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Methods Which Will Increase Your Conversion Rate

Conversion rates for websites are typically about 2-3%.

Only 2 or 3 customers may be expected for every 100 visitors and, that’s a decent conversion rate.

Many websites have conversion rates of barely 0.2 to 0.3percent. It takes 1000 visitors to convert two visitors into a buyer.

How can you increase conversions and gain more consumers with the traffic you have?

We’ll show you the best ways to boost your conversion rate in this post.

Effective ways to increase conversion rate

The amount of people that come to your website and subsequently take action is referred to as the conversion rate.

Filling out and completing a form, contacting your company, subscribing to get materials from you, enrolling for an event you’ve arranged, or making a purchase are all examples of this behavior.

If a substantial percentage of your visitors take these actions, you may be certain that your marketing strategy is working. If not, you’ll need to make adjustments, which the recommendations below will assist you with.

Unnecessary forms

Have you ever begun filling out an online form only to be discouraged by the sheer number of fields that must be completed?

It’s one of the most effective methods for decreasing conversion rates. Remove any form fields that aren’t needed for your goal.

Signups increased by around 5% for each form field we deleted.

Your signups may be high, but if your sales team lacks the information they need to follow up, your closing rate will suffer.

So strike the correct balance between gathering vital lead information and minimizing fields.

Simply ensure that each field is critical. Otherwise, get rid of it.

Pop-ups

If you use pop-ups correctly, you may achieve a 9.5% of the conversion rate on average.

This one tweak will increase your conversion rate dramatically. It also works on almost every website.

Here are some quick tips to help you get the greatest possible conversion rate:

The pop-ups should have a 30-second delay timer, which stops them from becoming irritating.
Make closing the pop-up window straightforward.
To prevent the pop-up from showing more than once per user, set a cookie. The majority of pop-up tools may assist you with this.

This combination will boost conversions while lowering complaints. You will not upset anyone and will receive all of the benefits.

Social proof

Did you know that 80% of people read internet reviews before buying something?

Positive evaluations are one of the top three purchasing triggers for 51 percent of consumers.

Without a question, your reputation and online presence have an impact on your conversion rate. That is why you should incorporate social proof on your website.

You may offer a link to your Yelp or Google account, which allows customers to post reviews.

To prevent referring people to a third-party site, incorporate testimonials and reviews on your website.

Customers should be able to tell you how much they enjoyed using your product.

Your conversion rate will suffer if it isn’t.

Use website analytics

If you don’t understand how people engage with your site, improving your conversion rate will be difficult.

But how can you figure out where visitors get tripped up? Always use website analytics tools.

You may observe session replays of people on your site using website analysis tools. You’ll be able to observe what people click on, whether they skim over an offer or abandon a form in the midst.

You can use heatmaps to track your website too. With these tools, you can observe which aspects stand out and grab the eye.

Calculate your conversion rate and investigate why visitors aren’t converting on your website.

Use A/B tests

It’s not always clear what works and what doesn’t. You should do A/B testing if this happens.

Examine which headlines, colors, content, layout, and CTAs are most effective for your target demographic. Experiments should be innovative.

You may, for example, attempt a completely different style of CTA or completely change the format of your copy.

Trust building is key

Users will not convert if they do not trust your website or if the buyer is too difficult.

So, how do you build trust?

Money-back guarantees, regular content updates, avoiding spammy links, and making the site simple to use are all effective strategies.

If it appears that you haven’t updated your blog in two years or that there are several broken links, there is friction and distrust.

You may also include team profiles so that your audience understands who is providing the material.

Email campaigns

Have you ever visited a website, placed something in your cart, and then chosen not to complete the transaction? We all do it, which means it’s most likely happening on your site as well.

You must not overlook such prospective consumers. An abandoned cart email campaign should be sent to everybody who leaves their cart unattended.

You’ll give consumers a reminder about the things in their basket, then follow up with a follow-up email that may include a discount or offer.

You’ll miss out on conversions if you don’t send this email.

CTAs

Your call to action is a critical component of conversion. Download an offer, share a post on social media, or sign up for your email subscription might be your CTA.

CTAs should be used across your website and landing pages, whatever it is. This usually suggests they’re simple and straightforward.

Marketers should take huge attention to CTA placement since one placement isn’t always enough. However, it’s quite easy for a CTA to show so frequently on a website that it appears spammy to visitors.

Each landing page will typically contain only one call to action, but it will be repeated numerous times across the page.

The sooner a CTA appears on a page, the better. Otherwise, visitors who do not scroll down far enough may miss the conversion point completely.

Each landing page will usually just feature one call to action. The crucial thing to remember is that the CTA is accessible from wherever on the website.

Taking away the visitor’s risk, for example, by giving a guarantee and properly expressing that message in your CTA will motivate them to take action.

Conclusion

Every marketer uses digital marketing to boost their total conversion rate, increase their exposure, grow their email list, and increase their income.

However, not everyone profits right away from their efforts.

The recommendations above may assist you in quickly and efficiently increasing your digital marketing conversion rate. If your marketing efforts are successful, making money from your firm is not tough.

We hope we can help.

Optimize Your Conversion Funnel With The Help Of Data Visualization

One of the most difficult jobs in the life of a web-based business is to increase the conversion rate. Everyone is attempting to boost this figure, as it can be critical to a company’s success.

However, there is a tendency for not everyone can increase this indicator. The result is the poorly configured conversion funnel.

But what exactly is the conversion funnel, and how can you make it well-optimized? You can learn more about it in the sections below.

About conversion funnel in general

The conversion funnel demonstrates how a casual visitor becomes a paying customer. Imagine it as a funnel through which you put together all of your visitors, and only the clients emerge at the other end.

There are three sections of the conversion funnel:

Upper section
Middle section
Lower section

In each section, you must employ a different strategy. It makes no difference which marketing tactic you employ at the top or bottom. If you don’t consider these factors, you’ve already committed the first error you can make when it comes to conversion funnel optimization.

At the top of your conversion funnel, you’ll see simple visitors. They are those who are visiting your website for the first time or who simply want to learn more about you.

In the middle, there are already a few people who are curious. Despite the fact that they are significantly fewer than visitors, this category already contains potential purchasers.

They already know who you are, what you do, and what you value you have. Furthermore, the people in the midst of your conversion funnel even have some belief in you.

You’ll come upon an even smaller bunch in the lower funnel. These are the people who are interested in purchasing your goods.

They already believe in you and your services, and they have all the knowledge they require to confidently purchase your product or service.

Now that you know who makes up each part of your conversion funnel, let’s move on to the optimization process. You need to take different actions in each section to complete the visit process with a purchase.

Don’t worry, data visualization tools help a lot in this. Let’s see how.

Optimization process

Let’s take a look at how conversion funnel optimization works in practice now that we’ve gone over the essential aspects and functionalities.

Continuous measuring is a necessary aspect of the procedure. Unfortunately, the process cannot be carried out successfully without it.

When you think of analytics, you probably think of a big chart, but you’ll need a far more creative and efficient approach here. Heatmaps are an excellent tool for this.

Heatmaps are methods for determining how effective a website is. You can use heatmaps to see how your visitors interact with your website, which subpages they view, and which icons they click.

Warm colors indicate high-performing areas of your website, whereas cool colors indicate low-performing elements. If you want to optimize your conversion funnel, you’ll need this information.

But, you’re probably curious about how heatmaps can be used in the optimization process, let’s get right in.

Heatmaps in the upper funnel

You must reach three factors at the top of the funnel:

Structure that is visible
Content of high quality
Personal information

Let’s get this party started. You must give your website a clear structure in order for your customers to spend longer on it and not depart after a few seconds.

We suggest that you examine the most popular portions of your website with heatmaps and then put each of the key subpages accordingly. This is significant since you might locate them in a location where your visitors will be sure to locate them.

Also, keep in mind that these visitors will most likely appear on your landing page first. You must only list subpages that are relevant to the upper funnel group.

Using heatmaps to determine these might also be a smart approach to do so, as the analysis will reveal which pages you visit frequently. You can rely on this information.

As you can see, improving the top of your conversion funnel is a quite difficult procedure. However, don’t fret, you’ve already completed the most difficult of the three sections listed above.

Heatmaps in the middle funnel

The deeper down the conversion funnel you go, the more specialized work you’ll have to undertake. This means that while the number of tasks you have will drop, you will have to cope with an increasing number of them.

Visitors have already turned into potential consumers by the time they reach the middle stage. In this step, the most crucial thing is to persuade them to buy your product.

In this instance, there are two things you should keep in mind:

Your products’ location
Building a foundation of trust

Use heatmaps to make some basic analysis before you cut into the optimization process

Determine which of your goods is the most successful. Put these products or services near the top of your subpage because then potential purchasers don’t have to scroll too far to find them.

We have the products and have been provided everything we need to purchase them. What could the issue be?

The worry. When making purchases, keep in mind that this influence is constantly present.

Use scroll heatmaps of your page and put customer reviews based on the measurement to eliminate this.

The scroll heatmap displays how long customers spend scrolling across your website, allowing you to strategically post reviews. This will lower the perceived risk and make it easier for your goods to be added to the cart.

Heatmaps in the lower funnel

Your product is already in the cart at the bottom of the funnel. The only thing that separates a potential buyer from becoming a buyer is this one stage. What kind of issue could arise?

If a potential buyer refuses to buy or cannot pay, the response is straightforward.

In the study of the cart, the use of heatmaps is quite important. Examine how your customers use your cart, where they frequently click, and what they do.

This brings us to the end of the optimization process. As you can see, heatmaps as a data visualization tool help a lot in this.

Conclusion

Heatmaps are used throughout the conversion funnel optimization process, as you can see. Do not begin the process in any way unless you have this tool.

Other measuring methods, such as session replays, can, of course, be used in addition to heatmaps. This can also improve this process efficiency.

We hope we can help.

How To Use Heatmaps To Create The Perfect Marketing Campaign

Millions of websites, ever-increasing demands, and plenty of competitors. If we hear the word e-commerce, similar words may come to mind.

Website or webshop owners haven’t got an easy task as they need to operate their business with these factors. Their main goal is usually to sell as many products as possible and increase their conversion rate.

But how can they be successful in such difficult circumstances? The solution is based on continuous measurements, for which heatmaps are perfect and often used tools.

In the following, you can read about how this tool can help you to run a successful online business run.

What is heatmap analytics?

Heatmap is an analytical tool based on quality data. You can use it primarily to gauge the effective elements of your website and how visitors use your website.

These tools show the effective parts of your website with warm colors and the less effective ones with cold colors. You can use it to find out what products, colors or CTAs work well in your webshop.

There are several types of tools available to you, depending on what your purpose is, what you want to measure:

Click heatmap
Segment heatmap
Scroll heatmap

Click heatmap

Click heatmaps can be called traditional tools. It evaluates the effective and less effective parts of your website based on clicks. You can use it to find out which subpages your visitors visit most often, or even how they purchase process works on your website.

This tool is of paramount importance in website optimization, but it can even help you make an effective marketing campaign.

Segment heatmap

Perhaps one of the most important tools in creating a good marketing campaign. It highlights the source of your visitors and it shows how visitors from different sources use your website.

Visitors from each source are marked in different colors so you can easily compare their activity. Sounds good right?

Scroll heatmap

This tool is the most specific of the three mentioned here. You can mainly use it to see how long your website is scrolled through by users.

You can use it to put your products or possibly important information in the right place. A place your users are sure to read.

It is often used to analyze the blog interface, as it allows you to place links to your products or other relevant links in the most relevant place. In addition, you can use scroll heatmaps to select the most potential placement for ads on your page.

But how can these contribute to the success of your marketing campaign? Let’s look at it.

The relationship between heatmaps and marketing campaigns

You already have a comprehensive picture of how these measurement tools work. But how do they relate to an effective marketing campaign?

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, online businesses aim to maximize their conversion rates. To do this, they need to gain as many visitors as possible, which requires an excellent marketing strategy.

This is where heatmaps come into play.

These analytics tools help you display the best CTAs, colors, and motifs throughout your campaigns. Displaying these elements is important because this is how you will get the most impact from your potential visitors.

Also, it doesn’t matter where you want to run your marketing campaign. Don’t despair, heatmaps provide an answer to this as well.

Let’s see what elements you need to consider during the measurement and incorporate them into your marketing campaign:

Well performing CTAs
Popular colors and motifs
Most popular products
Content from your frequently visited subpages
The source from which most of your visitors come

But how do you incorporate these elements into your marketing campaign?

Let’s make an excellent campaign

Let’s start at the beginning. First, you need to pay attention to the information provided by the segment heatmap.

Do most of your traffic come from social media? Maybe from direct searches or other websites?

Let’s say the segment heatmap analysis shows that 70% of your traffic comes from social media interfaces. In this case, you need to focus your marketing campaign on these platforms, as you can find the highest proportion of users here.

You find out the campaign location, what’s next? You need to create the campaign material. Before you get scared, keep in mind that heatmaps can help with that too.

As we mentioned, these analytics tools show you the powerful elements of your website. Collect them and use them in your campaign.

This is important because the elements that worked in your webshop will also work in your marketing campaign as well.

Just think about it, the measurement may reveal that none of the CTAs are effective except for one. In this case, you should also use that CTA on social media interfaces, because if you use something else, no one may click through to your website.

You’ll also have to display the distinctive colors of your online business in your campaign. This is important because in this way your visitors will identify you and your products with this color from the very first moment.

This promotes memorability and in addition, colors can reflect your goals and personality. We recommend that you also determine this based on the heatmap analytics.

The third very important step is, what do you need to advertise at all in order to increase your conversion rate?

The answer is simple, the product or content that was found to be popular during the measurement. It is important that you do not have to choose just one product, you can use more than one at a time, the point is to make them one of your popular products.

Keep them at the center of your ad. This is important because your popular product or content serves the most common demand, so you have the best chance of making a purchase.

This will greatly increase your chances to increase your conversion rate.

If you follow these steps and tips, you can create the perfect marketing campaign based on the heatmap measurement.

Conclusion

As you can see, continuous measurement plays a prominent role in the success of your webshop. We recommend that you have to repeat the mentioned process at regular intervals.

If you do not do this, your conversion rate will only increase for a while and then decrease abruptly. You don’t want that, do you? The point is continuity.

In addition, we recommend that you do not rely solely on heatmap data for a marketing campaign, but also combine it with other data. You can take A/B tests or even combine them with numerical data.

We hope we can help.

7 Things You Can Budget for Amidst the Coronavirus

Budgeting is an integral part of personal finance. It may very well be a crucial factor during these times given the current economic climate.

Although businesses are slowly starting to reopen, no one is entirely certain of the future. What is certain, though, is the need for one to have a solid financial plan. It can help you manage your money better during the pandemic and keep you from getting deeper in debt.

For simple ways on how to keep your finances in order, follow these recommendations below from the bankruptcy attorneys at Scura.

Here are seven ways to budget amidst the Coronavirus pandemic.

Say Goodbye to Unnecessary Habits

What Coronavirus has done is make us realize that we might not be able to indulge in some, if not most, of the activities we did pre-Corona. Staying indoors has kept us from socializing outside of our homes and frequenting to places that are happy to take our money. Whether these are bars during happy hour or just going to the mall to shop to our hearts content, these habits after Corona might have to take a backseat as most people’s salaries have taken a toll.

As life slowly crawls back to a normal pace, you need to ask yourself, what can you actually afford and what can you put on hold for the time being? Can you survive if you do not indulge in activity A or B? If yes, then you do not need it in your life at least until things come back to the way they were. If you cannot survive without them, these are the services or businesses you need to keep in your life and include in your budget.

Enjoy Homemade Food More Often

While we are on the subject of leaving behind unnecessary habits, eating take out every day or even a couple of times a week is another thing you can consider placing on hold.

Staying home has probably opened your palette to home cooking and this is probably something you should do more often coming out of Corona to tighten up the load on the money you spend. Cooking homemade food can be drastically less expensive than eating out, and yes that includes take-out.

The internet is full of fun and delicious recipes that you can easily cook up in no time to serve up a full course meal rather than spend money at a restaurant, say for example, that you could most likely hold off for the moment until your paycheck starts increasing again.

How Fat is Your Emergency Fund?

While no one knows how life post-Coronavirus will be for sure, most are anticipating that the economy will not be so kind. The possibility of losing one’s job, having a pay cut or reduced hours at work is very high and has actually been happening to many already.

If you are still receiving your paycheck, this is the right time to fatten your emergency fund. Try to be as frugal as possible with your spending and put as much money as you can aside for the time being. This way if you are directly affected by the loss of a steady income, you will have something that you can rely on.

Look to the Long-Term When Saving

Putting money away shouldn’t only be for short-term emergencies that might come up. Think also long-term. What will happen a couple of years down the line and the closer you get to retirement? What kind of lifestyle do you envision having and will you have enough money stowed away.

While you put money away during the Coronavirus pandemic to have some coins to spare, why not throw some of that money towards your retirement.

If you already have a retirement account or a Roth IRA why not throw up a few more dollars for down the line. It can be as easy as increasing your contribution amount by a few percentage points. This way your future self can thank you.

Don’t forget alternate investments like cryptocurrencies. Some financial experts predict the price of Bitcoin to shoot up from the current prices to over $1 million in the next five years. You may not want to miss the boat on that one.

Pay off debts with Higher Interests

If you have some money to spare, pay off your debts with high interest like credit cards or personal loans. If you keep paying the minimum balance only, the debt will keep accumulating.

You can try talking to your lenders to see if they can agree to lower your interest rates to make it easier on your pockets during these trialing times. If you manage to lower your interest rates, you will have some extra money to invest or pay off other low-interest debts.

Personal Investment is Important

Do you invest in yourself? Emergency fund and long-term savings aside, if you have some extra money in your account after budgeting, have a personal budget that helps improve your current self today.

For example, you can take online classes for that course you always wanted to take or buy that book that can help you with your financial planning.

Consider Your Children’s Future in Education

If you have children, open up a savings account for their future education expenses. College is not a cheap undertaking. A 529 college savings account will spare you the headache of having to pay taxes on it and the money saved can be used on any postsecondary accredited school.

Although Coronavirus has wracked havoc on the economy, proper budgeting will keep you afloat for times to come. With proper planning, you can survive the storm and still manage to save for your future.

Bridges Trending Today: Nearest Railway Stations in India

Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Press Release

Every successful company understands the importance of a well-written press release as it plays a huge role in any effective communication strategy. However, despite its relevance, many companies struggle to curate the perfect press release as it can be rather difficult to create one that captivates and engages the audience. A poorly written or untimely announcement can have detrimental repercussions, forcing your company to regroup and do damage control. Therefore, to help you write an informative yet newsworthy press release, here are the common mistakes you need to avoid.

Having a Bland Headline

Nowadays, journalists wade through a plethora of press releases, and many of them get overlooked because their titles do not generate enough interest. The more eye-catching your press release, the better. A bland headline will not spark interest and will most likely have your copy pushed to the side. To capture the attention of journalists, you’ll need to captivate them with a newsworthy title. You’ll want to come up with a direct and concise headline that communicates your message in an effective yet engaging manner.

Not Including Visuals

Many press releases are blocks of plain text, which deters both journalists and readers alike. Without interesting and relevant visuals, your press release will just be a block of black and white text that journalists are unwilling to read.

If you want readers to stop and take notice, your PR needs to sizzle; this means you need to generate excitement and interest. The best way to ensure this is by including eye-catching visuals that can increase your chances of creating an engaging press release that your audience will want to read. Studies show that today’s market is all about visuals. With the fast pace of the media – specifically social media – we gravitate to visuals first, and that helps us determine whether or not the text included deserves our attention.

Rushing it

If you’re a rookie, the mere idea of writing a press release can make you quite anxious. This can lead to 2 things: either you won’t give yourself enough time to write well-thought-out content, or you will become overwhelmed and cram too much information, which will lead you to lose the audiences’ interest as a result. Avoid rushing the writing process as this will affect your sentence structure and make you more likely to leave out relevant information. You also don’t want to ramble on and confuse your audience. The information has to be relevant to the reader, so give yourself enough time to devise an outline and identify the message you want to convey and the clearest way to do so.

Press releases are the fundamental foundation of a successful PR strategy, which is why you ought to conduct quality research before writing it out. For this reason, experts recommend that you consider using a template to provide your readers with a perfectly-formatted press release. Taking a look at some samples will also give you a better idea of the optimal outline to follow to ensure success.

One Dimensional Formatting

Many people tend to write their press releases in a formal manner similar to that of newspapers. This type of stiff writing has no flow. A lack of fluidity in your sentence structure won’t generate the engaging vibe you need to cultivate excitement. Take a look at some of the most captivating public speakers and pay attention to their rhythms and sentence structure to learn how to intrigue audiences. You want to avoid redundant sentences but, on the other hand, you don’t want your sentences to be short and stiff, either.

Overuse of Links

It’s easy to get carried away with embedded links and forget what the initial goal of this press release is. Follow this golden rule moving forward: stick to 2 links maximum for the best effect. In the meantime, don’t forget the importance of keywords and SEO practices to ensure your writing is not only compelling but that also aligns with your audiences’ online search habits.

Lacking Resonance

Of course, you will have goals you want to achieve and a vision you want to stick to, but a common mistake many people make is that they become so preoccupied with their vision that they create content that doesn’t resonate with the different audiences intend to target. It’s important to remember that it’s not a one-size-fits-all case. You will need to alter your copy for various audiences to resonate with journalists, editors, media publishers, and all the other readers you hope to reach out to. This means customizing your headline and leads accordingly. Some information that may seem relevant to you may not be relevant to a select few of your target audience.

Making it Too Promotional

As mentioned above, being preoccupied with your vision has its downsides. After all, a PR isn’t about patting yourself on the back; it is about resonating with your target audience, most notably, journalists. Avoid making your press release too promotional and instead, focus your attention on providing your readers with real value. Always ask yourself, “Is this news is relevant to readers?” “Does it coincide with what’s going on today?” Nothing that will put off journalists more and give you bad publicity than an untimely press release.

Relying Solely on Distribution Platforms

Back in the day, all you needed to rely on was distribution platforms. However, now there are a plethora of other methods to make use of. You need to be active on social media and keep in mind that it has a huge impact on what is deemed newsworthy and clickable. Therefore, you’ll need to optimize your online content by being informed on trends and popular interests, as this generates better results than traditional news articles. As such, include graphics, visuals, and images to increase your chances of being featured in various publications. It’s also a good idea for up-and-coming brands to cultivate relationships with a circle of journalists to expand their outreach and get their name out there.

Writing a press release may seem overwhelming, but once you understand what is relevant to your target audience, you’ll be able to create a press release that resonates with your readers. To generate and maintain the interest of your audience, you need to provide valuable content that’s suitable for today’s climate. Avoid making the aforementioned common mistakes, and use these tried-and-tested tips to write an engaging and captivating press release.

Local SEO Hacks: Why Reviews Matter and How to Leverage Them for Businesses

Everything in SEO goes back to this golden tenet: Google provides users with the best experience possible. And every element that contributes to this lofty goal improves your ranking.

As such, reviews — no matter how peripheral they seem — matter. In a conventional white-hat SEO campaign, the strategies revolve around keywords and codes, and reviews may be brushed off. However, this customer-generated content helps advance your site to the top of the results page because it improves customer experience; reviews help them decide.

Reviews accomplish two goals: compel your customers to take action and fortify your Local SEO services.

For SEO: Reviews Make for Rich Results Listings

Rich results are listings on the results page that go beyond the standard blue link. They have ratings, images, carousels, and more. These were borne out of the need to help users decide whether that listing is relevant to their search.

The rule is, the more information on the listing, the easier the decision.

This applies to sites that use markup language for social proof. When Google crawls your site, it recognizes the markup for reviews, which appear as golden stars under the listing.

These golden stars instantly make your listing stand out from the results page. After all, 84 percent of shoppers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. And it doesn’t take many reviews to convince them: 68 percent of shoppers form an opinion after reading between one and six online testimonies.

Using SEO software to management and analyze higher rating (the closer to five golden stars) leads to a higher click-through rate (CTR). This amplifies your SEO efforts — analysts observed a strong correlation between CTR and search rankings. If Google sees that a lot of people are clicking your site, then your site must be providing a great experience.

More importantly, a higher CTR generates a lot more traffic, which means more opportunities to convert and close a sale.

For SEO: Customer Feedback as Fresh, Keyword-Rich Content

The more content you publish, the more Google’s crawlers will visit your site and reassess your ranking. Every time you make an update on your site, the search engine crawls it and evaluates your site. And thanks to the Freshness Algorithm, search engines prefer fresh content.

High-quality content is prized because, going back to our golden tenet, it gives users an excellent experience.

Although you did not generate the reviews, Google still sees these testimonials as fresh content. When users leave a review on your site, the search engine has something new to crawl and index. What’s more, these reviews likely contain keywords relevant to your product, service, or location, like:

“I bought these chocolate molds”
“The best burger I’ve had in Queens”
“The hotel has a spectacular view of the Thames”

Though unintentional, these keywords help Google understand the nature of your business and consequently, create a better user intent match.

For Customers: Higher Brand Trust

Trust is a huge factor in conversion. Without trust, customers won’t take that leap of faith and buy from your brand. Many elements influence brand trust: the age of the company, word of mouth recommendations, and brand reputation.

In the digital space, reviews play a huge role in strengthening brand trust, especially among first-time buyers.

Looking at this 2019 Trustpilot research, we can observe that three out of the top ten factors that increase brand trust involves online reviews. About 93.7 percent of customers say they trust a brand more if they have positive customer reviews. So if people are saying good things about your products, proudly and prominently put them on your site.

Reviews are a double-edged sword, however. They can also lead to a decrease in trust when feedback puts your business in a bad light. About 88.8 percent of customers say their trust decreases if the company has negative customer reviews.

Despite this, it still pays to post reviews because the absence of social proof deters picky customers. About 81.0 percent say their trust takes a hit if the company has no customer reviews.

But no matter how tempting it may be, do not delete negative comments and reviews. A staggering 95 percent of consumers say that their trust decreases if the negative reviews are deleted. Even if you have a couple of negative reviews, hiding them may do your brand more harm than good.

Here’s how far ratings could go in driving sales: a 2018 TurnTo study reveals that, if customers were comparing two similar products with a price difference of two dollars, 73 percent would choose the pricier product with a higher rating.

For Customers: Creating Fresh Customer Interactions

So what do you do if you can’t delete negative comments? You respond to them.

Reviews are an important point of interaction between the customers and the brand. When you respond to reviews, customers feel heard, and their impression of the brand improves. There’s a good chance for you to restore their trust, even if the customer’s initial experience was negative.

Here’s a quick guide to responding to negative reviews:

Acknowledge the problem. Begin by acknowledging that a problem occurred and that it resulted in an unpleasant experience for the customer.
Take the high road — apologize. Even if the customer was on the wrong, offer an apology.
Offer an explanation, not an excuse. If possible, provide more information to clarify any misunderstanding. For instance, was there a huge technical issue that delayed shipping?
Take the conversation online. Invite the customer to talk about the problem through messaging, instead of the review page.

Taken in stock with all other elements in your digital marketing, reviews are not as valuable as site structure, user experience, keyword research, and link building when it comes to SEO. These strategies are foundational. However, your competitors are doing all that.

Once the “SEO basics” are taken care of, what will make your campaign stronger than the competition?

Your reviews offer a golden opportunity to amplify the effects of your SEO efforts — something your competitors may not realize. Reviews provide fresh, keyword-rich content for Google to crawl and enrich your site listing. More importantly, reviews convince people to choose you, which is what SEO is all about.

The Importance Of Email Marketing For Your Digital Marketing Efforts

When it comes to running a successful digital marketing campaign, there are many different elements that need to be incorporated.

From the on-page and off-page SEO, any paid advertising, to help promote your product and brand, to the way you communicate with your audience. This you can complete through social media, content marketing, but also email marketing.

A reliable and prominent figure within your digital marketing strategy, if you are unsure of the value of email marketing, then we can help.

Here to explain the true importance of email marketing, keep reading to discover whether email marketing is valuable for your business. But also, how you too can begin to incorporate this simple communication channel into your marketing.

What is Email Marketing

If you are new to the ever evolving world that is digital marketing and are about to take your first baby steps within email marketing. Let us first acquaint you with this valuable form of communication popular for its ability to communicate with receptive audiences.

As you may be somewhat aware, email marketing involves marketing and targeting consumers with commercial material with a particular goal in mind. Whether to improve customer loyalty, increase sales or share important information, email marketing is an important way to directly market to a targeted group of people.

With a commercial message in mind, this communication with customers is followed after the recipient consents to receive marketing messages in their inbox. This often follows the completion of a sale or a sign up to a business newsletter.

This remarketing of material to be truly successful should be separated into different segments. These segments of different characteristics of the email database and added audience insights can allow the business to focus and send material best suited to the participants’ interest.

What can Email Marketing achieve

If you are attempting to determine whether email marketing is beneficial for your business, regardless of how big or small your company is, email marketing is an essential addition.

With our lives becoming more and more digital, even more so following the COVID-19 outbreak, making sure that your digital marketing strategy is tidy and in pristine condition is more important than ever before. One way that you can do this and be confident that all efforts will not be wasted and that is by incorporating and optimising your use of email marketing.

As our lives are moving more online and with over 3.5 billion smartphones users in the world, so is the amount of time that we are spending on our devices. With a mobile phone continually in our possession, targeting your audience through this reliable channel should be paramount in this digital age.

Why should email marketing be incorporated into your digital marketing strategy? A method to contact and reach out to customers while they are out and about, while creating personalised messages that are in line with your marketing strategy.

Advantages of Email Marketing for businesses

When it comes to the importance of email marketing for your businesses and deciding whether to incorporate this form of communication into your marketing strategy, first you must look at the advantages. What are the advantages of email marketing? And why should you incorporate it into your business?

From looking at the results conducted and experienced by companies that incorporate email marketing into their strategy, there is one common outcome. That is the unbeatable ROI experienced.

When compared to other marketing channels, the Return Of Investment experienced from email marketing came in up at the top in second to the results experienced through the social media channel, Facebook.

Research also conducted has discovered that emails are 40 times more effective when it comes to acquiring and converting consumers. An important feature during these turbulent times.

Along with a higher ROI, what are the other advantages of email marketing?

Ties together your entire marketing strategy

What should be a foundation within your marketing strategy, when successfully promoting your brand of message, never use one channel alone. Instead, by incorporating all channels together, you can expect to receive maximum success. This point can be seen with the addition of email marketing and its ability to blend with your marketing strategy. While also working to benefit and give them the extra push that they deserve.

If you are planning on organising a social media contest. Don’t just promote it across social media. Instead promote it to your email subscribers to drive the activity and allow them to promote and share the contest with their friends and family.

ALSO READ: Press Release Mistakes To Avoid

Connects with larger number of customers

If you are launching a new service or product and are looking to connect and communicate with customers, email marketing should be considered. This it can do through its ability to be received and read by subscribers anywhere, at any time of the day.

With more people with an active email account than those that use social media, email marketing already looks to be a reliable addition.

Add in a higher conversion rate and ROI. There really is no excuse for not incorporating email marketing into your marketing strategy.

Longer lifespan

Social media is an important marketing platform for businesses to connect with customers. This fact has been highlighted in recent research that found 91% of marketers claimed social media increased their brand recognition. But, what makes email marketing more valuable than social media?

When comparing the two, email marketing can embody a longer lifespan. This lifespan can be seen through the permanent placement that the email creates when sitting within the inbox.

While a Tweet on the other hand has a lifespan of 18 minutes, proof that an email has a longer lifespan.

Offers a more personalised message

As previously touched upon, if you are looking to market and communicate with consumers on a personal level, personalising your message is recommended. This is where email marketing can be used to help assist with this task.

Email automation has never been more advanced than it is now. Along with personalising the subscriber names and the subject line, through the creation and segments of email lists, businesses can ensure that their message is going to the most receptive audience.

The email automation software that you choose to use can even filter emails by job titles and locations.

How to begin an email marketing campaign

We have covered the benefits of email marketing to a business and why it should be incorporated into your marketing strategy. From the longer lifespan to its ability to connect with a larger audience while offering a more personalized message.

Not to be used alone, email marketing is a superb pillar to support and propel your present marketing strategy. But how do you begin to create an email marketing campaign?

We have put together some top tips for beginners looking to take their first steps and grasp the benefits of this effective marketing channel.

When it comes to the importance of email marketing, making sure that you have created a strong foundation can ensure maximum success as you begin to harness and incorporate email marketing into your campaign.

Here are some the basic foundations that you must cover before starting to send out mass emails.

Choose an Email Automation software

Before you start to incorporate email marketing into your digital marketing plan, first you must review and choose an email automation software for your needs. With many platforms available, you won’t be short of choices. It is recommended that you take the time to familiarize yourself with the different softwares and their functions. Your email marketing campaign is only as good as your software that you choose to use. From Mailchimp, GetReponse to ConvertKit, there are a number of superb email automation softwares to review.

Email Database

You have chosen your email automation software of choice and have created an effective content marketing strategy that you are confident will be a huge success. But how are you going to get your message out there to your audience? Before you can press send, first you need to build an email database. There are a number of ways that you can begin to grow and invite customers to sign up to receive your emails.

From a signup form that you place on your website to receive the latest news, or the gift of an exclusive discount for signing up to the newsletter. Some websites choose to create gated content that becomes visible once the reader signs up to their newsletter and agrees to be contacted with relevant marketing material. How you choose to build your email database is up to you and should be in line whether to help drive sales or increase visibility of content.

Create relevant content and segment accordingly

Before you are able to start harvesting the fruits of your labour, first you must create relevant and engaging content. From the subject line, personalisation of emails, while catchy and easy to read emails all paramount for maximum effectiveness.

From making sure that your email is punchy, it is also recommended that you take the time to make sure that you are targeting the right group within your audience.

Segmenting and sending targeted emails to a particular group within your audience can ensure that is openly received. The more relevant the content, the higher the conversion rate.

Summary

A powerful and important addition to your digital marketing strategy, for those looking to propel their marketing efforts, email marketing is recommended. By ignoring the rumours that email marketing is dead, instead you can create an effective and powerful marketing strategy that can get your brand and message seen and heard by a receptive audience.

Coming in second to Facebook for high ROI results, within this blog we have covered the importance of email marketing and its many benefits.

With a little bit of investment and time put aside, you too can begin to see the benefits of this more personalised communication with interested audiences.

If you have yet to try your hand at email marketing and witness the benefits for yourself, by reviewing our 3 top tips for incorporating email marketing into your strategy, you too can put your best foot forward.

Have you embraced email marketing and witnessed any instant noticeable results? We would love to hear from you and discover your first hand experience of email marketing. Comment below and share your experience of email marketing with us today.

Featured Bridges For April 2020

For more than ten years, BridgeURL users have been using our service to create interesting and useful bridges to share with their family and friends. We have had PR agencies use BridgeURL to share their latest campaigns with their clients. We have had airplane staff use BridgeURL as a bookmark for all their internal login pages.

Now, each month, BridgeURL will feature the most interesting and popular bridges created using our service. We will of course not be highlighting the NSFW ones and those that are meant to be confidential. If you are the owner of one of these bridges and want this to be removed from the list, please feel free to get in touch with us.

List of experts/studies/analyses challenging Covid-10 panic – http://bridgeurl.com/list-of-experts-studies-analyses-challenging-covid-19-panic-3

Coronavirus Fall 2020 – http://bridgeurl.com/corona-virus-fall-2020/all

Coronavirus Come Aiutare (Italian – Coronavirus – how to help) – http://bridgeurl.com/coronavirus-come-aiutare/all and http://bridgeurl.com/coronavirus-come-aiutare-1/all

Stay home and read – http://bridgeurl.com/stay-home-and-read/all

Arteries for anatomy presentation – http://bridgeurl.com/arteries-for-anatomy-presentation/all

The Vegan diet and the environmnet – http://bridgeurl.com/the-vegan-diet-and-the-environment/all

Telling time to the nearest half hour – http://bridgeurl.com/telling-time-to-the-nearest-half-hour/all

David M Kessler Fine Art on Abstract Painting – http://bridgeurl.com/david-m-kessler-fine-art-on-abstract-painting/all

Rope access training links – http://bridgeurl.com/rope-access-training-perth/all and http://bridgeurl.com/rope-access-training-brisbane/all

Best Coming Soon Plugins for WordPress

Site maintenance can be tricky, but with the right tools, you can do pretty much anything. WordPress plugins are useful tools for web developers when it comes to site maintenance. Over 55,000 WordPress plugins are at your disposal. However, to save you some time, down below is a list of useful and powerful WordPress plugins for site maintenance and increasing traffic.

If you are upgrading or resetting your WordPress site or doing maintenance, WordPress plugins that display visual notifications can come in handy. These plugins are used to separate the maintenance part of your site and the content that your users see. Use these plugins to create “maintenance” pages or “coming soon” pages and improve your site’s looks by notifying your users of the site’s progress.

Doing this will improve your SER, SEO, and user experience. No matter the type of business, these are very important aspects that you should look after.

Site maintenance can be time-consuming and/or even expensive. If you do not maintain your site, users will have a bad experience and things will get worse sooner than later. Keep in mind that it can take you several days or even months to redesign a site, so it is best to let search engines and the users know what is going on by putting the site “under construction”.

Businesses cannot afford these basic mistakes, as mistakes cost money. If you do not notify your users and search engines about your work, all of it will become worthless.

Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode

Create simple and fully customizable “Coming Soon” or “Maintenance Mode” This plugin packs many useful features and it won’t waste your time, instead, it will save it. It is very easy to use and you can choose from many different themes, which will surely fit your business perfectly. No need to look any further, as this plugin excels at helping you build pages faster.

Features

1 Million+ Free Images – free HD images + Instagram filters

120+ Remarkable Themes – fully customizable designer themes

Get Things Done Faster – easy to use

Best-in-class SEO Setup – rank higher in search results with built-in tests

Easy Access for Clients – Secret Access Link feature lets clients see their site while the work is still in progress.

SEO Snippet Preview – access a real-time preview of how the site will look in search results

SEO Analysis – 20+ tests on different aspects of SEO

Google Analytics Tracking ID –see your site’s stats and track the site through Google Analytics

Themes

Preview and activate themes from the plugin’s settings, no need for any additional downloads.

List of themes

Design – Layout

The drag & drop builder features 10 fully customizable modules and is easier to use than other WordPress builders. Content Overlay adds a transparent background to the content section. You can choose from 47 introductory animations.

Design – Background

Use a static image background or an animated video background from 400,000+ images gallery, or, upload your own. Background Image Size is displayed in the original size, so resize images to cover the entire screen. There are 27 filters and 9 predefined positions for your background images. Set any background color instead of images if you like. Add YouTube videos and they will be played muted and looped, without any additional effort.

Design – Logo

Your logo reflects your product, so position it wisely. Select logos from the Media Library, or upload your own. Maximum height and width are calculated automatically, making it easy to resize them. You can use the Logo Title for SEO purposes.

UnderConstructionPage Plugin

UCP is a WordPress plugin, which will help you create and configure “Under Construction Pages”, “Maintenance Mode Pages”, “Coming Soon Pages”, and “Landing Pages”. Thanks to its efficiency and simple interface, the plugin comes highly rated and is used by many web developers.

The paid- PRO version has more than 50 additional features. They include the drag & drop builder, and over a million HD images. Also, there are more than 200 available templates, and it even supports affiliate & traffic tracking that comes included with advanced access control. If you got money to spend, you can go for the “Agency” version, which offers more features and you will definitely get your money’s worth.

This neat WordPress plugin comes in handy when your site is under maintenance, as it can hide the site behind the “Under Construction Page”, notifying your users of your work in progress.

With this WordPress plugin, you can collect leads and subscribers via opt-in boxes and popups. MailOptin plugin comes integrated for of charge, and it “plugs in” to MailChimp, or other autoresponder services, allowing you to easily collect emails.

Features

Under construction mode – on / off

Automatic End date & time – automatically disable “Under Construction Mode” on a pre-set date

Google Analytics Tracking ID – enables Google Analytics tracking

Themes –200+ available themes

Custom CSS – customize any page aspect

Opt-in box, opt-in popup – collect emails and synchronize with MailChimp or other autoresponder services

Login Button – displays links to the login form, and or WP admin if logged in

Social icons – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Skype, WhatsApp

Whitelisted User Roles – user roles who see the actual site, and who won’t see the “UCP”

Whitelisted Users – users who see the actual site, instead of the “UCP”

UCP WordPress plugin is compatible with the following caching plugins:

W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Endurance Page Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Swift Performance Cache, SiteGround SuperCacher, and Hummingbird cache.

Maintenance – By WP Maintenance

This WordPress plugin grants the site’s administrator access to site maintenance. The administrator can close the site for maintenance by enabling the “503 Service temporarily unavailable” page, and/or by creating a (temporary) page with authorization, which of course, can be edited in the plugin settings. You can customize your appearance on all devices by adding a logo, background images, or using a color for the background.

WP Maintenance supports collecting leads and subscribers through opt-in boxes and popups in content. MailOptin plugin is integrated into Maintenance (for free) and it can connect to various autoresponder services.

Amelia – free events & appointments booking calendar, adding events and bookings calendar to your maintenance page made easy. Start taking appointments and improve your work.

Features

Fully supported and retina ready HTML/CSS layout

Full-screen background

Blur effect for backgrounds

Add your logo

Customizable titles, colors, fonts, icons, backgrounds, and headlines

User login (frontend)

503 Error on/off

Google Analytics support

Exclusions for selected pages (Maintenance mode)

WP Maintenance

The WP Maintenance plugin allows you to put your website on the waiting time for you to do maintenance or launch your website. Personalize pages, pictures, and countdowns, etc. The plugin is open-source, which means that it is completely free! Of course, you don’t get all the pro features, but this is good enough to create simple coming soon pages in WordPress. You can find the ‘WP Maintenance’ menu in the WordPress admin panel.

Features

Choose from various texts colors and fonts

Upload logo picture

Upload background picture or pattern

Slider

Countdown

Google Analytics ready

Social Networks ready

Insert for shorcode (Newletter or Contact form)

Enable “503 Service temporarily unavailable”

Conclusion

If you are running a business that solely depends on your site’s performance, you cannot afford to skip maintenance. With the help of various plugins, you can easily create “Coming Soon” pages, which will transform your whole site, and boost your SEO & SER. If you skip the maintenance part, search engines (Google, Yahoo) won’t be able to do their job, and your site will rank lower than its competition.

These plugins offer you endless designs to choose from and surely, they will suit your needs. A well-designed page makes your site look confident and worth paying attention to. As these plugins are easy to use, they are web developer’s first choice when it comes to web development and maintenance in general.

How To Make Your eCommerce Startup A Social Media Brand

Establishing a loyal customer base for an eCommerce business is extremely profitable. Given the low margins that many stores operate at, repeat customers help improve the ROI of your business. Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram not only help businesses reach out to their niche audience, they are also great platforms to build a brand that can translate into off-channel sales. Here is a simple how-to guide to help you achieve this.

Stand out from the crowd

Investing in creating a brand identity may seem like a frivolous expense in the early days. However, they are great assets to have on social media. Your followers on platforms like Facebook view your posts alongside posts made by other brands and people. In the absence of a strong brand identity, your content may fail to stand out.

Use brand colors that is unique and showcase your logos prominently. This improves engagement among followers. Not only does that help with direct sales, it also plays a role in another critical aspect of social media marketing. Websites like Facebook and Instagram tweak the visibility of a post based on engagement. Your brand identity may thus influence better reach among your social media followers.

Pick the right eCommerce platform

There are a number of different factors you look at while choosing an eCommerce platform. One of the factors must be to pick a tool that integrates well with third party plugins and services. Alternately, you should go with a provider who has a generous database of plugins and add-ons in their app marketplace.

In doing so, you may be in a position to pick a platform that seamlessly integrates with social media – including the ability to manage a Facebook Store or promote your products on your Instagram timeline. This contributes to higher visibility and consequently, better branding.

Deploy the right add-on tools

There are tons of social media tools targeted at startups that can help an eCommerce business with improving their social media visibility. There are tools like Facebook’s “Watch Party” that lets Groups watch videos simultaneously. FBStart is a global program that helps startups build and grow their business while EmbedReviews is a tool that lets you easily embed reviews on your Facebook Page. Invest your time on the right tools that can help you improve social media visibility and build a brand.

Invest in building viral traction

Securing shares and likes on your social media posts may be relatively easy once you have a large following on these channels. However, if you are an eCommerce store that is just starting out, gaining social media visibility may be challenging. In such cases, make use of viral marketing tools like ViralContentBee to earn likes and shares on your social media posts from trusted peers. This way, you build a following on your Pages that can build momentum and brand equity over the long-term.

ECommerce is a challenging industry as it is and building a brand amid cut-throat competition can be painful. However, with the strategies outlined here, you should be in a position to improve visibility and exposure to your business that increases brand equity on social media channels.