Auteur: Magdalena Georgieva

This is an excerpt from our new ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Using Surveys in Your Marketing, created in collaboration with SurveyMonkey. To learn all about launching successful marketing surveys, download your free copy today.

As they say on Family Feud, “Survey says …” Well, when it comes to leveraging surveys in marketing, they can say quite a lot of helpful things.

Surveys are strong feedback mechanisms that can help marketers draw valuable insights from their communities — which can then be used to achieve better marketing results. But when building online surveys, it’s important for marketers to understand that the way you structure and pose your survey questions is critical to the overall survey’s success.

The formatting, design, clarity, and wording of your questions can have a huge impact on both the response rate and the accuracy of your survey results, so getting them right is key to a successful marketing survey. Here are some general best practices and recommendations every marketer should follow when it comes to building effective marketing surveys.

1) Make it Flow

Make sure your survey questions flow in a logical order. Begin with a brief introduction that motivates survey respondents to complete the survey. Start with questions that are broad, and then continue with those narrower in scope. For instance, if we were to evaluate how useful this blog post is to our audience in comparison to other blog posts, we might start with a question like, “How often do you read HubSpot’s blog?” Then we’d get into more nitty-gritty, specific questions.

Collect demographic data and ask any sensitive questions at the end of your survey, unless you are using that information to filter survey participants. Also, if you are asking for contact information, request that information last.

2) Keep it Short & Simple

Keep your questions simple, straightforward, and concise. This will make it easier for your survey respondents to understand exactly what you’re asking. It will also make it much easier for you to accurately analyze your data.

Keep it simple in terms of survey length is important, too. The folks over at SurveyMonkey have found that the more questions a survey has, the lower its completion rate. For each extra 35 questions, the completion rate goes down by a whole percentage point. So, don’t ask too many questions!

3) Avoid Double-Barreled Questions

Did you enjoy our ebook about surveys that you found on our website? This is an example of a double-barreled question. It has two parts to it: 1) Did you enjoy our ebook? and 2) Did you find the ebook on our website? This means that a respondent could answer positively to one part and negatively to the other. It’s also wicked confusing.

Such double-barreled questions don’t belong in surveys. Instead, go with closed-ended or open-ended survey questions. Closed-ended questions prompt specific choices (e.g., yes or no). These types of questions are great for collating and analytical purposes, which is why multiple choice questions are often a great choice for marketing surveys. Open-ended questions are effective at providing qualitative information and insights. These should be use when you want survey respondents to describe something in their own, unbiased words.

4) Randomize the Order of Questions

But you just told me earlier to “make it flow!” Stay with us here. While a general, logical, overall flow is important, the order that specific questions appear in your survey can directly impact the responses you gather. Priming is the reason behind this dynamic: respondents are primed to think about one issue while answering the subsequent question.

Another reason the order in which you pose survey questions matters is that survey takers have a tendency to want to appear consistent in their responses. For instance, if you ask a person to put together a controversial event announcement, then ask how much they enjoy event marketing, they may be inclined to rate their interest lower if they struggled to write it.

Response options from previous questions can also impact people’s reaction to later questions. For instance, if you ask respondents which of the following marketing channels (email, blog, or social media) they find most effective, and then ask them to rank the success rate of all their marketing channels, you may inadvertently focus their attention on just those suggested options from the previous question.

How can you avoid these types of question order-related effects in your own surveys? One option is to randomize your questions so respondents don’t all answer your survey questions in the same order.

5) Be Specific

A question like, “How happy are you with the quality of information on our blog?” might seems pretty standard at first glance. But what exactly does happy mean? What about quality? In this context, it would be more helpful to break up the question so you can be as specific as possible, as in:

• “How helpful are our blog posts?”
• “How compelling is the information we share on our blog?”

In this revision, helpful and compelling are two distinct ideas that will help you to better focus on actionable next steps.

6) Incorporate Scale Points

Another great way to improve the accuracy of survey respondents’ answers is to incorporate scale points. For example, let’s say we asked our readers to rate how helpful this blog post is. It may be the most helpful (or the least helpful blog post) you’ve ever read, but chances are there are readers who fall somewhere in between — extremely helpful, very helpful, somewhat helpful, slightly helpful, not at all helpful.

If you decide to use rating scales (e.g. from one to five), keep the numbering consistent throughout the survey. Use the same number of points on your scale, and make sure meanings of high and low stay consistent throughout.

Fully labeled scales are an added measure of stability that will help your respondents focus and thus help you make better decisions based on the feedback provided. Also, if you decide to use numbers as your scale points (e.g. “rank this blog post on a scale from one to five”), you need to be clear and descriptive about what one and five each represent.

7) Consider Offering Rewards

A large number of survey researchers try to boost response rates by offering some sort of reward for completing a survey.

Academic research suggests that offering prizes can initially increase completion rates. There’s a downside to this, however. Once you reward people for a task, they expect to be rewarded every time and often won’t complete the same task in the future without a reward.

In this context, rewards can be effective for one-time surveys but less beneficial if you plan to interview the same people in the future.

Lastly, some psychology literature shows that incentives, especially cash, can reduce people’s intrinsic motivation to do things, resulting in more careless responses, which can lead to poorer quality data.

8) Test Your Survey

Once you’ve created your questions and planned your survey, take that final step to ensure that everything is working as designed. Be sure to test your survey with a few members of your target audience and/or co–workers to find glitches and unexpected question interpretations.

Ready to learn more about building and launching successful marketing surveys? Download your copy of The Ultimate Guide to Using Surveys in Your Marketing.

Image Credit: dno1967b

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In our Introduction to Email Marketing ebook, we discussed that there are several different types of marketing emails you can send to your contacts. Depending on what your business goals and needs are, you could be sending newsletters, digests, dedicated sends, behavior-driven emails, lead nurturing emails, and more. All of these different options have their purposes, yet many marketers overlook a particular type of email that tends to get a lot of traction — the transactional email. That’s right: Transactional emails are one of the most effective types of communication to engage your prospects with.

Transactional emails are the messages you receive from ecommerce sites like Amazon.com that confirm your order and provide shipment information and other details. These messages get triggered by a specific action your contacts have taken and can also be used to inform contacts how to complete that particular action. For instance, if you were to sign up for a webinar, you’d complete a form and then receive a transactional email, which would provide you with the relevant login information in order to join.

 

So what’s the marketer’s equivalent to transactional emails? Thank-you emails, or the automated messages triggered when visitors convert on your landing pages!

The Benefits of Thank-You Emails

Recipients anticipate transactional/thank-you emails because they help them complete an action. It’s the main reason why recipients open and click on them. And as a marketer, you can easily take advantage of this dynamic by including highly customized calls-to-action in your thank-you emails to leverage the fact that the lead is fresh and already actively engaged with your brand.

Thank-you emails are effective for two main reasons:

1. They place your content directly in the contact’s inbox. So even if he or she clicks away from the thank-you page they’re redirected to after completing your conversion form, they can still search their inbox and find the information they need to redeem the offer, such as the ebook’s download link, webinar login information, etc.   
2. People will often share your content by forwarding it via email, so thank-you emails give you yet another opportunity to extend the reach of your content to a brand new audience.

An example of a simple thank-you email:

 

 

As you can see, the thank-you email above includes two links: The first one links to the thank-you page for the offer advertised on the landing page, where the user can access the ebook; and the second one links to a secondary conversion opportunity of higher commitment and value, enabling us to move the lead further along in the sales cycle.

Thank-You Emails Twice as Engaging as General Marketing Emails

While we can easily theorize that thank-you emails would be beneficial to a company’s marketing mix, we at HubSpot wanted to analyze just how engaging they are in practice. To understand how effective thank-you emails are compared to other email sends, we decided to compare them to another type of email we commonly send: dedicated marketing emails, sent on an one-off basis.

Using HubSpot’s Email tool we dug into the open and clickthrough rates (CTR) of our thank-you emails. We took a look at 21 of our existing thank-you emails and found that, on average, they generated a 42% open rate and a 14% CTR.

For comparison, we then looked at the generic marketing emails we’ve sent to one group of our buyer personas. The sample used here was larger — 131 emails — which, on average, generated a 12% open rate and a 6% CTR. In other words, the simple, automated kickback thank-you emails generated twice the engagement of one-off, dedicated marketing emails. What’s even better — they tend to take half the time to create!

Marketing Takeaways

Now that we’ve covered some of the fundamentals of thank-you emails and their effectiveness, here are some marketing tips you should start applying to your marketing today.

1) Use Simple Thank-You Emails

Starting with the obvious, if you aren’t yet using kickback thank-you emails that get triggered after prospects convert on your landing pages, start implementing them sooner rather than later. To take this a step further, you can even make these emails the first part of a more complex lead nurturing workflow so you can control what other communication that contact receives, continuing to nurture them over time and move them through your sales and marketing funnel. (Note: For HubSpot customers, these can both easily be set up using HubSpot’s Landing Pages and Workflows tools.)

 

2) Optimize Your Thank-You Emails

This part is key. Make sure you’re also optimizing your kickback emails to encourage secondary conversions. In other words, include calls-to-action (CTAs) for high-value marketing offers that will move your leads further along in the sales cycle, such as a consultation with your sales team or a free trial of your product.

If you’re already adding secondary calls-to-action to your thank-you emails (well done!), take your skills to the next level by implementing Smart CTAs that adapt to your individual email recipients. Smart CTAs are dynamic CTAs that automatically change based on the person viewing them, creating much more targeted, segmented, and effective email marketing. To learn more about how to implement Smart CTAs, check out our ultimate guide to using dynamic, personalized CTAs.

3) Make Your Thank-You Emails Social Media-Friendly

As we already mentioned, one of the key benefits of emails is that they get forwarded and shared, helping your content reach a brand new audience. Encourage this sharing of your emails by making it extremely easy for recipients to share your email content with their networks. Include social media sharing buttons/links and language that invites your contacts to forward the message to others.

Have you been using thank-you emails in your marketing? What has your experience been with this type of communication?

Image Credit: Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix)

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Animated GIFs. Think they’re just for internet geeks? Think again.

The fact is, animated GIFs have dominated the world of online memes for some time now, going viral across social media and blogs many times over. And when something’s around long enough and gets enough attention, you can bet marketers will start experimenting with ways to turn them into a new tool to add to their marketing toolkit.

If you’re still not sure what the heck we’re talking about when we say “animated GIF,” it’s really just a series of still image frames coded into a single file. Or if you’re more of a visual learner, here’s an example of one we whipped up for this blog post:

Now you know what we’re talking about! Since we’re all on the same page, let’s talk a little about the history of the animated GIF, how you can make one of your own (it’s easy, promise!), and how you can implement them in your inbound marketing.

A Brief Introduction to the Animated GIF

The original GIF specification was introduced by CompuServe in 1987. According to Patrick Davison of MemeFactory, some of the first popular animated GIFs were simple things like flames and waving flags. But in the 2000s, with the growing division between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the animated GIF started to lose its initial popularity. “The idea of using GIFs became way less fashionable,” explains Davison.

A few years after the evolution of Web 2.0, however, people started realizing that they could use animated GIFs in a lot of different ways and feature them in a lot more places, like blogs and social networks. The tools for GIF creation, Davison explains, also became more widespread. Thanks to this fortunate combination of circumstances, the animated GIF has now experienced a powerful comeback in the ecosystem of online content.

The Benefits of Animated GIFs for Marketers

Alright, so animated GIFs are cute and cool … but does that mean they can be used in marketing? Absolutely! They actually present a few key benefits to marketers:

Animated GIFs are easy to consume.

In the attention economy, it’s tough to capture someone’s attention for more than a minute or two. That’s why online video is such a challenging medium to master. Yet, we all know that video has the power to tell a story in a different way than still content can … which is why the animated GIF presents the perfect middle ground!

Think of the animated GIF as a hybrid between a still image and a video. Photographer Jamie Beck of Cinemagraphs describes an animated GIF as “a photograph that is still alive.” This means people can engage with this format quickly (like they would with a still image), yet they can extract a lesson from the highlighted movement (like they would from a video). As Christopher Price of Tumblr explains, GIFs are short and have a low barrier to entry. No doubt, this is great news for marketers!

They can serve as calls-to-action.

The animated GIF is guiding the viewer’s eye along a specific path without being obtrusive. The format zooms in on a specific moment in the bigger picture. “Whatever that one thing is that is alive is what your eye is going to go to,” says Beck.

Such eye guidance is the essence of a good call-to-action. As a marketer, you should always be considering different ways in which you can capture the attention of your audience through effective (and creative) use of calls-to-action. Animated GIFs might present the perfect opportunity for you to try something new.

They can have emotional impact.

Cinemagraphs‘ approach to animated GIFs borders on the magical by mesmerizing the viewer with its elegance and simplicity. Their animated GIFs build an image of the world that people wouldn’t have necessarily noticed in still images. That’s why picking the right moment to focus on when creating an animated GIF is a big creative decision for Cinemagraphs.

The potential of the animated GIF to connect with people emotionally is tremendous for marketers. An emotional message, for instance, can bring people inspiration, laughter and harmony. Such an emotional impact, thanks to its immediate value to the user, certainly extends the reach of the format to new audiences.

Some Real-Life Uses of Animated GIFs in Marketing

Now that we’ve gained a conceptual understanding of the animated GIF and how it can be used in marketing, let’s look at a few examples of how this format can be implemented in your marketing. Here are some companies that have made clever use of the animated GIF in their marketing collateral.

Note: We tried out best to embed these GIFs in a reader-friendly way. If you’re having trouble seeing any of the animated GIFs in this section, click on the link we’ve provided in the explanatory text to visit the company’s site!

Jive Uses an Animated GIF on its Homepage

When done well, animated GIFs instantly capture the attention of visitors with their novelty. That’s why it might be smart to use them in select places across your business website where you’re trying to drive visitor attention. For instance, consider using them on your homepage or on your “About Us” page to keep readers engaged.

For inspiration, check out the homepage of Jive Social Business. It features a still image of four employees in an office and elements of the picture are animated. When you visit the website, you will see the gentle rustling of the blond lady’s burgundy skirt as well as the soft movements of the window blinds and the water cooler.

Verizon Uses an Animated GIF on Google+

Animated GIFs are native to the social media world — they thrive on networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In fact, Verizon has done a great job of using animated GIFs in its Google+ profile. The profile picture consists of five small images that come together to form a message.

 

American Apparel Uses an Animated GIF to Announce a Product

You can use animated GIFs to announce new product releases. This is something American Apparel did this summer with its Sheer Nail Lacquer. The company featured an animated GIF of nail polish pictures on its Tumblr blog, accompanied by the caption, “They’re just here for the summer! Introducing American Apparel Sheer Nail Lacquer, our limited-time line of six vibrant-yet-sheer colors, inspired by and named after some of our favorite beaches in Southern California.”

Uses of Animated GIFs in Email Marketing

Animated GIFs display in email the same way a regular image does. That means you can experiment with replacing one of your still pictures in an email with an animated one! In fact, according to an A/B test conducted by BlueFly, emails featuring an animated GIF pulled in 12% more revenue than their non-animated version. In reponse to this test, Tom Buchok, co-founder of Bannerflow, explains that by using animated GIFs in email marketing one leverages the element of novelty.

Tiffany & Co embraced the novelty aspect of GIFs with its animated email that changes the text it displays.

Harry & David is yet another company that took advantage of animated GIFs in email marketing. It used this format to show the movement of snowflakes in one of its Christmas email campaigns.

Dogfish Head Showcases its Product With Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs can be used to document and highlight key functions and features of your product. You can use a series of animated GIFs to create a short tutorial, or illustrate a step-by-step process around your product or service.

Here is how Cinematographs used animated GIFs to show the making of Dogfish Head’s new strawberry-and-honey-flavored Tweason’ale:

HubSpot Features an Animated GIF on a Landing Page

We are always looking for ways to increase the conversion rates of our landing pages. That led us to test a landing page of an ebook with a still image versus a landing page of an ebook with an animated GIF.

While the results of that test weren’t statistically significant, we intend to conduct a few more tests with animated GIFs on landing pages. Consider testing it out as well, especially if you’re trying to keep people on your landing pages longer and increase conversion rates.

How to Create Animated GIFs

After browsing through all these examples, you’re probably eager to create your own animated GIFs. So how do you go about it? Luckily, it’s not very difficult and you have a few options!

First, you will need a series of still images (frames) that will come together in a single file. So before you even start following any tutorials, make sure you know what set of images you will be using to convey your message. If you’re going for the funny tone, for example, the images you pick can be drastically different (like a mashup of characters from different movies). If you’re going for a subtle and elegant message, the images can be part of the same photography session (like the works of Cinematographs).

If you have Photoshop and some basic design skills, use that software to your animated GIF. Here are some detailed instructions on the steps you need to take. There are also some online tools that make the creation of animated GIFs easier and possible, even if you don’t have any Photoshop skills; try Make A Gif and Gifninja. Finally, you can also take text and animate it with a tool like TypePop.

So are you going to experiment with animated GIFs in your marketing? Did you get any ideas that you want to try out?

Image credit: jonny goldstein

 

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The navigation of your website is a key component that directly impacts you from a business and marketing perspective. After all, a navigation is often what stands between the user and the user’s goal. And as a marketer, you should want to make that distance as short as possible.

That’s why you need to ensure your website navigation offers a positive experience from a usability perspective. In other words, designing your navigation in a way that makes sense to website users. Don’t make your visitors do a lot of work to reach their goal — if the user’s goal is to locate your pricing page, for instance, help them get to it fast.

What Should a Website Navigation Do?

Navigation of information, as discussed in Alan Cooper’s book, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, can be accomplished by three key methods: scrolling (panning), linking (jumping), and zooming. In order to develop a solid navigation system, designers need to enable the user to move smoothly from one place to another place, and promote flow.

Specifically, the navigation should:

• Enable users to choose from a small selection of pages to visit.
• Provide clear labels for the pages where navigation tabs take you.
• Adapt your website to match user needs.
• Tell people where they currently are and how to get back.
• Provide a search function.

Components of a Navigational System

In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, a well-designed navigational system should include three main components:

• Current Locator: This is also known as a site ID and is a way for users to know where on the website they currently are. For instance, when you select a given tab in the website navigation, does the appearance of that tab change to reflect that it has been selected? Check out a screenshot from Apple’s website: when a user selects a tab (in this case, the iPod tab), it becomes darker than the rest of the navigation. 

 

 

• Navigation Method: For visitors, this is a way to find out where on a website you can go — and how to get there. It gives you access to the primary content sections and utilities, then places you can get to that aren’t part of the primary content hierarchy. For instance, when you visit the Apple website and click on the iPod tab, you will see that the information is organized in a hierarchical order: you can choose between iPod products or apps related to the iPod.

 

 

• Trace Route: This is a way for you to find where on the website you’ve been. This is also known as a home link and answers the question, “How can I get back to where I started?” In the case of the Apple website, you can simply click on the Apple icon to go back to the home page.

 

• Search: This is the search functionality visitors have access to. It’s a way to quickly find specific information they might be looking for, and is often illustrated by the magnifying glass icon.

As you incorporate these components into your website navigation, ensure that you keep their look and feel consistent. Providing consistent navigation throughout your website allows users to feel confident that they know where they are and that they can find what they’re looking for.

Types of Navigation Systems

Now that we’ve covered the role of the website navigation and its components, let’s explore what options for navigation systems you have. There are three main types of navigation systems.

• Global Navigation: Global navigation is a site-wide navigation that allows access to key areas or functions. It usually appears on every page and can contain multiple levels of hierarchy. The Apple screenshots above are good representations of a global navigation.
• Local Navigation: Local navigation enables the user to explore the immediate area or a subset of the site. If you visit Amazon.com, for instance, you will see a left-hand navigation that allows you to explore the specific section of the website you are currently in.

 

 

• Contextual Navigation: Contextual navigation provides navigation in line with content (e.g. hyperlinks). Gerry McGovern, the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, explains, “The primary purpose of web navigation is to help people to move forward. It is not to tell them where they have been, or where they could have gone.”

Navigation Patterns

Depending on context, you might take several different approaches to organizing your website or application:

• Task-Based: Your navigation can be task-based. It’s sometimes useful to provide one or more task-based points of entry to your site.

 

• Content-Based: Navigation options appear consistently across all pages. It may represent flat or hierarchical structure.
• Menu-Driven: A main menu provides access to isolated sub-modules. Navigation across screens is not permitted. This is used mostly for device interfaces.
• Transactional: Provides feedback about where you are in a sequential process, and provides the option to back up to a prior step. Your design should start with thinking about how the user will move between pages or screens.

 

An Example of a Great Website Navigation

In this blog post, we intentionally chose to feature screenshots of Apple’s website navigation, since Apple does a great job of directing its users to different places of its website through its navigation. Spend some time studying Apple’s navigation, and see if you can adopt some of the lessons you spot.

What other great examples of website navigation have you noticed? Share them with us in the comments below.

Photo Credit: olgaberrios

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This blog post is an excerpt from “The Step-by-Step Guide to Lovable Marketing Campaigns.” Download your free copy today to read more about how to make your marketing lovable.

In order for a marketing campaign to be powerful, it needs a good offer — you know, the thing that gets people excited enough to click! The creative coupon. The helpful ebook. The customized consultation. But your offer also needs one other element to make it a big-hit success …

It needs to be lovable.

Are you creating offers your prospects will love? If not, (or if you’re not sure), let’s look at the characteristics of creating marketing content — particularly offer content — that people love.

Create Content For Your Persona

It’s easy enough to say you’re going to create a helpful, educational offer … but … how? To handle the demands of content creation, marketers have been told again and again to “think like a publisher.” It’s great advice, but what exactly does that mean? Just how do you think like a publisher? Publishers have a detailed picture of who their reader is that drives every content creation decision they made; inbound marketers should be no different.

Generate a detailed picture of your target audience (what we call a buyer persona in the marketing biz) so you can create the type of content they’ll love to read — from the right topic, to the right tone, to the right format in which it’s presented (more on that later).

So if you haven’t already, ask yourself … who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them — on search engines, social media, or blogs — and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas. And if you need more help creating your buyer persona, download this PowerPoint template that helps you lay the whole thing out, step by step!

Focus on the Right Stage

Content plays a critical role in every stage of the inbound marketing process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. But the types of content you should use to achieve each of these goals depends on where your lead is in the sales cycle. How would you appreciate someone sending you buyer guides when you’ve only just downloaded a checklist? Here’s a sketch of the buying cycle that should help you align the right content with the right stage of the buying cycle so your leads keep on loving the offers you send their way:

• Awareness: The prospect gets acquainted with your brand or realizes they have a need for your product/service.

• Research/Education: The prospect identifies the problem and researches potential solutions, including your product/service.

• Comparison/Validation: The prospect examines the options and begins narrowing down the list of vendors.

• Purchase: The prospect decides from whom to buy.

Use Data to Create Lovable Content — in Topic and Format

Content comes in all shapes and sizes — whitepapers, videos, webinars, ebooks, templates, kits — you name it. While you can host an internal brainstorm session and come up with creative ideas for different content formats that you can produce, it’s important that this new content matches the needs and preferences of your target persona.

But how do you know? Well, you can certainly ask them — an ideal time is when you’re creating your buyer personas and performing interviews of your target audience, anyway. But we also like to use analytics to make that decision! At HubSpot, for instance, we’re using our landing page analytics to explore how successful different types of content are in converting visitors to leads. If the conversion rate is lower than average, the marketing offer isn’t appealing enough to our audience. If you have a sense of what that format is for your business, use it to build your marketing campaign around it.

But your job doesn’t end in determining the right format in which to present your offer. You also need to figure out what on earth you’re going to write about. And the answer isn’t, “Whatever strikes my fancy.” Not if you want your leads to love your offer.

In order to find what content topics capture the attention of your target audience, you should look at past data that you have access to. For instance, what are the most popular blog articles you’ve published? What are some of the most viewed pages on your website? Your historical performance should dictate your future direction for all new marketing content — particularly your lead generation content. If you don’t have access to marketing analytics that give you this type of intelligence, look in the public domain (places like Google News, Google Trends, and Twitter Trending Topics) for popular and newsworthy industry stories. You can then piggyback on these popular topics by adding a personal spin that reflects your expertise and resonates with your audience.

Recruit a Team of Content Creators

You don’t have to be the only one creating your company’s offer content. You can (and should!) use different voices from inside your organization. Technical folks, customer service people, C-level executives, product managers, and others in your organization have a unique take on important aspects of your business, as well as different areas of expertise you can tap into. Get your coworkers to contribute by:

• Asking them to co-write a whitepaper or an ebook
• Interviewing them and posting short videos that share their expertise
• Inviting them to give presentations or answer questions in webinars

You can also look outside your own company for help creating content. New online content marketplaces are springing up to connect marketers with legions of freelance writers and editors who will take on blog posts, ebooks, and other writing jobs for you. You can specify the topic, your desired style and tone, and your intended audience. And depending on the marketplace you work with, you typically don’t have to pay unless you accept the finished article.

Repurporse Content

Almost every piece of content you create can be adapted, reused, modified, and republished in another format. Make a habit of finding multiple ways to package and distribute the same information in different formats. Here are a few ideas:

• Combine text from an old whitepaper with new videos to create a multimedia ebook

• Turn videos or webinars into blog posts and ebooks — or vice versa.

• Use commonly asked questions and comments from webinars to create a new ebook. These topics will directly address your prospects’ pain points.

• Share all company presentations in multiple formats. Post the slides on SlideShare, upload the video on YouTube, and create a series of blog posts that dive into specific points of the presentation.

Do you have any more tips for lovable content that can help build strong marketing offers? Share it in the comments below!

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If you’ve ever downloaded an ebook from HubSpot, you’ve probably spotted the social media sharing links we include in all our text-based content. Theses buttons encourage readers to share our content on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, so while they’re flipping through the pages, readers can easily click on any of these links and let their social connections, friends, and coworkers know what they’re reading.

Remember: people are naturally inclined to share content they find valuable. It shows to their followers that they’re someone worth following because of the useful information they share, making them a valuable contributor to the social networks they populate. Furthermore, content sparks conversations and gives people fodder to comment about and discuss with their social media connections. On the marketing side of things, encouraging your readers to share your content in social media also extends the reach of it to people outside of your direct network. So why not make it as easy as possible for your readers to share your valuable content? Think about it as social sharing enablement!

But how do you create the social media sharing links like the ones you see in HubSpot’s ebooks? In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the process, step by step, showing you exactly how to create sharing links for the top three, most commonly used social networks — Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It’s a lot easier than you might think!

For HubSpot’s own ebook production, we use our internal brand templates on the design software program called Adobe InDesign. However, you can make your ebooks and whitepapers social even if you use something simpler like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to design and lay out your ebooks. (If you’re deciding between the two, we recommend starting out with PowerPoint because it’s offers more flexibility with images and formatting than Word).

 

 

Creating social media sharing links for buttons like the ones you see above is simple. All you have to do is hyperlink the button/text with the right URLs.

How to Create Social Sharing Links for LinkedIn

The URL you’ll want to modify for LinkedIn will look something like this:

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://www.hubspot.com/how-to-master-the-design-and-copy-of-calls-to-action/

In the example above, you’ll need to keep the first part of the URL as it is and just change its ending (everything in the red text) to feature the link of the content you want people to share. In your case, you should be encouraging your ebook readers to share a link to the landing page of the ebook they’re reading, so if others are interesting in reading it too, they have to complete the form on your landing page to get the content. Remember, you don’t want to sacrifice lead generation here, unless of course you’re not putting your ebook content behind a form. For instance, the example link above is embedded in our call-to-action ebook, sending people back to the landing page of that ebook.

Once you’ve formatted your link, take the full URL and hyperlink what you want people to click on to share your content, whether it’s a LinkedIn icon or some text that looks like something this: Share on LinkedIn.

When readers click on this link (go ahead, try it!), a new window will open in their browser and they’ll see something like the following, which enables them to edit the description, add an accompanying comment, and specify who can see their LinkedIn update. That’s all there is to it!

 

 

How to Create Social Sharing Links for Facebook

The URL you’ll want to modify for Facebook will look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.hubspot.com/software-buyers-guide/

Creating a social sharing link for Facebook works the same way as it does for LinkedIn. Just change the last (red) part of the above URL to reflect the landing page you want your ebook readers to share. Then hyperlink what you want readers to click, either a Facebook icon or some text like this: Share on Facebook

After clicking on the link, users will be able to select who they want to share their Facebook update with, add a comment, and edit the description of the link.

 

 

How to Create Social Sharing Links for Twitter

Creating social media sharing links for Twitter is a little bit trickier than LinkedIn and Facebook, but don’t be daunted. The URL you’ll want to edit will look something like this:

http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Learn%20how%20to%20optimize%20your%20calls-to-action%20-%20download%20@HubSpot’s%20free%20ebook%20on%20mastering%20the%20
design%20and%20copy%20of%20CTAs:%20http://bit.ly/LSjMFA

In the example above, you’ll want to keep the beginning of the URL and edit the part after the equals sign (in the red and blue). Simply replace the words between the %20 characters (%20 represents a space) with the text you want to populate in your readers’ tweet, and then change the link at the end of that snippet of code (depicted in blue) to refer to the landing page you want users to share. It’s also smart to use a URL shortener like bitly to shorten your links before you add them to the code; then test your link to make sure it’s 140 characters or fewer, within Twitter’s character limitations. 

We understand this may sound a bit complicated, and luckily there’s a free tool that can do all the work for you, called clicktotweet. All you have to do is type in the message and the link you want users to tweet, and the tool will generate your tweet link for you. Easy peasy! Then hyperlink either the Twitter icon you want people to click, or text that looks like this: Share on Twitter

Clicking on the link will give Twitter users the ability customize and edit the update before they tweet it.

 

 

The great thing about all these social media sharing links is that you can use them to hyperlink text or images anywhere: within text-based content, on web pages and landing pages, and in emails. Try it out and let us know how that works for you!

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When we discuss calls-to-action (CTAs) in marketing, we often look at them as a key driver of lead generation. After all, they are mostly used to send incoming traffic to your landing pages and lead-capture forms. While CTAs are great for generating lead conversions, they can also help contribute to a different goal: growing your email list.

A lot of companies also find it beneficial to use calls-to-action to expand their email database and list of contacts (which they will later nurture and follow up with). And in some cases, this can be even more effective than using a CTA to promote a lead-gen offer. In fact, some businesses are doing this exceptionally well! So in this blog post, which is an excerpt from our new ebook 101 Examples of Effective Calls-to-Action, let’s review some awesome examples of how companies are effectively using calls-to-action for email list growth.

1) The Combine

The best calls-to-actions don’t look like flashing ads, but instead are paths toward valuable information discovery. The Combine offers a great example of that. The text above the email opt-in box conveys the action readers need to take, and it’s clear and direct. The layout of the page is clean and simple, helping the reader focus on the most important action here — entering his or her email address and signing up for email updates.

 

 

2) Crowd Track Gent

Another great approach when collecting emails and contacts to grow your database is to use subtle text that shows readers what information they need to enter. In this case, Crowd Track Gent is not collecting email addresses, but it surely provides a good lesson on how to design your call-to-action effectively. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that the subtle text within the blank boxes instructs visitors to enter their “First Name” and “Surname.” The play button to the right of the “Surname” box sends users a signal that the element is interactive and makes the result of the action more tangible.

 

 

3) Gilt

When you collect email addresses, make sure you’re setting clear expectations. What are your recipients going to get? How often? Gilt, for instance, features a call-to-action that includes a hyperlink to the company’s Terms of Membership. The sentence is right beneath the main call-to-action button.

You can take a different approach of setting expectations and mentioning that your email updates will be about product discounts, new offers, events, etc. The takeaway here is, let your new contacts know what they will start receiving from you so they stay subscribed.

 

 

4) Gojee

Even if your site visitors are interested in downloading your resources, some people will still experience form anxiety. Therefore, you need to reassure them that their personal information and privacy will be safe with you.

Reduce people’s anxiety by guaranteeing that you will keep their privacy and send them only content and information they care about. Check out how creatively Gojee achieves this: “We swear on our finest bottle of scotch that we won’t spam you.”

 

5) GraphEffect

Experiment with adding background images to your email opt-in calls-to-action to increase readers’ desire to sign up for your offers and convey positive emotions of efficiency, enjoyment, success, etc. GraphEffect provides a good example of a CTA using a background image and also incorporating a semi-transparent black box on top of the picture in order to increase the readability of the text.

 

 

6) Jetsetter

You can increase the visitor’s incentive to sign up for your communication if you mention that access/membership is free. Don’t be afraid to brag about your strengths—confident and hyperbolic language helps boost conversions. Jettsetter, for instance, tells people that by signing up for their email updates, they will “get access to the world’s greatest vacations.”

 

 

7) LaunchRock

Another great call-to-action tactic is to address the speediness of the sign-up process. Your CTA message should convey that setting up an account offers a lot of benefits and is no hassle at all. Check out how LaunchRock accomplishes this by telling visitors they can launch a page “in minutes.” This no-hassle process increases the user’s motivation and facilitates the conversion.

 

 

8) Shopify

Consider experimenting with the layout of your form fields. Are they laid out vertically or horizontally? Does that impact your conversion rates?

By presenting all required fields in one spot, you are transparent with visitors, reinforcing the simplicity of the action you’re asking them to take. Here is how Shopify set up its account registration:

 

9) Skillshare

As a general call-to-action best practice, you should try to remove distractions from your main CTA and help people focus on what’s truly important – conversion! Skillshare has done a great job of this by using a simple white background and creating a clean, spacious experience.

 

 

10) TaskRabbit

You might also consider using the Facebook login option to gain more insights about your users. In this way, you allow visitors to sign into your website by using their Facebook credentials. While this one-click process might save people time, it might also make visitors anxious about their privacy. That is why TaskRabbit makes it an option to sign up with Facebook login – not a necessity.

 

 

11) Smashing Magazine

Social proof—or also known as social influence—is a great way to sway people in a specific direction. Smashing Magazine provides a good example of using social proof to collect email addresses and expand its contact database. The publication is showing its number of existing subscribers, thus encouraging you to become a part of this big community.

 

 

Do you use calls-to-action to expand your email list? Share your tips and best practices in the comments below.

Image credit: Christopher Craig

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If email is a regular part of your company’s marketing mix, you’ve probably considered the some of the different ways email can engage your contacts. But have you ever wondered which links within your email sends engage recipients (that is, get them to click) the most? We were very curious about that, too, especially since the links within your email are critical for driving action — and conversion — from your email marketing.

Considering that’s the case, wouldn’t it be powerful to know which parts of your emails are the most effective at attracting your recipients’ attention — and which parts lose it? To help get to the bottom of it, we analyzed a sample of 26 unique HubSpot emails that we sent to the same audience over a period of three months in 2012. We then explored which links in our dedicated email sends got the most clicks. (Note: a dedicated email send is one that promotes a specific offer as opposed to a newsletter that covers a range of topics and offers.)

Before we reveal the findings of this analysis, let’s cover the various link types we feature in our HubSpot email sends.

6 Types of Links to Include in Your Marketing Emails

1. Main Call-to-Action Link

This is the link to your primary call-to-action, or what you want your recipients to do after they’ve opened your email. For instance, if you send an email about your new ebook, you should be asking people to “download it.” If you’re hosting a webinar or some other type of event, your main call-to-action in the email should invite people to “sign up for the event.”

2. Social Media Sharing Links

These are the links that enable recipients to share the content of the email within their social networks. If they find the email valuable, they may want to spread the word about it and let their friends and coworkers know about the type of information they consume. Providing links or buttons for your recipients to easily do just that extends the reach of your email content to people beyond your direct email list. In our marketing emails, for example, we include social media links to the most popular social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

3. Social Media Follow Links

These are the links that recipients click if they want to follow your company via social channels. The logic is simple: if your contacts are happy with the email content you’ve sent them, they might also be interested in subscribing to receive even more information/updates from you through other channels of communication such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

4. Logo Link

Most companies include their logos in the marketing emails they send. This reinforces to email recipients where the content they’re receiving is coming from. HubSpot’s logo, for instance, is located at the top left of our email templates. This logo can also be linked to a page, whether your homepage, a product page, or an About Us page.

5. Link in the P.S.

All industry research shows that the P.S. has tremendous marketing power. It stands out visually, and draws the eye of the readers. In dedicated sends, marketers can use the P.S. as a call-to-action to the main offer (reinforcing the primary action) or as an introduction of an alternative, supplementary offer.

6. Link in Plain-Text Version of the Email

Lastly, your ESP should allow you to create plain-text versions of your HTML emails. The plain-text version will strip out all images and code, leaving just text in recipients’ inboxes. These emails have a personal feel and, some marketers argue, can have higher CTR than HTML emails in some instances. However, this is something worth testing with your audience and voice.

So now you are probably wondering what the engagement of subscribers is across these different types of links. Let’s dig in to the data!

The Winner of ‘Most Engagement’ Goes to (Drumroll, Please) … the Primary Call-to-Action!

No surprise here! If your email subject line presented a specific offer (like most subject lines for dedicated sends do) and recipients opened your message, they would most likely go straight for your primary call-to-action.

If you’re not doing dedicated sends but rather newsletters, digests, or another type of email format, you should pay closer attention to the specific call-to-action links your subscribers clicked on. In that way, you can identify the content your recipients are most interested in.

Clicks on the Logo & P.S. Come Second in Importance

Our analysis showed that besides clicks on the main call-to-action HubSpot’s marketing emails present, subscribers also like to explore what’s behind our logo and P.S.

In the P.S., we usually introduce an alternative, supplementary HubSpot offer in our dedicated email sends. So if a subscriber isn’t interested in the email’s primary call-to-action, he or she can engage with another resource on a similar topic. If you’re not using a P.S., start adding it to your marketing emails and watch your CTR climb. Also, don’t forget to hyperlink your logo to a page on your website that will teach your recipients more about your company and what you offer. Some email recipients may forget why they signed up for email from you — use this as an opportunity to remind them!

Social Media Sharing Links Get More Clicks Than Social Media Follow Links

In order to make your emails social, we often recommend that you add social media sharing and follow links to each email send. But what if your email was already looking jam-packed and you wanted to remove some elements to de-clutter your email real estate? Well, if you had to choose between one or the other, go with the sharing links — people tend to click them more. For HubSpot’s emails, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook sharing links get about a 0.01% CTR, which means that if you send a message to 100,000 people, 5-9 of them will click on the social media sharing links. (To increase that number, consider offering an incentive to people who share your email socially, such as entering them into a raffle or a giveaway.)

Emails Promoting Ebooks Get a Higher CTR Than Emails Promoting Webinars

The biggest variable in your email marketing is the offer you provide. Are you sending an invite to an upcoming event, asking people to sign up for your product, offering them a free whitepaper or some other marketing resource? The offer can impact the performance of your send to a large degree.

We separated our sample of email sends into two groups based on the offer they promoted — emails revolving around a marketing ebook and emails revolving around an upcoming webinar. The ones promoting ebooks got almost twice the CTR of the emails promoting webinars.

That dynamic has been familiar to us as we’ve looked at our landing page dashboard and conducted content surveys. For one reason or another, the majority of the HubSpot audience seems to prefer text-based content. What does that ratio look like for your company? Find out and ensure that you are doing proper email segmentation that sends the right type of content to the folks interested in it.

Analyzing Your Own Email Links

The results we’ve shared here are specific to our own audience, and they may have even been different had we analyzed emails sent to a different segment of contacts. That’s why it’s critical that you analyze your own emails to determine your own email marketing best practices. For example, while our audience seems to prefer text-based content over webinar content, your audience might prefer something different.

We did the analysis above pretty quickly using HubSpot’s email tool, which gives us insights into click activity for every email we send. Here is an example of what the display of click activity might look like:

 

 

Some other ESPs can also provide information on click activity across different emails. Look into this data and consider how you can boost your numbers or optimize the pages that receive the most attention from your email subscribers.

Have you noticed any patterns on the clicks you get in your emails? Share them with us in the comments below.

Image Credit: olgaberrios

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Summer is officially here, and if you aren’t already at the beach, I’m sure your thoughts are periodically drifting toward it. But while summer does offer a prime opportunity to relax in the sun and take a vacation, well all know too well that the marketing can’t really stop either.

So as true marketing geeks, we wanted to share with you some fun postcards that will inspire you to be a better marketer, even in the hot summer months. Feel free to share these with your coworkers and friends using the social sharing buttons on the left-hand side of this post or via the ‘Pin It’ buttons below each postcard!

25 Summer-Themed Marketing Postcards for the Sharing

Since we know our friends outside the States don’t have the luxury of a day off today, this one’s for you! And if these postcards really inspired you to be a better marketers, you should check out our brand new ebook on international SEO tips. No worries: you can flip through it even if you do happen to be on the beach. 😉

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Our prospects are often inundated with invitations to download online whitepapers, ebooks, and other text-based marketing offers. And while the content that marketers offer may be educational and helpful, their layout often ruins the reading experience and prevents readers from fully understanding the material. 

A better user experience can improve not only the look of your ebooks, but also help readers develop a better understanding of the educational content you’re offering. Yet, for some reason, ebook design often comes as an afterthought and doesn’t get fully incorporated into the ebook writing process. Let’s change this, shall we? In this post, we’ll explore 5 ways in which you can improve the user experience of your marketing ebooks. 

1) Stick to One Message Per Page 

People need constant reassurance that their time is being well spent as they read your content. Remember: there are a million other things they could be doing instead. To put them at ease and enable them to fully focus on your resources, you need to help them understand what each page is about.

Readers don’t have the time to read through each of your paragraphs, only to realize halfway through that a whole section is addressing a subject that didn’t concern them all that much. Allow readers to skim through sections by including headings or subtitles on every page, making it clear what each chunk of content is about. This will enhance the learning process by making the time they spend reading your content much more efficient.

 

 

In business blogging, for example, we often use formatting to make the reading experience easier. We add bulleted lists and numbered steps; we separate paragraphs visually with images and headers; and we bold and italicize text we want to emphasize. Take that same approach, and apply it to your long-form writing. Include a title on each page, feature a bolded quotation at the top, or highlight some key piece of data. People often don’t have time to read the whole page to determine whether the content is worth reading — format your pages in a way that enables them to quickly and easily choose whether they should read something or move on to another section of your ebook that’s more relevant or helpful to them.

2) Use Visuals That Enhance the Reader’s Understanding 

Images and graphics in ebooks are hard to get right. The key to making them fit well is to think of them as an inseparable part of your writing. Whether you add them during or after you’ve finished preparing your ebook’s text-based content, your visuals should highlight an important point you’re making or deconstruct the meaning of a concept in an easy-to-understand way. Images shouldn’t just be there to make the ebook easy on the eyes. Rather, they should be used to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material you’re covering. 

For instance, you might want to deconstruct a piece of data by emphasizing some of the keywords with images. Or you might want to illustrate a process step by step by using a diagram. See the screenshot below as an example — it seeks to demonstrate what an email workflow might look like.

 

 

3) Maintain Consistency of Style 

In point one, we touched upon the importance of using formatting in ebooks, and that might have led you to think of incorporating a lot of bullet points, colors, fonts, and other styling elements in your writing. It’s easy to start mixing different styles of formatting in an attempt to create some vibrancy. However, it’s important to resist this temptation and stay consistent with your initial style choice.

If you start using a specific line style, title color, or image frame, stick with it. Failing to do so will only create a chaotic experience for your readers and distract them from the knowledge you’re trying to share with them. By being consistent, your readers’ photographic memory will recognize what certain colors and formatting mean from section to section. You can also leverage this concept by bringing those style elements back time and again to reinforce key points.

 

 

For instance, if throughout your pages you consistently use a rounded blue box with a call-to-action to “learn more” about a specific topic, your readers will learn to anticipate it on the following pages. On the other hand, if you always introduce different shapes and colors, readers won’t make an immediate association of the visual with a message.

4) Embrace White Space 

When I wrote for my college’s newspaper, we often had to fit too many words on too little space. In these cases, we would sometimes increase the margins of the columns and reduce the space between words. One day, an experienced newspaper editor visited us to share some lessons. He saw what we did when we were lacking space in the print edition of our newspaper, and he asked us if we would make the same decision in life — to constantly adjust our standards in order to accommodate one-time needs. He had a great point: that’s not how you achieve high quality. Instead, he advised us to separate or cut the content instead of sacrificing the look and experience of the entire page. Ever since then, I began to cherish white space.

Compare your reaction to a page overflowing with words and one that has just a few, neatly organized columns. The first one is burdensome; the latter inviting. A text-heavy page with no breathing space makes you feel tired even before you start reading. A page that embraces white space and looks clean and simple, on the other hand, welcomes you to explore the content.

 

 

As you’re reviewing your ebooks, consider how you can separate the content or cut back on it so you don’t ever have to sacrifice the look and feel of your ebook template to increase margins or reduce spacing between words.

5) Avoid Jargon 

Jargon, or also known as gobbledygook, makes everything more difficult to understand. We all want to sound intelligent and authoritative in our writing, but using technical language is not the way to achieve it. Instead of trying to use sophisticated language to convey a point, write simply and clearly. That’s the most effective way of educating readers and helping them understand the new material you’re providing. This is should also hold true for all your other marketing efforts, such as email marketing, call-to-action creation, and landing page production. “Clarity trumps persuasion,” as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABS often likes to say.

How else do you ensure a positive user experience of your ebooks and other text-based content? Share your suggestions in the comments below!

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