Their fundamental mistake is assuming that there’s inherent value in following the zeitgeist. That a new and much-discussed channel must be incredibly useful. Because why else would people be talking about it so much? As it happens, things aren’t anywhere near that simple. For instance, influencer marketing might be huge at the moment (and for a good reason), but that doesn’t mean it’s going to prove useful for your business.

What ecommerce marketers should care about is ROI. Not what’s new, or flashy, or creatively inspiring. But what consistently brings in leads drives conversions, and returns value far more significant than what has put it into it. And if you’re looking for ROI, look no further than email marketing. The reigning, defending, unsurpassed (though sadly disputed) ecommerce marketing champion.

Indeed, a 2015 study found that email marketing had an ROI of $38 for each $1 spent. So why does email marketing (one of the oldest forms of digital marketing) have such a high ROI?

That’s a fairly reasonable question — allow me to explain:

It Can Be Very Finely Targeted

In marketing, the better the targeting (, the more relevant the audience), the better the results — and the level of targeting that can be achieved with email marketing even goes beyond what Facebook can offer through its advertising platform (though there are caveats). Yes, Facebook allows advertisers to get highly granular with targeting people fitting specific profiles. But they don’t get to target specific people or businesses.

With email marketing, though, you can get that specific if you want to. You can mix the scattershot approach (of, say, social media marketing) with the 1-on-1 targeting of account-based marketers. It takes time to build up a strong mailing list naturally (buying lists is a very bad idea), but you’ll collect emails through online sales anyway, and once you’ve finally reached that point, you can take complete control over the content emailed to any given customer — ensuring that it’s optimally relevant and compelling.

It’s 100% Customizable

Even the most generous social media advertising platforms have various limitations on what you can do with your choice of an ad. You might be forced to use images with specific aspect ratios. Have limitations on how much text you can overlay, and need to include links in particular formats. Want a bold CTA? You’re stuck with whichever type has been provided for you.

An email, however, is a blank canvas for you to fill; however, you see fit. You can make it conform to every last element of your business branding, carrying over your color schemes, fonts, shapes, styles, and logos. You can create a punchy single-screen experience, or offer up a long-form story that scrolls down for ten pages. The CTAs can be positioned, however (and in whichever parts) you prefer. You can embed video, or include animation elements. It’s up to you.

It’s Great for Multi-Part Marketing

The marketing funnel can be lengthy and complicated. Mainly when you’re aiming to sell a high-end product to people who’ll take a lot of convincing. Ecommerce marketing often benefits, Then, from multi-part marketing: aiming to slightly increase interest with every part. Until the recipient eventually feels sufficiently persuaded to take action.

Due to how richly customizable emails are, it’s possible to assemble a formidable series of marketing emails, with each one following on naturally from the last. For example, the first can cryptically allude to a problem. The second can give a brief glimpse of the product. The third can fully reveal it to the now-interested recipient.

That type of series would be so much harder to implement using social media marketing — and each email can only be sent out to those who opened the previous one in the series, ensuring optimal efficiency.

It’s Ideal for Triggered Automation

One of the biggest strengths of email is how comprehensively it can be tracked through analytics. Every last element of an email can be tagged in any way you see fit — if you want to know whenever someone clicks on your first CTA, or your second CTA, or watches an embedded video, or clicks away from the email entirely, you can find it out.

You can use this information in combination with general customer data to achieve timely email triggering: Setting specific emails to be sent at specific times or in particular circumstances. You’ll need to pick a suitable email marketing platform, of course, but there are plenty available, and they’re all perfectly compatible with WooCommerce. Catch someone at precisely the optimal time, and the likelihood of them converting will be significantly higher.

It’s Extremely Affordable, Even at Scale

Last, but not least, email marketing manages to achieve such remarkable ROI for ecommerce sellers because it’s so very cheap to implement. On the right plan with a tried-and-tested service. You can get unlimited email sends for a very reasonable monthly cost. Allowing you to send thousands upon thousands of emails at no additional cost. Instead of spending $1 for every social media ad click.

The biggest ecommerce sellers do as much as they possibly can with their emails, sending out consistent streams of content, promotions, product/service updates, and incentivizing emails (featuring vouchers, coupons, special deals, etc.). Past a certain point, it doesn’t matter whether you have a thousand customers subscribed or ten thousand. You can ensure that everyone receives relevant content regularly.

For all of these reasons, and likely various more, email marketing still gets the nod as far as basic ROI goes. It’s powerful, flexible, customizable, and affordable — and it doesn’t hurt that email is still used heavily for business. Making it harder for people to breeze through their inboxes in the way they breeze through social media feeds or SERPs.

Are you making the most of email marketing for your ecommerce store? If you feel you could be doing more — or you’re not using it at all. Then this is your time to turn things around.

The post Why Email Has The Highest ROI Of Ecommerce Marketing appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

The king of the social proof world, of course, is the basic review: typically a score out of 5, with some type of commentary to form a full testimonial. If you want to achieve great success as a seller, you need to get the best possible reviews — but how do you do this?

How to Improve Your Reviews and Make More Sales

Let’s take a look at some tactics you can use to improve your reviews and ultimately win more customers as a result:

Describe Your Products More Clearly

You should be aware that negative reviews don’t always result from products lacking quality or being unreasonably priced, but one of the most frustrating reasons for a negative review is a disconnect between what was offered and what was sold (false advertising, essentially).

Imagine that you buy a new umbrella that’s listed as being mauve. But when it arrives you discover that it’s pink — the umbrella itself is just as good as you’d hoped. But because you didn’t get what you paid for. You decide to return it and leave a negative review for good measure. If it had been listed as pink, you might have bought it and been satisfied with it.

Every one of your product pages should have information that’s accurate and representative. If your descriptions are vague or even incorrect, update them accordingly — and if your image galleries are lacking, put some work into them.

Patagonia, one of the leading outdoor clothing companies in the world, have nailed their product descriptions. Taking the men’s Torrentshell Jacket as a representative example:

The product description is not only incredibly detailed. Has an excellent overview of the features that will appeal to adventurers, and a link to a size guide that will help buyers find the right fit. The description is also complemented by the ability to leave reviews.

At the time of writing, the coat had earned over 200 reviews. Of which the vast majority were positive, reinforcing the value of product descriptions and reviews.

Encourage People to Leave Reviews

When talking about improving your reviews. What you’re looking to do is work on your average because that’s what matters. You’re always going to get some negative reviews. No matter how good your products are. So learning how to deal with negativity and making the most of positive opinion to show that overall sentiment is firmly in your favor.

To that end, the significant thing to consider is that most people don’t leave reviews on the products they buy. This doesn’t mean that they’re unhappy with them. Mostly, it means that they’re broadly happy, but not so blown away that they’ll heap praise on them. The reviews you pick up will tend to result from two scenarios: someone is thrilled with their buy, or they’re quite dissatisfied for whatever reason.

Yes, you’ll get some three-to-four-star reviews from those who are somewhere in the middle. But you need more to make up the bulk of your social proof. You can find ways to incentivize reviews, but you’ll find that you can make a big difference by simply asking people (quite politely) to review your products, explaining that you need their feedback to improve.

A few useful places to ask for reviews include email, social media, and on your website itself. For the latter. You can design landing pages that are designed to collect customer feedback and encourage your customers to be more forthcoming with their opinions.

Landing pages for reviews and surveys can be built by a developer, or if you have an ecommerce store, you can use a widget such as WP Product Review to integrate one into your site quickly and easily. Either way, once you have set up the page. You can then share the link on your social media, email newsletters, and more.

Provide Post-Purchase Support

What do you do once you’ve made a sale? Do you leave the buyer to take it from there, assuming that they’ll know what to do? If so, that’s typically a mistake. Because a lot can go wrong after a product purchase. The customer can have difficulty with setting it up or transporting it or storing it and end up punishing you for that difficulty by leaving a scathing review for the product.

Ensure that every order is followed up with an email that does more than provide confirmation: it should offer avenues for support, potentially including a live chat system, a support email address, and a phone number. You can also include FAQ information, guides, manuals, and anything else that can prove useful to a new buyer.

Also, remember to establish and maintain a presence on social media. Because people commonly share their product-related frustrations through Twitter or Facebook. If you track mentions of your brand and/or product names, you can spot potential issues and address them directly before they lead to negative reviews.

Sell Better Products

As we wrap things up, this point needs to be made: sometimes. The best thing you can do to improve your reviews does more to deserve them by making your products better. Always listen to feedback instead of dismissing it — what could you do differently? What features would you add? What alternative materials could you use?

If you’ve already done everything possible to optimize your products, then you can disregard this step. But I’m willing to get that you still have a lot of room for improvement. Because there’s no such thing as a perfect product, times change, tastes change, technology develops, and you need to keep up, or you’ll be left behind by your competitors.

In Conclusion

In the end, improving your reviews comes down to offering clear and representative value propositions. Helping your customers make the most of their buys, converting as many positive buying experiences as possible into reviews. Doing everything you can to make your products as good as they can be. It’s difficult in practice, but incredibly valuable, so make it a priority.

The post 4 Ways to Improve Your Reviews and Make More Sales appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Chances are, you’re on the verge of discovering this for yourself already. You’ve probably already had a client request an infographic to accompany the article you just sent over, or you’re trying to find the right visuals to make your landing page pop.

Unless you’ve got an unlimited budget or some very generous graphic designer friends, you’re probably going to have to figure out how to do this yourself or suffer the consequences (which can include getting paid less or having a second-rate website).

Luckily, some excellent DIY design tools are reasonably priced and easy to use.

In this post, we’ll be comparing two of the best DIY design tools on the market: Canva and Piktochart. Read on to find out which one comes out on top.

Recommended reading: 11 Tips on Finding the Right Infographic Ideas

A Brief Introduction

If you’re looking for a strong DIY design tool choice, then you can’t do much better than Piktochart and Canva, the two market-leading options.

First, meet Canva:

Canva was founded back in 2012 in Sydney, Australia; since then, it has skyrocketed to popularity and is now used by millions of people across the world.

Whether it’s professional designers, online merchants or nonprofits, this web-based graphic design tool is beloved by many for its intuitive use and drag-and-drop functionality.

Probably the most famous name in the market, Canva can be used for both web and print media design. If you want to create attractive visuals and branding for your business, then Canva is worth checking out.

Next up is Piktochart:

Like Canva, Piktochart — founded in 2012 in Malaysia— is a web-based design tool. And like Canva, Piktochart can be used to create stunning visuals to support your brand easily.

However, while Canva markets itself as a broad graphics tool for a range of uses, Piktochart mainly markets itself as a tool for making high-quality infographics without any expert knowledge. It’s easy to see the appeal, particularly for non-professional users.

Getting Started: The Interface

Let’s get started with the very first feature you meet when you use both tools: the interface.

This is where it’s difficult to pick a winner; both Piktochart and Canva have with interface designs that are very easy to use. Although this isn’t too much of a surprise, as both tools are aimed at helping everyone from total newbies to professionals create great designs, it’s a pleasant one.

Both of these DIY design tools offer dashboards that are intuitive and easy-to-use — coming with ready-made templates for the first design that you can either choose and edit or replace with your own.

Piktochart edges towards the finish line with a button that allows you to hide the selector to gain extra space for the canvas.

The Winner: Piktochart — but only just!

Choice and Collection

Piktochart has an impressive library of over 800 professionally designed infographic, presentation, and print templates. Quite simply, there’s no need ever to build anything from scratch when you have this vast variety of designs at your disposal.

However, it’s worth noting that a lot of the high-quality, intricate infographic templates are only available with the paid pricing plan. The free version of Piktochart offers much less in terms of infographic templates — a mere eight options. However, the free tool does provide 4000 free icons and images, which is not bad at all.

Canva also provides some great templates from its professional designers as well as a decent offering of user contributions — and there are thousands of them. Canva also gets major bonus points for including this in its free pricing plan as well.

As with Piktograph, Canva offers access to a rich image library. They’ve paired up with stock site Unsplash, but don’t restrict you to using these images alone — you can either pick your faves from other high-quality stock images sites like Burst or take your product photos and upload them to Canva for editing and branding.

The Winner: Canva trumps Piktograph with its vast range.

Most Extensive Features

So both options have a comprehensive collection of images and templates to choose from. But who comes out on top when it comes to the complicated stuff?

If you’re looking for extensive features, then Piktograph has you covered. This DIY design tool is renowned for its infographic options; in particular, it has video embed capabilities which means it’s perfect for interactive and visually engaging designs.

Piktochart users also love the interactive map and chart builders (in which you can pick a country and break up into regions). And as Piktograph lets you import data and survey results from tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Sheets, you can customize away for stunning data-driven visuals.

Then we come on to Canva. While this DIY design tool is excellent for making infographics, banners, and posters for your ecommerce biz, it has its limits.

Unlike Piktograph, Canva has no video embed capabilities and doesn’t offer animated features or live-data integrations. Unfortunately, this rules out using Canva for anything that’s remotely interactive or that you want to feature real-time data. Instead, you’re limited to static graphics.

The Winner: Piktochart comes out on top in this fight.

Community & Collaboration

Graphic design isn’t always a one-person job. It can involve many different people — others on your team, clients, collaborators… So how easy does each DIY design tool make collaborating with other creators?

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that Canva has many different options for sharing your work and collaborating with others. This is excellent news for all the design newbies looking for some additional help. With Canva’s free version, users can create a team with up to 10 people (with premium users allowed up to 30). You are making it easy enough to share and work on your project as a group.

Canva even has a design school community that users can join. It’s an excellent opportunity to connect with other creators and get feedback and expert options. You can either ask for comments or leave your design open to editing.

Piktograph, on the other hand, prefers to leave its community to grow organically. They’ve created a Piktograph Slack Comunity to house the community and allow users to share ideas and learn from each other.

If you want to collaborate with others on design, then you can choose Piktochart For Teams — a group dashboard in which members can work together to create and edit.

The Winner: Canva for its helpful community vibes.

Price

Canva also offers a free version of its tool. It’s a simple drag and drops editor that includes two folders to organize designs, 1GB storage for photos and assets. Access to over 8,000 templates and the ability to upload your images for editing.

On the other hand, you can upgrade to a Canva for Work pricing place for $12.95 per month (or $9.95 per month for a year’s subscription). For additional access to a whole load of features, including exclusive access to a comprehensive library 400,000 free photos, illustrations, and templates. This paid version allows you to do much more, such as set branded color palettes, upload custom fonts — export designs as animated GIFs or with transparent backgrounds.

As with Canva, Piktograph also offers a freemium version of its product. This version includes an intuitive editor and the ability to create as many visuals as you like. It also provides access 4,000 free icons and images (which is half as many as the free version of Canva offers).

An upgrade to Piktograph PRO will cost you $29 a month (or $24.17 a month if you buy it annually). This gives you access to extra features such as 1GB of image uploads, HD and PDF exports: watermark removal, and custom color schemes.

The Winner: Canva for its excellent pricing.

Conclusion: Who Is the Winner?

In the battle of the DIY design tools, both contestants have a lot going for them. Overall, Canva beats Piktograph when we totted up the scores — but only just!

One thing is for sure: both tools are at the top of the market when it comes to a design tool offerings that are easy-to-use and intuitive for both experts and beginners alike — and that can produce polished professional designs.

And since both DIY design tools offer free options — as well as free trials of their paid versions — why not experiment with both and find out which one suits your needs best?

The post Piktochart VS. Canva: What You Need To Know About These DIY Design Tools appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

But forget that muddled image, and believe me when I say that email marketing remains one of the best and most reliable methods in the digital marketing toolbox.

There’s a much less mixed perspective of WordPress, of course. Time may march on, but its position as the most widely-used CMS in the world still feels unassailable. I can be very confident that you use WordPress because you’re on this site, but even if the context were different, it would still most likely be your platform of choice.

Used together, these ever-effective stalwarts of the digital era can be extremely potent — but you have to get email marketing right if it’s going to be effective. Here are some simple WordPress Email Marketing hacks for running email marketing for your WordPress site as 2020 rolls on:

Install Relevant Plugins

One of the many reasons why WordPress is so popular is that it’s incredibly flexible through its vast library of plugins. Consequently, using some of those plugins will allow you to greatly improve your email marketing — and there are two things in particular that you should seek to use plugins to achieve:

Get More Subscribers

Before you can do any WordPress email marketing hacks. You need people interested in hearing from you. It can be quite challenging to build up a decent mailing list. To make people more likely to subscribe to your email list, and thus speed up the database-building process, you must improve your method for requesting and gathering email addresses.

One such plugin is Optin Cat. Costing a maximum of $99 (for the Elite-tier version). It provides you with a rich selection of customizable layouts and widgets. You can even track user habits to determine the best time to present a sign-up box, ultimately making it far more likely that your website visitors will convert.

Automate Your Emails

Handling emails manually is a huge time-sink, and it only gets worse the more subscribers you win. No one has the time to painstakingly trawl through a huge list of recipients and send emails out one by one. That’s why you need to automate your emails wherever possible, and thankfully WordPress is compatible with plenty of useful plugins.

You can start by looking at options such as Drip Marketing or SendPulse — you’ll find them (and many more) in the main selection of WordPress email marketing plugins. Look for everything relating to automation, and think carefully about what type of service you need. Do you want something optimally affordable, or optimally configurable? It’s up to you.

Use Some Decent Email Templates

While there’s a lot of room for creativity in creating high-quality emails. There’s also no pressing need to do anything unusual with the format. The typical layout of a marketing email has proven effective time and time again. If you use a modern business email templates as a jumping-off point for your copywriting process, you’ll avoid a lot of unnecessary effort.

Here are some newsletter templates that I suggest reviewing. You can sort by category to narrow things down, and preview anything that you think might be suitable. Everything there is mobile responsive, as well. Which is exceptionally significant in a time of so much internet browsing (both professional and personal) taking place on mobile devices.

In general, you’ll find that one of the biggest hacks is always to avoid reinventing the wheel. Take advantage of what’s already been done. Add your own unique tweaks, and you’ll be in a good position to compete without having to spend a lot of money or time.

Take Advantage of Easy Graphic Design Tools

A huge part of creating compelling marketing emails is including high-quality visuals. After all, even if someone has decided to click on your subject line. They’re not going to stick around for very long if they find your email content to be bland and boring.

However, a lot of marketers struggle to achieve good visuals: they can’t justify hiring graphic designers, but all the stock imagery they can find is too generic.

Thankfully, recent years have seen the development of countless intuitive graphic design tools, many of which are free. Consider not only Canva but also the likes of Crello or Snappa.

Furthermore, there are more great Canva Alternatives that you can use to create attractive graphic designs for blogs, infographics, and social media. These tools allow you to rapidly combine stock and library images with customized text and effects to produce results that can look remarkably professional once you’ve had some practice.

Of course, you can always use something like Photoshop. Adobe’s Creative Suite has become a lot more affordable over the years. There’s simply a much harsher learning curve, and straightforward online tools tend to be better optimized for rapidly producing images to fit templates and standard formats (e.g. email headers or social media ads). Unless your needs demand sophisticated software, it makes more sense to stick with the basics.

Wrapping Up

WordPress makes a great target for email marketing campaigns. But you need to work as efficiently as possible to avoid the work piling up. By using free (or affordable) plugins, templates, and tools, you can achieve excellent results while saving your time and attention for more pressing tasks with these WordPress Email Marketing hacks.

Featured Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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