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How To Make Email Segmentation Simple And Quick For Your Ecommerce Store

How To Make Email Segmentation Simple And Quick For Your Ecommerce Store

By Bhaskar Sarma

Email segmentation can turn ho-hum email lists into money printing machines, letting you tailor your emails according to varying customer characteristics.

“How many emails should I send my list, now that I know how to build one?”

If you were to ask me that question, I would reply: “At least 10, and if you have a big list, 25-30.”

Shocked? Think I am talking trash?

[Read more…] about How To Make Email Segmentation Simple And Quick For Your Ecommerce Store

Filed Under: Ecommerce/DTC Tagged With: ecommerce, email marketing, email segmentation

How To Build Your Email List Like High Growth Ecommerce Brands

How To Build Your Email List Like High Growth Ecommerce Brands

By Bhaskar Sarma 1 Comment

Welcome emails give you the second chance to make a good first impression. Here’s how to make them shine for your brand using the principles of JTBD theory

2020 has seen eCommerce as a sector grow at a blistering pace, recording 10 years worth of growth in a single quarter.

Rapid growth of ecommerce in the US, recoding 10 years growth in 3 months

If you are a small or a medium-sized eCom/DTC brand relying on the paid social playbook to acquire customers and grow sales, 2021 isn’t going to be pretty.

Here’s why:

[Read more…] about How To Build Your Email List Like High Growth Ecommerce Brands

Filed Under: Customer acquisition, Ecommerce/DTC Tagged With: DTC, ecommerce, email marketing, list building

How to Get Your Custom Alexa Skill Without Writing a Single Line of Code

How to Get Your Custom Alexa Skill Without Writing a Single Line of Code

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

Email segmentation can turn ho-hum email lists into money printing machines, letting you tailor your emails according to varying customer characteristics.

If you have followed the advice in the last post around list building, you know that you are just getting started.

Your list will be made up of diffrent types of people who are at different places in their customer lifecycle journey.

Some are just interested. Others are apathetic, and yet others are chomping at the bit and looking to buy from you again.

One message blasted to this disparate group is going to get drowned in the din, because it will mean nothing to nobody.

To harness email’s true power of one on one communication, you need to segment your list into sublists based on user behavior.

Listen:

I don’t need to be a marketing oracle to tell you that you are not getting enough engagement, traffic, and clicks on your content.

Email CTRs are dipping, traffic to your blog isn’t making your heart sing, and even the numbers of likes and comments on your Instagram are not what they used to be.

You hear gurus and thought leaders tell you about writing MORE blog posts, sending more emails, posting videos everyday.

You nod, but the noise on these channels gives you pause, especially when you see a tweet like this:

[Read more…] about How to Get Your Custom Alexa Skill Without Writing a Single Line of Code

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing Tagged With: Alexa, Skills, voicefirst

Get Cheaper Leads From Facebook With This Free Lead Gen Chatbot [Tutorial]

Get Cheaper Leads From Facebook With This Free Lead Gen Chatbot [Tutorial]

By Bhaskar Sarma 2 Comments

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about Facebook Messenger bots.

That hype is backed by a solid number too: there are an estimated 1.2 billion Facebook Messenger users as of Q1 2017, and the platform is adding thousands of new users every day.

Regardless of what you are selling, you can bet that your ideal customers, clients or users are on Messenger.

With more and more people using mobile devices over desktops and laptops to go online, it’s critical that your lead gen systems keep up with changing behavior patterns.

This is why you should pay attention to messaging apps, because it’s much more natural to text something in a chat than fill out a form on a small smartphone, like those forms on landing pages that Facebook ads send traffic to. [Read more…] about Get Cheaper Leads From Facebook With This Free Lead Gen Chatbot [Tutorial]

Filed Under: Lead gen Tagged With: Chatfuel, Facebook chatbots, lead gen

What is the formula to calculate ‘cost per acquisition’ for SAAS product with subscription revenue?

What is the formula to calculate ‘cost per acquisition’ for SAAS product with subscription revenue?

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

Since you have mentioned one time set up fee I am assuming that you have an enterprise SaaS product.

I am also assuming that you will have a high touch sales model, in that there’s someone who will follow up with the lead during or after the trial period over email/Skype and answer questions related to set up.

Now, on a broad level, CAC= (Sum of all marketing and sales expenses)/ (Number of new customers)

Let’s look at the activities you will typically perform to get customers (in terms of both sales and marketing)

  • Content Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media
  • Webcopy and design
  • Conversion Rate Optimization
  • Onboarding
  • Funnel optimization
  • Setup
  • Custom modifications
  • Hosting
  • Affiliate fees
  • Credit card fees
  • Costs of apps and other services.

Tally up all the costs involved with all these activities for a fixed time period, and divide them by the number of new customers you have acquired in that same amount of time.

That will be your customer acquisition cost (that’s the easy way).

If you want to go more granular, track the costs associated with each marketing channel, with every affiliate partner, every sales associate etc.

For instance, you might discover in your website analytics that a well designed infographic which cost $500 sent you 10,327 visits to your home page. 10.3% signed up for a free trial, and out of that, 4% became paying customers.

The second approach involves setting up analytics, measurement and testing, all of which falls under conversion rate optimization but is worth it to get more insights and make corrections.

The thing with CAC, though is that the absolute number is meaningless.

You want to look at two numbers related to CAC (LTV is your life time value)

CAC and LTV

To know more about how to calculate these numbers and ratios I highly recommend these excellent articles by David Skok :

  • SaaS Metrics 2.0
  • SaaS Metrics 2.0 Detailed Definitions
  • Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisition

Filed Under: Quora Tagged With: CAC, LTV, SaaS growth metrics

18+ Tips & Hacks To Transform Disinterested Prospects To Repeat Customers Using High Converting Webinars

18+ Tips & Hacks To Transform Disinterested Prospects To Repeat Customers Using High Converting Webinars

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

If you are a startup with a complex product, one of the best ways to acquire, onboard and retain customers is through webinars.

You can sell to 5 people or to 1000 people using the same content at the same time. You can interact with your audience in real time, answer questions and show people the benefits of your product.

This is the reason why well run webinars regularly see conversion rates in the high double digits: see this case study where two webinars and a list under 100 people generated $17k in sales. [Read more…] about 18+ Tips & Hacks To Transform Disinterested Prospects To Repeat Customers Using High Converting Webinars

Filed Under: Customer acquisition Tagged With: growth hacks, lead gen, webinars

Can you ace this SaaS growth metrics quiz?

Can you ace this SaaS growth metrics quiz?

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

CAC…LTV…MRR…Negative churn…Burn Rate…COGS…CCA…

If there is one thing many SaaS folks struggle with it’s the metrics.

Unlike S.I units in hard sciences, there are new metrics invented all the time, with varying definitions.

Many of these metrics sound important but they are actually vanity metrics, like likes or shares.

They are good for the ego but they tell you absolutely nothing about the health of your SaaS startup.

To find out how well you know the critical SaaS metrics so that you can measure them and adjust your growth plan take this quiz.

It’s a tough one, unlike those “Which Harry Potter character are you?” quizzes.

But you will get to know whether you are the Yoda, John McClane, Frodo or Nemo of SaaS growth metrics.

It’ll be fun, I promise.

This quiz has a number of unfamiliar metrics. If you want to know more about them, or why a particular option was correct, download the key. It has case studies of how companies like Hubspot measure critical growth metrics, formulas for calculating many metrics, and links to authoritative resources on SaaS

[qzzr quiz=”133426″ width=”100%” height=”auto” redirect=”true” offset=”0″]

Filed Under: SaaS Tagged With: quiz, SaaS growth metrics

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