Regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA and frameworks such as IAB TCF have dramatically changed the digital privacy landscape — for the better. They set the standard for providing transparency and choices for how data is used and shared with third parties.
Today’s consumers are increasingly concerned with protecting their personal data. At the same time, they demand more personalized experiences. This creates a challenge for marketers, advertisers, and publishers to respect customers’ privacy while also capturing consent, driving opt-ins, and delivering compelling user experiences. The solution for companies to bring privacy and personalization together through transparency, choice, and trust? A consent management platform.
Right now, companies have an opportunity to embrace the new norm the digital privacy transformation has ushered in and, by doing so, give themselves a competitive edge. In fact, 70% of customers say trusting a brand is more important now than ever before. And this shows — for every dollar spent on consent and preference management, businesses see an average 40x return on investment.
When it comes to keeping up to date on global compliance, the most effective solution is to implement a consent management platform (CMP) to maintain your compliance coverage and reduce risk across all your websites, mobile applications, or even CTV applications. But beyond that, it’s important to understand how a consent management strategy helps companies build customer trust, comply with global privacy regulations and meet business goals.
With the right consent management platform, you can capture and manage consent on web, mobile, and CTV applications; uncover hidden trackers and cookies on websites; configure branded banners using unique consent approaches based on location; and measure and optimize consent rates for maximum opt-ins. In short, a CMP can support you to operationalize compliance while building customer trust and meeting your business goals.
In this e-book, you’ll learn about important regulatory requirements, the role the tech industry plays in consent management, and best practices for setting up and leveraging a consent management platform.
One of the most challenging aspects of providing SEO services is proving the value of your work to clients.
To address this problem, SE Ranking sat down with representatives of both digital agencies and businesses from the US, UK and Australia to discuss the main issues that occur in the communication between agencies and their clients and to find reasonable solutions for them.
This article highlights actionable insights and useful advice shared during the discussion.
“Why does it take so much time for SEO to show palpable results?!”
Clients often don’t fully understand all of the nuances and value of SEO. As a result, you will have a hard time finding an SEO contractor who hasn’t been asked multiple times why it takes so long to produce results.
Here are a few things you can do to relieve the anxiety of your clients and build trust from day one.
Set clear expectations. As soon as you start working with a client, let them know what results you can help them achieve. Give them a clear idea of what’s ahead by providing projections on what results they can see in 3, 6, 9, and 12 months.
Communicate with and educate clients. Make sure to spend enough time explaining to clients that SEO is a massive field with many moving parts where each part needs a different amount of time and effort to produce results. Besides talking to clients, build a good rapport with their in-house teams too, and make sure they’re also on the same page.
Provide interim results. Your clients must be able to see actual progress as soon as possible. Alleviate their concerns by showing specific progress that’s been made since you started optimizing their website.
For example, let’s take tech SEO. You can audit the website of your client using website audit tools, such as SE Ranking, to let them know how healthy their website is from a technical perspective.
Then, you can explain what issues and why are to focus in, say, the first month as well as during the first three months. That way, your clients will have a better picture of what to expect.
Plus, the Website Audit also contains detailed information on each issue in terms of why it’s important for SEO and how it can be fixed, allowing your clients to learn everything they need to better understand the urgency of fixing particular errors.
And as for providing interim results, you can compare several audit reports to show clients an overview of the progress that’s been made.
The feeling of having control over the situation is very important for your clients. That is why a bit of education supported by clear self-explanatory reports will help you explain the key things that matter for SEO and show the progress of your work.
“I don’t think these changes are necessary. We have more important things to do!”
Another issue that agencies often come across is that clients don’t implement all the necessary changes. For example, your client doesn’t see the need to create new content, update their landing pages, or build backlinks. So, what do you do?
Find a common point of agreement. Make your clients feel that you are on their side and want to achieve the same things they do. While it’s okay for SEO and business reps to see things differently on occasion, it’s important to articulate what the common objective is.
Provide stats and case studies to prove the validity of your point when it comes to dealing with big changes and investments. Your clients probably want to take the beaten path to success instead of being trailblazers.
Prove the value of suggested changes by providing examples from competitor websites. With a Competitive Research tool, you can gather the necessary data to show your clients how their website needs to be optimized in order to catch up or even outrank the competition.
Depending on your task, you can point out the keywords that competitors use, the amount of optimized content, the quality of their links, the technical performance of their websites, and so on.
Prioritize what clients need to implement. Clients are often too busy with their business and need your help to set their SEO priorities straight. To do this, score everything you need a client to do by its potential effectiveness and urgency, plus point out how much time each issue can take.
“I don’t understand what I am paying you for!”
Sometimes, clients don’t really understand or haven’t the slightest idea of what their SEO agency is currently working on. What this means is that they don’t know what they’re paying for, which can end up being harmful to both clients and agencies.
Here’s the advice our experts shared that will help your clients avoid having any question marks.
Be extra transparent and honest. Make sure to be as open as possible in your communication with clients.Present them with a detailed plan of action and hold regular sync-up meetings to report on what’s been done and what you are planning to do next. Communicating KPI progress reports also helps achieve this.
Talk about your own mistakes. If the strategy you’ve opted for didn’t work, don’t try to cover it up with some vague conclusions. Instead, be open and frank, and have a plan of recovery ready to make up for the losses in the future.
To avoid your clients guessing what they are paying you for, take advantage of a Report Builder tool to send out regular reports to your clients. Depending on how often they want reports, you can send out reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis or on-demand.
Sit with your client and agree on the data points that must be included in the report and how often they want to get such reports. You can design and personalize the report however you want and add all the necessary data points to make sure the client understands exactly where you are and where you are going.
“I’m overwhelmed with the technical details you are sharing with me and don’t understand why it matters for my business!”
In addition to providing SEO reports full of easy-to-read charts and tables, you must make sure your clients, as well as their teammates, understand all of the data they see. So, besides focusing on SEO progress, provide additional information to let your clients know how each aspect of your work correlates to the business goals of your clients.
Let’s take a look at some actionable tips you can benefit from.
Set up tracking straight away. Don’t delay getting access to your clients’ analytics and verify that you are tracking every part of the client website. That way, you will be able to make data-informed decisions along the way. Keep in mind that linking SEO deliverables to business parameters is key.
If you want to give your clients the opportunity to check in on specific aspects of your work whenever they choose to, you can also share a guest link with them. Sharing a guest link facilitates the work of SEO agencies.
Provide context to your reports. Don’t just throw raw SEO data at your clients, but provide detailed explanations on what exactly you’ve been working on, why it’s important, what were the objectives, and which parameters indicate the results. Adding comments to each report section and tailoring your reports to each specific client can go a long way.
Know who you’re talking to. Prepare different reports for the CEO of a client company and for that company’s SEO or marketing team. After all, they have different levels of engagement in the actual SEO process and need different levels of digitalization in the information you can provide. So, before putting together a report, find out whose table it’s going to end up on.
Remember that smart reporting is not just about sending out visually stunning graphs to your clients, but about providing enough relevant data along with all of the necessary context.
Final thoughts
It’s absolutely critical that you and your clients realize that you are playing for the same team and that you are both invested in the growth of the client’s business. So keeping your clients as well-informed as possible is key.
Dedicate the time to make sure your clients understand what you are planning to do or are already doing to their website. That way, you won’t have any unpleasant surprises further down the road. Also, be transparent and honest in your communication so that the client doesn’t just know when everything is going according to plan but when things fall through as well.
While there are multiple ways of communicating with your clients, it’s best to manage it all from one central location like SE Ranking which gives you all of the SEO data you need to carry out your work as well as the tools you need to keep your clients fully informed.
For a couple of years, SEO PowerSuite has been working on enhancing its backlink index, used by the SEO PowerSuite backlink API and the SEO SpyGlass backlink tool. In June 2021, a huge infrastructure update went live, increasing our crawling speed by three times.
To better understand our progress and see where we stand, we’ve decided to run an in-house analysis of the top backlink database providers — Ahrefs, SEO PowerSuite, Semrush, and Majestic.
We’ve described all the major findings of the comparison here, but more details can be found on this page.
Disclaimer: For this study, we’d purchased the API keys from each of the compared providers ($6,200 worth in total). In this report, SEO PowerSuite enclosed the raw data files for your reference. To verify that the data hasn’t been modified in any way, you can reach out to the mentioned companies and purchase similar stats from them to run your own comparison.
The methodology
To run this analysis, we decided to use the Majestic Million dataset.
Why this dataset? The Majestic Million is a list of the top million sites on the web, based on the number of citations (aka links) from other websites. That’s why each of these domains should have sufficient backlinks to make the comparison statistically significant.
So, we have taken this dataset and analyzed the results from the following backlink index providers:
The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $899.
Ahrefs
According to the official website, Ahrefs has 3.2 trillion external backlinks and 193 million indexed domains.
The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $2,000.
Semrush
Semrush contends to have over 43 trillion backlinks and 1.6 billion domains in its index.
The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $2,500.
Majestic
We haven’t found any information on the number of backlinks and referring domains in the Majestic backlink index. The only stats that are available on the official website are that the Fresh backlink index has 434 billion URLs crawled and over 1 trillion URLs found.
The cost of checking backlink stats for 1M domains: $800.
After setting up the accounts and checking the data for one million domains, we then calculated
the total wins by referring domains;
the total wins by backlinks;
how often each of the vendors occupied the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th position in the comparison (for links and referring domains);
First off, we looked at the number of referring domains returned by every provider, the metric that lets us evaluate the backlink index coverage.
When it came to the largest number of reported backlink domains, SEO PowerSuite led the way with 44.4% wins:
The backlink index by Semrush took second place with over 36.3% wins. Ahrefs received 14% wins, and Majestic – 5.3%.
Please keep in mind that the graph above highlights the number of wins. Here’s how the quantity of reported referring domains looked in absolute numbers:
What’s the difference between wins and absolute numbers? Here’s a simple example – let’s imagine we’ve checked how many referring domains each of the analyzed databases reported for the same URL:
SEO PowerSuite: 100 referring domains
Ahrefs: 101 referring domains
Semrush: 99 referring domains
Majestic: 100 referring domains
In this case, Ahrefs would receive the “point” for their “win.” And then, we repeat the process for the remaining 999,999 domains.
The winner in the referring domains category: SEO PowerSuite
Who wins by the number of backlinks?
For the total number of backlinks, Semrush came out on top with 47.65% wins. It was followed by SEO PowerSuite (21.38% wins) and Ahrefs (16.25% wins). Majestic showed the lowest number of backlinks in this run and gained 14.73% wins.
Total backlinks in absolute numbers:
The winner in the referring backlinks category: Semrush
How positions in the comparison were distributed
Additionally, we have calculated how often each of the vendors occupied the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th position in the comparison.
This is how the positions were distributed for referring domains:
And this is how the vendors scored for backlinks:
Important factors to keep in mind
All tests have limitations, and this one’s no exception. It’s quite challenging to run research of backlink databases and draw a totally unbiased conclusion.
Below, we’ve outlined a few important aspects that you should keep in mind when you read any backlink index study.
Different types of backlink indexes
Every backlink index is unique since every company uses a different approach to crawl, store and count backlink data. So, with any backlink index comparison, you have this big flaw of analyzing databases that are inherently not equal.
In our research, we’ve accessed the data via APIs that allegedly return the results from the following indexes:
Ahrefs Live index (all links that are currently live, a link is considered live until recrawled and found otherwise)
Semrush Fresh index (all links crawled in the last six months)
Majestic Fresh index (all links crawled in the last four months)
SEO PowerSuite backlink index includes all live links (similarly to Ahrefs, a link in our index is considered live until we recrawl it and see otherwise).
Unlike Ahrefs and SEO PowerSuite, Semrush and Majestic return both live and dead backlinks, and in most cases, it can make a huge difference in the backlink numbers.
For example, if you check the backlink profile of Amazon.com in Semrush, you’ll see that this domain has a total of over 18 billion backlinks (that’s what you get via the API as well). But if you switch to the Active links mode, you’ll see only seven million links:
Although Ahrefs index includes links that are currently live, you can still spot some inconsistencies. Ahrefs API returns 114 million backlinks for Ahrefs.com, this is close to the number we see in the Summary dashboard, but if we switch to the backlinks report, we’ll see just 35 million links.
There’s probably a good explanation behind this mismatch (low-quality or lost backlinks filtered out?), but it brings us to two important conclusions:
We can’t be 100% certain about the type of backlink index used by APIs.
We can’t eliminate this type of discrepancy from our research.
Different ways to count links
Yet another problem you’ll face when comparing the backlink indexes is that links are counted differently. For instance, you may calculate duplicate links on a page as a single link or as multiple links. The same’s true for redirects, canonicals, etc. All these things will affect the total calculation, and that’s why we have to take every backlink index comparison with a grain of salt.
Different ways to record IPs
Similarly, there’s a question of how backlink API providers record IP data. Most providers count only the most recent IP they’ve found for the backlink, which means they have one IP recorded per domain. But Semrush seems to record every IP they’ve detected in the last six months; thus, they may have a few dozen IPs recorded for the same domain.
The IP/subnet stats are included in the raw data file, and initially, we planned to use these numbers in the report. However, when we noticed this crucial difference in IP calculation, we considered that these stats could not be used to draw meaningful conclusions.
Different understanding of referring domains
A domain is a domain, right? Our analysis shows that things are a bit more complicated when we talk about backlink indexes.
According to Verisign, “the second quarter of 2021 closed with 367.3 million domains across all top-level domains.”
And while many data providers have a matching number of domains indexed (Ahrefs – 193.4 million referring domains, SEO PowerSuite – 264 million domains), Semrush claims to have a very dubious 1.6 billion referring domains.
Hence, what Semrush counts as a unique domain seem to be different from the widely accepted notion.
To sum it up, there’s probably no winner or loser in this type of comparison, due to all the mentioned factors and varying approaches.
But we believe that the more experiments we run, the more transparent backlink index providers will become about their data in the long run. And that means that enterprise and API users will better understand what they are paying for.
If you’re interested in testing our backlink API for your SEO services and apps (or running your own independent analysis), please drop us a note to api@link-assistant.com, and we’ll set you up with a free trial.
“We’re all in this together.” Last year, this statement became the universal motto of brands everywhere, as people learned to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances brought on by the global pandemic.
As the world embraces more in-person interactions, things aren’t going to just go back to the way they were before. The great challenge for brands is how to reimagine their approach to customer experience by connecting every point of interaction, uniting all teams across the business and merging the trust gap between brands and consumers.
To help marketers understand how to bring these pieces together, Acquia surveyed 8,000 consumers and 800 marketers across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. Our research explored shifts in both marketer and consumer expectations around customer experience and privacy. Now we’re sharing key lessons we learned from this research in our global report: Deliver a Modern Digital CX: A Guide for Marketing Innovators.
1. Create more content without sacrificing brand consistency
With live events, trade shows and physical storefronts unavailable, business leaders needed to stay engaged with their audience by expanding their content efforts to new channels and formats.
Our CX Trends Report found that 49% of global marketers have created more content for customer engagement in 2021 compared to previous years to fulfill new customer behaviors. But as businesses introduce dozens of new content channels into the mix, maintaining brand consistency and a clear, overarching brand message becomes more challenging.
Without strong brand governance and oversight into all the content you’re publishing, the customer journey can become confusing and frustrating, sending your audience off to a competitor.
2. Empower marketer and developer collaboration with low-code tools
Meeting the rising demand for new, more personalized content requires organizations to eliminate barriers between internal teams and take a holistic approach to creating digital experiences.
Our survey found that 83% of marketers still struggle to create content that can be rapidly released across all their digital platforms. If businesses want to reach maximum efficiency and get new experiences to market faster, they need to use their teams to their full potential.
Today, 72% of marketers require help from technologists to create digital customer experiences. Rather than waiting for developers to fulfill requests, modern marketers need tools that will put them in control of shaping the customer experience from end to end.
3. Bridge the gap between customer privacy and personalization with first-party data
One of the greatest points of disconnect our CX Trends Report revealed was in marketers’ and consumers’ perceptions of how organizations use individuals’ personal data.
Marketing teams need customer data to create personalized experiences, but customers want to have meaningful experiences with a brand before providing them with this information. This is the privacy and personalization paradox. 54% of global marketers found that increasing personalization efforts led to more engagement with consumers.
So how can we bridge the customer trust gap? Our survey points to first-party data as the secret weapon that will keep companies successful in the long term.
While the future of digital transformation is often unpredictable, the customer experiences your brand offers should feel seamless and trustworthy. Learn more about how today’s marketers create more unified customer experiences in our new global report, Deliver a Modern Digital CX: A Guide for Marketing Innovators.
Marketers and business leaders came together at Zeta Live ‘21 to discuss the evolution to a digital-first world and trending topics on the future of marketing. From NFTs to first-party data to the Metaverse and everything in between, here are some of the conference’s most engaging themes that marketers can’t afford to ignore.
1. E-commerce enters the experience era
The last 20 years of ecommerce and the technological progress made within the industry have offered solely static experiences for consumers. Enter the “experience era.”
The experience era enables marketers to give consumers the branded experience they crave. In the What Comes Next for Social Commerce session, industry experts from Verishop, Snap Inc., ThirdLove, and Yahoo! explain what’s next, with emphasis on one-to-one interactivity, sustainability, the Metaverse, and livestream selling being the holy grails.
2. Web 3.0, NFTs, and blockchain technology go mainstream
Web 3.0 represents the next iteration of the evolution of the internet as we know it. Built upon the core concepts of decentralization, openness, and great user utility, the real value coming out of web 3.0 will be blockchain.
At the center of this blockchain technology now sits non-fungible tokens, better referred to as NFTs. In our session 2022: The Year NFTS Take the Mainstage, industry leaders from TIME and CNBC weighed in on the ability of crypto technology to create a new type of relationship with consumers through exclusivity. Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, supported this positioning in his session on Sports Marketing in The Digital Era, sharing why he is launching NFT trading cards to strengthen the fan experience. While we’re still a few years out, NFTs and other Web 2.0 products platforms will inevitably disrupt the MarTech industry as we know it.
3. The next wave of customer engagement in the Metaverse
Despite an uptick in big news surrounding the Metaverse lately, the reality is that this shift to virtual experiences won’t come overnight. Bob Sherwin, CMO of Wayfair, noted in the session on The Future of Commerce & Creativity that the home goods brand has offered these experiences to its shoppers for years. Yet, the question of ‘when do consumers want to engage with it?’ still remains.
4. Identity plays a pivotal role in the digital economy
Identity-based marketing – especially through the use of first-party data – has become increasingly important as consumers accelerate their transition to digital for everyday conveniences, transactions, and social interactions.
In the session Navigating the Golden Age of Identity, marketing experts from Zeta, LiveRamp, AWS Data Exchange, and T-Mobile unpacked the significance of identity being the only thing that unifies the customer experience.
5. CDPs become the marketer’s North Star
Whether it’s added complexity that slows down processes, or siloed processes that lead to mono-channels, marketers are breaking through these roadblocks by implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to power their martech stack. In the session Technology Bets for the Modern Marketer, industry experts from Carter’s, Email Connect, Healthgrades, and SIMON weigh in on the importance of having such a CDP platform at the core of their marketing infrastructure.
Access all the Zeta Live ‘21 session recordings until December 17th by navigating to the “theater” area of our virtual experience here.
Content has become the primary tool we use to create a dialogue with our prospects and cultivate online customer relationships. That content must be relevant, valuable and interactive to win their attention and draw them into a conversation. In reality, content has always been the best way to do marketing.
But with the overabundance of information overloading your customers and prospects, it becomes difficult for them to find a trustworthy source of information. The solution is more than positioning your brand as the expert in your niche by creating content and reaping the rewards. It is optimizing your content for organic, paid traffic and site search that converts.
By exploring the relationship between SEO, SEM and on-site search, you can begin to optimize the experience your prospects get when they arrive at your site.
Learn more by watching Coveo’s Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Rahal’s informative SMX Next session for tips and tricks on creating an onsite search strategy that helps you better understand each visit and optimize every interaction.
After this session, you’ll be able to educate your teams about the value of onsite search and why you need to invest now; benchmark your site search and learn what capabilities are key to boosting conversion; rethink how you design navigation and map user journeys with artificial intelligence and start unifying your search and web analytics data to understand customer intent better.
Ensure that every visitor you get through organic and paid search finds what they’re looking for. Sign up here to learn more about on-site search.
Email is a powerful marketing tool. And email with signatures can be a great way to add a personal touch. If you’re new to email signatures, you may be wondering what they are and why your brand needs them. And if you use corporate signatures already, you may not be getting the most out of them right now. In this post, you’ll get the lowdown on email signatures and what you stand to gain by including this highly underestimated but powerful solution in your marketing mix.
Email signatures are not new
Email signatures have been around for a long time, and businesses and individuals widely use them. Professional email signature makes your email messages look formal and helps you build trust with your clients.
Email signature may seem old, but it comes with a lot of exciting benefits. Social media is a great option for many B2B marketers. However, it is not a replacement for the email marketing channel.
There are three times more individual email accounts than both Facebook and Twitter social media profiles combined. That’s not all. You are six times more likely to get a click-through from email than on Twitter.
Every brand should therefore leverage email signature solutions to increase the effectiveness of their business communication.
Do you use email signatures and know the many benefits that come with them? Here are ten important reasons you should give professional email signatures more attention than ever before.
1. Get the best out of every email you send out
Email, as a one-to-one communication channel, remains popular with individuals, brands and employees simply because:
It works and is still highly relevant!
It’s easy to use, accessible and highly effective when sending messages from one person to the other.
Email has long been a go-to one-on-one communication channel for individuals and will continue to be so in future years.
Professional email signatures help you make the most out of every email you send out. Your recipients would sometimes forward or share the message you send to them.
Think of how many people your employees reach out to daily. Leveraging email signature means you add more avenues to drive more sales and increase revenue for your business.
2. Make the first good and professional impression
Your email signature is the first opportunity you have to make the first good impression as a business.
Including a signature in every outgoing message makes you stand out from the crowd.
It makes your messages look more professional than when you don’t have one.
Email signatures make it possible to use personalized, targeted and non-intrusive banners to promote your brand and products.
Your email signature is a branding tool that can make a long-lasting impression. It’s a great place to put your company logo, website, social media handles, blog URL or even an appointment scheduler link to make it easier for your customers to connect with you.
3. Boost your brand identity and awareness
Each time you send an email without including an email signature, you throw away opportunities to promote your brand to a cold and warm audience via corporate signature.
Your email signature works like your business card. Instead of handing over your card around, your professional signature would do the job of introducing you and how people can reach you. Isn’t that an exciting feature you should include to position your brand for better visibility?
The signature also establishes your credibility and increases your value before the recipients.
You can choose to keep your email signature simple by adding only the company logo and a link to your business website. You can also add more information, such as new offers or upcoming events. Your email signatures keep your recipients informed and let prospects know what to do next.
4. Higher response rate
The number of email users will grow to 4.3 billion by 2023. That’s over half of the world population. Email helps you reach people anywhere they are at any time of the day. One-to-one email communication has proven to be the best over the years. It delivers optimal results and gives a higher delivery rate.
Consequently, you cannot afford to have your employees use different email signatures.
Create customized email signatures to promote your brand’s values.
Professional and consistent email signatures will help you cement the trust of your customers.
As communication becomes increasingly digital, the email signature remains an essential tool for any business. Corporate signature gives people you’ve reached out to unfettered access to your contact details.
Email signature provides you with a unique opportunity to include your primary contact details, such as your phone number, at the end of your message.
If your contact needs to reach you quickly, a reference to the previous email will provide the information necessary without unnecessary delay.
You can also include your social media handles so that your contact will have more avenues of reaching out to you.
6. Generate new leads to your business
You can quickly scale your email outreach by sharing engaging email banners and non-salesy marketing links.
An email signature provides a great way to quickly inform the reader about your company, contact information, and mission statement.
It gives you a chance to promote other business ventures and to generate new leads.
7. Improve your email marketing campaigns
The professional email signature is a simple but powerful tool that any business can use to improve its marketing, advertising and branding efforts.
It is an integral part of your email as it gives a complete picture of your business.
With the help of professional email signatures, you can send more targeted one-on-one email messages to employees and clients.
For instance, you can customize your email signatures to suit the needs of the recipient.
Email signature solutions allow you to have a variety of signatures that you can choose from depending on what you want your recipients to know.
Email signature is a simple but a smart way to keep your brand name in your customers’ minds.
Business signatures will not only make your internal communication formal, but they also open many opportunities for personalization among the employees and management.
You can use an email signature to customize your closing by including a personalized link at the bottom of your email.
The solution is brilliant and makes it easy for any organization to boost employee engagement, advertise new roles, share internal surveys or suggestion boxes, and distribute specific banners internally.
9. Test and measure the performance of your email signatures
It may never cross your mind that you can test new creative with your corporate email signature. But that is another golden opportunity for you!
An email signature marketing platform provides a fantastic tool and easy way for brand and marketing managers to quickly and easily test new creative, such as CTA, theme, banner, and much more.
Like every other digital marketing channel, you can track the metrics and KPIs of your corporate emails.
10. Build brand loyalty and engagement with every email you send
When people hand over their email to you, they give you access to their email inbox so you can exchange messages and vital information.
Email is the top preference for users in the United States.
Email is undoubtedly the most personal medium and access you can ever have to build brand loyalty and engagement.
The email signature should be every marketer’s secret weapon to strengthen brand image and increase brand visibility. It is a highly effective and non-invasive way to engage prospects and customers but is usually under-utilized by most marketers and businesses.
Stop losing opportunities to market your brand
Are you a marketer or a brand that is yet to start harnessing the power of email signatures? It is high time you tapped the enormous benefits of corporate email signatures.
Take advantage of professional email signature solutions to get your branding and marketing message before a target audience who has permitted you to message them.
You have nothing to lose by including your email signature in every outbound email message. But your business has a lot more to gain by strategically positioning your brand for better conversions and engagements.
Urgent requests make it hard to prioritize the most strategic jobs. But when you standardize and centralize the entire process, you can make data-driven resource decisions and ensure the most strategic work gets done first.
In this webinar, join Adobe Workfront as they share six proven methods to handle the onslaught of marketing requests, prioritize the most important work, and increase your value to make 2022 your best year yet.
Marketing functions are at a turning point in their evolution. In the wake of recent challenges, CMOs and leaders face an imperative: reenvision operations and brand experiences to drive growth without more resources or taking more risk to move faster.
Consistency in providing an on-brand customer experience is critical to scale. Delivering consistent brand experiences (e.g., unchanging messaging, values, and language across channels and the customer lifecycle) drives engagement and growth. Consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by as much as 33%. Inconsistent and off-brand experiences do just the opposite: nearly three-fourths (73%) of consumers would go so far as to switch brands if they don’t receive a consistent experience.
With remote teams and customers engaging in more ways, CMOs can no longer ignore the impact of unwanted variability in the brand experience that their company delivers. But many CMOs feel out of control over all the many places that audiences engage with their brand, making it difficult to maintain a consistent experience.
Let’s look at the perennial challenge of living the brand—and the opportunity that awaits if CMOs rethink their approach to the brand experience.
Why meeting new demands requires a consistent brand experience
Consistency underpins the ability to meet new customer behaviors and demands. Most consumers (75%) now expect consistent experiences across multiple channels. But the focus on omnichannel and influx of new digital channels have opened up more opportunities for disconnected, off-brand content and communications. CMOs need to bridge these gaps to overcome conflicting interactions that slow down teams and erode the brand experience.
On top of customer demands, remote and hybrid work isn’t going away, and the shift to distributed teams makes it more challenging for brands to present a united front. According to IDC, “intelligent digital workspaces” that deliver a single integrated experience to employees—no matter the location—are becoming an expected way of working. With dispersed environments as the norm, CMOs need to find new ways to keep teams in sync so they aren’t weighed down trying to manage brand positioning across touchpoints.
Meeting these new realities starts with a new, scalable approach to the brand experience. By equipping teams to stay on-brand no matter the channel or context, CMOs can drive up customer and employee engagement while positioning the business for growth.
Driving consistent, scalable brand experiences with technology
Traditional approaches to improving the brand experience—like employee training, manual tools, and static guidelines—don’t sufficiently scale and contribute to digital overload among teams. CMOs and teams don’t need more systems to manage; they need ways to enhance existing content and communications that don’t require additional resources.
AI-powered solutions are now available that provide automated ways to keep teams on-brand. Yet surprisingly, Gartner reports only 17% of digital marketing leaders use AI and machine learning. For example, platform-agnostic tools like digital writing assistants and living style guides offer real-time guidance to teams around preferred language, brand names, terminology style, and even tone. By integrating into all the places employees and audiences already engage, these types of tools improve productivity while delivering higher-quality team and customer experiences.
At the same time, CMOs must avoid using automation in a way that impacts the human side of their brand. The focus should be on solutions that fit what IDC calls the “digital coworker”—technology that expands or enhances human capabilities, not detracts from them. The right solutions help teams augment their work across systems and strengthen their own abilities in the process, allowing CMOs to improve the brand experience in a more productive and human-centric way.
Case study: Building customer trust with a unified brand voice
Let’s look at a real-world example from HackerOne, the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform committed to mitigating cyber risk. HackerOne’s marketing team needed to present a unified brand voice across two very different but equally critical audiences: enterprise businesses and the hacker community. By deploying AI-powered writing assistance from Grammarly Business, the team can maintain a consistent brand identity and experience across every touchpoint—no matter the writer or channel.
With access to in-line writing suggestions, tone detection, and automated style guides, HackerOne’s entire team can easily follow brand language and guidelines, avoid confusing jargon, and balance the right voice and tone across audiences. The solution updates dynamically and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, making it easy to push updates on branded terms and preferences to the entire company in minutes. As a result, HackerOne’s metrics show that communication as a whole improved by 66%—measured across quality pillars such as clarity, correctness, delivery, and engagement.
“HackerOne’s brand must speak to two very distinct audiences: the security teams that benefit from our products and services and the hackers that make up our hacker community,” said Tim Matthews, CMO at HackerOne. “Real-time writing assistance from Grammarly Business lets us deliver higher-quality marketing content for our customers while bringing our brand voice to life consistently across channels. This reduces our time spent reviewing written work and managing our brand identity, improving productivity in a scalable way so we can focus on higher-order growth initiatives.”
The bottom line
As we look ahead, CMOs have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the brand experience in a way that boosts both productivity and engagement. With a foundation of consistency across the board, they can ensure exceptional customer experiences, free up time to focus on growth, and build resilience that leads to long-term results.
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For more about the importance of a consistent brand experience in driving marketing outcomes, visit www.grammarly.com/business.
This article was written by Dorian Stone, Head of Organizations Revenue, Grammarly.
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