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Cooking is my favorite pastime. It’s so much fun to find new recipes and learn about new ingredients. Plus, (usually) the results are delicious. Finding new recipes and ingredients is nothing short of delightful.

One meal I love to make is grilled cheese — but not just any ole’ grilled cheese. Instead, I use plant-based ingredients and add two condiments: butter, and mayonnaise (trust me).

If I were making grilled cheese for me, I’d have to add some things. First, all of my ingredients have to be plant-based due to my dietary restrictions. Second, I’d add two more condiments: butter and mayonnaise (trust me).

On its own, cheese and bread is a great duo. But with a few additions, a nice duo becomes an excellent mix — one that I’m always excited to eat.

Like a perfect sandwich, every marketing structure calls for good strategies, or “ingredients,” that make it great. Those “ingredients” are generally referred to as a marketing mix, and can be summed up in four categories: Product, pricing, placement, and promotion.

While the marketing mix describes the basics for product marketing, it doesn’t have room for services marketing. That’s where the extended marketing mix comes into play. And, just like my vegan grilled cheeses, a few additional changes can elevate your service marketing structure to the next level.

Here, let’s dive into what extended marketing mix means, and how it can help

Extended Marketing Mix vs. Marketing Mix

The marketing mix pillars work together to help you make business decisions that’ll define marketing strategy and activities. Identifying these pillars points out what you need, where your company excels, and where it can improve.

The four pillars of the original marketing mix are as follows:

• Product — This is what your company sells.
• Place — This identifies how you will sell the product to customers in their preferred way to shop. For instance, will you sell your product on a website, or in a brick-and-mortar shop?
• Price — This determines how much money you need to sell your product for to hit revenue goals while remaining within price ranges determined by the industry at-large.
• Promotion — This is where you flesh out the methods you use to engage customers. Promotion, selling, PR, sales, and ads are how businesses commonly communicate with their target market.

Notice how the marketing mix naturally works together. Products need a price, place to be sold, and promotions to reach an intended audience. Promotions need a product, price, and place to make that messaging effective. Ultimately, any way you look at the mix, you’ll find how the other three fit.

On the other hand, the extended marketing mix is just that — an extension of the original pillars. Instead of just four components, there’s an additional three. These three allow for a more complete, updated mix.

The extended marketing mix came along when marketers noticed the original was outdated and needed a few extra pillars. With the additions, the marketing mix now allows for services marketing.

• People — Describes the people behind the company. No matter the role, the people working with the product are as essential as customers. They advocate for the company and communicate the business’ value to their customers.

Example: The baristas at my local coffee shop create an exceptional customer experience. Of course, the lattes are good, but my favorite barista greets me by name and knows my order, and that ultimately keeps me coming back. A company is only as good as the people behind the scenes.

• Processes — Identifies how you will meet customer expectations. Outline what you will do to deliver a fantastic consumer experience every time. Consider creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) to solidify processes.

Example: Let’s revisit the coffee shop scenario. Baristas have a recipe to follow when making various drinks that make sure the customer gets their order the way they expect.

• Physical Evidence — Notes the physical elements needed to complete the mix. Even if a company provides services, there are physical aspects that companies use to delight customers and set themselves apart from competitors, like promotional materials.

Example: The coffee shop in my neighborhood thrives and defines itself with being a local business among the mass of coffee chains in my area. Everything is local — the beans, the mugs, and the decor comes from the Boston area — and that’s how it’s different from a massive chain.

The extended mix, like the original, works with the rest of the mix.

First, let’s talk about how the three Ps can intertwine. People at your company have to follow the processes set in place, using physical evidence. We can also say the processes set in place define the role of people and physical evidence.

If we look at the both mixes, we see the same. Companies need the right people to execute promotion of the product or service. To put the connection between the mixes in a different way, the extended mix is a customer-facing toolkit for enhancing the marketing mix.

The extended marketing mix helps companies define their marketing strategy in a well-rounded system. Identifying each portion of the mix gets you one step closer to a functional, complete marketing plan.

Consider using the extended marketing mix to help you make business decisions that sets your company apart from competitors. For instance, fleshing out the tools needed for promotion involves coming up with an individualized marketing campaign audiences love.

Marketing mixes are considered a foundational part of any organization. If you are just starting to define a business plan, use this strategy to help with budgeting for marketing. The different elements of the mix helps figure out costs.

Every pillar, especially price and promotion, help you determine where to allocate your budget. For example, you have to determine a fair price for your product, and finalize how much you’re willing to put towards other factors, such as promotion and physical evidence.

Now that you know a little more about the extended marketing mix, are you going to use it to figure out your next campaign’s expenses? Remember, this strategy isn’t just for start-ups. If you’re struggling to define a successful strategy, identifying these pillars can be a helpful organizational tool.

Marketing mixes and their extension. Cheese and bread. Chai leaves and hot water. Duos are best when they work together — how are you going to make your marketing mixes work together for your company?

Believe it or not, driving traffic to your website — albeit challenging — isn’t enough to sustain your business. In an effort to truly leverage that investment in traffic, marketers must use conversion rate optimization, or CRO, to convince said traffic to complete a desired action.

In some cases, these optimization techniques might be as basic as changing the color of a CTA. In other cases, there’s a lot more that can be improved.

The list below outlines a ton of helpful tools for marketers who are looking to optimize their conversion rates. To help you understand which tools are used for what, we’ve also broken this list into a few major categories: Lead capture tools, research tools, analytics tools, mouse tracking and heat maps, feedback tools, and experiment tools.

From high-level changes like landing page and email design and inspiration to in-depth insights on how your visitors navigate through your content, these tools will help you improve the performance of your site.

Ready? Let’s get converting …

Lead Capture Tools

These are the tools that you will use to capture more leads on your site, thus improving your CRO. While most conversion-focused content has a built-in form or CTA, these tools act as additional lead capture mechanisms to boost the number of leads that convert on your content.

1. HubSpot

Price: Free

Picture Google Analytics meets SumoMe meets a CRM. Sounds cool, right? It starts with an exit intent popup CTA, then sync with your website’s existing forms to learn about your site visitors and their path through your pages.

HubSpot’s tools give you in-depth contact insights on prospects and current contacts in your database, and also pairs its contacts database with a dashboard that shows you on a high-level view of which marketing efforts are paying off and converting, and which ones aren’t.

2. HelloBar

Price: Free plan, or $29-$49/mo.

HelloBar is a lead capture tool that allows you to add a popup form to your website to grow your email list, promote your social pages, showcase a sale, or other lead generation strategies. The free version allows you to create one modal that’ll be shown to every tenth visitor. However, premium plans offer more advanced call-to-action options.

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3. Sumo

Price: Free plan, or $49/mo.

Sumo offers a suite of free tools to help you increase your site conversions. For lead capture, it offers a “Welcome Mat” popup CTA, a “Smart Bar” to increase email subscribers, a scroll-triggered box, and a “Contact Us” form.

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Along with their Google Analytics research tools, the Sumo suite helps you gain on-page insights and increase your email list.

Research Tools

Before you create any content, you’ll want to call upon these tools to draw inspiration and check out what other smart marketers have seen success with in the past.

4. BuzzSumo

Price: $99-$499/mo.

The best content is the content that gets shared and linked to the most. So what better way to gain preliminary insights than to compile all of the most shared content on your particular topic?

With BuzzSumo, all you have to do is enter the keyword or topic. Then, it’ll pull together the most shared and linked to content on that topic. Time frames range from the last day, week, month, or year.

So if you’re trying to optimize the landing page for your new webinar on cat fashion, all you have to do is enter “cat fashion,” and BuzzSumo will give the best articles, resources, videos, and more on the fascinating topic of cat couture.

You’ll then be able to dig in and explore some of the key elements that made these pages popular so that you can go back and incorporate them into your own content.

5. SimilarWeb

Price: Contact for pricing

Knowing where your website visitors came from can (and should) have a big impact on the type of content you create. With SimilarWeb, you can see where your traffic is coming from, which keywords are fueling your organic traffic, and what other sites are considered most similar to yours.

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With this information, you’ll be able to optimize content for your biggest traffic sources, and dig in to see what competitor sites and doing to drive conversions.

6. Land-book

Price: Free

If you’re creating a landing page from scratch, getting started can be difficult. Luckily there’s Land-book: A free collection of the web’s best designed landing pages.

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With Land-book, you can explore the ways that top companies are using elements like copy, positioning, layout, and design to drive conversions. Pick and choose your favorite elements from the Land-book database, and then incorporate them into your own landing page.

7. Really Good Emails

Price: Free

In today’s marketing landscape, if you want to get your message across, you’d better know a thing or two about visual communication and design.

Don’t know a thing or two about either? Enter: Really Good Emails.

Similar to Land-book (see above), Really Good Emails is a database of the web’s best designed emails from the world’s most innovative companies. Use this as a resource to see how you can design your email to get your message across in the best way possible, as fast as possible.

(Check out this post for even more resources where you can find great marketing examples.)

8. SubjectLine.com

Price: Free

When sending email, the subject line can either make or break your performance. Before you choose which ones to ship, check them out using this awesome resource.

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SubjectLine.com has tested over three million subject lines and has a tool to evaluate your potential options. It gives a deliverability and marketing score, plus advice on improving.

9. Headline Analyzer

Price: Free

CoSchedule’s headline analyzer gives a score of 1–100 to gauge the effectiveness of titles. The score is calculated based on word usage, grammar, vocabulary, which type of headline it is, as well as character and word count.

The tool shows you what your headline looks like on Google and in an email subject line. This tool serves as a great litmus test to generally know how well your headline will perform.

Analytics Tools

These are the tools that you will use to measure and track your content’s performance. You can use them to fully analyze the dips, jumps, and fluctuations in your conversion rate.

10. Kissmetrics

Price: Contact for pricing

Kissmetrics is a complex tool that integrates with your email service provider to make it easy for you to analyze your audience and email them in specific cohorts.

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With Kissmetrics, you can learn the path that your customers have taken through your website, conduct A/B tests, build data sets (without SQL), and figure out the ROI from your campaigns.

11. Google Analytics

Price: Free for basic, contact sales for premium

Google Analytics is a free way to track your website visitors. You can see how long it takes visitors to bounce from your pages, if visitors complete goals from a certain path, and which sources are bringing people to your website.

What’s great about Google Analytics is that is allows you to see which keywords people are searching to find your page, track which device people are searching for your website on, and uncover demographic data. However, there are no specific emails/contacts associated with your site visitors.

12. HubSpot Website Grader

Price: Free

Website Grader is a great way to get a quick snapshot of a website’s overall performance. It gives insights on performance factors (including speed, page size, and page requests), mobile responsiveness and appearance, SEO (page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and site map), and security.

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From there, the tool devises a grade and provides suggestions on how to improve, which makes it easy to come up with some quick wins that’ll help you boost conversions.

Mouse Tracking & Heat Mapping Tools

These are the tools that you will use to see how people are interacting with your content, including how they scroll and where they click.

13. Hotjar

Price: Free for Basic, $29/mo.

Once you’ve nailed the basics like landing pages, CTAs, popups, and content, you’re ready for some more advanced conversion rate optimization. Hotjar offers heat maps and screen recordings, which enable you to track how much of your page is being viewed, as well as how visitors are navigating your website.

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Like the screenshot above, Hotjar also offers analytics, so you can see how well your pages are performing. This is helpful to see what is and isn’t working, and what you can change to increase conversion.

14. Clicktale

Price: Contact for pricing

Clicktale is similar to Hotjar, as it also offers heat maps to help you determine the most valuable real estate on your pages, scroll depth (where is the “fold” on your website?), click tracking, and also link analysis.

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Using these tools, you’ll have the information you need to organize content, CTAs, and page design in a way that makes the most sense for engagement.

15. Clicky

Price: Free plan, or $9.99-$149/mo.

Clicky gives you real time analytics on the visitors on your website. It tells you where people are accessing your site from, how long they’ve stayed on each page, and how many visitors are actively online. The resource also offers heat maps and scroll tracking.

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Clicky is an excellent one-stop shop for customer behavior. You’ll have multiple formats at your disposal to leverage for optimizing the performance of your website — so you can convert as many leads as possible.

16. Crazy Egg

Price: $24 – $249/mo.

Crazy Egg offers a full suite of heat maps and click tracking, with the additional functionality of being able to segment clicks by source and evaluate link effectiveness.The basic package is fairly inexpensive and gives great insights on how effective each page of your website is.

17. Heatmap.me

Price: Free plan, or up to $100/mo.

Heatmap.me is a great free option for anyone looking to start exploring heat maps, responsive web design tests, and real-time page statistics. Heatmap.me can also track dynamic elements on your site in the heat map tool — think: slider bars, photo galleries, and other interactive sections.

When you use the tool, you’ll be able to see real-time analytics. It gives you the data you really care about, such as CTR and page performance. They’re easy to analyze for beginners, and provide the numbers you need to enhance success.

Feedback Tools

These are the tools that you will use to engage and receive feedback from your visitors. Feedback tools include surveys, polls, messaging, and user testing programs.

18. Intercom

Price: $87-$153/mo.

You can use chat tools to both acquire new customers and chat with existing customers.

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As a CRO tool, you can use Intercom to communicate with website prospects to learn if they need additional help, find out how their experience is going, and learn how you can improve. It also allows you to track leads and use a shared inbox with your team.

19. Qualaroo

Price: $149-$499/mo.

Using chat windows doesn’t have to be limited to just being live. In fact, Qualaroo proves that. It offers popups to collect live feedback from website viewers.

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With this information, you can tailor a site experience, target certain customers, and learn what issues people may be experiencing. This tool is extremely helpful at all stages of the funnel, and is especially utilized in the ecommerce space.

20. SurveyMonkey

Price: $25-$99/mo.

SurveyMonkey has a free option for those just starting out with survey research. You can use this tool to learn demographic information, discover which types of content your prospects and blog subscribers prefer, and get product feedback.

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Survey your customers about their satisfaction. You’ll get great insight, straight from the source, about what draws your audience to your company. From these results, you can work on improving conversion methods.

21. Five Second Test

Price: $50-$100/mo.

UsabilityHub has an awesome community-fueled tool called 5 Second Test that allows users to upload a product, app experience, or design and have the community test it before launch. For example, one of the tests you can run is a click test, which will give you a heat map of page performance.

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You get responses about recall, general feedback, and UI thoughts. This is a great way to have opinions. Five Second Test also offer click tests, preference tests, question tests, and navflow tests for other website and UI questions. You can also design surveys with the tool.

Experiment Tools

These are the tools that you will use to manage, plan, and execute A/B and multivariate tests. Some of these tools will help you turn ideas into experiments, while others will help you create the variations and run the actual tests on your site.

22. Optimizely

Price: Contact for pricing

Testing is hard: It’s hard to come up with a good control group, find a large sample, and determine if your experiment is statistically significant. Luckily, Optimizely helps a lot with all of that … and then some. With Optimizely, you conduct tests across all devices and platforms, then figure out if it is significant or not. The software offers A/B, multiple page, and multivariate tests.

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Optimizely’s tool gives you a full, robust report of test results, like shown above. You’ll see how interactions, and best of all — sign up clicks. Your report will tell you how many leads each test variant earned, so you can choose the best.

23. Effective Experiments

Price: Contact for pricing

Effective Experiments is a concise way to track all of your experiments. If you have tons of Excel spreadsheets cross-referenced with Google Analytics data, you are probably going crazy trying to keep track of everything. This tool puts it all in one place and helps you determine statistical significance.

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Now, you’re armed and ready to start improving conversion rates across your website and marketing efforts. These tools range from free and for beginners to robust and more advanced. Feel out which options seem right for you and soon you’ll be upgrading to the more complex tools when you’ve mastered the basics.

Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on March 11, businesses have had to reckon with its economic impact for over a full quarter.

For the last several months, we’ve been publishing weekly cuts of data on core performance metrics, to provide business owners with useful benchmarks as they adapted to circumstances that were changing by the day.

Now that businesses have closed the books on Q2, we wanted to take a step back and assess where our customers are, four months later. How does the state of business compare today to where it was in March? How have teams changed their behavior to adapt to the new economic climate? What’s worked, and what hasn’t? And what changes are here to stay?

This retrospective takes a deep dive into buyer interest, marketing and sales outreach, and sales outcomes (spoiler alert: there’s a lot of engaged prospects out there, but sales teams have work to do in capturing that interest). We examine how different industries, regions, and company sizes have been impacted by COVID-19, and offer suggestions for investments that make sense right now.

HubSpot can’t make predictions about what will happen, and nobody knows what the future looks like. But we hope this report from our customer base provides a helpful reference as businesses enter the next quarter, and that the insights are useful to you in some way. To explore the accompanying dataset on your own, you can find our interactive microsite here.

This data is based on benchmarks calculated using weekly averages from Q2 vs. post-holiday weekly averages from Q1. Because the data is aggregated from our customer base, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot’s, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors. While certain data is reported by industry, please note that we do not track all industries, and that HubSpot’s industry classifications may not correspond with standard industry classifications.

What We’re Seeing Today: A Q2 Snapshot

When COVID-19 began shutting down economies in Q1, businesses that already had an online presence were at a distinct advantage. The data shows steady and sustained growth in buyer engagement, and that businesses with an online presence were ready to capture that interest.

The story gets a little murkier once buyers actually start to engage with companies. Marketing teams have risen to the challenge of keeping prospects interested in a messy, chaotic crisis and met an audience of buyers who suddenly spend all day at their computer. While email volume has risen significantly — typically a no-no for teams hoping to keep their open rates up — open rates have risen faster than volume has grown, demonstrating that teams have been successful at providing relevant and helpful content.

On the sales side, things aren’t going so well. We at HubSpot are wholly empathetic to the uncertainty of buyers everywhere and the stressful situation salespeople work in right now — and that stress has been reflected in an explosion in prospecting activity. Sales teams sent up to 60% more email than pre-COVID benchmarks. But response rates have been dismal. Marketing teams have been able to connect, but sales teams haven’t. This is a huge area of opportunity for businesses as they enter the next quarter of COVID-19.

How COVID-19 Impacted Businesses in Q2

1. Buyer Interest

Site Traffic

Website traffic has been one of the strongest-performing marketing metrics over the last three months. As buyers have moved their purchasing online out of necessity, businesses with an established digital presence have reaped the rewards. Global site traffic increased by 16% during Q2 compared to Q1. Traffic started increasing the week of March 9 and peaked during the week of April 20, at 24% above the benchmark. The metric then settled in the 15-20% range throughout May and June, and currently sits at 20% above the pre-COVID benchmark. Since we saw a similar drop for this metric at the end of Q1, we hope that site traffic will rebound again in July.

With the exception of last week, construction is one of the few industries where website traffic has risen consistently, increasing by 28% since Q1. In fact, traffic to construction websites was almost 50% above the benchmark at the start of June, before coming down a bit later in the month. Computer software followed a similar trend until late April; its positive momentum stalled during May, but rose again in early June. Both industries plateaued last week, but are still trending around 40% above the benchmark.

All other non-structurally impacted industries are following the global trend at just above or below the benchmark. But this average is a tale of two pandemics — some industries are overperforming, while others are lagging far behind. Industries like human resources and manufacturing are seeing similar traffic patterns to pre-COVID, and have remained consistent throughout May and June. Travel, an industry that was structurally impacted by COVID-19, has recovered a remarkable 40% since the week of March 30. Its site traffic is now just below the benchmark at -1%.

Customer-Initiated Chat

Since the business world has suddenly shifted to a remote setting, chat volume has soared. Sales teams have pivoted to chat to grow their pipelines, while customer service teams are leveraging this medium to manage the increased demand for support.

With the exception of two weeks, chat volume has steadily risen week-over-week since the beginning of March, peaking at 45% above the benchmark in late-May. Total chat volume in Q2 outpaced Q1 by a notable 31%. As restrictions on businesses continue to be lifted around the world, it’ll be interesting to see if chat volume maintains this steady growth.

Every industry is trending above the benchmark when it comes to live chat. This is a positive sign that buyer interest is increasing, and that people are engaging with companies more frequently. The industries that have seen the strongest performance in Q2 are construction, consumer goods, human resources, and manufacturing, which all grew by 25% or more during this last quarter. Consumer goods and construction were certainly outliers in Q2, with both industries seeing a bump of 45-50% in volume.

2. Buyer Engagement

Email Marketing

Global marketing email sends rose significantly during the week of March 9, and stayed at elevated levels throughout Q2. Marketers sent 21% more emails during Q2 than Q1, and email sends have recently peaked at 36% above the benchmark during the week of June 15. This elevated volume is the basis for one of this report’s most surprising findings — open rates have not only remained steady relative to the increased send volume, they have actually gone up. The world has only gotten noisier since COVID-19 shut down business as usual, so this is a real testament to marketing teams that have been able to remain relevant and top-of-mind in a stressful time.

Email open rates have hovered around 10-20% above the benchmark throughout Q2. Currently, marketing email open rates sit at 18% above pre-COVID levels. It’s clear that marketing email has been a reliable outlet for engagement during the pandemic, leaving it up to sales teams to capitalize on these opportunities.

It’s also interesting to see how companies of different sizes pivoted their approach to email marketing during COVID-19. For instance, companies with 0-200 employees experienced the most growth in terms of marketing email sends during the past few months. In Q2, 0-25 employees grew 31% compared to Q1 and 26-200 grew 21%. Companies with 201+ employees sent 14% more emails in Q2, and currently this metric sits at 23% above the pre-COVID benchmark.

Even as open rates reached unexpected highs, one rule of marketing email remained true — companies that sent less email got more opens. Companies with 201+ employees had the smallest increase in email volume, and saw consistently higher open rates, currently performing 25% above the benchmark at the end of Q2. 0-25 and 26-200-employee companies also showed a strong end of June, with open rates roughly 15% above benchmark. These numbers are likely trailing behind larger companies because 0-200 employees are sending a lot more emails to a smaller customer base.

All the industries we’re tracking seem to be following the same global trend for marketing email sends, with the exception of human resources, which is sending 81% more email than pre-COVID levels. However, open rates have been quite volatile since late March, calling into question how effective their strategy has been. Right now, open rates for human resources are trending 4% below benchmark, consistent with the maxim that companies should be using email to communicate with customers, but not overusing it to the point where it’s ineffective.

Sales Emails

If Marketing’s job is to identify buyer interest, Sales is responsible for finding the prospects in that pool who will eventually become customers. While sales outcomes are improving (more on this later), sales prospecting has fallen short of its potential.

The number of emails sent by sales teams experienced an immediate and dramatic uptick following the pandemic declaration. From early-March to late-April, sales teams pushed hard to generate pipelines, leading to a 42% increase in email volume. Compared to Q1, sales teams sent 44% more email in Q2. Today, global sales email volume is at an eye-popping 59% above the pre-COVID benchmark.

The problem is that customers aren’t responding to sales emails the same way they’re responding to marketing ones. Like marketing, sales teams increased their email send frequency following the pandemic declaration. But, unlike marketing, their response rates fell significantly during the week of March 16, and have hovered at 25-30% below the benchmark ever since.

Response rates dropped 24% in Q2, even as email volume fluctuated throughout the quarter. As sales teams increased email sends, customers began to tune these messages out or even mark them as spam in their inboxes. So far, it seems if email send rates remain this high, we can expect response rates to trend in the opposite direction.

Two industries — construction and consumer goods — have really stood out. In Q2, both more than doubled the number of sales emails sent compared to Q1, are still well above the benchmark despite some decline in volume during June. Their response rates have been correspondingly lower than the global decrease, with both industries receiving 33% fewer responses in Q2 than Q1.

These trends tell an important story. Email prospecting, to put it bluntly, is out of control. It’s easy to send thousands of emails with just a few clicks, and in a chaotic time, we understand why sales teams are sending so many. But volume and quality is a tradeoff — the time a team saves by sending out email blasts is wasted if that outreach isn’t personalized, relevant, and helpful. These gaps are clear in the data. At this point, sales teams should be working closely with marketing to understand how they can improve their email engagement rates, and sending far less email.

Call Prospecting

As both marketing and sales email volume went up globally, call prospecting plummeted, falling to a low of 27% below the benchmark by the week of April 6. This has been trending upward since, as call events are now at 9% below pre-COVID levels. However, the total number of prospecting activities (email and calling) has increased by 19%, and the shifting ratio between calling and emailing is revealing. In Q1, the ratio was closer to 1:1 while in Q2, sales people sent more than twice as many emails as they made calls. Sales teams will need to return to their pre-COVID balance in order to see improvements in response rates.

All regions have demonstrated overall positive momentum since the week of April 27. EMEA is the furthest below benchmark at -18%, while NORTHAM and APAC are close to pre-COVID levels, trending at 6-7% below the benchmark. LATAM is currently the closest to the benchmark at -2%, following a recent rise in call activity in June. We hope to see these numbers continue to trend in a positive direction as we move into the start of Q3.

3. Sales Outcomes

Deal Creation

New deal creation took a nosedive in March, as companies paused “business as usual” to understand what cutbacks and operating changes they’d need to weather the pandemic. Globally, the number of new deals created was at its lowest point the week of April 6, where 30% fewer deals were created compared to pre-COVID levels. Overall, the number of deals created in Q2 is 8% less than the number of deals created in Q1, and this trend is reflected in all regions and company sizes.

More recently, this metric has been on an upward trajectory globally, though this growth has been volatile. In the 11 weeks since April 6, eight weeks have seen week-over-week growth in deal creation, while three weeks have seen week-over-week decline. The number of deals created have increased for each of the last four weeks, and businesses are hoping that this trend will hold.

All regions are trending positively and are re-approaching pre-COVID levels. APAC, the region that was first impacted by COVID-19 and has to date been relatively successful at containing the virus’ spread, created 5% fewer deals in Q2 than in Q1. North America created 6% fewer deals in Q2, and EMEA and LATAM trail the group at 12% below Q1 averages.

All company sizes are on a similar upward trend, though none have returned to pre-COVID levels. Companies with more than 200 employees are leading the pack, creating just 2% fewer deals in Q2 than in Q1. Compared to Q1, companies with 0-25 employees are down 8%, and companies with 26-200 employees are down 12%.

Unsurprisingly, deal creation cut by industry is seeing the most variability. Travel and entertainment, the two most structurally impacted of the industries we’re tracking, are still far below pre-COVID benchmarks (35% below and 27% below, respectively). Consumer goods is 11% below benchmark, human resources is 10% below benchmark, and computer software is 3% below benchmark. The two industries that are outperforming pre-COVID levels are manufacturing (6% above) and construction, a whopping 36% above benchmark.

Deals Won

Globally, the number of deals won is trending upward as well, and was 8% above benchmark the week of June 22. Like deal creation, this metric has been highly variable since its lowest point — also the week of April 6, when it was 36% below pre-COVID benchmarks. Deals won has seen week-over-week increases for 10 out of the last 11 weeks.

When comparing Q2 to Q1, this metric lagged slightly behind new deals created in its climb toward pre-COVID levels. There were 11% fewer deals won in Q2 compared to Q1, with variability among regions, industries, and company sizes balancing out to that number. As deal creation is a leading indicator of future revenue, this trend is to be expected.

By region, APAC has made the best recovery, with only 6% fewer deals won in Q2 than in Q1. EMEA is the farthest behind at 17% fewer deals won in Q2, while LATAM and NORTHAM are on par with each other at 13% and 9% below Q1 volume, respectively.

Companies with 0-25 employees are closest to Q1 volume, at only 5% fewer deals won in Q2. Companies with 26-200 employees won 17% fewer deals in Q2 than in Q1, while companies with 201+ employees won 16% fewer deals.

As with deal creation, deals won is the most variable when viewed through an industry cut. Four industries are closing more deals than pre-COVID, while three are still far below. Here’s how each industry we’re tracking shakes out:

Above pre-COVID benchmarks:

• Construction: 24% above benchmark
• Computer software: 14% above benchmark
• Manufacturing: 13% above benchmark
• Consumer goods: 8% above benchmark

Below pre-COVID benchmarks:

• Human resources: 20% below benchmark
• Entertainment: 21% below benchmark
• Travel: 29% benchmark

Perhaps more than any of the other metrics covered in this piece, the long-term health of both deal creation and deals won wholly depends on how the biological reality of the pandemic unfolds. It’s also important to remember that this data should be viewed not as a commentary on the overall health of the economy, but rather as a snapshot of how businesses are behaving right now. Because our data is pulled from HubSpot customers, it is not reflective of the entire economy and does not capture the economic circumstances of any individuals or HubSpot’s own business.

Takeaways

1. Invest in chat.

As many businesses move online for the first time, live chat numbers have skyrocketed in a few industries: construction, consumer goods, and manufacturing. The next few months of the pandemic are, by all expert accounts, uncertain. But we can say that there will be a significant change in how structurally affected industries operate in the future. Many companies who have transitioned online recently will remain online in the future, and this is an investment businesses will be thinking seriously about.

Investing in chat is not only a way to capture the significant uptick in online buyer interest, it’s also a long-term play to help scale your business. Even simple chatbots can take the manual work of basic qualification screening, meeting booking, lead routing, and even simple customer service tasks off your team’s plate, leaving them free to focus on higher-value activities.

Resources to Help:

• Learn how chat should and shouldn’t work in this blog post
• Get up to speed with this beginner’s guide to conversational marketing
• Learn how marketers are using conversational marketing in 2020
• Get your sales team started by learning how to add live chat to your website

Free Software to Get Started

• Free conversational marketing tools are included in HubSpot CRM
• Facebook Messenger integration with HubSpot

2. Shift prospecting away from quantity and toward quality.

The ratio of call prospecting to email prospecting was almost 1:1 before the pandemic. Now it’s closer to 1:2. But response rates are historically low for the non-holiday season, a disconnect between marketing and sales performance that cannot be explained purely by the economic downturn. Salespeople are prospecting 19% more than they were in Q1, and the quality of that outreach has suffered as activity has increased.

Calling is inherently a forcing function in quality sales prospecting. It’s almost not worth it to get on the phone unless you do some research, and that background is key to building rapport, qualifying (and disqualifying), and connecting with buyers. In the age of COVID-19, your entire qualification framework should change — a product that would never have been considered pre-pandemic could be business-critical today, and vice versa. Rethink what a “good fit” looks like right now, create crisp disqualification frameworks to work through leads efficiently, and reprioritize prospecting appropriately. Sales should also be borrowing tactics from marketing — personalization through content, adding a personal touch through video, and prioritizing help over selling.

This ratio also reveals a broader principle sales leaders would do well to remember. Part of sales will always be a volume game, and it’s pointless to deny that. Adopting automation and software cuts down on the time the team has to spend manually sorting leads, and frees them up to feel secure in taking a slower approach to prospecting. Prospecting must be worked from an individual and an operational perspective, and can’t succeed without investment in both processes.

Resources to Help:

• Use these prospecting strategies to find new channels to engage your prospects
• These phrases that top salespeople use can help your team build customer rapport
• Watch the replay of our Adapt 2020 webinar on selling through uncertainty
• Refresh your email outreach with these sales templates
• Start using video in your sales outreach to engage more prospects
• Use this guide to increase your sales close rates
• Lead with empathy in sales emails to build rapport and increase response rates
• Equip your team with these essential inside sales technologies
• Streamline your sales process with this guide to frictionless selling (and this course)

Free Software to Get Started

• HubSpot CRM is free and comes with included advertising and sales acceleration tools, including free 1:1 video, meetings, and chatbot tools
• Gmail and Google Calendar integrations with HubSpot
• Zoom integration with HubSpot
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration with HubSpot
• Check out what HubSpot’s app partners are offering at this time with this list of relief initiatives

3. Invest in online discoverability.

As a company that sells software to help businesses grow online, we’re witness to a unique moment for our industry. Huge numbers of businesses and buyers shifted online out of necessity, many for the first time. Because this data is reflective of our customer base, which contains companies that have chosen to invest in their online strategy, we don’t have a clear picture of what these numbers look like for businesses that are still 100% offline. But one thing is clear: Businesses that already had an online presence in March were at an advantage.

For most of us right now, our business’s online presence is our business. Whether it’s through a website, a landing page, or a business run through social media, buyers need to be able to find you online. Prioritizing relevant and helpful content, investing in SEO, or taking advantage of a cheaper-than-usual ad marketplace (global ad spend is 8% below pre-COVID levels, and fewer buyers means cheaper keywords), are just a few of the many options you have to reach the right buyers at the right time.

For businesses that do not already have online presences, it may seem intimidating to think about building a website. But the ubiquity of CMS software in 2020 means that it’s possible to stand up a simple site in half a day, for free. And social accounts take even less time. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution — if a website is too daunting right now, it’s perfectly fine to start with just one account and go from there. Any move to online will be more valuable than relying exclusively on analog methods of growing your business.

Resources to Help:

• Create an effective SEO strategy using this helpful guide and template
• Prevent traffic loss altogether using this guide to predictive SEO
• Use this editorial calendar template to plan educational content
• Get started writing with these blog post templates
• Optimize content and get found online with our guide to SEO

Free Software to Get Started

• HubSpot for WordPress integration
• Google Search Console integration with HubSpot

Sign up for this week’s webinar for more insights surrounding our three-month COVID-19 retrospective.

In 2020, brands are increasingly growing global awareness with international marketing strategies. And, one major way they’ve driven traffic from different regions to their site is through international SEO.

But, like any marketing campaign, SEO is not always a one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, every country is diverse, uses the internet a little differently, and might have different sets of regulations. Not to mention, audiences in one country might have vastly different interests, cultural backgrounds, and values than audiences in another region.

As a marketer, your biggest goal should be to know your audience. And, according to HubSpot SEO experts, this is no different when it comes to building an SEO strategy for your international or multi-language website.

“When you run a multi-language version of your website and you’re serious about delivering best-in-class, high-quality content to audiences around the globe, you should invest in an international SEO strategy that will rely strongly on a proper technical structure and global content strategy that considers local nuances,” advises Karolina Bujalska-Exner, HubSpot’s international SEO manager.

But how do you create a winning international SEO strategy? First, it’s important to identify how SEO, search engine algorithms, and search platforms might vary from region to region.

To help those interested in gaining global online awareness, I spoke with HubSpot’s SEO experts to learn how optimization strategies differ around the world. Here are four things to know.

4 Ways SEO Varies Around the World

1. Your search competition might vary in different geographies

When you’ve only marketed your brand in one country, it will take time to get a social media following, email subscribers, traffic, and other metrics from a new international audience. This is because people around the world are just getting familiar with your brand for the first time.

Although SEO focuses on search, it will similarly take time to grow awareness on another country’s Google or Bing domain.

“Every region of the world has its own Google ccTLD (for example, Google.com, Google.es, Google.fr, Google.jp, etc). Each Google domain follows similar — if not identical — algorithms, but each one is ultimately its own market with its own economy of publishers,” Becker explains.

“A different Google site doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be starting with zero domain authority if you were to expand your content to other regions,” Becker adds. “But it does mean your brand might not have the same awareness it has on Google.com. Therefore, traffic growth may be a bit of an uphill battle as you establish an audience.”

Even though you might be ranking on the U.S. version of Google, keep in mind that audiences on Google.fr in French territories might not know you exist just yet. As you create more content for these markets, they’ll get more chances to click on your content and boost your website’s authority. However, when you start with no SEO or content strategies catered to this market, it will take time to get traffic needed to rank quickly.

2. A region’s language and local nuances can impact your rankings in that territory.

If you’ve done any research on SEO, you probably know that keyword research is a vital way to create and optimize content so it ranks on Google. This is no different in other regions where English or your website’s language might not be as smoothly translated.

“When serving content in different languages, translations or localisations sometimes might not be enough to win rankings or get valuable traffic from another locale,” says Bujalska-Exner.

“Why? Even when the most amazing content is optimized for one region, it might not have a similar meaning or wording when translated to another regional language.”

To mitigate translation issues, Bujalska-Exner says, “It’s important to do your keyword research in the target language so you can find the best regional opportunities for main and long-tail keywords.”

“The same goes for search intent. One term might have completely different intent in another country,” Bujalska-Exner adds. “The way SERPs look varies across the globe. Some countries have more specific search features present than others. This should always be taken into account when deciding how to structure your content.”

As you do international keyword research, Bujalska-Exner advises, “Remember that some SEO tools offer more accurate results for search volumes in specific languages or regions than others. Test several tools before implementing one that provides the most accurate information for your target language.”

Aside from doing research, another helpful way to optimize content for one region is by writing it in that locale’s language from the start.

When you have a regional creator write your content in their language, the writer can better ensure that content is “optimized, helpful, and engaging” to the regional audiences. They can also use their knowledge of the area and audience to include “local examples and ideas,” Bujalska-Exner says.

“There are many ways to set your website for an international audience. The most common are separate ccTlds, subdomains, or language folders.” Bujalska-Exner explains. “Each of those has advantages and disadvantages. You should choose your strategy based on what you want to achieve. You have to think of your SEO needs, the resources you have or might invest in, and choose the best option for you.”

For a technical comparison of ccTlds and international subdomain options, check out this guide.

3. The top search engines in some regions might not be Google or Bing.

While search engines behave similarly internationally, it’s important to know that some of the major sites like Google, Bing, or Yahoo are rarely used or banned in other countries. When marketing web content in these areas, you might need to consider an alternative other than optimizing your site for major search platforms.

“One very clear difference that does exist globally is a search engine’s share of voice in various countries,” Becker explains. “Most search engines you’ve heard of — Bing, Yahoo, Google — have similar algorithms and ranking factors. Therefore SEO for one engine will benefit you across multiple engines. However. some national markets operate on a completely different set of rules “

As our SEO experts have revealed, you don’t have to dramatically change your SEO process, or learn about a whole new list of algorithms to rank on Google in different countries.

But, while the foundation of your keyword research and SEO strategy could be similar from country to country, you’ll still need to identify how search behaviors vary internationally, which languages will be key to your SEO, and local topics that certain international markets might be more heavily searching.

“When discussing SEO, we usually think about optimizing for Google. But, there are many countries in the world where Google’s market share is actually very low,” Bujalska-Exner explains. “Instead there are other regional alternatives that are used as primary engines. For example Yandex is used in Russia and Baidu is primarily used in China.”

Although search engines like Baidu, shown below might look similar to Google, they don’t necessarily act the same, according to our experts.

Becker, who also points out China as one region with its own search engine, adds, “China is unique in that Google does not have a presence in this country at all. The primary source of information in China is from Baidu, which does not resemble the ranking factors that marketers are familiar with from Google.”

4. SEO isn’t that different around the globe — but you still need a strategy for each country.

Because platforms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are still present around the world, optimizing your website for them won’t be that different from country to country. According to Braden Becker, a senior SEO strategist, there are a number of strategies that will work for these search engines in many different countries.

“SEO isn’t really something that differs globally, but rather extends globally,” says Backer. “In the case of HubSpot, we have an SEO strategy that is both native to each region, but also follows a number of universal SEO techniques that marketers need to know in order to do international SEO successfully.”

Yes. If you want to develop audiences in international territories, you’ll need to keep in mind that people in other regions will be searching for different phrases in different languages. This instantly will make keyword research and SEO strategies different in each area.

However, the ranking algorithms that major search platforms, like Google, use in one country aren’t much different in another. So, if you have SEO specialists in different locations, they might use a similar keyword research and SEO optimization strategy. However, they’ll likely discover different lists of keywords and different blog posts to optimize based on what people in their area are looking for.

Navigating International Marketing

Like any other international or audience growth marketing strategy, you’ll ultimately need to know your target audience, give them content that they enjoy, and encourage them to visit your website more often. As you gain traffic to your international website, you’ll gain brand awareness as well as ranking authority from these markets.

For more international marketing tips, check out this post on social media platforms that weren’t founded in the U.S., as well as this list of brilliant international marketing examples.

Want to dive deeper into international SEO? Here’s a technical guide on how to optimize your site for global search engines. Or, worried you’ll make a major global SEO mistake? Read this post to discover how you could sabotage global SEO.

In 2008, the Great Recession was all over the news. At 14, I didn’t exactly know what that meant. However, I understood that my parents were struggling financially.

While it was the first economic crisis I was old enough to remember, it isn’t the only economic downturn we’ve seen, nationally or internationally.

In 1997, there was the Asian financial crisis. After 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange closed for four days, the first time that had happened since World War I.

The world has faced uncertain times before, and I’m sure it will again. But, how do companies thrive during financially rough times?

In this post, we’ll review seven companies that grew during the recession and see how they succeeded during economic uncertainty.

1. TeamLogic IT

TeamLogic IT provides IT solutions and consulting services for small businesses. Interestingly, IT has been a growing industry during times of uncertainty, including the 2008 recession.

Since consumers are becoming more and more dependent on newer technologies, this industry usually does well during economic recessions. Technology impacts almost every area of our life from our security to our entertainment.

In fact, sales for technology increased during the 2008 recession.

Because of this trend, TeamLogic IT weathered the storm of 2008 well.

If you want to start a business, it’s important to consider whether that industry has done well during times of economic unrest. Industries such as tech, discount stores, accounting, grocery, healthcare, and DIY/repairs do well.

2. Netflix

You might be thinking, “Of course Netflix survived the 2008 recession, it’s a huge company.”

However, in 2008, Netflix wasn’t yet the media giant it is today.

In fact, Netflix introduced a new product (the streaming service), around the time of the Great Recession as a response to dying video rental stores.

Then, during 2008 and 2009, the company continued to work on partnerships with organizations like Xbox so people could stream through those devices.

It was these innovations that allowed the company to continue to grow during the economic downturn. In fact, they were increasing memberships and subscriptions during the 2008 recession while other companies were struggling to maintain revenue.

Additionally, 2008 wasn’t the only time this company has faced a recession. Netflix was founded before the dot-com bubble and had to weather that storm in the early 2000s.

It was during these times that the brand innovated ways to continue to appeal to their audience, whether that meant introducing new products or expanding its products with partnerships and collaborations.

3. Citigroup

Every year, the Federal Reserve conducts stress tests to see how much capital banks would have if they were subjected to hefty losses.

Interestingly, in 2014, Citigroup had grown in assets, making it one of the only banks to have grown since the 2008 recession.

This bank grew in the aftermath of economic distress while others didn’t because they worked on branding and offering quality services. Citigroup started supporting certain community services which helped with their brand story.

In fact, marketing played a large role in Citigroup’s ability to grow after the 2008 recession.

4. Lego

Lego is an interesting case study because you might think that toys and amusement parks or play centers are unessential, so the industry would be impacted by an economic crisis.

However, during the 2008 recession, Lego decided to expand into a global market.

The company concentrated its efforts on building revenue in Europe and Asia while the U.S. faced economic distress.

By doing this, the company reached an all-time high profitability during a recession. This company expertly knew to expand to global markets when its main market was facing an economic downturn.

5. Groupon

Groupon is another company that you might think, “Of course they survived an economic downturn.”

However, Groupon was just a startup in 2008. In fact, the company launched in the middle of the Great Recession. How can this happen?

Well, surprisingly, startups tend to do well during recessions because they usually fill a need and are able to spend less money because of discount prices.

With Groupon specifically, the site did well because it was offering discounts.

Discounts are in extreme demand during recessions because consumers are trying to cut costs wherever they can. Discounts actually offer consumers a way to survive a recession, which is why discount stores tend to do well during economic instability.

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp has been around for almost 20 years and has survived several economic uncertainties. The company weathered the economic downturn in 2001 (in fact, that’s when it was founded), and the 2008 recession.

So, how did the brand survive and thrive during a recession? Well, the company was founded during the 2001 crisis and was able to do well because of it.

In 2008, the company survived because they changed their entire business model. They became a freemium business, and their revenue soared after that.

Many customers wanted to use Mailchimp during an economic crisis because it was free. By adjusting to the times and offering a free product, the brand was able to grow and they’ve maintained that business model ever since.

7. Warby Parker

Warby Parker is another example of a brand that was founded during the Great Recession. The reason they were able to succeed during this time? They filled an enormous gap in the marketplace.

While you might think that you shouldn’t start a business during an economic crisis, it’s actually a good time to notice gaps and pain points in the marketplace and fill the need.

Warby Parker did that when they realized it was hard to purchase an affordable pair of fashionable glasses online.

They filled a need and customers showed up even though they weren’t spending a lot of money. The company was marketed as affordable (which was necessary during a recession) and customers needed an affordable glassware solution.

Even if your company isn’t as big as these examples, remember that a lot of enterprise companies today started during a recession.

As another example, Microsoft started after the recession in the 70s. Apple transformed its brand after the 9/11 economic downturn by introducing new products and investments.

The global economy is resilient and uncertainty has always passed. The economy will recover, but it’s important for your company to be prepared for when a financial crisis happens.

These companies succeeded because they looked for new opportunities, expanded into new markets, adjusted their offers, developed new products, and gave folks a cost-efficient alternative. Innovation and creativity can help you succeed in the next economic downturn.

Want to learn more about business growth? Check out our ultimate guide.

Whether you’re working for a small agency or a major marketing firm, you’re probably eventually going to need to fill out a Request for Proposal, or RFP.

Your company can’t do everything internally, and when your business needs to purchase a product or service from elsewhere, you might need to shop around. An RFP allows you to collect offers from various vendors and select the vendor that best meets your criteria, both in regards to skill and budget.

Any time you outsource work to a supplier, there’s a potential for issues such as miscommunication around the scope of the work and the compensation. What a good RFP does is eliminate gray area so that both parties understand what needs to be delivered, when, and for how much.

RFP Template

Here, we’ve provided an RFP template you can follow for initial structure, as well as a sample RFP for further inspiration. But it isn’t one-size-fits-all — you’ll need to tailor your RFP to best articulate your company’s needs.

Download this Template for Free

RFPs come in all shapes, sizes, and visual formats depending on the needs of your company and the work that must be performed. At the top of a standard RFP, you’ll find the following:

Project Name or Description

Company Name

Address

City, State, Zip Code

Procurement Contact Person

Telephone Number of PCP

Email Address of PCP

Fax Number

The body of the RFP will contain additional details about the project, including:

1. Background/Introduction
2. Project Goals and Scope of Services
3. Anticipated Selection Schedule
4. Time and Place of Submission of Proposals
5. Timeline
6. Elements of Proposal
7. Evaluation Criteria
8. Possible Roadblocks
9. Budget

Read on to learn more about what goes into each of these sections so that you can build an RFP of your own.

1. Background/Introduction

In your introductory paragraph, you’ll want to include useful background information about your company — who founded it, what product or service your company offers, what sets you apart from competitors, and where you’re located. If any vendor is serious about working with you, they’ll want this information before moving forward.

2. Project Goals and Scope of Services

Next, you’ll want to outline the project you need completed, and the goals you expect to accomplish from the project. It’s important you get as specific as possible — even outlining individual tasks and criteria involved. You’ll want to include phrases such as “The award will be given to X firm,” with the “X” establishing how you’ll determine the best candidate.

3. Anticipated Selection Schedule

It’s crucial you include a detailed schedule so vendors know if they can meet your deadlines. You’ll also need to give vendors a window for when they can ask questions regarding your project. This’ll limit the hassle, for you and for them.

4. Time and Place of Submission of Proposals

Similar to paragraph #3, this is important information you’ll want to clearly present, so vendors know how and where to submit themselves for consideration.

5. Timeline

By including a time frame in your RFP, you’re able to eliminate any vendor who can’t work within your time constraints. If you’re flexible on your time, you can write something like, “Our company hopes to finish the project within six months, but we’re open to negotiation for the right candidate.”

6. Elements of Proposal

If you don’t outline clearly and specifically what you expect bidders to include in their proposal, you can’t necessarily fault them if they don’t include it. It’s critical you outline a checklist so vendors know which elements you’re expecting to receive. It’s also a good test for who’s capable of handling your demands — if a vendor can’t complete all elements of your proposal, you probably can’t trust them to finish your project, either.

7. Evaluation Criteria

Outlining your expectations will help eliminate vendors who don’t meet them. For this section, you’ll want to do some brainstorming with your team to come up with a mandatory list of items you feel are the best indicators of impressive candidates. Your list could include samples of past work, a proven success record with companies in similar industries, the expertise and technical skills to meet your demands, and a cost of services within your price range.

8. Possible Roadblocks

Here, you’ll want to outline any roadblocks, such as limited resources or a custom website, that might prevent certain vendors from successfully completing the project. This allows you to eliminate unsatisfactory bidders, and it will also help you determine which vendors have the skills and expertise to tackle those challenges.

9. Budget

Any vendor needs to know how much you’re able to pay them for their services before they’ll move forward with their bid.

RFP Sample

The above elements might manifest on the page in a number of ways. For example, here is an RFP sample from TemplateLab.

Image Source 

Now that you understand the elements of an RFP , you can build your own template and then fill it out so that you can start accepting bids. We’ll use a fictitious company, Caroline’s Websites, Inc., to illustrate exactly how each section should be executed, starting with the header:

Project Name or Description: Marketing Services

Company Name: Caroline’s Websites, Inc.

Address: 302 Inbound Ave.

City, State, Zip Code: Boston, MA 29814

Procurement Contact Person: Caroline Forsey

Telephone Number of PCP: 227-124-2481

Email Address of PCP: cforsey@consulting.com

Fax Number: N/A

Next, we’ll go into each of the elements of the RFP with information using the same fictitious company. 

1. Background/Introduction

Caroline’s Websites, Inc. is a web design firm created by Caroline Forsey in 2010. Caroline’s Websites, Inc. prides itself on a team-oriented, solutions-based approach to web design. We provide our clients with web design services including coding, development, and branding. Our staff is located in two offices in Massachusetts.

2. Project Goals and Scope of Services

Caroline’s Websites, Inc. is seeking the services of a full-service communications and marketing firm to develop and execute a comprehensive integrated marketing plan that increases our SEO presence; attracts more social media followers; and effectively completes a lead generation campaign. The award will be made to a responsive and responsible firm based on the best value and professional capability.

The selected firm will be responsible for the development and implementation of a comprehensive and cost-effective marketing plan.

Tasks include but may not be limited to the following criteria:

• Lead generation campaign

• Paid media strategy

• Production of creative material including collateral and direct mail

• Online marketing campaign

• Website enhancement

• Search engine optimization

• General account management

• Other communications and/or marketing-related assistance as required

3. Anticipated Selection Schedule

The Request for Proposal timeline is as follows:

Request for RFP: June 1, 2020

Deadline for Bidders to Submit Questions: July 5, 2020

[Company Name] Responds to Bidder Questions: July 20, 2020

Selection of Top Bidders / Notification to Unsuccessful Bidders: July 31, 2020

Start of Negotiation: August 5, 2020

Contract Award / Notification to Unsuccessful Bidders: August 31, 2020

4. Time and Place of Submission of Proposals

The RFP will be posted on our website, Carolinewebsites.com, and can be downloaded from there directly as of 10 a.m. on June 1, 2020.

Respondents to this RFP must submit one original and five copies of their proposal. Responses must be received no later than July 25, 2020. Responses should be clearly marked “RFP-MarketingServices” and mailed or delivered to the contact person listed above.

5. Timeline

Caroline’s Websites, Inc. needs the project completed within 8 months.

6. Elements of Proposal

A submission must, at a minimum, include the following elements:

• Description of the firm that includes a general overview, names and credentials of creative team, number of full-time employees.

• A one-page narrative outlining the firm’s strengths and distinguishing skills or capabilities as they might relate to Caroline’s Websites, Inc.

• A representative selection of social media ads, direct response material, collateral, and website development created for current and past clients.

7. Evaluation Criteria

The successful respondent will:

• Have been operating continuously as a marketing agency for a minimum of 24 months and possess full-service, in-house capabilities for marketing, creative services, production, media planning and placement, direct response and research.

• The education, experience, knowledge, skills, and qualifications of the firm and the individuals who will be available to provide these services.

• The competitive cost of services.

• The expertise of the firm in working with similar customers.

8. Possible Roadblocks

At this time, Caroline’s Websites, Inc. currently has custom coding on our website, of which bidders should be aware.

9. Budget

Caroline’s Websites, Inc.’s budget for the project is $8,750.00.

These elements were written in a way to clarify the scope of the project that Caroline’s Websites, Inc. wants completed so that suppliers know whether or not to make a bid. Defining the project allows the bidder to determine if they’re a good fit and how much they’d likely charge. Being as transparent as possible serves to benefit (and even protect) both parties in the long run.

To use some of these elements in your own RFP, start with an RFP template and adjust it to your liking.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

We complain about spending countless hours in unproductive and mismanaged meetings.

But the greater crime is all the wasted time we spend scheduling the meeting.

The endless back-and-forth communication and steps — reviewing calendars, finding out the best place to meet, setting up a call-in number, adding the meeting to the calendar, and inviting all the necessary attendees. The process makes your meeting a hassle before it even starts.

Effortlessly scheduling meetings without the annoying back-and-forth emails. Get free access to HubSpot Meetings here.

Whether you’re trying to find the perfect window of time to catch up with your busy team, or looking for the best way to coordinate with your clients, these meeting scheduler tools have you covered.

1. HubSpot

A lot of meeting scheduler tools connect to your inbox, but what if you need your meeting schedule available in your CRM as well? HubSpot’s meeting scheduling tool integrates with both your calendar and your HubSpot CRM, so setting up meetings with customers, prospects, or leads is a painless process.

The Meetings tool provides users with a personalized booking link they can share via email to invite people to view their availability and book time. When someone schedules a meeting, it will automatically be added to your calendar, and pushed to the CRM.

(By the way, we humbly recommend our own tool because of the value it provides, especially for sales reps and marketers. Click here to see how it works.)

2. Arrangr

This tool handles meeting scheduling from beginning to end by reserving tentative meeting times and also releasing slots that don’t get taken. It integrates with calendars and CRMs, and it has the capability of scheduling group events. The most unique thing, though, is its ability to suggest the perfect meeting location for all parties.

3. Demodesk

Demodesk is an all-in-one meeting scheduler and assistant designed specifically for sales demo scheduling. Not only do you get custom booking pages, calendar syncing, and meeting analytics, but you can also take advantage of its advanced screen sharing and virtual display options. As a plus, it has native integrations with many tools, including CRMs.

4. Rallly

Finding a time for a group of people to meet can be a nightmare, especially if your team is large or includes remote employees. Rallly lets you create a simple, straightforward poll where attendees can vote on a day for an event that works best for them. It also includes an open comment section on the meeting page, so attendees can plan the meeting agenda or discuss details before the event.

5. Assistant.to

Assistant.to lets you work directly from Gmail and Google Calendar to select available meeting times and share those open slots with the person you’re trying to schedule a meeting with.

From within the message compose screen in Gmail, you can select the meeting duration and location. This information is included in an email, allowing the recipient to click on the time that works best for them. Once you’ve agreed on a time, the app adds the meeting with all the relevant details to your calendar. Currently, group scheduling is not an option.

6. Calendar

Calendar, which recently acquired Timebridge, is a free service that integrates Google and Apple calendars. The app offers two ways to schedule meetings.

With the “outbound” method, hosts indicate their own availability, list the attendees they’d like to come to a meeting, and use the Calendar software to send out an email to collect everyone’s preferred times. After Calendar determines the ideal time for everyone to meet, the app will schedule the meeting for you. With the “inbound” method, Calendar gives you a personal URL where users can check your availability and request times to meet with you.

7. NeedToMeet

NeedToMeet doesn’t require you to sign up for an account to use their service. You simply enter a brief description of your meeting’s purpose, block off your availability on a calendar, and send the link to attendees. The free version doesn’t sync with your calendar, but they do offer a premium subscription which integrates with Outlook.

This tool differs from services like Rally and Doodle because it allows attendees to indicate their preferred date and times, rather than only choosing from a list of dates and times set by the meeting host.

8. YouCanBook.me

If you find yourself struggling to make your availability known to clients, try out YouCanBook.me. This freemium service offers users a custom URL where users can view free spots on your Google Calendar or iCloud Calendar and book time with you.

The service allows you to customize your booking page with different layouts, colors, and your company’s logo.

9. Pick

Pick automatically scans everyone’s Gmail calendars to find open slots, and then delivers a list of mutually available times. You can then send a calendar invite to all attendees directly from the app.

All members of your team need to be on Pick in order to share their availability. The app also provides users with an individual URL so you can share your availability with people requesting a meeting.

10. Doodle

With Doodle, you can pick date and time options, and poll a group to see what works best for them. You don’t have to sign up for a Doodle account to participate in a poll. You can also create a public Doodle URL, where individuals can request a meeting with you based on your listed availability.

11. Calendly

Calendly integrates directly with your Google or Office 365 calendar, and gives you a personalized URL where people can view your availability and schedule times to meet you. They offer a basic free plan, and a paid premium plan that allows for group scheduling and other additional features.

To help you stay organized, the app lets you set up custom meeting types and durations, e.g., “30 Minute Check-In” or “60 Minute Project Review.” You can add also add custom questions to the form people use to sign up to meet with you, include a link to a document or web page people should review prior to your meeting, or even make events private.

12. Clara

Meet Clara, a virtual assistant fueled by machine learning who can schedule all your meetings and get acquainted with your scheduling patterns. Once you sign up, you indicate your preferences as to which days and times you are available for meetings and your favorite locations for coffee, lunch, or drinks.

If someone requests a meeting, you canCC Clara’s email address (which can be customized to your company’s domain), and the virtual assistant will determine a time, date, duration, participants, and location for the meeting. She also understands human commands like, “I’m sick, can you reschedule my meetings on Tuesday?”

It currently only works with Gmail, and it does have a hefty price tag, but it could be worth the cost if scheduling is a major pain point for your company. Especially considering it’s still significantly cheaper than hiring a human personal assistant.

13.Google Calendar

If your team uses the GSuite and would like to streamline scheduling processes, you can schedule meetings with others through Google Calendar.

If your work email is already part of a GSuite membership, you can go to your calendar, search another team member under the “Meet with” tab on your left, and then click their name to view their calendar up against your own. If you click on a time slot on that calendar, you can schedule a meeting with both yourself and that teammate.

If your teammates aren’t part of your GSuite, you can press the share button and share your calendar with their email address. From there, they can enter the calendar and schedule a meeting time with you.

The options are endless for meeting scheduler tools. The choice is ultimately up to you which one fits your personal workflow.

14. Zoom

Zoom is known as one of the most popular video conferencing platforms, but it also includes tools to make the process of scheduling one a lot easier. You can choose to add the meeting to your calendar (which may send an invite to the recipient for you) or you can copy and paste the generated invite to an email. In addition, Zoom Meetings features include recording and transcripts functions.

How to Schedule a Meeting With HubSpot’s Meeting Tool

The HubSpot Meetings Tool allows you to book meetings with contacts without wasting time with all the back-and-forth, and it connects with Gmail, Outlook, and more. Best of all: It’s free.

Here are the steps to get started:

1. Sign up for a free HubSpot Sales account.

The Meetings Tool comes free with our Sales Hub, and both are powerful when combined with our free CRM.

2. Click the Meetings link under the Sales tab.

This will take you to the back end of the Meetings tool where you can create your own meeting link.

3. Click the “Create meeting link” button in the top right corner.

You may see the option to choose Personal or Team. If it’s just you that’s requesting the meeting, choose Personal.

4. Fill out your meeting details.

HubSpot asks for the headline (which will show up on your Meetings Tool), name, what you want your link URL to be, and more details.

5. Configure your meeting in HubSpot.

There are also additional fields for optional details to be included in the invite, such as subject and description that will be sent to attendees.

6. Designate your availability.

This is the key feature that eliminates the back and forth. By designating when you can meet, this will display only those times for the recipient to choose from.

7. Add form questions for qualification.

If you’re in sales and have your Meetings Tool visible to anyone, you may want to only allow qualified prospects to book with you. This section requires a few fields to give you more insight.

8. Click “Save changes” and check your work.

Once you click this button, you’ll see a popup that includes your page link and the embed code.

Copy and paste the booking link into your browser and check to see if your Meetings Tool has this meeting configured the way you want it.

If you’re ready to take advantage of this neat tool, you can set it up for free right now.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

When internal talent is stretched thin and in-house teams are struggling to get campaigns over the line, outsourcing marketing tasks to a specialist third-party can alleviate a ton of the operational pressures your team might be facing.

That being said, outsourcing is a big decision that requires financial commitment and an agreeable working relationship between companies. So, if you have the bandwidth and budget, it can make more sense for some tasks to be kept in-house, or to use a combination of the two.

There are three outsourcing routes you can take:

• Outsource your marketing in full
• Keep all of your marketing efforts in-house
• Use a combination of outsourced and in-house marketing

Requirements will differ between businesses. The option you select will be determined by your financial situation and the experience, capacity, and skill sets of your current in-house team.

Here, let’s dive into the advantages of outsourcing your marketing efforts, and which individual components of your overall marketing strategy might be best-suited for your brand to outsource versus tackling in-house.

The Advantages of Outsourcing Marketing

Time constraints, limited budgets, and even complacency can make it all too easy for even the best marketers to fall back on familiar tactics.

But for marketing to be effective, it needs to be innovative and engaging, so relying on the easy option will only get you so far. Outsourcing connects you with marketing agencies who specialize in keeping on-top of new technology and trends.

These professionals can offer an outsider’s perspective of your business and bring new, exciting ideas and strategies to the table.

Additionally, maintaining a salaried in-house marketing team can be expensive and — depending on your marketing requirements — often unnecessary. Turning to a third party whenever you require marketing collateral means you’re only using budget when it’s necessary.

For instance, let’s say you work for a small company and want to publish two blog posts a week on your company’s blog. Rather than paying an in-house blogger to write full-time for your brand, you might consider hiring a freelancer to write those two posts per week, which is undeniably cheaper than the alternative. As your company grows, you can reassess whether it makes sense to pay a writer full-time.

With time, you’ll be able to develop a fixed budget that better reflects marketing expenditure in terms of requirements. This budget will help you determine if developing an in-house team is financially viable for your business.

If you want to outsource some (but not all) of your marketing efforts, let’s dive into a few different aspects of your overall strategy where you might consider hiring a third-party to do the heavy lifting.

Outsourcing Content Marketing

Authoritative, informative content that positions your business as a thought leader can do wonders for your bottom line. So what does it matter if it’s written or designed by people outside of your organization? As long as these writers or video creators are fully immersed in, and understand the complexities of your business, they should be able to serve up relevant, engaging content for your target audience.

If you want to outsource your content marketing efforts, you can choose to go with an agency or freelancer — sites like Upwork and Fiverr are great resources for entrepreneurs and allow you to vet a professional’s work before committing.

Take a look at How to Find Freelancers for Your Business to learn more about how to find top-notch freelancers for your business.

However, you might feel that your internal team has a better grasp on the nuances of your business. That’s fine! There are a number of marketing tools and platforms available to make the content creation process simpler. For example: WordPress and its deeply functional dashboard; Ceros with its collaborative, experiential slant; or HubSpot’s own marketing suite, which brings blogging, social media, and website material together under one powerful software solution.

Outsourcing Marketing Strategy

From lead generation tactics to email workflows, a solid marketing strategy should cater to all stages of the buyer’s journey. This vital groundwork includes developing buyer personas, mapping campaigns to need states, and identifying growing trends in the market.

Outsourcing your marketing strategy to a career specialist means you’re enlisting the help of someone whose job it is to keep abreast of industry innovations and new, creative methods of marketing delivery. They will also be able to identify audience demographics that you may not have considered before.

However, it may not be financially viable for your business to outsource the entire task to a marketing strategist. If that’s the case, then another solution is for you to commission a ‘strategy skeleton’ for your internal team to build on. For instance, the outsourced strategist defines your buyer personas and then your team adds the muscle and sinew to the bare strategic bones.

Outsourcing Marketing Analytics

Your marketing intelligence is informed by how well you use your data analytics. Many businesses will find that they just don’t have the in-house expertise to extract nuggets of insight that can turn marketing efforts into gold. Moreover, it can be expensive and time-consuming to recruit and train an in-house team of data scientists and engineers.

Specialty agencies, however, can provide the expertise necessary to interpret your data and offer data-driven insights in response to your existing analytics. Additionally, they can offer a number of solutions that can be fitted to your budget and requirements.

Instead of stretching your resources thin or incurring unnecessary costs, you can focus on developing outstanding products and delivering exceptional service, drawing on the insights unearthed by your marketing intelligence agency.

If you’re interested in diving into marketing intelligence in-house, take a look at How Market Intelligence Will Make Your Marketing Team More Agile to explore whether that’s the right solution for your needs.

Outsourcing Email Marketing

Wary of either cluttering a prospect’s inbox or being forgotten by them altogether? A successful email marketing strategy can make automation and personalization your secret weapons.

For instance, hands-off, lead-nurturing workflows can fire off emails automatically based on a user’s action — such as when a user clicks on a social media advertisement or plays a video. Outsourcing the creation and setup of these workflows takes much of the manual, administrative labor from your shoulders and places it into the hands of professionals.

Should the in-house route sound like a better option, you’ll need an infrastructure in place to facilitate the timed delivery of these emails, as well as an internal strategic and content team to develop them. HubSpot’s marketing suite offers an intuitive framework to outline your email workflow strategy and its automatic triggers.

Outsourcing Social Media Strategy

There are plenty of benefits to keeping social media in-house: for instance, social media is one of the most direct opportunities your business has to connect and engage with prospects and customers. If you keep social media in-house, you can hire full-time social media strategists who communicate with prospects via social media and then relay that information back to leadership to inform more personalized, targeted brand messages moving forward.

However, if you work for a smaller company with a limited budget, a full-time social media manager might currently be out-of-reach.

Additionally, the power of social media might actually make it an important task for you to outsource — when done correctly, social media can take your brand’s reach and visibility to the next level, so you might want to outsource to an agency with proven success in the industry.

You can also delegate certain social media tasks to a third-party group, rather than handing off the entire strategy to them. For instance, maybe you notice Instagram is a fantastic avenue to connect with leads, but your social media manager is currently juggling Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook as well, making it difficult for her to give her full attention to Instagram.

To combat the issue, you might hire an agency to focus primarily on all things related to Instagram, including Instagram advertising, posting to Instagram Stories, and hiring Instagram influencers to promote your products or services.

If you don’t want to hire a third-party agency for your social media needs, however, there are plenty of impressive social media tools to help you automatically post across channels on a regular basis, use data to refine your strategy over time, and communicate with prospects at-scale.

Every business requires a marketing strategy that’s tailored to their unique challenges. Some may find that outsourcing the entire marketing spectrum is right for them, while others may want to implement marketing technology and develop a core team around it.

We recommend keeping activity in-house if your current marketing technology is generating excellent ROI and you have a trained, experienced marketing workforce with the capacity to handle long-term campaign work and ad-hoc tasks.

You should consider outsourcing all of your marketing activity if your team members are wearing too many marketing hats, consistently missing deadlines, or are hampered more than helped by your current marketing technology.

A happy medium can be found by using a mix of agency and in-house resources, alongside powerful marketing tools. With an experienced third-party agency guiding you every step of the way, you’ll be able to upskill staff and onboard new technology without overspending or embarking on a lengthy recruitment process.

Additionally, if you’re having a difficult time making an informed decision, consider reaching out to a consultancy (like ours, Huble Digital) to explore which software and skill sets can transform your marketing efforts in 2020 and beyond. 

Think email marketing is dead?

Think again.. Email marketing is actually thriving.

In HubSpot’s 2020 State of Marketing Report, roughly 80% of marketers said their brand’s email engagement had improved in the last year. Our researchers also discovered that brands make an average of $42 for every dollar spent on email advertising.

mail marketing is still widely used and continues to offer many benefits to marketers. It can boost brand awareness, increase web traffic, delight your audience, and ease subscribers through the customer funnel.

While email marketing isn’t a new strategy,, many marketers still struggle to grow and maintain the size of their subscriber lists.

But you shouldn’t throw in the towel if you’re struggling to build your list of contacts. Like any great marketing strategy, you’ll need to get in the mindset of your customers to determine why they’re likely to subscribe — or unsubscribe — from your email list.

To help you think like your subscribers, I polled 400 consumers to ask them about why they’ve joined or removed themselves from marketing email lists in the past. Here’s what they said.

Why Consumers Subscribe to Marketing Emails

The first question I asked consumers was, “Why do you most commonly subscribe to marketing emails or email newsletters?”

It’s apparent that consumers sign up for emails that provide direct value to them.

Data Source

Below is a quick breakdown of what each result means for marketers, as well as examples of effective emails that leveraged their audience interests.

1. Deals, Discount Promo Codes, and Coupons

Roughly 28% of consumers say they subscribe to branded emails because they “want to be notified about sales, promo codes, or coupons from a company.”

It’s not shocking that emails promoting deals and sales are the top preference of consumers. By now, many of us have either subscribed to an email like this for personal use, or skimmed our inbox looking for promo codes before a big shop.

Although these emails are primarily for announcing deals or ways that your prospect can save money, you can still also use them for other promotions. For example, while prioritizing a sale, deal, or coupon code at the top of the email, you can also share news about a new product or blog posts at the bottom. Just keep in mind that your subscribers signed up to get the best bang for their buck, then continue to come up with ways to delight them.

Here’s a great example. When you subscribe to Postmates, you can ask to receive emails with promotions and coupons. Once subscribed, Postmates will send you semi-regular coupon codes and news about restaurant-specific sales:

As a subscriber, I personally love the Postmates email because it stands by its mission to send me discount information. Whenever I consider ordering in, I search through my inbox to see if they sent any promo codes recently. When they do, I don’t hesitate to get my meal delivery from this app over other competitors.

2. Links to Valuable Content From the Brand

Not all audiences are looking to get the latest deals on products. Sometimes, people subscribe to emails just for the sake of learning new things. This explains why one-quarter of participants say they subscribe to emails because they want to regularly receive “a brand’s content (i.e. blogs, videos, graphics).”

Although creating an email for your blog posts or branded content might not seem like it will benefit purchases or ROI directly, these types of emails still offer a number of benefits that can impact the bottom line.

For example, those who subscribe will get to see content from you that demonstrates why your brand is a trusted voice in your industry. After seeing and consuming valuable content from you regularly, your company could be the first that comes to mind when a subscriber needs to purchase a product that you sell.

Additionally, although content-based emails might not focus on promotions, this doesn’t mean you can’t include one within the mix of links shared in an email. Aside from subtly including promotions in one of these emails, you could also link to blog or video content aimed at lead generation.

To give you an example of a content-based marketing email, take a look at HubSpot’s Service Blog email. Each day, the Service Blog sends the posts that were published the same day to subscribers. While the content is mostly informative, we occasionally mix in other promotions, such as the call-to-action to visit our new Website Blog.

3. Company Announcements

A number of brands choose to use their emails to show audiences the inner-workings of their company. These emails might include press release-styled announcements, information about the staff, or posts from the company’s corporate blog.

While this content might not directly value audiences as much as coupons or educational content, it still helps brands to establish themselves as credible and successful to audiences who are interested in watching them grow. This might be why 16% of those I polled subscribe purely to get company-specific announcements in their inbox.

4. Mixes of Content, Promotion, and Company News

While 10% of participants selected “All of the above” as their primary email subscription reasoning, 14% chose “Other.” These results might hint that groups of email subscribers might enjoy different types of content in one email.

As you get to know your email audience, center your emails around the content you promised email recipients on their subscriber form. But, consider including one or two promotions that break your usual email norm to see if you can diversify your emails a bit more.

For example, if you have an audience subscribed to your company blog’s email, consider subtly including a coupon or discount at the bottom — after your blog content — to see if you can gain conversions.

5. Other Reasons

Interestingly, only 5% of consumers said they commonly sign up for emails to learn about new products from a brand. Additionally, although many companies will offer discounts when consumers sign up for their email newsletter, just 2% say they sign up for emails primarily for these tactics.

Although the minority of participants chose the options listed above, you might still want to consider experimenting with them in case they work for you, or your audience prefers a mix of content.

Why Consumers Unsubscribe to Marketing Emails

Once marketers build out their email list, the next challenge they’ll face is maintaining it.

And, sometimes, even if you have great email engagement or a winning formula for email success, you’ll see a random dip in subscribers. \

Why could this be? Have people gotten bored with your content? Have they found another competing brand with a better newsletter? Are they just over email altogether?

The truth is, a bump in your unsubscribe rate could be due to super simple — and easily fixable — logistical reasons.

When I asked consumers, “What’s the most common reason why you unsubscribe from marketing emails?” most participants sighted reasons other than the quality of email content.

In fact, 51% say they unsubscribe because “emails come too often.”

Data Source

Below, I’ll explain what frequency-related unsubscriptions mean for email marketers, as well as break down some of the other major subscription barriers.

1. Email Frequency

While 34% of those surveyed say they most commonly unsubscribe from email lists because “emails come too often. [More than once per day.],” 17% say, “Emails come too often. [More than once per week.]

Despite stats like those above, and the fear that too many emails will result in high unsubscribe rates, most marketers still send multiple weekly and daily emails. According to our State of Marketing Report, more than 50% of marketers send emails between three and eight times per week.

So, how do you stick to an effective email cadence without losing subscribers? Keep reading to learn about a few preventative measures.

Preventing Frequency-Related Unsubscription

If your audience begins to cite frequency as a reason for unsubscribing, or you suspect you might be sending too many emails based on the lower click or open rates throughout the week, consider dropping one to two of your regular emails, or combining two emails scheduled for the same day.

Once you consolidate your emails, see if your unsubscription or spam rates lower, while paying attention increases in engagement metrics like open rate or click-through rates. If you see your metrics fluctuate for the better, you might want to identify more ways to consolidate your brand’s email.

If you absolutely can’t consolidate your emails, make sure that you’re transparent about how many you’ll be sending subscribers on your subscribe form. This will ensure that all subscribers know what type of content and email frequency they’re signing up for upfront and might weed out audiences who will quickly unsubscribe.

2. Low-Value Content

Although content isn’t the biggest driver of unsubscriptions, it still can be a factor.

While 17% of participants commonly unsubscribe from emails that feel “spammy or over promotional,” 9% will unsubscribe if the content is “no longer valuable.”

The result above isn’t that surprising. When’s the last time you unsubscribed from an email that you used to love getting in your inbox?

Luckily, there are a number of tactics you can try to prevent your content from getting too stale or spammy.

How to Prevent Content-Related Unsubscribes

First, do a deep dive into your email metrics.

If you’re seeing low open rates, click-through rates, high skim-to-read-rate ratios, as well as unsubscribes or spam reports related to poor content, it might be time to audit the content you’re sharing in each email, test out new types of content, and avoid any sharing things that might disengage your audience.

Along with looking at hard metrics, you should also consider the content you’re creating for your audience before you hit send. Ask yourself questions like, “Is this email valuable to my audience?”, “Does it over-promote my products?”, “Does the content in this email align with how I marketed this email subscription in the first place?”, and “Is this content on brand?”

If you have a large audience with a number of different interests. You might also worry that some audiences will love the links you’re sharing in your email while others might be interested in other topics. If that’s the case, you can also consider email segmentation.

With email segmentation, you can break your list of contacts into separate lists to ensure that people with vastly different interests are only getting sent content that will interest them.

For example, since HubSpot Blog readers are primarily interested in marketing, sales, service, or website development, we have daily and weekly email lists for each of our blog properties. This way, if you’re a marketer interested in web development, you can subscribe to our Marketing Blog and Website Blog emails without seeing Sales or Service content that relates less to your field.

3. Unexpected Promotions or Content

Along with content that isn’t valuable, 10% of participants primarily unsubscribe from emails that don’t provide content they expected to receive.

Roughly 5% of participants say they most commonly unsubscribe from emails that they “didn’t sign up for” in the first place, while another 5% says they primarily unsubscribe from emails that “don’t offer content, promotions, or coupons” that the brand described when marketing the subscription.

Avoiding Unsolicited Email Content

As an email marketer, it’s your job to understand your audience and send content they’ll engage with. Meanwhile, consumers that sign up for your email will expect you to send them the valuable content they asked for when signing up. When you blast them with emails they won’t like or didn’t ask for, they might trust your brand a little bit less.

For example, if you market a daily newsletter that promises expert tips from thought leaders, blog posts, or coupons, and instead send semi-daily newsletters that promote only products with no discounts, your audiences might not be too happy.

As you manage your email strategy, remember what you promised your subscribers when they signed up. Focus on promoting links that are valuable and align with their interests, as well as your brand.

Because consumers don’t appreciate or trust unsolicited email in their inboxes, we don’t condone purchasing contacts from another company. Not only is this against GDPR mandates, but it could also annoy contacts, cause unsubscriptions, and hurt your IP reputation.

As an alternative, consider co-branded emails. With this strategy, you can market one brand’s email subscription and content in your email while they market your email and content to their subscription list. This way, the brand’s audience can choose whether or not they want to subscribe and might be less likely to remove themselves from your list after signing up.

Here’s a great example of a co-branded email campaign from HubSpot and Unbounce. Although this doesn’t directly market HubSpot or Unbounce email subscription options, it highlights great points about both companies and a project they’re jointly working on which could indirectly result in both brands gaining email subscribers:

Tips for Winning (and Keeping) Email Subscribers

Email marketing best practices aren’t always the same for every brand. That means that it will take experimentation and practice to grow and maintain your email subscriber list.

Because building a list can be challenging in the beginning, it’s important to not give up when one or two tactics don’t work. Although you’ll want to personalize your tactics to your audience, here are a few overarching tips to keep in mind as you aim to grow your list.

1. Create email tactics and content that audiences will value.

First, and most importantly, you’ll want to develop and execute on an email strategy that prioritizes valuable content and avoids over-promotion.

For example, you could create an email with a mix of sales, coupons, and promo codes, or focus on promoting your most engaging blog posts. Or, if you have a giant audience with a few key interests, you could segment them by creating separate marketing emails and subscriber lists.

2. Market the most valuable aspects of your brand’s email.

To get people to actually see your valuable email content, you’ll need to market it in order to get subscribers. When you share your email subscription form on your site or social media, point out what your emails will provide to your audience. Will they include blog content, expert tips related to your industry, or special deals? If so, clearly state this in your messaging.

Here’s a look at how we promote the HubSpot Blog’s emails:

3. Don’t just focus on just your products.

Yes. You are a marketer and shouldn’t avoid talking about great product offerings when you have them. However, too many product details in an email can feel spammy or over promotional.

When you promote your products in an email, try to include other content, such as links to blogs or videos to balance the email out. This will be even more important if you promoted valuable content rather than just product news when marketing your email subscription form.

In our 2020 State of Marketing Report, EMEA marketing manager Henni Roini emphasized why product promotion isn’t everything.

“Only the companies and brands that create human connection are going to succeed. This is extremely true with email. You might get short term benefits from very promotional content, but honest, human, and personalized content creates a following for the long term,” Roini said.

Want to learn more about email marketing? Here’s a guide on how to use email marketing to guide your prospect through the buyer’s journey. More interested in diving into email data? Check out this list of helpful email marketing stats.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is transforming the B2B marketing and sales world because of its effectiveness in reaching high-value target accounts — but it’s a difficult strategy to manage.

ABM has a lot of moving parts that need to move as a synchronized whole to bring success to your organization.

Fortunately, like any aspect of marketing, ABM is made easier with strategic planning.

Starting with your goals and mapping out a targeted plan is key to building an effective ABM campaign.

Here, we’ll break down the steps of how to put ABM mapping into practice within your organization and implement the right process to make it happen.

What is Account Mapping?

Account mapping involves selecting and organizing the accounts targeted within an ABM program.

After establishing goals, the next and arguably most critical step to ensuring a successful ABM campaign is selecting and mapping the accounts.

Once accounts have been selected and mapped, the sales and marketing team can build their engagement strategy and ensure both sides maximize their alignment.

How to Get Started With Account Mapping

Account mapping is an exercise in account research and documenting details that will be useful as you target an account on your journey to a successful close.

Here are the four main steps you’ll need to take when account mapping:

1. Identify Key Decision Makers and Influencers

After identifying what accounts to target through account planning, the next step is digging into the account to understand the organizational structure and how decisions are made. Starting with the top person in a functional area is an excellent place to begin mapping the functions.

The larger the account, the tougher this task, as many large organizations operate in a matrix environment where influence comes from many directions.

Nonetheless, sourcing these contacts and documenting their Buyer Role using HubSpot or alternative system of record will allow you to track and manage information related to each contact. This will also improve your ability to create unique experiences as a part of your ABM program.

It’s essential to consider buyer roles as it relates to the buying process, not a functional title.

Buyer roles to be considered include:

• Decision Maker
• Blocker
• Influencer
• Budget Holder
• Champion
• Legal & Compliance

Depending on the goods/service sold and the operational impact it may have in the account, there may be a need to expand the roles to meet the specific needs of the account, so you can edit or add new roles as needed.

Using tools such as LinkedIn or ZoomInfo can be helpful when researching an account and the key contacts within the account. Using the Buying Role Property within HubSpot is a great way to align your account intelligence to the contacts within the account.

During your research, you may find that one contact has multiple roles, so you can assign them accordingly as well as assign multiple contacts to the same role.

2. Gather Intel and Align Content

Understanding an account’s needs and pain points is an important input to your ABM engagement strategy. Whether it’s for content alignment or sales outreach, align relevant communications to each stage of the buyer’s journey.

While getting direct intelligence through discovery calls is an excellent way to explore account needs, you should use a wide range of sources to gather as much information as possible to fill any gaps.

Social listening, search intent, press releases, and Google Alerts are all great resources to leverage for information that can be used to gain insights into future account needs. Once well-documented, these insights can be used to map marketing content and sales playbooks to ensure each interaction with the account is meaningful.

3. Engage and Learn

Develop a plan for how and when you will engage the target account. Using a playbook for both sales and marketing engagement plans can help standardize the approach you take and identify points within the process that are working well or areas that need improvements.

Depending on where the account is within the sales cycle when you implement the ABM strategy, the engagement approach may vary. Targeting with account-based advertising may be an excellent first step to warm up the accounts if starting with cold accounts.

Many platforms can enable ABM advertising; however, using HubSpot’s Company List and its LinkedIn Ads integration provides a seamless introduction into account-based advertising without leaving HubSpot.

4. Document How Decisions are Made

Throughout the research and documentation process, you’ve been collecting data that will be useful for both marketing and sales teams. As you seek to advance the engagement process, direct outreach to contacts within the account will be required. Be sure to add value and use best practices to improve the quality of this interaction so that it’s a seamless and valuable experience for the prospect.

You have been gathering account intelligence through the planning process, so now it’s time to put those activities to work. Before reaching out, utilize LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to research the contact. Using the outreach activities to fill data and intelligence gaps will help improve future interactions and engagements.

Of the things you need to learn, understanding who will influence the purchasing decision is high on the list. It’s also helpful to know how the company makes a purchasing decision and their process of awarding a contract. Ensure that you’re gathering these details effectively by recording information in your CRM under the deal, company, and contact records.

Account Mapping Software

There is a long list of software applications that can assist with the account mapping process. The good news is that a lot can be done with free tools, many of which are commonly used within both small and large sales and marketing organizations.

Below is a short list of free and premium tools, along with a brief description that will get you started with ABM Mapping.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is the centralized marketing platform that helps sales and marketing leaders execute marketing campaigns. HubSpot provides a set of tools that helps keep an ABM-centric campaign, which enables greater transparency between sales and marketing teams when compared to disparate systems.

Cost: Freemium to Paid

2. LinkedIn

The king of professional networking within a digital environment has become a dream tool for sales and marketing professionals. When targeting specific accounts, LinkedIn is a great free resource. In addition to general account research, LinkedIn also is a great integration partner for three of their paid services, which can be invaluable to ABM.

• LinkedIn Ads
• Sales Navigator
• LinkedIn InMail

Cost: Varies depending on tools/service used. 

3. ZoomInfo

From prospecting to buyer intent, ZoomInfo is an excellent resource for finding and tracking companies that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). In addition to identifying the account, they provide a comprehensive set of products that offer deeper account insights, including organizational charts. ZoomInfo is also a HubSpot integration partner, which makes working with the tool seamless.

Cost: Free Trial to Premium

4. 6sense

If you are seeking to take action on Buyer Intent, 6sense provides solutions that improve the transparency into the buyer’s intent using AI. It captures signals across a wide variety of channels and connects it to prospect accounts. 

When moving into the engagement stage of an ABM campaign, these tools provide the ultimate reach and scale.

Cost: Paid (Contact 6sense for pricing details)

ABM mapping can be an effective process to help sales and marketing teams navigate complex account structures. While there are great tools that provide helpful insights, the mapping process is robust and tends to be manual.

An important part of the planning process will be to gain buy in from your internal team and properly assign team members who will be part of the research and documentation process so that your organization will have access to centralized information about your target accounts and contacts within them.

The payoff can be well worth the work if you take the proper steps while developing a focused account-based marketing strategy.

As a writer, I’ve never been very good at math. I know … shocking.

Most marketers can relate, because as a bunch, we tend to be better at English and history than math and science.

However, as a marketer, we need to be able to analyze data and calculate the effectiveness of an article or campaign, even though math might not be our strong suit.

One of the calculations we need to run and metrics we need to track is return on ad spend (ROAS).

Below, let’s review ROAS. In this post, we’ll discuss what ROAS is, how it’s different from ROI, and how to calculate it.

Ultimately, ROAS is meant to measure the effectiveness of a specific ad campaign, not your overall ROI — more on that below.

Besides ROAS, you’ll most likely measure other metrics such as click-through rate and ROI. By measuring multiple metrics, you’ll get a more accurate view of your results.

Of course, measuring performance and tracking analytics is an important part of any marketing campaign.

By tracking performance, you can improve and iterate on your marketing techniques. Plus, data is one of the only ways to truly prove that your department brings in revenue, which is incredibly important.

However, it’s important to note that not everything can be measured with quantitative data. For instance, calculating brand awareness and sentiment is much more difficult. And while you can calculate downloads or email sign-ups, those might not always lead to revenue.

When you’re analyzing any data, it’s important to consider context and review qualitative data as well as quantitative data.

That being said, today we’re going to dive into ROAS specifically. Before we do that, let’s review how ROAS is different from ROI.

Ultimately, this means that the only cost considered in a ROAS calculation is the cost of advertising. On the other hand, the cost of an entire project or campaign will be considered in an ROI calculation.

The goal of your ads campaign, of course, will be to generate a positive return on your ad spend. However, how can you determine what that ad spend should be?

In the YouTube video below, HubSpot details how to determine ad spend by understanding the bidding system used by ad networks.

You’d use ROAS to help you determine how you spend your advertising budget and as a signal to determine if your campaigns are successful. This would let you know that you might need to evaluate your approach to running ads.

So, at this point, you might be wondering, “How can I calculate ROAS?” Let’s review that now.

While the equation is simple, you might face difficulty gathering the data needed to run this calculation. For instance, calculating the cost of an ad isn’t always easy. You’ll need to consider the cost of the ad bid, the labor cost for the time it took to create the creative assets, vendor costs, and affiliate commissions.

But it’s important to get an accurate estimate of the actual money spent on an ad to get an accurate ROAS measurement. If your data isn’t accurate, your findings won’t be either.

Additionally, if you don’t run an ecommerce business, it can also be difficult to measure the revenue generated by an ad. For example, someone might convert from your ad because they downloaded an ebook, however they haven’t spent any money yet. In fact, they might not spend money for months.

To combat this, you can use a CRM software like HubSpot in conjunction with HubSpot Ads, to track revenue made from leads.

With a CRM and ads software, you can keep track of your data and tie it all together — marketing leads, ad results, etc.

Now, you might be wondering, “What’s a good ROAS?” and “How can I improve my ROAS?”

Well, a good ROAS is typically around 3:1. If you’re barely breaking even, it might be time to dig further into the accuracy of your metrics and evaluate your ads and bidding strategy.

However, it’s important to note that the objective of some ad campaigns might not be to make immediate revenue, but to increase brand awareness. If that’s your objective, then a lower ROAS makes sense.

To improve your ROAS, you can lower your ad spend and review your ads campaigns. You might want to optimize your landing pages or rethink your negative keywords.

Overall, ROAS is an important metric to track, but it shouldn’t be tracked in a vacuum. It’s important to look at other data and metrics to get the full picture of your return on investment.

You’ve likely heard of Software as a Service, or SaaS.

A SaaS company sells software to a user as a subscription. Along with that subscription, the software company provides technical support, customer service and upgrade options to maximize their customers’ ability to use their software.

HubSpot is an example of a SaaS company. We sell (darn good) marketing, sales, and service software so you can use them to grow your business. But there’s just one problem …

Over time, we’ve learned that things aren’t so linear and consumers rarely use just one software to satisfy all of their needs. Instead, they find a plugin here, some software there, and maybe even a widget until they have a smorgasbord of options that, together, create the perfect solution.

Consumer expectations have changed — they want instant feedback, immediate solutions, and access to everything they need to solve their problems.

From a business standpoint, it can be costly to add more tools to your existing software. An ever-increasing demand makes it hard to accommodate every customer need.

Additionally, most software companies have segregated systems themselves, pulling in data from the cloud and on-site systems to complete their own stack. Ascend2 found that 57% of marketers recognize integrating disparate technologies as the biggest barrier to success.

What happens when you have different systems operating on separate platforms that each play an integral role in your business? You become subject to data loss, disjointed information, and misalignment.

Between consumer expectations and internal systems, we need to find a way to create a more frictionless experience.

iPaaS is the solution.

iPaaS is a platform that connects otherwise disjointed systems to deliver a unified solution to customers. It acts as a conduit for communication between multiple systems — allowing for integration and data sharing.

iPaaS gives platforms unlimited potential, and as we deepen our cloud dependency, iPaaS becomes integral to nearly every business model.

This guide will give you an overview of iPaaS, how it works, and its key benefits.

Most companies run on various systems, especially between their sales, marketing, and service departments. iPaaS is a solution that improves communication between different silos by integrating software to better share data within the organization.

iPaaS also allows a company to expand its offering without the need to build out more services. Instead, it can integrate with another software that already provides that service and offer a unified, more robust solution to customers.

For example, say you sell a scheduling software that helps hairstylists book, manage, and send appointment reminders to their clients. After developing your product, you realize that stylists also want their clients to be able to leave reviews and make payments through your software. To meet your customers’ needs, you could either build out and add these features to your product, or you could use iPaaS to connect your software to existing review and payment software. The latter allows you to save time and money while also expanding your service offering and providing your clients with what they want.

How does iPaaS work?

A software company will rely on iPaaS to supply the infrastructure for creating connections and deploying software applications within the cloud.

The software company will set the parameters for the types of connections that are allowed on the platform. These parameters could be in the form of an application programming interface (API), prebuilt connectors, or some other rule.

Once these rules are in place, iPaaS creates a central ecosystem to view, manage, and modify all data, infrastructure, and operations. This, in turn, allows entities to easily modify their product, share information, and provide solutions to their market.

iPaaS-Related Terms to Know

How do you distinguish between all service-oriented architecture (SOA)? Let’s cover the common cloud-based service business models out there to help you get a better grasp on what makes iPaaS unique.

Platform

A platform is the centralized component of all connections. HubSpot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker defines a platform as a “hub, with spokes connecting other products to its center. The hub binds those disparate products together and orchestrates them in a common mission.”

Integration Platform

An integration platform creates connections between different applications and systems. This type of platform creates an environment for engineers to build upon.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

A PaaS is a platform where the provider houses all of the elements that users need to deploy a particular software. Those elements include the servers, network, memory, database, and operating system.

Software

Software is a program that performs a specific set of tasks for a user.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is a system where a user is provided with software to use on demand. All maintenance, hosting, and deployment of that software is the responsibility of the software provider.

Integration as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS is a cloud-based model that allows for data integration between systems and third-party vendors. IaaS keeps all connected parties from having to create complex interdependencies and minimizes delays in data sharing.

Electronic Service Bus (ESB)

Electronic Service Bus is not denoted “as a service,” but it could be considered a predecessor of iPaaS. An ESB is a middleware tool, which means that it works between applications the same way an iPaaS does. While iPaaS focuses on integration, an ESB has two functions: integrating and distributing data and messages.

Since ESBs were created before the cloud, they operate on-premises. They are still a reliable option for legacy systems. 

iPaaS Vs. PaaS

Although iPaaS and PaaS are only one letter away, their functionality is completely different. 

A PaaS is basically a toolbox with generic features that developers can use to build their own applications. 

PaaS supports different aspects of an application. Next to the development tools, PaaS vendors provide operating systems, business analytics, storage options, and data management solutions. With this last option, your developers might be able to build data integrations without too much hassle. Usually, companies working with this type of vendor are medium-sized enterprises. 

Smaller businesses working with different applications will need an iPaaS at some point. The main reason is that those applications are not created by the same vendors. They are not connected natively, while the applications built on a PaaS usually live within the same environment. 

Just like PaaS, some iPaaS providers, like PieSync, offer a very complete set of features. The difference is that those features are exclusively focused on integration.

Last but not least, to work with PaaS, you’ll need a team of developers. On the other hand, iPaaS tools are usually created so that anyone in any team can create an integration with no coding required.

iPaaS Vs. ESB

ESB and iPaaS are bridges between two applications, but they offer completely different solutions. The first distinction is that an ESB works on-premises, while iPaaS are cloud-based solutions. That doesn’t mean that an ESB won’t be able to integrate with a cloud application, but it makes the connection less viable.

Scalability is also different for ESB and iPaaS. In a company using iPaaS, integrating new applications is easy. iPaaS usually allows you to create as many connections as you want between the hundreds of applications they support. However, in a company working with ESB, it can take months to implement a new app.

Another variable to consider is multitenancy. This concept refers to the possibility of having several users accessing the same software. iPaaS and other cloud-based software usually support multitenancy. On the other hand, considering that ESB requires a piece of hardware to operate, multitenancy is very hard to guarantee.

Benefits of iPaaS

The rise of SaaS over the past two decades created a gap in the ecosystem that needed to be filled. That gap — the need for more integrated systems — has only become more apparent. iPaaS arose out of a need for an organized solution for deploying quick and seamless cloud-based solutions.

You can think about the benefits of iPaaS as two-fold: benefits to the company that employs iPaaS (internal) and benefits to the customers of the company that employs iPaas (external).

External Benefits

Software companies that employ iPaaS technology as part of their offering to consumers reap benefits from increased customer satisfaction. Consumers benefit from iPaaS in a number of ways.

A Single Solution

Instead of piecing together separate software to solve their needs, consumers can use a platform that connects to all of their software in one convenient cloud-based location, thereby eliminating the need to source and deploy their technology in different environments.

Organized Data

Consumers can access all of their data in one place and set rules for how that data is organized and accessed. So, while they’re working with different systems, all of those systems will render data in an easy-to-interpret manner. All of this makes data analysis, interpretation, and application easier and more accurate.

Improved Communication

One platform means a single source of truth. Data is being shared within the same ecosystem so no important information is lost and everyone has the same access which leaves less room for misinterpretation.

Better Workflow

Less time switching between tools means more time for work and a central place where all of that work is done. A platform creates a more efficient environment for team dynamics and workflows.

Internal Benefits

Consumers aren’t the only ones who need integrated solutions. Companies also use disparate tools to run their businesses — think email providers, marketing software, document sharing, the list goes on. iPaaS brings these tools together to increase internal efficiency and improve workflows.

Here are some of the internal benefits to iPaaS.

Eliminate Silos

Third-party integrations can be created and deployed in various environments. This might not be an issue when there are only a few connections, however, as a company develops its offerings to become a more robust entity, integrations can become scattered, creating a mess where information is hidden from view or difficult to access and preventing a business from realizing critical insights.

Real-Time Processing

iPaaS allows for real-time data sharing and processing thereby eliminating delays in access and providing a quick and accessible solution.

Increased Efficiency

iPaaS mitigates confusion, data loss, and inconsistencies by creating a centralized system for the management of all parties involved.

Centralized Management

iPaaS creates a single, virtual view for managing all connections across the platform. Instead of having one individual or team manage different integrations, all of them can be accessed from a single console.

Multitenancy

Typically, each tenant that calls upon software requires its own instance. Similar to how every person on a call needs their own phone connection, an instance is created each time someone accesses the software. iPaaS allows for shared instances among tenants, eliminating overload, reducing costs, and increasing the speed of use.

Improved Security and Compliance

Security threats are inevitable in any environment, especially the cloud. iPaaS solutions offer fraud detection and intruder alerts. But the real benefit is that a centralized platform makes it easier to see where these threats are and respond adequately. In addition, a platform makes regulation compliance simple by implementing changes in a single environment.

Gartner iPaaS Magic Quadrant

Being that iPaaS is a newer technology, we look to objective opinions to check the validity, safety, and potential longevity of iPaaS vendors. Gartner iPaaS Magic Quadrant is that resource.

Gartner is an IT consulting firm and trusted resource for objective, qualitative industry research. According to Gartner, “Magic Quadrants offer visual snapshots, in-depth analyses and actionable advice that provide insight into a market’s direction, maturity, and participants.”

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration as a Service looks at several iPaaS vendors in the space and details the strengths and cautions of each provider. It compares vendors like Boomi, Jitterbit, MuleSoft, Oracle, and SAP among several others to provide an objective view on the iPaaS environment and to give readers perspective on which solution would best fit their needs.

iPaaS Integration: Best Practices

iPaaS is an outstanding solution to integrate your business’s technology ecosystem and to enhance its data flow. In order to get the most out of it, make sure to follow these best practices:

Have a data integration plan before implementing an iPaaS solution.

It’s crucial to decide on a sound data integration plan before you begin syncing your data between multiple apps. For your plan to be successful, you need to:

• Define the goals you want to achieve with data integration. For example, you may want to integrate internal business data to have a holistic view of your business and build better analytics reports. Or you might want to integrate customer data from different applications to have a 360-degree view of your customers.
• Decide what kind of data you want to integrate. Once your data integration goals are set, you will have a much clearer idea of what kind of data you need to integrate. iPaaS platforms set algorithms to sync the same type of ‘object’ between apps. These objects can be names, emails, deals details, service tickets, etc. However, not every iPaaS can integrate all the objects of your apps. Determining which kind of data you need to integrate is key to decide which iPaaS to use.    
• Find out where this data lives. In which applications are you storing this information? These are the tools you’ll want to integrate with iPaaS. For example, if you want to sync customer data, find out which applications are collecting it across your business.
• Figure out how the data should flow. Decide how the data needs to flow between your tools. You might need one-way, trigger-action data pushes, or you might need a real-time, two-way synchronization.

Choose the right iPaaS solution for your business.

Different iPaaS tools suit different purposes. There are iPaaS tools that work perfectly to automate workflows between several tools, such as Zapier. Others automate contact management between several tools, such as PieSync. 

Once you’ve honed in on your integration needs, you’ll be in a better position to decide which iPaaS tool will work for you. Take time to research your options thoroughly and determine which tool is the best option to help you achieve your data integration goals. We’ve included a list of top iPaaS vendors to help you get started with your search.

Set up your iPaaS tool properly.

iPaaS solutions hold a multitude of possibilities. Most of them will allow you to get really specific in your integration. Features such as rules and field mappings enable you to decide which groups of data to share between applications (in case you don’t want to share your entire database). You can also pair different kinds of information between your tools.

For example, you can add a “New Customer” label to certain contacts in your CRM to identify your newest customers. You can then sync this label into your email marketing tool and automatically enroll these new customers in an onboarding email sequence that sends them all necessary resources, useful links, and who to contact within your organization if they have any questions or issues.

Manage your data.

While iPaaS will do a lot of the work for you when it comes to data management, it’s still important to manually check in on your databases every so often.

This includes making sure your data is rid of duplicates, cleaning up invalid contact details, keeping your data fresh and deleting outdated information, and implementing consistent, company-wide procedures for data entry and management.

In addition, remember to check your syncs to make sure they are running smoothly and your data is flowing as it should.

iPaaS Vendors

iPaaS is a great solution to improve connection to and communication between all data and applications within your company. We’ve compiled this list of iPaaS vendors to help narrow your search for the perfect iPaaS partner.

PieSync

PieSync offers intelligent contact syncing that prevents duplicates and allows for historical data as well as easy to setup filtering rules between CRMs, marketing apps, accounting software and several other tools in your tech stack. The tool allows you to sync contact data bidirectionally and in real time across hundreds of apps, ensuring that you’re always looking at the most up-to-date and consistent customer information.

Dell Boomi

Dell Boomi offers a complete iPaaS solution with application and data integration, workflow automation, application deployment, API design, and B2B management all within a single master hub.

Informatica

Informatica boasts customer loyalty and top-ranked iPaaS provider as their main advantages over other solutions. With a nod from Gartner and over seven thousand customers worldwide, the iPaaS vendor holds a top spot in the industry.

Celigo

Celigo offers an iPaaS solution that can handle everything from simple FTP integrations to complex integration needs. In addition, Celigo’s application marketplace features vetted apps that solve for a multitude of business needs.

Jitterbit

Jitterbit understands the stress of building APIs between on-premise and cloud-based systems. The company has done well to empathize with businesses that lack the resources to build these integrations on their own and offers quick integrations with their platform as a result.

Blendr.io

Blendr.io offers a low-code visual builder to create complex enterprise-grade or standardized self-service integrations. In addition, Blendr.io provides with a set of features to embed integrations into the UI of other SaaS platforms.

Mulesoft

Mulesoft offers cloud integration through its product called “CloudHub.” This solution offers multitenancy for integrations and API. The solution allows for deployment in eight different regions around the world, a number of workers, and out-of-the-box cloud security, and compliance. It also offers insights based on various metrics.

Zapier

Zapier is a well-known solution for connecting apps, automating workflows, and sharing data between otherwise disjointed systems.

iPaaS providers don’t stop there. You can view and compare dozens of vendors through a bit of research. Otherwise, Gartner has already done the work for you.

Get Integrated

As we continue to move towards cloud-based options, iPaaS becomes the most viable solution to eliminate the friction associated with disparate systems, and for connecting all applications and data between your organization and third parties. A single source that connects all of the systems we use to grow our businesses is an important step toward growing better. When we’re connected and in-sync, we can go further together.