3 - 2023 - Hit Your Mark

Leveraging Data Analytics for Better Customer Targeting

by Hit Your Mark | Mar 30, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Imagine trying to get a birthday present for someone you’ve never met before. First of all, will they be male or female? Then you wonder where they live, what they like to do, and what food they enjoy. It’s impossible to know without having any idea who they are. You get them something you like, candy and your favorite book, hoping they will enjoy it too. But what if they don’t?

Trying to target customers for your online business without any data is much the same as trying to buy a birthday present for someone you’ve never met. If you don’t know anything about them, how will you create ads or design a website that will draw their attention? Fortunately, business owners don’t have to gamble on who their customers are. Through data analytics and the opportunities they open up, you can be certain of who your customers are and what they enjoy.

What is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is one of the most powerful ways for business owners to grow their company and reach out to more customers. Multiple types of data can be used in data analytics. These include:

Sales Data. This data tells you what parts of your business succeed and why they do. This includes data from areas like sales growth, net revenue, and average profit margin. With sales data analytics, you can reach out to new customers, better your relationship with existing customers, or even measure how much of a product to make.
Customer Data. This is the best way to learn about your customers, what they are like, and where their interests lie. Customer data includes things like how you can contact them, their demographics, where they live, and even their social media usage habits. Through this, you can know better how to personalize your emails and website for them, as well as how to better segment your advertising to appeal to certain customer groups.
Competitor Data. By knowing your competitors, you can make your company distinctive from everyone else around it. If you know where your competitors have filled the market, you can identify where they have missed the mark and fill their shoes. Filing new holes sets you apart and gives you new leads that other companies do not have.
Market Data. By researching the market around you, you can understand your position in the market and how to best interact with the market as a whole. This lets you reach your goals faster by detailing the best products to sell, the best promotions to run, and the best public face to have.
Product Data. This kind of data interacts heavily with the customer, just like sales data does. It can better the value of each customer by creating positive customer experiences and responses. It will also show you what kinds of new products customers would enjoy, thus giving you a measure of what kind of expansion would be best for your company.

Data analytics increases your reach into the business world and simultaneously grows your business. By taking your data in hand, aggregating it, and drawing a conclusion from it, you will learn how to best expand, entertain, and engage with your customers.

The Power of Data Analytics in Marketing

Data analytics are powerful tools that many businesses often fail to employ. Given that businesses who do use them are 23 times more likely to get new leads, 19 times more likely to make a profit, and 6 times more likely to keep their customers, data analytics is a tool that every business owner should invest in and explore.

These results occur because data analytics lets you reach customers who are more likely to enjoy what you offer, rather than people of the completely wrong demographic. It helps you get to know your customers better so you can offer them exactly what they want.

In addition, understanding your company’s data is an important step toward expanding your brand awareness. If you know where to expand and how to target customers, you can begin engaging in the profitable area of performance marketing. This technique lets you partner with an affiliate company to spread the word about your business and continue to get to know your data better. Affiliate companies will place your ads on websites you might not get access to, and they will help you analyze your data. Data analytics can show you just where a performance marketing strategy might come in handy. So, data analytics are compelling. They can expand your reach, create awareness for your business, and even show you how to embrace new techniques to further your growth.

How Data Analytics Can Help You Better Understand Your Customers

Many of the data groups introduced above have special skills that can help you connect with your customers better. Since this is the ultimate goal of data analytics, it is important to know how to leverage this data to your best advantage and expand your customer base through it. For example, product data lets you do this because it shows you what products the customers are looking for. This means that you can produce items of interest to them.

Customer data, on the other hand, helps you segment your customers into lists so that you can further personalize your outreach to them. Statistics and data today show that 75% of customers are happier with marketing if they receive personalized emails, texts, or mail. By understanding your customers, you can personalize your approach to help them feel more welcomed and known.

From market data, you can glean the knowledge of what campaign strategies will best fill holes in the market. This means that you will limit the number of competitors you face in certain areas of the market, creating larger profits.

Finally, competitor data helps you understand your position in the market. If you understand this, then you will know how to expand so that your competition is low and your profits are high.

These are just a few of the ways that data analytics can help you understand your customers. Through these powerful tools, your customer base and product range can explode

Choosing the Right Data Metrics for Customer Segmentation

There are many ways to make sure that you are succeeding in the realm of data analytics besides embracing the five categories of analytic data. Increasing your intake of analytic data will help you embrace better methods of customer segmentation. Since this is one of the best ways to put your data to work, choosing the right metrics to capture even more data ultimately moves you toward the goal of customer segmentation.

Many of the ways to get more data are simple. Often, they are methods to improve your website and outreach. One simple way to make your data more accurate and helpful is to make a landing page with an enticing offer. If your landing page is professional and attractive, and you offer a product that customers will want, then you have succeeded. If you want to do even more, you can A/B test your website to learn where there might be problems for visitors, or where the aesthetic appeal isn’t quite hitting the spot.

In addition, if you are interested in bettering your performance marketing game, you should keep up with your affiliate marketing company. Make sure that they are placing your ads on trustworthy websites and places where people would tend to be interested in your services. Track and monitor what your affiliate company is doing with your data, and track and monitor your data closely for ways to improve it. By editing your website for an optimized appearance and staying in touch with performance marketing, you can optimize your company for customer segmentation.

The Key Factors to Consider When Creating Customer Segments

One of the greatest parts of good data analytics is the perspective it gives you when segmenting your customers into lists. Just like data can be segmented by what kind of data it is, so can customers. Customer segmentation is the idea of taking your data, applying it to your customers, and dividing them into lists based on your data. This means that you can make lists based on the age of your customer, what type of products they tend to buy, or even what time of day they are most active online. Personalized lists and personalized data make it easier than ever to reach your customers.

The Best Targeting Strategies for Reaching Your Ideal Customers

But to achieve this, you need to have the best kind of data. Mediocre data will not get you nearly as far as specific, detailed data. This kind of data lets you analyze your customers in depth. This is the key factor to look out for when using data to get to know your customer community. If your data is not highly informative about your customers, then you need to look elsewhere for it.

To get better data, you can embrace a few new techniques. These include:

Using a customer data platform, or CDP. A platform like this will take all of your data on one customer, bring it together, and sort it for you to give you a full understanding of that customer and how to best cater to their desires and needs. In the end, you will target customers better if you have a holistic idea of who they are as a person.
Creating a more personalized outreach. This can be the next step after your CDP analysis. Using your data, you can reach customers in new, more personal ways. If your data shows you that one customer likes a certain type of product and is more active at night, you can send them an email at night advertising that product. These are small ways to customize your outreach and campaigns to make customers feel more understood and known.
Interacting with customers. You don’t have to meet them in person to do this. There are plenty of ways to chat online with customers, whether through a literal website chat box or a questionnaire on your social media story. However, in-person is also a fantastic way to connect with customers. You can do this through events for your company, or other business events. Either way, making a more personal connection with your customers will help them remember your company and associate you with their more human side.

These techniques will help you reach out to your customers, make your company feel more personal, and show them a new side of your business. By doing this, you will help the customer remember your business and maybe even recommend your business to friends and family. This lets you target new audiences indirectly.

Measuring and Optimizing Your Customer Segmentation and Targeting Efforts

Finally, once you’ve analyzed your data and segmented your customers, it’s time to learn how to track your progress. There are many ways to measure if your segmentation is successful or not, but two of the best ways to do this are your returns on investment (ROIs) and your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your ROIs will show you if the money that you put into reaching new customers and getting better connections with existing ones is producing adequate financial returns. If you are losing money overall on your customer marketing efforts, then it’s time to check back in and see if you can change anything to try to draw more customer attention. On the other hand, you may find that with new improvements you are making money by drawing more sales from your customers. If this is so, then continue the segmentation strategy you are always using, of course looking constantly for ways to continuously improve.

Your KPIs are things like the number of clicks a certain link gets, the number of views each page gets, and how many sales you make. These numbers are insightful because they show you customer activity. If these numbers are low compared to how many customers you contact regularly, then you probably need to take a look back at your customer segmentation and what methods you use to engage with them. However, if they are high, then you should continue doing what you have been.

These two techniques are the best ways to measure your customer engagement based on data analytics and customer segmentation. The data can both help you engage customers as well as get new ones and it can let you see where you can improve your business for your customers.

Data analytics is both powerful and important. This method lets you learn more about your customers and get new customers in one fell swoop. Information on your customers, like their age, where they live, and what they enjoy, can be aggregated easily to help you expand your business, drive up your sales, and see significant progress toward your goals.

Transform Your Marketing Strategy: Start Leveraging Data Analytics

Because data analytics is such a powerful tool and an important part of your business, Hit Your Mark offers many ways to embrace its benefits. Our team offers much experience with data analytics and many resources for understanding and collecting data. With expertise in data collection and analytics, we will collect customer, product, and operational data to allow your business to flourish. Then, with the information we collect, we target your goals and grow your business through them and the power of data analytics. Let us help you hit your mark in data analytics and each of your company goals!

Optimizing Your Website for Conversions: Crafting Effective CTAs

by Hit Your Mark | Mar 28, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

Reading Time: 7 minutes

It’s captivating. It’s catchy. It’s colorful. It’s your CTA. But for some reason, your website and CTA are still not yielding the results that you want from your business. No matter how many color schemes you try, your results are not drastically changed. You realize it’s time to seriously revamp your CTA so it doesn’t appeal to just you but to your consumers too. You’re ready to learn how to craft compelling CTAs so your business and website will flourish.

What Are CTAs and How Do They Affect Conversions?

In the world of business and online marketing, nothing is more important than your CTA. But what is it? A CTA, or a call to action, is a statement meant to invoke some sort of response or action from the guests to your website. The action could be anything from purchasing a product to downloading an ebook to signing up for your email list. A CTA is a quick way to prompt your consumers to interact with your website. It can also help your users know how to interact better with your website and company.

So why are CTAs so important? After all, just clicking a button doesn’t mean that your customer will stick around. Clicking a button won’t necessarily tell them everything there is to know about your website or your products. While this is true, CTAs are so effective because the human attention span is so short. They grab your reader’s attention with flashy colors and snappy statements to help your reader make a quick decision and engage with what you offer. CTAs impact your conversion rates so much because they are the first step to making a consistent connection with your consumers. This connection can quickly lead to accomplishing your final goal.

A CTA is also a good way to increase how long consumers look at your website, and this is something that you want. After all, increased website usage time and growing conversion rates correlate. If your CTA connects pieces of engaging and applicable content throughout your website, your readers are more likely to stay on your website longer. You can lengthen their attention span by guiding them through what you offer.

Placing a CTA on your landing page is even better, as it is often the place that newcomers first arrive at. So what is a landing page?

What Is A Landing Page?

Your landing page is one of the most important elements of your webpage. Here, visitors will come for their first viewing of your website. On this page, you can display your digital marketing campaign, encouraging your visitors to take an action based on your website.

Landing pages are also essential to a flourishing business because you can have multiple landing pages to appeal to various demographics and audiences. For example, one page may appeal to the younger generation, while another may offer information that would draw the attention of the elderly.

Each landing page should include its own unique CTA, guiding your readers to anything from scheduling an appointment to filling out a form. In addition, landing pages should also feature any accreditation or trusted relationships you may have with other businesses, testimonials or reviews from thrilled customers, a quick summary of your goals, and a striking headline to draw in your readers.

Landing pages can be one of the most exciting aspects of your website. Here, you have the opportunity to connect with your customers on a personal level. These kinds of connections are the best and most lasting. The easiest way to begin them is through landing pages accompanied by CTAs that speak the consumer’s language.

What Are The Key Elements of a Strong CTA?

So, now that you know what a CTA is and where to place it, it’s time to figure out how to make that CTA stand out from any other on your competitors’ websites. It’s not just where you place your CTA that will make the difference, it’s also the wording and the graphic design. It’s the individual appeal that it brings to the customer and the spirit of the whole CTA. So how do you achieve a catchy, bright CTA that communicates effectively and directly with your visitors?

Communication is key. A vague, general CTA will not draw in customers like a specific, brief CTA does. You should communicate your goals in a direct, straightforward fashion that’s easy to understand. Your CTA should answer your visitors’ questions but also make them curious.
Wording is everything. Certain words will make your customers feel like you are manipulating them into engaging with your website. “Request” and “schedule” not only feel too formal but also make consumers feel like they are not deciding on their own. Instead, try “get”. Paint a picture that shows them exactly what a wonderful thing you are about to give them. Action words are also a great way to guide your visitors to engage with your content. “Start”, “join”, “learn”, and “discover” all create an atmosphere of forward progress and development that people find attractive.
Keep it brief and simple. While you don’t want to make people feel stupid, you do want to speak to everyone. It’s risky to assume that people read your blog page and now know exactly what your goals are. Instead, the CTA needs to quickly communicate this. Never assume that your readers know the next step.
Don’t shy away from having multiple CTAs. The more CTAs your consumers encounter, the more they will have the option to engage with your business. If you only have one CTA on your whole website, only the people who happen to visit that specific page will know how to stay in touch with you and your company. Instead, make sure CTAs are a prevalent feature on your website.
Make an aesthetic appeal. People like looking at something that is bright and cheerful and that draws their eye. Don’t let your colors get muddled together: put light-colored text on a dark background or vice versa. Use a border around your wording and a font that’s big enough to stand out.
Place your CTA somewhere it can be seen. If your CTA is stuck in a little-viewed corner of your website, no one will know it is there. Instead, place it “above the fold” (the part of the webpage you can see before you scroll down) and make sure it’s not hidden. Make it the main feature of your webpage.

With these simple steps, it’s easy to create a CTA that succeeds. If your CTA is well-placed, colorful, and clear, customers will notice it and take advantage of it. Your CTA will become a quick way to communicate your goals and achieve them.

What Are Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating CTAs?

Because CTAs are such essential elements to your website, it’s even easier to make mistakes in creating them. To help you avoid this, we’ve laid out the most common CTA problems.

Don’t stack multiple CTAs on top of each other. This can overwhelm your visitors with too many requests. Rather than this, focus on putting one CTA on each page.
Make your CTA follow through with what it says it will give. Don’t let it take your visitor somewhere other than where it says it will. It can frustrate customers if CTAs are deceiving, take up their brief attention span, and make them much more likely to leave your website.
Don’t request too many things at once. If you overwhelm your customers with requests and possible actions, they won’t know what to do. In the same way, if you ask them for all of their contact information at once, they will be overwhelmed and much less likely to give you even a name or an email address. Especially with purchases, customers usually aren’t ready to make a purchase right away. Instead, engage with them and build a relationship.
Create CTAs that are phrases, not just single words. Single words make a weak emotional appeal that the customer is unlikely to respond to. Phrases are more memorable and emotionally appealing. In addition, they are also clearer in communicating your goals.
Lastly, don’t try to make your customers feel guilty for not engaging. This comes across as pesky or even offensive to their personal decisions. Instead, you want them to feel welcomed by your website. You want them to genuinely choose to interact with your content, instead of being manipulated into it.

Crafting CTAs that draw your readers in can be difficult, but by avoiding these top five mistakes, your CTA will be much stronger and more brilliant. CTAs that are phrases instead of single words, that welcome your customers in, and that communicate one clear goal at once are basic ways to begin connecting with your readers.

What Metrics Should You Be Tracking to Measure CTA and Landing Page Performance?

Finally, once you have an effective CTA in place, it’s time to learn how to keep testing that CTA for effectiveness. This is where you can use A/B testing to track the success of your CTAs, headlines, and whole website layout.

How Do You Analyze Your Data and Make Changes for Optimal Conversions?

A/B testing is a way to test how your readers interact with your content and how successful it is. Platforms like Instapage, Unbounce, and Google Optimize all allow you to A/B test your website and CTA. Each of these lets you consistently review what areas of your website are succeeding, and which ones are falling behind. You can see the results from certain CTAs to measure whether or not they are successful. If you find that your CTA is not converting well, try changing up its placement, wording, or color contrast. The best way to know how well it is converting is to use these analytics and A/B testing to track your results and conversions.

Crafting a creative and successful CTA can be a challenge, but it is one that every business owner must master. Through a CTA, you can engage with your audience so much more effectively. This kind of communication lets you grow your customer base effortlessly. Fortunately, these simple steps make creating and optimizing your CTA smoother and more effective.

Ready to Boost Your Website’s Conversions? Let’s Optimize Your CTAs Today!

Here at Hit Your Mark, we offer services to help you grow your business and website through your CTA! From features like user flow to wireframes and prototypes, we help you identify successful and unsuccessful CTAs and recreate them into profitable, converting CTAs. Our services also analyze data and collect it to show more about your web flow and customer experience. We even collect consumer data and product data to help you visualize areas to push your business forward and on to higher goals. We are here for you to help you effortlessly make the best decisions for your business and break the boundaries of imagination and creativity in your business and its CTAs!

User Experience (UX) Design: Improving Website Conversions for Your Business

by Hit Your Mark | Mar 22, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Have you ever had the frustrating experience of visiting a website that won’t load, or is hard to navigate? No one likes to click on a website and discover that it doesn’t work. User experience, or UX, is an essential part of eCommerce and your conversion rates. How your website flows will help to determine the number of users you have and how many actions they take on your website.

Brands that succeed in eCommerce often succeed in design-led strategy, as well. Design matters, because it’s a form of communication. Design is a part of user experience, and conversion rates are heavily impacted by it. This impact is so significant that your website design and your conversion rates typically change in direct correlation with one another. So, if you upgrade your website design, you will likely see an uptick in your conversation rates, whereas, if you ignore website design, your conversion rates will probably slowly plummet. In fact, 58% of customers say that a good website design will make them more likely to purchase from the website.

For many companies, the goal of eCommerce is to get as many sales as possible. To reach this goal, one key thing you can do as a business owner is to make your website as simple and as smooth as possible. A focus on user experience is one of the best ways to achieve this (we’ll refer to this as UX from here on out).

What Is UX Design and Why Does It Matter?

So, what is this magical UX? Simply put, UX is the tools and the items that make a given customer’s experience on your website better. Its purpose is simple. If you want customers to return, you should give them what they want. UX will help you do that.

UX encompasses everything that helps you optimize your site for visitors and bring them to your website in the first place. This includes transitions, navigation, loading speed, and everything in between. Effective UX matters because it will make your visitor’s experience on your website much smoother and more positive. Especially effective UX will answer your visitors’ questions before they’ve even left the website, and will answer ones they didn’t even know they had. The best UX will draw visitors in based only on their brief understanding of your website in their search results. As a diverse and multi-faceted tool, UX should cover every aspect of your website and its outreach.

The most essential thing about UX is how it can affect your conversion rate optimization (CRO). There are many types of CRO, but UX is most concerned with how you optimize the user’s experience to make your completion rates better. UX has so many benefits and so much potential, and one of the biggest areas where this comes in clutch is in giving your visitors an optimal experience.

What About UI?

Chances are, if you’ve heard of UX, you’ve also heard of UI. Since both relate to your website’s design and productivity, it’s sometimes easy to confuse the two. UX is the tool that transforms how your website functions. It covers your website’s loading speed, how customers can navigate through it (flow), and other things like how customers interact overall with your website. UI, on the other hand, is the tool that transforms how your website looks. UI is mainly related to design. It works to add images, place pieces of text in a logical place, and complete other tasks like where you put your dropdown menu.

Although these two parts of website optimization often work together, we’ll focus mainly on UX in this article. Having good UX will ensure that customers can also enjoy the excellent UI experience of your website.

What Is the Impact of UX Design on Website Conversions?

Because the ultimate goal of UX is to increase your conversion rates, good UX will push up your conversion rate optimization. Through the power of UX, you can revitalize your website and transform it into something fresh and user-friendly.

What UX Changes Will Increase Website Conversions?

More specifically, UX impacts your website conversions through a variety of techniques. These techniques are what will make your website’s UX stand out. One is to change the flow of your website so it’s easier to use. For example, if you mention a topic or product, make sure to include a link to it. This will help customers be able to find that product without searching high and low across your whole website. Spending time searching for something is often a purchasing deterrent for customers; they are more likely to buy your product if it is only one click away.

Another way you can implement UX to increase your conversion rates is by making your website flow intuitive. Fill your homepage with relevant information by including your newest products or blog posts and adding basic information like who you are or your contact information, depending on what kind of site you run. Customers should not have to search your website to know who you are or to find what they came for. Instead, it should be right in front of them.

Since UX is all about making website navigation seamless while simultaneously providing valuable information, giving your visitors a smooth and memorable visit is essential. If users can find everything easily and follow your business’s message, they will remember your website as a reliable and positive source. These kinds of changes can make a massive impact on your conversion rate. And it’s all done through UX!

How To Conduct a UX Audit of Your Website

Improving your conversion rates correlates with improving your UX. If your UX is good, customers can buy products without running into major technical issues or getting lost on their way to the shopping cart. So how do you figure out where customers are having trouble?

If you want to conduct a UX audit on your website, you should check things like

The conversion funnel. This is the process from when a customer enters your website to when they either purchase something or leave it behind in the cart. If you can find the moments when customers tend to abandon products, then you know where to begin improving your UX. For example, if you find that most customers are leaving the website without even adding something to the cart, you may want to explore making your brand’s reliability more obvious or making website navigation as a whole simpler.
The website design. Sometimes the problem isn’t that customers are abandoning products halfway to the purchase button, it’s that the website design is so unconventional that they have a hard time even beginning to look for products. In this case, the best option is to give your website a makeover. Try a new layout, new color scheme, new homepage, or all of the above. This is a task relegated to UI, so if you struggle with this, you might want to try the UI branch of website overhauls.
The site navigation. If your customers are having a hard time finding what they want on your website, then you may need to improve your website navigation. Whether it means adding a dropdown menu or making your website optimized for mobile devices, there are plenty of ways to improve this feature of your business through UX. Sometimes all you need is something intuitive like a search bar. That way customers can simply search for what they want.
The checkout experience. Customers may become frustrated and leave products in the cart if they are having a hard time checking out. We’ve all had that annoying moment when we put in all our information, but something is wrong and the order won’t submit. Often, customers who don’t have luck the first time around won’t give the purchase a second try. Instead of losing a customer at the last second, improving your shopping experience and checkout process will guide customers to make that purchase. You can also eliminate any confusing buttons or unneeded steps. Make the checkout process as simple as possible and request as little information as possible. The easier the checkout, the more customers will choose to purchase from you.

A simple audit of your website can help you identify these problematic areas. After you’ve completed your audit and improved your website, the next step is to watch and see the difference in your conversion rates. With better UX, customers will begin to find what a resource you offer theme! After this, you can continue making improvements based on the new customer data that you glean.

Analyzing User Behavior and Identifying Pain Points

Once you’ve completed the audit of your website, you may be wondering how to know exactly if your user is running into other difficulties. Your audit will reveal some of the main problems in your UX, but are there others that customers consistently meet? Even if your conversion rates go up, that doesn’t mean that your website is perfect. Where, you might ask, are customers across the board running into problems? What you’re wondering about is called a pain point.

So, what is a pain point? For a user, a pain point is anything that causes frustration or negative emotions when using your website. It might be something simple like the loading speed of your homepage, or something more complex like having trouble finding specific products. So how can you identify and overcome these pains so that your website doesn’t cause customers frustration?

To identify a pain point, you can look at some different areas. For example, one way to start figuring out where your customers run into trouble on your website is to take surveys and ask questions. Make sure that you ask people from different demographics, age groups, and product preferences. Look over your interviews and surveys more than once. Get fresh opinions on what the interviewee might have meant. Ask questions that imply as little bias as possible, and be ready to take the hit if you get negative responses back. Finally, give all of your data a fair look. If you don’t examine the data in detail, you probably won’t get the answers you want from it.

These steps will guide you to finding the common pain points that your customers experience. But now that you know what they are, how do you overcome them?

Overcoming Consumer Pain Points,

Fortunately, these problems meet their solution in UX. They may seem overwhelming, but there are several simple steps you can take to make the process of UX changes on your website manageable.

So, now that you know which problems you face, it’s time to form a plan to defeat them. However, it can be overwhelming to even know where to start, especially if you are dealing with multiple problems at once. First, you should choose only one or two problems to tackle at once. Rank them in order of importance, and start with the top two.

Then, take your top problem and break it down into manageable steps. For example, if you are dealing with problems in how fast your website loads, you can break it down first into figuring out what slows your loading, and then correcting that first on the home page, then on the next most commonly visited page, and so forth until you have finished your number one problem. And your tool for fixing slow loading? UX, of course!

Next, you will need to make sure that your changes have fixed the problem. As frustrating as it can be, sometimes the changes don’t always make the problems go away as you anticipated. So, to make sure that your changes are doing their job, test them. If your customers are not experiencing any improvements in their experience, then it’s time to try a new solution. However, if your changes are making a big difference, then you can move to the third step.

This step is to measure your results. No solution is ever perfect. As you learn more about how customers respond to the changes you’ve made, you can continue to fix small problems until the whole system is working very smoothly.

Through this process, you can overcome pain points and make your website run smoothly. A UX audit will begin this process; beating pain points through UX will complete it.

Key Elements of a High-Converting Landing Page

Another area where UX will be your best friend is in how you create your landing page. UX helps a landing page function so that it will meet your customers’ needs and give them an easy, smooth journey throughout your website. The most important thing to remember about UX is that it aims to give the customer a valuable experience. Your landing page is the place where you need to demonstrate this most clearly.

There are multiple ways that you can make an excellent landing page. Some key aspects of one that UX specifically targets are:

Aim for a fast loading speed. Your website needs to be able to load quickly not just on laptops and desktops, but especially on tablets and mobile phones. These are the most commonly used devices for website skimming. So, aim high and make loading speed one of your top UX priorities.
Include stand-out CTAs. Your landing page should include stand-out CTAs that make a clear point. Often, people briefly glance through a webpage and then evaluate whether or not to continue taking action based on the landing page. So, your CTA is your main pitch to convince your audience to embrace your product or service. Remember to make your CTA link to what it says it does: this link is what brings customers into your base. UX can help you perfect the flow of that link and make it easy for customers to keep engaging with your company.
Provide all of your contact information. This one is huge to help customers trust you. If they see that they can contact you through email, phone, and an actual physical address, they are much more inclined to believe that you are a real company and trust you. Also, customers may need to contact you about your products. If you include contact information, this makes it much easier for them to have their questions answered.

These are just a few of the steps you can take to create a usable and logical landing page. If your customers’ first impressions of your page are that it is trustworthy and easy to use, then you can expect heightened conversion rates.

Best Practices for Mobile UX Design

Since one of the best ways to design an effective website is to optimize it for mobile use, there are a few steps you can take to make your mobile website succeed:

Remember that most people have slow internet speeds. This means that you’ll need to have a website that will load fast on little data. One way that you can achieve this is to only load the essential portions of your content at first, and then let it continue to load other pages as the user navigates through your website.
Keep any forms that customers will have to fill out short. Typing on a mobile device is a lot harder than typing on a laptop. We’ve all had to fill out forms on our phones, sighing as we do. Bless your customers by keeping your forms short!
Make your website friendly to common gestures in phone usage. These include things like tapping, swiping, and pinching. If these are the easiest ways for customers to navigate through your website, then you will not need to instruct them on how to use your website.
Set up your mobile website to be cohesive with your desktop version. Customers should be able to expect a uniform experience throughout the different versions of your website. You can do this by keeping the layout very similar to your desktop version and keeping your UI design aspects consistent. This also keeps your brand’s trustworthiness higher.

Making your webpage friendly to mobile users is a key step in increasing your conversion rates. Because so many users navigate websites on their phones, it’s very important to make mobile engagement easy and seamless.

UX is one of the best ways to reach more customers and increase your conversion rates. By making your platform user-friendly, you will create a seamless experience that consumers find attractive. UX lets you do this through mobile optimization, landing page improvement, and resolving pain points. Overall, UX is an essential tool for any eager business developer to increase the function of their website.

Improve Your Website Conversions With Effective UX Design Strategies!

Here at Hit Your Mark, we harness the power of UX to improve your website conversions. By implementing effective strategies and marketing techniques, we will broaden your range of customers and increase your conversion rates. Our experts are trained extensively in digital marketing and have insight into even the most complex digital marketing challenges and needs. Through our attention to detail, we engage in comprehensive performance marketing, email marketing, content creation, and overall project management. Contact us today for a consultation and the opportunity to work with a company that executes plans with transparency and trust.

How To Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

by Hit Your Mark | Mar 20, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

Reading Time: 6 minutes

As a business leader, you know you can bring a brilliant product or unparalleled service to market, but there are times when you need help to meet your intended success.

Here’s the thing: digital marketing is not a game of chance. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope for the best. Instead, you need to measure your marketing campaigns to see if they’re actually working. It’s like being a doctor and checking your patient’s vital signs — except instead of a heartbeat and blood pressure, you’re looking at website traffic and conversion rates.

Without an effective marketing strategy in place, the individuals, families, and groups of people who could benefit from your efforts may never become aware of what you have to offer! You’re basically throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. And let’s face it, that’s not a great way to run a business. So let’s get into the basics of measuring marketing campaigns!

How To Measure Digital Marketing Success

We’ve all heard how our goals need to be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The genius of data and analytics — the backbone of digital marketing — is that they ensure your goals are measurable.

Having the information you need to tell a successful strategy from a failing one allows you to minimize all-around waste — instead of being led on a wild goose chase!

To measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns, you need to be a master of metrics. How many people clicked on your ad? How long did they stay on your website? How many visitors filled out your contact form? It’s like piecing together a puzzle — the more pieces you have, the clearer the picture becomes!

But don’t worry; you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to measure digital marketing success. With the right tools and expertise, you can easily track and analyze your metrics to see what’s working and what’s not and adjust your efforts accordingly.

It’s all about avoiding ineffective strategies and freeing up resources to focus on the ones that work for you. With our data-driven approach, you can trust that your budget is being spent effectively to maximize your return on investment!

The Role of Data Analytics in Reaching KPIs

But what does measuring data look like in practice? Understanding marketing data is a crucial first step. This process includes any information that paints a clearer picture of your customers — what they want and how to reach them.

Different marketing campaigns gather different key performance indicators or KPIs (i.e., a measurable metric used to evaluate the success of a campaign). These various indicators can be more or less helpful, depending on the industry you’re dealing with. For example, content marketers would be especially interested in the “organic traffic” and “time spent on site” indicators. Part of a solid digital marketing strategy is a strong sense of which KPIs are most important to track.

Without tracking the right KPIs, businesses may not have the necessary data to make informed decisions, thus potentially missing opportunities to optimize their marketing campaigns for maximum impact.

Of course, data alone cannot produce results. While helpful in assessing whether your KPIs are trending up or down, data analytics only become useful when they are married with an understanding of your company’s goals.

To turn data — even highly relevant data — into actionable steps, you need to combine data-driven information with the purpose behind your marketing strategies. With this purpose-driven model in mind, let’s assess the different processes for data and analytics management!

What Are the Best Processes for Data Management and Collection?

Marketing analytics sounds highly technical but can be put into simpler terms: they are the tools and processes that turn data into actionable knowledge.

Three examples of the most popular approaches to marketing analytics include:

Media Mix Models, which assess data gathered over more extended periods.
Multi-Touch Attribution, which analyzes individual-scale information from consumer purchases,
Unified Marketing Measurement, which is a combination of the previous two.

Once a particular model has been chosen, it pays to implement it smartly. Using these models, you can assess a plethora of metrics, such as:

Bounce rate
Click-through rate (CTR)
Conversion rate
Email open rate
Social post likes

And these data points are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring the success of your marketing campaigns!

One of the essential practices for today’s marketing landscape is to collect data transparently. Think of the prompt you see when you open a newly-downloaded smartphone app. Users are often allowed to “allow” or “ask app not to track.” Whether it’s permitting location information, syncing contacts, or other data points, consumers appreciate it when companies transparently give them a decision to opt in or out of data collection.

Another great reason to be transparent regarding data collection is that sometimes, to act otherwise is illegal. While the U.S. has yet to see the passage of a data-collection-regulating law on the federal level, many states have taken it upon themselves to regulate the relationship between data-collecting companies and data-providing consumers.

Different laws and regulations apply to data in various fields, with fields as diverse as healthcare, financial institutions, and telecommunications prompting the fine-tuning of different legal expectations. Here, too, it pays to stay vigilant and up-to-speed on the kinds of data collection the law allows.

What Are the Best Data Collection Tools?

The most accessible marketing analytics tool for beginners is Google Analytics. This tool provides data on visitors to your website, such as which sites they came from and how long they spent on your website.

MixPanel is a step up in the sense that it will track the activity on your mobile app as well as your website. MixPanel’s premium version is also more feasible for small businesses than the upgraded Google Analytics tools.

Another tool to consider is Cyfe. If you’ve taken a few steps down on your digital marketing journey and have an array of data points to track, Cyfe functions as a “dashboard” so that they can all be viewed in one place. It covers both social media and sales platforms, with widgets integrating other tools like Google Analytics or Salesforce.

Klipfolio is another dashboard-style competitively-priced tool for any businesses looking to upgrade their marketing analytics experience.

It provides a view of your business’s performance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to optimize your digital marketing strategy. However, using such platforms can be challenging.

At Hit Your Mark, we understand the importance of tracking and measuring your data to optimize your digital marketing strategy, as well as keeping a pulse on all other related marketing disciplines. While there are many powerful tools to choose from, we take a holistic approach to data tracking and marketing to provide a complete and accurate view of your business’s performance.

What Are Key Metrics To Track?

Even with the perfect marketing analytics tools in place, your organization might still fumble the opportunity to harness analytics if you’re paying attention to the wrong data points and KPIs.

All the infrastructure in the world won’t help unless you’re taking in data that can be turned into actionable steps to grow your business. The top metric, unsurprisingly, is revenue. But there’s still much to be learned after revenue is accounted for!

What Are the 10 Marketing Metrics To Use?

The 10 key digital marketing metrics include:

Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Cost per lead
Customer acquisition cost
Customer lifetime value
Goal completion rate
Leads
Page views
Returning visitors
Web traffic sources

A complete picture of these metrics will give you a real-time view of how your business is doing and, with some analysis, how it could be doing better.

Conversion rates, for example, measure the number of consumers who “converted” as a percentage of the total number of consumers that visited your website. Whether it is opening an email, making a purchase, or filling out an online form, the number of conversions is only significant compared to the number of potential ones.

If thousands of people see your content, but only a few dozen are being converted, that could be a sign that you’re marketing to the wrong audience.

But there’s hope! With insights from accurate conversion rates, page views, and other KPIs, you can make your digital marketing strategy much more efficient! Once you switch to data-driven marketing decisions, you’ll wonder how you got along without them!

Use Metrics To Rocket Marketing Effectiveness!

If metrics or data are the banes of your existence, don’t worry! Just let the experts at Hit Your Mark handle it. We’ll crunch all those numbers and analyze all that data, leaving you free to focus on what really matters, like drinking coffee, your business, or your next meeting. Because let’s be honest, who wants to spend their days staring at spreadsheets and graphs? Not you, that’s for sure. So book a discovery call with HYM and finally get the boost your marketing needs!

Email Marketing: Tips and Best Practices for Success

by Hit Your Mark | Mar 13, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

Reading Time: 8 minutes

We live in a world where business competition is a constant reality. In a sea of endless options and competitors, finding ways to make your business stand out is essential. There are many advertising methods out there, from billboards to commercials to online ads, but if you want to reach your consumers on a personal level, email marketing is one of your best bets.

Now, we know what you might be thinking. “Emails? Who even reads those anymore?” But let us tell you, despite the rise of social media and other digital platforms; emails are still a trusted and effective tool because they are cost-effective, allow for personalization, are highly measurable, and have a wide reach with a high open rate – all the things you’d want out of a marketing campaign.

In fact, email marketing has been proven to have a higher return on investment than most other marketing methods. Plus, with the ability to segment your email lists and personalize your messages, you can make sure you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time!

Not only that, but email marketing is also incredibly cost-effective. Compared to traditional advertising methods like billboards or TV commercials, email marketing allows you to reach a large audience at a much lower cost.

With a little creativity and strategy, you can make your emails stand out and engage your audience on a personal level. From promotional emails to newsletters, the possibilities are endless.

What is Email Marketing?

So what is email marketing? Email marketing is a way to economically reach your customers digitally.

You can create personalized emails that speak to your customers’ interests and needs, which fosters a connection with them and shows that you care about what matters to them. Whether you’re sending promotions, newsletters, or other types of content, the key is to make it fun, relevant, and valuable.

So get creative with your emails and watch your audience engage with your brand on a whole new level! This gives also give your customer a whole new perspective on how your company is personally beneficial to them.

How To: Email Marketing 101

Since email marketing is a great way to reach customers personally, knowing how to reach them is a good place to start. There are several essential steps to starting your email marketing campaign.

The first thing you will need is to have a list of consumers and their email addresses. This is often collected when customers subscribe to an email list. So how do you get subscribers, you may wonder?

This is where the concept of a lead magnet comes in. A lead magnet can be anything that gives a customer an incentive to subscribe to your email list. The best way to execute this is to put an offer of some sort on your website. It can be anything from a free pdf to a coupon, webinar, or free sample. Once you’ve created your lead magnet, you’ll want to place it somewhere prominent on your website. This allows consumers to subscribe of their own volition.

Your next step is to find an email service provider (ESP) to help you manage your email list and contact your customers at the appropriate time. Typically, an ESP will specialize in sending your emails in response to triggers created by customers’ actions, whatever they may be. These actions can range from e-commerce and webinar registrations to form submissions.

Finally, you will need to make sure that you have clear goals for your company and email marketing campaigns. You’ll want to make sure each campaign targets a specific goal.

Goals can be anything from creating more sales to getting more subscribers to simply keeping your consumers up to date. The best way to achieve these goals is to segment your email list by customer demographics, such as location, interests, age, or gender.

Setting clear goals for your email marketing campaigns and segmenting your email list by customer demographics can help you achieve greater success and engagement with your audience. So start planning your campaigns with specific goals in mind!

How To Build Effective Email Marketing Lists?

One of the most important factors of successful email marketing is ensuring that your list targets the right audience. You’ll want to garner subscribers who have an interest in your content, and the best way to do this is to expose them to it before they subscribe or when they subscribe.

Once again, a lead magnet can help you do this. For visitors to your website, a lead magnet placed on your website will prompt people to engage with what you offer so that they can subscribe and get a reward.

You can also create an opt-in on your website. You can place it anywhere it will be noticed—within your posts, at the top of your website, in a lightbox popup, or at the welcome gate. This opt-in should be attention-grabbing and make your subscribers interested. Using a headline that quickly describes the benefits of subscribing draws people in and makes them feel invited.

You can also attractively design the subscribe button itself, using bright colors and unique wording. Both of these techniques will allow you to draw the attention of potential subscribers and make their job easy—one click and they will be on your email list, available for you to further segment it.

With a little creativity and strategy, you can build a strong and engaged email list that will help your business thrive.

Let’s Answer Your Email Marketing Questions

We aim to provide helpful insights and advice to anyone who is looking to improve their email marketing efforts, whether you’re a small business owner or a seasoned marketer. From list building and segmentation to content creation and analytics, we offer guidance on a wide range of email marketing topics.

Why Is It Important?

Email marketing may seem like a bit of an old concept today – especially when there are dozens of other options available, from Pinterest to Instagram and WhatsApp. However, email is still the number one way that companies communicate with their customers.

The ROI (return on investments) for each dollar poured into email marketing is $36. This makes it a more successful investment than any of the other marketing methods.

What Are The Best Strategies For Successful Email Lists?

There are many great strategies to make sure that your email campaigns are consistently successful and reach an interested audience. These include:

Using lead magnets to further build your list
Deleting subscribers who don’t consistently respond to your campaigns from your email list
Finding a good schedule for sending emails, so customers don’t quickly forget your company
Tracking your goals for email response through open rates, sales, unsubscribe rates, and other metrics (called KPIs)

How Do I Keep My Consumers’ Data Private?

People are becoming more and more concerned with privacy, so it is important to make sure that you can keep your consumer’s data private for both their sake and the respectability of your company.

This, fortunately, is not hard to do. You can create options for customers to unsubscribe from your emails or change what kind of emails they would prefer to receive.

By protecting your clients’ data and respecting their privacy, you can build a long-term relationship based on mutual trust and respect, which ultimately benefits both your company and your clients in terms of the success of your email marketing campaigns.

What Are The Best Email Campaign Types?

There are many ways to create a successful email campaign. What kind of campaign you decide to employ depends on your goals, but once that is determined, choosing the type of campaign is not as difficult. There are many options for email campaign types, but some of the best and most effective ones are:

A newsletter: Newsletters are great for keeping your customers engaged and informed about current happenings inside the company. They are also good for maintaining your email list.
A marketing offer: In this campaign type, you can reach out to potential customers. This is also a campaign style that usually receives a lot of responses.
An announcement: Announcements, like newsletters, keep your existing customers up to date and let them see the company grow. It will also boost awareness and response to new products and services.
An event invitation: This is a great way to publicize your event and your company more. While not a direct method for list-building, it can be a building block toward that goal.
Human interest information: People love hearing about other people, and they love stories. These types of campaigns include employee biographies, interviews, or testimonies from happy customers. This lets your customers see the human side of your business.

Most Effective Email Marketing Trends

Once you’ve found the campaign types that work for you, it’s time to think about email marketing trends. With email marketing being bigger than ever, there are so many popular trends for email marketing.

Some are proven to be successful, and others are just new fads. Fortunately, we’ve found the three most popular and effective trends and compiled them right here.

Trend #1: Extensively Personalized Emails

Consumers’ inboxes are flooded by dozens of emails per day, which is why it’s important to stand out from everyone else.

The best way to do this is to make the customer feel like you are reaching out to just them and no one else. Make it feel like a caring, personal, informative relationship. This works because 71% of consumers interact with companies and their emails based on how personalized the emails are.

You need to do more than simply put the subscriber’s name in the first line of the email. In 2023, to succeed in the competitive world of email marketing, you need to pay attention to their personal preferences and reflect them to the customer.

You can do this by sending emails with recommendations, usage reports, or even marketing offers based on what you know this consumer enjoys. This is another reason why having a highly segmented email list is so important, which is trend #2.

Trend #2: Lots of List Segmentation

If your list is very segmented, then you can start sending out those personalized emails a lot faster. For example, if you have a list segmented to those subscribers who purchase home decor items, then it’s easy to create a personalized trigger email. When home decor items go on sale, an email will be sent specifically to those customers.

Or, when they shop for pillows and leave some in their cart, you can send an email to remind them of the items in their cart—but also include a recommendation for a matching throw blanket. In the emails that you send, you will need to make sure that they feature attractive designs and graphics.

Trend #3: Flashy Email Designs

Flashy doesn’t have to mean busy or heavy. Instead, it means making your email graphics so good that they are simple and easy to interpret via email on mobile and desktop without being very busy and overwhelming to the eye.

Track what graphics subscribers respond to best and segment your email based on customer graphics response. A good graphics scheme will include a complementary color palette, effective copy, interactive style, and final email size.

Your email marketing list is one of the most important and effective aspects of advertising your business! With one of the largest growth and return on investment rates of any potential business marketing method, email is the best place to begin launching your business.

Don’t fret if this sounds too complicated; fortunately, there are ways to manage email marketing so that you don’t have to navigate the steps alone.

You Can Reach Your Email Marketing Goals!

Here at Hit Your Mark Media, we offer a personalized and tailored marketing program to make your business goals easier to reach than they ever have been before. Through our comprehensive program, we can quickly launch your email list into reality and organize an email automation plan that fits your specific business. Our email data research services will scour the internet for any new customers that might fit your goals and demographic, keeping your email list fresh and active. We will customize and execute email campaigns that target your goals to make achieving them feel effortless. Let us take care of repetitive email marketing work so you can dream bigger. With Hit Your Mark Media, you can achieve your email marketing goals and beyond!

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