Wednesday, July 6, 2016
How to Optimize Your Emails for Mobile: 10 Tricks Every Marketer Should Know [Live Google Hangout]
As a marketer, you know how powerful email can be to generating leads and nurturing prospects through your funnel.
But have you ever wondered if you're really getting the most value out of the channel?
If you're not optimizing your emails for your mobile audience, you're missing out. Over 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device, making it crucial for marketers to master capturing the attention of their mobile readers.
If you're looking to learn more about mobile email optimization best practices, tune into a live Google Hangout with email marketing experts from Litmus and HubSpot.
In this 45-minute discussion, Litmus' Justine Jordan and Jason Rodriguez and HubSpot's Nick Barrasso will share their advice for designing high-converting emails for your mobile audience.
Want to join us? Here are all the details:
- When: Tuesday 7/12 @ 2 p.m. ET // 11 a.m. PT
- Where: Live Google Hangout
- RSVP: Click Here
Want to learn more about mobile email optimization? Click here to save your seat for this live event.
via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bitly.com/29NKGBf
How to Defuse a Client Freakout
We’ve all been there -- a client calls, frustrated or even angry about something that happened, and he blames your agency. Often, it’s not your fault, but that’s the last thing your client wants to hear right then.
No agency can function without clients, but when this happens regularly, it can make you want to quit. That’s true whether you run a small agency and work with many clients directly, or if you run a larger agency and you’re coaching your team on how to handle things when a client freaks out.
To put things into perspective, client freakouts are a common problem at agencies. In my experience as an agency consultant, most agencies experience at least a few client freakouts a year. This article will help you defuse them -- and start finding ways to keep them from happening so often in the future.
Remember that this is about them, not you.
The first step is to recognize that this is about them, not you. If they’ve reached out -- because you’re their contact or because they’ve chosen to escalate above one of your employees -- this is your opportunity to save the day.
Marketing expert Jay Baer writes, “People who complain put in the effort to register their opinions, which is much better than the silent frustration and apathy of the unimpressed middle.”
Focus on helping them feel heard, helping them calm down, and figuring out how you can resolve things. According to research by Zendesk, an unhappy client is 50% more likely to share about their experience than a happy client -- so do your best to turn things around.
Get the client on the phone.
Shift the conversation from email (or text message or social media) to a phone call as soon as possible. You’ll have fewer miscommunications via phone -- and you can adjust what you say as the conversation unfolds.
If a client cold calls you without notice to unload about a problem, take notes to keep track of what he said. And if he calls and leaves a voicemail, call him back the same day.
Don't interrupt -- let them vent their concerns.
People want to feel heard -- so if a client calls sounding upset, let him talk. If you interrupt him, he’ll get more frustrated.
Take notes on what the client shares, since you’ll want to recap his concerns later in the call.
Act quickly.
The longer you wait, the more likely your client is going to jump to the worst conclusion -- that you don’t care about his problem, and he should consider firing your agency (or worse).
You may not be able to solve the problem immediately, but you should demonstrate you’re taking it seriously by sharing the timeline for what you’re going to do next. Even an interim answer is fine, such as: “I’m going to speak with the team right now to see what happened and how we’re going to fix this.”
Acting promptly can de-escalate problems. After some event production issues at my marketing association, I called and emailed people who complained on the post-event survey. Almost everyone responded to thank me for the follow up -- and then said the problem wasn’t as bad as they originally thought.
Validate their feelings.
The client is calling, in part, to confirm you see this as a problem, too. Even if it’s not your fault, he thinks -- for now -- it’s your fault. Denying responsibility just makes him more annoyed.
You can validate his feelings without admitting responsibility. I suggest using phrases like, “That sounds frustrating” or “I’d be frustrated, too.”
Validation includes recapping his concern later in the call. This shows him you were paying attention, and it makes your frustrated client feel more confident that you’re going to fix this.
Don’t jump to assign blame ...
Unless you know the problem was your agency’s fault, don’t jump to take blame.
As an agency account manager, I once got a call from a client who said his email account wasn’t working, and he needed our help fixing it. We didn’t provide support on email accounts -- but I ran a computer troubleshooting business in high school, so I figured I’d see if I could help quickly.
Within three minutes, I’d concluded that the reason his email didn’t work was that he had an internet outage at home. I said I was sorry he was running into the problem, but he’d need to contact his cable company to fix the internet problem first.
One of my clients runs an agency providing a range of digital services. Once of his clients called him recently, freaking out that website conversions had plummeted. It turns out the agency’s client had hired a contractor to redesign its website, without getting help from the agency.
... but recognize this might be your agency’s fault.
Often, your client is freaking out about something your agency did do. Maybe an employee was rude to him. Maybe you promised deliverables by a particular deadline, but things slipped through the cracks, and now the client’s boss is upset.
If it’s your agency’s fault, you definitely need to fix it. Instead of jumping to a solution, ask what he wants. More on that below.
Listen carefully, and take notes.
Practice active listening -- listening, demonstrating you listened, and asking follow up questions to show you want to fully understand the issue.
If you have time before the call, open a doc or a CRM page to type notes on what your client says. If a client calls you to freak out, take notes on whatever you can. But don’t let note-taking distract you from active listening.
Ask for their ideal outcome.
Don’t assume you know what they want. For instance, not every unhappy client wants a refund -- sometimes they just want you to fix the problem. I’ve identified at least six “ideal outcomes” that an unhappy client might prefer over a refund.
You won’t know what they want as an ideal outcome until you ask. Often, unhappy clients request less than you’d be willing to give them. And if they demand more, you can always tell them you need to regroup and will follow up.
Let them know you’ll follow up shortly (and then do it).
You probably can’t resolve every problem during the initial call -- that’s OK, but be sure to give clients an estimate on when they’ll hear back from you.
This is also a good time to ask them to send you screenshots, emails, or other documentation on what they’re experiencing. Most people understand that you’re asking for this to help them solve the problem.
Get additional information from your team to know what happened.
If you’re running the agency, odds are you don’t know all the details of what went wrong. Once you’ve calmed the client down and promised to follow up, ask your team what happened.
Your goal is to piece together a picture of what happened -- the specific problem as well as the cause. You’ll use this information to follow up with the client.
As a leader, you’re responsible for your team’s actions. This sometimes means apologizing for something your team did that you didn’t know about until later.
Update your client on the plan from there.
Based on what you find, let your client know your plan to fix things -- based on his ideal outcome and what you’re willing to do.
Sometimes you’ll find your agency had nothing to do with the freakout. In that case, point him to the appropriate resource. If there’s budget and he is a valued client, it may be worth doing some of the legwork for him -- for instance, sending him an article on how to fix something on his end.
If you can’t fix what caused the freakout in one step, keep your client updated. This is one of the few times you shouldn’t delegate things -- if you’re the person who handled the initial call, you should “own” communication with the client until he is satisfied with the outcome. If the client has to re-explain things to someone new, it’s just going to frustrate him further.
Later, discuss how to prevent similar situations in the future.
Above-average agencies are committed to continuous improvement. This means learning from your mistakes -- and from your successes. Do a debrief with your team (three simple questions: what worked, what didn’t work, and what to do differently next time).
Are you seeing a pattern behind several client freakouts? In my experience, most agency problems are symptoms of a larger systems failure. If your client freakouts are caused by systems problems, you need to fix the system to stop the freakouts.
Share this process with your team so they can start solving problems before they get to you.
Coach your team on handling problems themselves. Once you do this, the less you’ll get sucked into solving things every time. It’s part of making yourself “irrelevant” as an agency leader.
If you don’t trust your employees to handle problems themselves, they’ll never take responsibility for solving the problems. Talk through how you handle client freakouts, and let your employees listen-in as you solve issues with unhappy clients.
It may not happen overnight, but you’ll make life easier for yourself -- and help your employees grow.
How do you defuse client freakouts at your digital agency? Share your answer in the comments below!
Featured image via Flickr.
via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bitly.com/29nl7ao
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
How to Pick the Perfect Color Combination for Your Data Visualization
Choosing any color scheme -- whether for graphics, websites, brands, etc. -- is a challenge in and of itself. That choice of colors sets the mood for anything and everything you create.
When it comes to data visualization, color is especially important. The color scheme sets the tone of the imagery and each color serves to represent a unique piece of information.
The colors you use in your data visualizations represent more than just one idea. The color scheme you choose has the power to display the type of data your showing, its relationship, the differences between categories, and more.
This post will take you through the process of choosing the perfect color combination for your next data visualization -- from understanding your data to finding the right color tool.
How to Pick the Perfect Color Combination for Your Data Visualization
Is Your Data Sequential or Qualitative?
The first step when choosing a color scheme for your data visualization is understanding the data that you’re working with. There are three main categories that matter when choosing color schemes for data: sequential, diverging, and qualitative color schemes.
Sequential color schemes are those schemes that are used to organize quantitative data from high to low using a gradient effect. With quantitative data, you typically want to show a progression rather than a contrast. Using a gradient-based color scheme allows you to show this progression without causing any confusion.
Diverging color schemes allow you to highlight the middle range/extremes of quantitative data by using two contrasting hues on the extremes and a lighter tinted mixture to highlight the middle range.
Qualitative color schemes are used to highlight -- you guessed it -- qualitative categories. With qualitative data, you typically want to create a lot of contrast, which means using different hues to represent each of your data points.
Note: The images above are from Color Brewer 2.0 -- a data visualization color tool designed for working with data mapping. Check it out for your next data map visualization or for grabbing pre-made color schemes to use based on the sequential, diverging, and qualitative models.
How Many Unique Hues Do You Need to Use?
Now that you’ve determined which kind of display you want to use, it’s time to determine the number of hues you need to use.
Your hues are the unique colors (like red or blue) in their purest form (without any tinting or shading). Using unique hues is what creates contrast. In data visualization, creating contrast is highly important because it tells the viewer that the contrasting colors are comparative data points. Contrasting colors suggest that the data points are categorical, not correlated, showing you the difference between them rather than the relationship of progression.
Keep in mind that it's possible to use both a sequential and qualitative color scheme in the same visualization. And if this is the case, you’ll need to build a scheme that uses both gradients and unique hues.
The Role of Brightness in Color Selection
One very important tip for creating and finding color schemes for you data visualizations concerns understanding and utilizing the brilliance of colors for a purpose.
In the two pie charts below, notice the brightness of the colors used. On the left pie chart, you can see that there are four main hues used and four tints of each hue. This might signify a relationship between the hue and the tints, or it may just be used to draw attention to some sections of the data over the others.
On the right pie chart, all of the eight hues used have the same brightness. None have more white or black added them to create a shade or a tint, which ultimately creates a balanced, contrasting aesthetic.
Shading and brightness is incredibly important to consider when creating data visualizations because it can be easy to skew the interpretation of your data by drawing attention to some data points over others.
For qualitative data, unless you’re trying to point out one specific data point’s significance, try to use equally bright hues with contrasting colors to display your data.
For sequential quantitative data, shading is important because you’re likely using a gradient. Gradients are made up of different shades and tints of a hue to show the progression of one hue from light to dark -- much like the progression of the data from high to low.
What Tools Can You Use to Find the Perfect Color Combination?
When it comes to finding the perfect color scheme for your data visualizations, I highly recommend finding a scheme that’s already out there. This isn't to say that you don't need to have a strong grasp on basics of color selection, though -- even existing color schemes will need to be customized to the data you're using. In other words, it's still important that you know you're stuff.
Let's check out a few tools that'll help you get started ...
1) Colorpicker for Data
A fairly simple tool, Colorpicker let’s you hold one color in place while you drag the other locator around to find a multi-hued, gradient-based color scheme. Although this tool is limited in nature, I like that it gives you the option to visualize your color scheme on a map to show you what the scheme looks like in practice.
2) Color Hunt
If you’re just looking for premade color schemes to browse through, Color Hunt is the tool for you. This website is devoted to just color schemes, allowing you to easily gain inspiration and uncover HEX codes.
A caveat, however, is that each of the schemes are limited to four colors. If you’re data visualization requires more hues than four, this may not be the tool for you.
3) Designspiration.net
One of my personal favorite sites for design work, be it data visualization or otherwise, is Designspiration.net. Not only does Designspiration give you thousands of graphics to look through for inspiration, but it also allows you to sort through designs by color.
This is a great tool to use for your data visualization (even if the representations aren’t data-based) because it shows you what colors look like in contrast to one another. The color-sort tool also gives you the HEX codes ready to access, making it really easy to put together a combination that suits your needs.
4) FlatUIColorpicker.com
As a part of Designmodo’s Free User Interface toolkit, they created a tool to help you uncover colors to use in your design process. Although these colors aren’t necessarily part of premade schemes, they are really great for showing you bright, vibrant colors used for user interface design. You can easily browse through their color lists and create your own color schemes using the color picker.
5) Adobe Color CC
A classic tool for designers using Adobe products, Adobe Color CC allows you to create your own color schemes using the mathematical model-based color schemes (monochromatic, analogous, triadic, complementary, etc.). Adobe Color CC also has a great browser section you can use to find premade color schemes.
What If You Still Can't Find What You Need?
What if you decide you’re really looking for a color scheme that isn’t already out there? What do you do?
Creating a color scheme for data visualizations from scratch can be especially difficult because the colors you use have to either show vast contrast or natural progressions.
A great way to find inspiration for these types of color schemes is to draw on your surroundings. This could be a colorful photo, a mural, a sunset, or anything in nature --- you name it. If you look around to find color schemes that appeal to you in your physical surroundings, you can use this to create a color scheme for the virtual.
If you have a good eye, you may even be able to create a color scheme this way by trial and error. However, it's more likely that you’ll need to use a tool like Adobe Capture CC or Chroma by Softpress to snap a picture and grab the colors from the picture to use in your designs.
When creating data visualizations, the most important part of choosing the right color scheme comes down to understanding your data.
With so many different tools and premade color schemes out there, the hardest part isn’t actually finding the right colors; it’s knowing how to use those colors to display the information in the best way possible.
Now that you know how to find your color schemes, go put your newfound knowledge to work.
How do you choose color schemes for your data visualizations? Share your tips below.
via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bitly.com/29dSien
Do You Have a Clutter Problem? [Flowchart]
Have you ever looked around you -- at your desk, your room, your car, your garage -- and realized that the clutter has gotten out of control?
Don't worry, we all have those moments.
Everyone has a unique relationship with their "stuff." I, for example, have a drawer full of youth soccer jerseys I just can't seem to part with. (I swear I'm going to make a T-shirt quilt out of them someday!) For a friend of mine, it's mugs. She has like six of them on her desk at work. Who needs six mugs?
And yet, I know plenty of people who are really good at "spring cleaning" -- i.e., clearing out their unnecessary stuff in spontaneous purges. Sometimes, I wish I were brave enough to set them loose on my stuff to see what I could get rid of if I wasn't so darn sentimental.
That makes me what the folks at QuickQuid call a "sentimental clutterer." There are a few other types, including the folks who binge shop (who can resist a good sale?), those whose living spaces are filled with books, papers, and schoolwork, and so on.
What type of "clutterer" are you, and how is it affecting your life and work? If you’ve ever wondered where you might fall on the spectrum, take the flowchart quiz below from QuickQuid. It'll help you identify your relationship with your stuff, and give you some quick tips for how to live a more balanced lifestyle.
via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bitly.com/29l6zI2
6 Important Questions to Ask Before Your Agency Grows
Many agency leaders think the path to success is through growth. Grow bigger, grow faster, and don't look back.
But do they have the right business practices in place to actually achieve this? And are they prepared for the inevitable changes that occur as a company gets larger?
6 Questions to Ask Before Your Agency Grows
1) How do you want to grow?
What do you want your agency to look like in a few years? There are two main approaches to growth, and they look very different.
For one type of firm, you can grow through increased sales -- or growing by volume. You bring on lots of clients, and hire more people to service those clients. Client accounts will most likely be smaller, and the firm will be more concerned with productivity and the profitability of projects.
You can also grow through the size of your accounts, taking on fewer clients and focusing on longer engagements and less tactical or project-based work. For this type of growth to occur, the agency needs to be committed to a strong positioning as well as be able to showcase its value to obtain more revenue from clients. The agency may only need to win a few key accounts each year to replace leaving clients.
2) Are your current hiring practices in line with your future agency?
As you grow, your agency changes. Your clients' needs evolve. And you need more people to manage, train, and lead different teams. While some might rely on hiring for the role when they reach that size, most owners want to develop leadership skills in the people who have been with them when the team could easily fit in one room for a meeting. A key external hire -- someone with a specific skill set and experience -- can benefit the agency's growth; however, you'll have a hard time retaining people in the long-run if you fail to create a path of advancement for your current employees.
That means that you need to begin developing a bench of future leaders, and that requires a different approach to hiring and training. In the past, you might have simply been concerned about whether or not the candidate can do the job or be trained to complete the work. Now, you need to consider other qualities in top performers, such as emotional intelligence, interest in long-term career growth and management, and if the person has skills that challenge the team. You're looking for someone who will add to the overall talent of the team, rather than simply fit into a vacant seat.
3) How will you attract the right type of clients?
When you're just starting out, your agency could thrive on word-of-mouth, referrals, and projects from local companies. But if you want to grow, you'll need to tap a new group of prospects -- and do so in a sustainable way.
And it means you need to think differently about your company. Why would someone located 1,000 miles away want to work with your agency? What facts would make a prospect say, "I only want to work with your firm"? What do you need to change about the way you market your agency? Or do you need to actually start building your brand?
4) What does your sales process look like?
A lot of time is wasted on lunch meetings, calls with "prospects" who simply want to learn a few marketing tips, and proposals that never even reach a decision-maker.
This wasted time could be better spent with prospects that actually want to work with your agency and that your agency wants to work with -- you know you can provide value to the client, the account will be profitable, and your team members will enjoy working with the client.
But without a sales process, it's easy to get distracted by this prospect or that project. Without a goal, you'll always be running towards a finish line, yet the line will keep moving.
By defining your sales process with steps and processes for qualifying clients, prospecting, closing, and upselling, you'll be able to more quickly and efficiently grow.
5) How will your role change?
As the company grows, many agency owners struggle with the fact that they can't be everywhere and do everything. In the beginning, they were involved in every client account, approved all the creative, tracked financials, and made the final decision for all hires.
This isn't possible as your agency grows -- leaders have to make themselves irrelevant. And you need to take some time to figure out if this is really what you want. Do you want to be able to scale your influence on a larger team and client base? Or do you more enjoy the day-to-day management and involvement in your clients' accounts? These are two different types of businesses, and it's worth considering what type of company you actually want to build, rather than growing for growth's sake.
6) Is your approach to creating work repeatable and consistent?
Finally, to scale you need to create, document, and train people on your processes. Without a way to create and deliver work on time and profitably, you can't scale. To retain clients, you can't miss deadlines or deliver poor quality work. New employees need to be properly trained and onboarded to deliver a consistent experience to clients. While it might be fun to "figure things out as you go," it doesn't lead to creating a growing and stable company.
via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bitly.com/29v18Y5