you want total control over your documents’ design, but it will take longer, and it’s worryingly easy to make a mistake.

Day Eighteen: Social Media

Start today by researching social media accounts. Look at the list of target businesses you made on day eight; which social media channel do they use the most? For example, if the niche you picked on day three is restaurants, they probably use Instagram. If you chose retirement communities, they probably use Facebook.

Once you have a clear picture of your clients’ channels, pick one (yes, 1) and register an account.

Social media is a significant drain on your time and provides considerably less return on investment than you might expect. So, choose one service that your prospective clients use and start building your profile. It’s far better to invest your time and effort in a place your clients will notice you than to spread yourself too thin.

Day Nineteen: Domain & Hosting

It’s another two-task day. We’ve grouped these together because domains and hosting are frequently rented together.

Back on day nine, you selected your tech stack. You’ll be building your own site with the technology you offer clients, so it’s important to ensure your hosting enables this. If you intend to develop with WordPress, you need WordPress hosting. If you intend to build with Wix, you need a Wix account. If you’re planning on offering any kind of web app, you probably need Netlify.

Whatever you choose, choose something appropriate for your tech stack. The only exception is if you plan to specialize in a niche service like Shopify, which is entirely inappropriate for an agency portfolio.

There are endless debates over whether or not you should register a domain with the same company that hosts your site. Everyone seems to know someone who knows someone who registered a domain, and then something improbable happened to cause them to lose the domain that wouldn’t have happened if they’d hosted separately.

Back in the real world, simplicity is a gift you give yourself. Choose a reputable company, register a good domain, host in the same place, and let their support sort out your DNS for you — many good hosts will even give you free domain rental for a year to entice you to take up their hosting.

Good hosting is reliable, with plenty of room to grow. If it can be cheap too, that’s a bonus. It’s common to start with bottom-end(ish) shared hosting and expand to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at some point in the future.

Day Twenty: Email

Despite the massive growth in messaging apps over the last decade, email is still your most important business tool.

Depending on the hosting you set up yesterday, email inboxes may have been included. If not, you’ll need to set up a separate email provider.

You’ll need a general email address. Traditionally this has been info@, but hi@, hey@, hello@, and ciao@ are a little more friendly.

You need a personal email address that’s just for you. For example, I use ben@.

You also need a separate account for finances that you can use for invoicing and services like Stripe and PayPal. accounts@ or billing@ are fine.

Finally, you’ll need to set up a catch-all email forwarder for all the times people guess your email, mistype your email or assume you used info@. Forward those emails to your general address.

Once that’s done, set up an email signature for each account. Include your logo, contact details, and the social media address you set up a couple of days ago.

Finally, update your email address with your hosting company, social media account, and business accounts.

Day Twenty-One: Rest

That’s it for this week. So shut down your machine, go outside, ride a bike, go on a hike, learn to skateboard, and relax with family and friends.

We’re approaching the sharp end of this process, and next week will be busy, so do whatever you do to recharge your batteries.

Featured image via Pexels.

The post How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Three first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

19 août 2022/par Service comm.

How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Two

Last week, you started a web design agency. This week we’ll help you take the next steps towards making your agency viable.

The first couple of days were spent on legal checks and taxes. After that, you’ve picked a niche to specialize in, an awesome name, worked out how much you’re going to charge, and set up business accounts. Then, finally, you took a day off to prepare for this week. (If you skipped any of those steps, go back and catch up now.)

This week, we’ll start defining who you are as an agency. The process is the same as last week: focusing on one task per day. By the end of the week, who you are as an agency will start to become apparent.

Day Eight: Choose Your Clients

For any new business, the temptation is to grab any work you can get to keep the money flowing in. However, chasing money is counter-productive; you end up clutching at opportunities instead of taking a targeted approach.

Last week you selected your niche. Today, you will choose the clients you intend to work for. And we mean that literally: draw up a list of target clients.

Do you want to work for Nike? Fine, add it to the list. Think Apple would look good in your portfolio? Add it too. Make sure you add a few that are more realistic but don’t aim too low.

By the end of the day, you should have a spreadsheet of companies to target.

Day Nine: Tech Stack

Now you know who your agency is planning to work for, it’s time to identify the technology stack you’re planning to offer them.

It may be that you will be a full-service agency handling everything from branding to custom apps. Alternately, you may perform better handling one aspect of the job well and outsourcing the rest.

However you plan to approach the actual work, you’ll need a full-stack solution for most clients. That means brand design, web design, marketing and content, front-end code, content management, and SEO.

The best advice is to focus on your existing strengths and develop a skill to an expert level. Then, once you’ve done so, you can expand sideways to plug any gaps.

For example, moving into WordPress development is a good option if you already know HTML and CSS. On the other hand, if you’re more design orientated, a site builder approach using SquareSpace or Shopify might be a better fit.

Technologies change, so you shouldn’t expect your core technologies to stay with you throughout your career. But these are the solutions you’ll become an expert at over the next few years.

Day Ten: Define Your Red Lines

All companies have brand values, whether they define them or not. So at this stage, it’s more practical to look at what you’re not prepared to do.

Everyone has red lines that they’re not prepared to cross. Would you work for a pornography company? Would you work for a radical political group? Would you work for a controversial religion? Would you work for a company with a patchy human rights record? Would you work for big pharma?

There’s no right and wrong answer to this; it all comes down to your personal values. However, you will be asked to cross the line at some point. It’s easier to say “no thanks” if you know where the lines are in advance.

If you don’t have red lines, that’s valid too. But be aware that once you’ve crossed a line, that line will stay crossed; you’ll attract more of that type of work, which will define you.

Day Eleven: Write Your Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is a short couple of lines that can be delivered to a prospective client on a (hypothetical) elevator ride between two floors.

When someone asks you what you do, “Um, well, you know, mostly just websites and stuff.” Is not a good answer.

Your language should be natural, non-technical, and self-assured. Something like, “We help startups like yours outperform their competitors on Google.”

Once you’ve settled on a good elevator pitch, practice it over and over. Write it on a post-it and stick it to your monitor, screenshot it and use it as your phone’s wallpaper. Say it over and over in the shower, in the car, and in the elevator. Learn it so that when someone asks, it trips off your tongue effortlessly.

Day Twelve: Pick a Coffee Shop

You don’t need fancy offices to start a web design agency, and in fact, the first agency I worked for tanked primarily because they couldn’t afford their office lease.

People are used to remote work now, and most meetings can be conducted by video call. But you will still find clients who like to meet one-to-one, especially for a kick-off meeting.

It’s always best to visit a client’s premises if you can, but coffee shops are a good alternative, and every new agency should have one.

Consider your coffee shop your meeting room. If you’re lucky enough to be in a town or city where there are a few to choose from, try to pick one that matches your values: quirky and independent, efficient and corporate, etc.

Check when the quiet times are (you don’t want to be shouting over the buzz of rush-hour orders). Make sure you know where the nearest parking or public transport is so that you can direct clients. Ensure the wi-fi is OK, preferably free, and find out the password in advance.

Day Thirteen: Start Your Branding

Two weeks in, you finally get to do something creative: design your logo.

If you’ve been matching days to the days of the week, then it’s Saturday. That should give you more time for this task, but don’t go to town. Your logo is going to change and evolve. It is far too easy to get wrapped up in tiny details like logos and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Remember: no logo, no matter how cool, ever won a pitch.

If you’re a designer, you probably ignored us and started the logo on day one. In fact, you’ve probably had something knocking around in a sketchbook for a while.

If you’re not a designer, type out your name in a geometric sans-serif, tighten the tracking, and call it a day.

Either way, by the end of today, you’ll have something that fits your niche, ties into your elevator pitch, and appeals to your target clients.

Day Fourteen: Rest

Hopefully, you learned the benefits of a rest day last week, and this week was easier as a result.

It’s time to do whatever you do to relax. If you can, do it outside away from your computer. Create some distance and recharge your batteries.

Next week, we’ll start putting together the assets you will use to present your business professionally.

Featured image via Unsplash.

The post How to Start a Web Design Agency in 28 Days: Week Two first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

10 août 2022/par Service comm.

3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools

An unreliable, semi-broken and unresponsive website is an excellent way to lose leads and visitors — regardless of how aesthetically pleasing or well-designed, the visual elements are.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen more initiative to deliver faster internet to regions of the world that were previously devoid of it. With online communities expanding and more people becoming receptive to online shopping, ensuring your site’s dependability is now more important than ever.

One way to achieve this is by employing uptime and downtime monitoring tools. This guide will examine the best ways to get alerts when something goes wrong and your website falters.

Why Is Website Uptime Monitoring Important?

Downtime is bound to occur occasionally. Nonetheless, the goal is to minimize it. The longer the downtime occurs, the more traffic and potential clients you lose. A dysfunctional website is also detrimental to your credibility and reputation. People may associate your website’s unreliability with your real-world products or services.

With web developers charging an average of $200 per hour, high-quality websites can be expensive to build and maintain. Nevertheless, it’s often worth the investment. However, an unreliable website can backfire on you. Instead of attracting more customers, it could potentially repel them. This can result in lost revenue.

An uptime monitoring solution can help you prevent or reduce these losses. It verifies if your website is up and functional and notifies you if it’s not. This allows you to troubleshoot the issue and get your website back up and running as soon as you’re alerted. The most common issues behind your website’s downtime include:

Server faults;
Network outages;
Power outage;
Traffic spikes;
Cyberattacks;
Domain name issues;
An erroneous web application deployment;
Increased server loads;
DNS Resolve issues;
Human error.

Thus, you must employ a dependable tool that detects downtime or any interruptions related to your website as soon as they occur. They are must-have tools for web designers, developers, and network administrators. However, not all of them are built the same. So how do you identify the best uptime monitoring tools?

Essential Features of Uptime Monitoring Tools

Uptime monitoring tools typically detect interruptions by running network tests such as pings and trace routes. You could practically monitor your website’s uptime by constantly running these tests yourself.

However, this isn’t an efficient way to monitor your website’s uptime. A comprehensive uptime monitoring tool will automatically monitor your website’s uptime in the background. It will then alert you through various channels as soon as it senses that your website may be down.

Furthermore, high-quality uptime monitoring solutions tend to offer additional information regarding your website’s uptime/downtime and its performance. These tools commonly feature dashboards, status pages, badges, exportable records, etc., to help you keep track of your site’s overall health.

9 Best Features of an Uptime Monitoring Solution

The ideal uptime monitoring tool or service should feature:

Website security features that notify of and repel potential cyber attacks;
24/7 uninterrupted background website monitoring;
Multi-channel alerts (email, SMS, push notifications, instant messages, social media, etc.);
Report generation;
24/7 customer support available through different channels (email, phone, chat, etc.);
Be capable of monitoring multiple websites and proxies at the same time;
Offer insights and suggestions to improve your website’s performance;
Be affordable;
High customizability should allow you to choose which features to enable and disable.

Another optional feature to look out for is public status pages that your clients can access to determine if all your services are up and running. GetWeave is an excellent example of this. The website features a well-organized systems status page where customers can check if all of Weave’s services are functional.

Nevertheless, you can use the above information as a buying guide when assessing potential uptime monitoring tools. The rest of this guide will supply a few suggestions as to which tools you should use for your website.

3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools

Some of the best uptime monitoring tools for website downtime alerts include:

1. Uptrends

Uptrends isn’t just a downtime detection tool; it’s a complete web performance monitoring solution. It will notify you as soon as it detects any disturbance in your website’s performance. It features highly customizable checks. For instance, you can set performance check limits for load times. Uptrends will notify you instantly if your website takes too long to load.

You can also configure from which locations you want it to monitor your website. Uptrends will then point you to where your website usually suffers performance dips in the real world.

The service uses multiple communication channels to send users notifications: email, phone calls, and SMS. Alternatively, you can download one of Uptrend’s mobile applications and receive push notifications. Additionally, you can integrate Uptrends with messaging and communication applications such as PagerDuty, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

Another impressive Uptrend feature is its ability to emulate your website’s performance on different browsers. It runs Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge on its servers. Thus, you can compare how your website runs on these web browsers without installing them on your servers or computer.

Uptrends supplies users with various charts, reports, and graphs to help identify sudden spikes or dips. Waterfall reports display the complete page-load from the initial request to the last download. This allows you to compare the history of your website’s performance element by element. It comes with three price plans whose costs depend on the number of monitors you would like. Starting at $16.21 (at the time of writing) the Starter Plan is the most affordable.

2. Oh Dear

Oh Dear is a slightly cheaper option than Uptrends, with the most affordable plan starting at $12 per month (at the time of writing). However, while Uptrends offers a 30-day free trial, Oh Dear only provides a 12-day trial period. Nevertheless, Oh Dear’s interface is a lot cleaner and more minimal.

Since Oh Dear runs servers in different locations across the globe, it can track how your website performs in various regions. Oh Dear will scan through your website and index all the pages. If it detects any issues, it will alert you immediately.

Oh Dear also features a continuous certificate monitoring function. Site owners who are concerned with their website’s security may find this feature to be especially useful. It will verify your SSL certificate expiration dates and alert you of any changes.

Oh Dear’s public status page enables your clients to keep track of your website’s availability.

Oh Dear uses email and SMS text messages to alert site owners of any issues. It also features integrations with communications and social media applications such as Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. Oh Dear ensures that messages are as detailed and user-friendly. This makes it easier to troubleshoot and find the origin of your problem. Oh Dear is more than a worthy alternative to Uptrends.

3. WP Umbrella

WP Umbrella is a little different from the previous entries. It’s intended to help users manage and monitor multiple WordPress sites. Thus, it is far more particularized in its approach to website uptime monitoring. Again, as is the primary function of the uptime monitoring tool, it offers a real-time alert system that will contact you through email, SMS, Slack, etc.

WP Umbrella employs a simple minimal UI. Its main screen consists of a dashboard that allows you to view all your WordPress websites. By default, this dashboard features four columns: Site, Uptime, Speed, and Issues.

WP Umbrella will alert you of any outdated or erroneous plugins or themes. While it doesn’t offer dedicated public status pages, it does have a client report generation feature. You can automatically send these reports to your various subscribers or clients when your website is down.

WP Umbrella is the most affordable option on this list. Users are charged $1.99 per month (at the time of writing) for each website monitored. In addition, WP Umbrella offers a 14-day trial and does not require your credit card details. It’s an excellent option for anyone running a WordPress website or two.

Conclusion

This guide has only explored three possible uptime monitoring solutions. They won’t only assist you in detecting downtimes, they can also help you find the reason your site may be slow.

These solutions are an excellent place to start. But there are many other options coming to market all the time. You may find that this is the first step to converting more leads and reducing your bounce rate.

The post 3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

1 juillet 2022/par Service comm.

The Complete Guide To Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is when you attune your marketing efforts based on customer data. This data can be anything from the first and last name to purchase intent, concerns, and history.

Personalized marketing has revolutionized the way businesses market their product and service to their audience. It brings value to people’s lives, spiking the sales graph for brands and businesses. So it’s a win-win situation for both the company and the consumer.

Even big companies do this for their campaigns. They do so because it gives them great results and ROI for their marketing initiatives. If these multinational businesses do this, it’s a good idea to incorporate this strategy and learn from a top resource on digital marketing.

This article aims to explain every nook and cranny of personalized marketing. By the end of this 5-minute read, you will know the impact of personalized marketing on our lives. And how you can integrate this into your marketing strategy to benefit your business.

What Is Personalized Marketing?

Have you ever encountered a business that knows what you’re going through? Or did you see an ad online that you closely relate to? Chances are, you were one of the target markets of those marketing materials. And if you could associate yourself with the ad, their marketing strategy worked.

That is what personalized marketing does to your audience, market, or particular demographic. This style of advertising leverages personalization in your marketing materials. The details of your marketing content are tailored to a specific audience and address the issues or real-time problems of a particular segment in your market.

Personalized marketing has become popular because more people demand it from businesses. Once the people have experienced what it felt like, they want to feel more of it.

To objectively see the demand for personalization, here are some statistics to back it up.

Accenture reported that 91% of consumers are likelier to shop with businesses that offer them relevant content. This shows that the right product recommendations can increase the chances of shopping with you.

Salesforce mentioned that 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their individual needs. This statement proves that a generalized way of marketing isn’t as effective as before. The consumer mindset has already developed, and they demand more personalization from businesses.

A striking piece of data from Statista showed that 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing. If that figure is accurate, almost all businesses should start incorporating this into their strategies. There’s no reason for them not to try this out.

Given the high positive demand for personalized marketing, it’s no secret why more and more businesses are doing this. However, not every company out there is doing this right. A wrong way of doing this can bring a loss of clients and a negative ROI.

To help you go on the right track of using personalization in your marketing, read up on the next section of this article.

Know These 6 Tips To Correctly Do Personalized Marketing

You’d agree that knowing your customer’s first and last name is essential. But with the dynamically changing strategies, personalized marketing is going beyond that. It’s actually about understanding what your targeted consumers need, merging with a way to convey the message that your business is the solution.

To help you achieve this, take note of the things below:

1. Leverage Your Customer Data

The foundation of personalized marketing is laid on customer data. The best marketing professionals and strategists emphasize gathering relevant data if you want to scale. Excellent digital marketing courses will teach you that customer data will help you build a solid foundation for your content and campaigns.

Consumer behavior has always been the most important detail for target marketing. With every click, it has become easier to gather data about individual customers, their interests, hobbies, purchase history, buying behavior, and more.

You’ll be able to get this information if you’ve practiced data management and collecting customer data throughout the years of your operation. However, it’s not too late to begin if you haven’t started with this yet. There is a lot of marketing automation software that aids marketing teams in doing this. For example, many businesses use lead scoring software to gain insight into their clients’ needs and categorize them appropriately.

For your personalization efforts, you can use questionnaires, surveys, and feedback forms to capture personal data on the internet. A customer will happily fill out a survey form if a reward in return entices him. This reward can be in any form– a voucher, a first buy discount, free shipping, or more.

This initiative will help you get more data in a shorter time frame.

2. Understand Your Customer’s Needs

Hoarding data will be a complete waste of marketing efforts, capital, and efficiency if you do not extract consumer behavior from it. When you have access to a rich set of data, you have the privilege to understand your customers’ trending needs deeply. After gaining insights from the data, create a marketing strategy based on those findings to target your audience.

Doing this doesn’t just apply to B2C; it also works for B2B companies, which is why the demand for custom software development, tailored services, personalized packages, and B2B data providers have been on the rise in these recent years.

It is a two-way road. While you are on the lookout for your target market, at the same time, the customers expect businesses to know what they need. The market you’re currently serving expects you to know what products or services are fit for them.

So this is where it gets crucial: you have to dig deeper into your niche and find the specs of your audience’s needs. Having a general idea about the needs of your target audience and personalized marketing usually don’t go harmoniously.

Planning a better-personalized marketing strategy will not be a piece of cake but will be much more rewarding for every aspect of your business. May it be sales, return on investments, customer relationships, or personalized marketing campaigns.

3. Personalize Every Stage Of The Customer Journey

The first rule of business is convincing the customer that you are their best friend. Now that you know what they want, you pledge to provide them with whatever best you can. Limiting personalization to marketing is not the solution. You have to be vigilant in meeting these individual requirements at every stage. And remember that consistency is the name of the game. That is how you bring your business into the running.

You can integrate CRM automation, email marketing tools and deploy other content marketing strategies to help make this process a lot simpler. Personalized live chat and chatbots, such as those offered by ThriveDesk, allow businesses to personalize their offerings and build their brand reputation.

As a customer, my requirement would be reading content, browsing, and experiencing products that would hit home. A personalized experience is what every consumer demands. And this is what makes them want to go back and do business with you again.

By creating helpful and relevant content, recommending the right products to them, and giving out convenient payment options, you are setting your business apart from the rest. Doing this allows you to have personalized every touchpoint that your customers do with your business.

4. Present In An Engaging Way

Consider customer engagement as absolutely necessary. Having the best data set and knowing what your customers want is not enough. In the competitive space of business and marketing, everyone is trying to get the attention of one another. And this is what you are supposed to do. This helps in building consumer-brand relations.

When a consumer engages, meaningful things happen. Engaging content pushes the consumer through the funnel and hence promotes conversions. Your content should be creative and eye-catching.

Engaging content blended with personalization boosts the brand experience. Increased loyalty, trust-building, and improved customer experience enhance the conversion and sales speed.

A great way to use personalization in an engaging manner that most businesses overlook would be through exit-intent popups.

5. Be Where Your Customers Are

This is an element that some businesses miss out on. They have created excellent social media marketing content but only distributed it on the wrong channel. For personalized marketing to be effective, it needs to be seen by people.

Are you questioning your marketing techniques because all you see is stagnancy? You have set up an engaging online store on Shopify or Wix, collected all the relevant data, your content is engaging enough, and your marketing strategy is top-notch. But you are still unable to reach your clientele.

You start wondering what you are missing out on. Your content and your strategies will not be prolific if you are on the wrong channel. Remember: the message of your content has to reach the right people for it to be effective.

Should you be on social media? If so, which one? Do you get more traction with email campaigns? Or do you have more engagements on forums?

Find out where your market is, then spend your focus there. Now the next step is how to know where they spend most of their time?

This is where we go back in the loop. And hence we again emphasize that data collection is the foundation of any great marketing strategy.

6. Improve Marketing Content

Don’t rest on your laurels when you’ve gotten everything down to a tee and have attained your desired marketing analytics behind your personalized marketing content. Always think of ways how you can improve.

Evolving at every step will keep you in the running. Don’t be misguided into thinking that your work is done if you feel like you have reached the pinnacle. Keep looking for ways to get better. Set bigger goals and status for your business.

Always go back to the drawing board and brainstorm with your team on how you can change and strive with the dynamically changing world and mindsets. In the end, all you want is to build better relationships with your customers, new and existing.

For enhanced productivity, your marketing team should always look for new strategies. This is how fresh and great marketing ideas are made.

See How You Can Benefit From Personalized Marketing

Irrelevant information can waste energy and time for both customers and the business. Personalized marketing hits the bull’s eye 99% of the time. It brings immeasurable value to the company as well as the customer.

Here are some of the top benefits of personalized marketing:

1. Better Engagement

The first target personalized marketing aims at is grabbing an individual’s attention. And this results in better engagement eventually. If you are presenting your customer with something that wows them, needless to say, it will grab their attention.

This will help bridge the gap between your customer and your brand. Identifying customers’ needs and then giving them what they want will help improve customer interaction with your brand.

It can even be enough for them to follow your call to action. The next thing you know, they will be checking your website, signing up for a list, or even purchasing a product right then and there.

2. Higher Conversions

Are you there for your customer at the right time and place? One-on-one marketing provides easy solutions to customers because you hit them with just what they are looking for at the right time.

When potential customers realize that you understand what they’re going through and provide the solution, most won’t hesitate to try your business out.

Personalization isn’t just focused on content. It can also be integrated into your processes. This results in aiding the increase of higher conversion rates.

3. Improved Customer Experience

Offering personalization will significantly improve the user experience. Once you provide the products, services, and content that meet their needs, their opinion of your business automatically improves.

Considering the statistics about personalized experiences, it is evident that consumers demand personalization strategies from companies. And if you offer such an experience, you increase the chance of making them do more business with you. Personalization helps businesses in reducing cart abandonment rates, better customer journey, increased customer satisfaction, and many more.

4. Customer Retention

Retaining persisting customers is equally important to your business as bringing new ones. Most businesses face low customer retention. It’s also a factor that some companies overlook. You must understand that it’s not all about converting prospects into paying customers. Your focus should also be on retaining those customers to make them loyal advocates of your brand.

One of the major benefits of consistent personalization is an improved customer retention rate. Consumers tend to stay with a business that understands their needs and provides solutions to their problems.

Once you can transfer a customer to a loyal advocate, you can also receive a ton of benefits. These are people that are going to defend your brand from critics. These are the same people who will give you free marketing via word of mouth and positive reviews.

5. Better Customer Relationships

Personalized experience leads to customer retention, eventually building better relationships with your nurtured customers. These entities are connected in a loop.

Customer relationships are an aspect of business that significantly helps with scalability and higher revenue. So connecting with your customers and building a relationship with them is as important as the product you are selling. This is why strengthening customer relationships should be a top priority for businesses.

Personalization makes you an expert on your target market trends. You get to know your audience deeper, which helps you build a foundation for creating a great customer relationship. And this requires marketing and customer experience teams to work together in a symphony.

For this, you can use team collaboration software which aids in the optimization of content and your approach toward the market. You’ll have a better strategy in getting their attention, providing what they want, and recommending things they’ll be interested in.

All of these things help in building customer rapport. When a customer feels that you treat them as more than just a paying customer, their customer loyalty goes to your business.

Best Examples Personalization Marketing

To inspire you to integrate this marketing strategy into your operations, below are different personalization marketing campaigns done exceptionally by various businesses. Grab inspiration, ideas, and motivation from these examples.

1. Coca-Cola

We all know the most basic form of personalization is addressing your customers’ names, but Coca-Cola took this simple idea into a massive global campaign. Their “Share a Coke” campaign started in 2011, wherein they printed different popular names on their Coke bottles and cans.

It seemed like a regular campaign at first, but it started getting traction as more customers wanted to get the name of their family, friends, and themselves. Coca-Cola said the campaign’s purpose was “to create a more personal relationship with consumers and inspire shared moments of happiness.”

The soft drinks giant used personalization and tied such a strategy with its mission: to bring memories and happiness to its consumers. You, too, can do the same – combine your mission and personalization strategy to create a unique campaign.

2. Spotify

Spotify leverages user data in its marketing strategy. They have several campaigns that make users want to use their application more often because it gives out a more tailored experience.

Other than their year-end campaign( #spotifywrapped), where they show the most played songs and podcasts their users listen to (which was a viral hit), they now also have an #OnlyYou campaign that shows your unique listening taste partnered with a musical astrology reading.

3. Nike

Nike has consistently been recognized for authentic, personalized, and heartfelt ad campaigns. This personalization always makes them capture an audience who can relate and those who start connecting to the brand. So Nike isn’t new to personalization. Their aim is robust community engagement.

Their highly inspirational campaigns with real-life heroes induce inspiration in their audience. Nike is great at converting people because of its excellent storytelling ability while adding personalization to the mix.

Nike’s just launched a new app that offers personalized content and rewards for committed fans. They tackle challenges and issues head-on, but they always make their marketing messages relatable to their audience. That is why they “just do it.”

Conclusion

Personalized marketing is the secret sauce to thriving businesses in the world today. However, incorporating this marketing strategy and finding success is not as simple as you might think. You will face challenges, but with enough perseverance and brainstorming, you can surpass them and successfully create a great campaign.

Remember, this marketing approach can be a hit or a miss. The first step to making it a success is relevant data collection followed by judicious implementation. This isn’t an overnight activity that you can do. It requires months of diligence in the right direction with the proper guidance. And you can gain valuable insights into this guidance via the content marketing strategies outlined in this article. But remember, once you start rolling, there is no looking back.

The post The Complete Guide To Personalized Marketing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

29 juin 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.

22 juin 2022/par Service comm.

WordPress 6.0 Lives Up To The Hype

WordPress 6.0 has been released, and another niche jazz musician will be enjoying extra Spotify royalties next month.

WordPress 6, named for latin-jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, is the realization of a change of direction the WordPress Foundation adopted several years ago.

All versions of WordPress now power around 42% of the web. That’s approximately 810,000,000 sites. If you looked at each site for a single second, without pausing to blink, it would take you over 25 years to see the home page of each one — of course, if you factor in how long a typical WordPress site takes to load it would take well over a century.

Some people (i.e., me) have been predicting the decline of WordPress for so long that sooner or later, we were bound to be correct. And, despite its astonishing reach, there are some signs that its market share may now be in decline. Even the W3C abandoned it in favor of Craft.

Of the 1,930,000,000 sites that currently make up the web, only around 400,000,000 are active. WordPress’s long-term dominance, coupled with a stalling market share, means that a disproportionate number of abandoned sites are WordPress. With site builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify taking huge chunks of WordPress’ share of new sites, WordPress is facing something of a cliff edge.

What the ill-informed naysayers (i.e., me) hadn’t counted on was that WordPress had already seen the writing on the wall and formulated a plan…

WordPress’s problem has always been its legacy code; supporting out-of-date ideas and a spaghetti-like codebase has meant a great deal of work to do anything new. As a result, the last few releases have seen great ideas stifled by labored implementation. Even the most loyal WordPress user has to admit that Gutenberg, while filled with potential, doesn’t work the way it should. However, with WordPress 6, all the work may be starting to pay off.

With version 6, the block editor in WordPress is starting to feel like a design tool that, if not perfect, is at least usable. Editing content no longer feels like you’re fighting against the UI. Most importantly, the bar for creating a site is much, much lower. WordPress 6 also offers improved performance and accessibility, both areas that have traditionally been lacking. Security is still something of an issue, but that is mainly due to the ROI for hackers that massive market shares generate.

WordPress, it seems, has arrived at two conclusions: its main competition isn’t other CMS but other site builders. To maintain its market dominance, it needs to cater not to professionals but to amateurs.

Don’t get me wrong; the WordPress ecosystem will benefit from WordPress 6, at least reputationally. New sites run by amateurs eventually become established sites run by, if not professionals, then at least knowledgeable amateurs.

OK, so WordPress probably isn’t a good choice for enterprise sites. And there are certainly better options for ecommerce. And as for SEO, well, probably best not mentioned.

But in WordPress 6, we have a free, open-source site builder that lowers the bar for making a new site. It’s a credit to the community that has persevered to produce it.

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