email marketing
There's the big boys like Mailchimp but I like some of the other players on the market!
If like me you are design led and just want something that is easy to use and will do the job nicely, I recommend Flodesk. It is so simple to use and it has the workflow capabilities that Mailchimp charge a lot more for than Flodesk.
If you have lots of contacts and you want more detailed reports then I suggest Benchmark it has some great templates you can use and add your branding to. It charges based on the number of contacts you have on your list but its still a reasonably priced product for the functions it can provide.
If you want to sell more digital products you can have a look at ConvertKit. They are great if you are selling e-books, PDFs, Canva templates etc, you can send abandoned basket emails and take payments easily. Again they charge based on the number of subscribers but it's definitely worth taking a look at.
Lead Generation
In this section I will be talking about Quiz software and how it can be used in different ways to get potential clients into your sales funnel.
First up is a firm favourite of mine, Interact. The quizzes are so easy to build and the templates they have are great. The team have worked hard to have the integration with Mailchimp but also use Zapier to make it friendly with most of the other CRMs and Email Marketing software out there. Interact allows you to be serious or fun with your audience. It gets me playing the game!
Next up is ScoreApp which is great if you can do assesment style quizzes in your business. This is a tool I have used with my clients and it is brilliant for diagnosing areas that might need work etc. It is easy to setup, has branding that you can programme and best of all for its price it can even double as a digital product for you.
Surveys
Ok so we've all had requests for feedback and long boring questionnaires, if your business needs to capture data at least ONE of these tools will help you do it in a very slick way!
We have Typeform up first, its a great piece of kit as it not only has conditional logic, branding and white labelling it also allows you to store the data as a sheet to export into Excel. I have seen some big companies use typeform and they love its diversity. Me too, I put Typeform in for a client who wanted her onboarding questionnaire to feel more conversational. Enter Typeform. It referenced the persons name and the phrasing of the questions really took it to the next level.
Another great tool to use for collecting data is AirTable. The free version is powerful and using forms to collect the answers you can then create dashboards to present that data back. I really love it and its such a diverse tool.
Lastly, I wanted to touch on the fact that most CRMs will allow you to collect feedback in some way, some do not translate the data into a useable format creating the need to double the work.
Your conversion rate?
how many leads you have right now?
your most successful service?
Marketing is a big old pot to have on this site! It is so broad and there are sooooo many apps, software and tools out there that can help you. I'm going to do my best to break it down.
Marketing Software - I adore these!
Social Media
Well, you need content. So a graphics tool like Canva would be great for you to use. The free version is great but when you upgrade you get the brand kit and other features that just make life so easy.
Now you have the graphics you need the caption. Well I had a life changing moment in 2022 when I discovered Jasper AI. Yes, artificial intelligence that helps write content for your business. It isn't a necessity but it's definitely nice to have!
Onto hashtags (the pain of so many of us!) Flick helps you find the hashtags that are relevant to you and gives you the usage data too.
Then it comes to posting. Why add yourself a job to do every day when you could use a publishing tool like Later to do the job for you- it even posts to multiple platforms meaning you get to knock it out of the park with consistency when posting.