digital marketing
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Demand Curve: Email marketing tactics that convert subscribers into customers
Email has the highest return on investment of any other marketing channel. On average, email earns you $40 for every $1 spent. And the best part is that email is an owned channel, which means you can reach your subscriber directly instead of relying on social media algorithms to surface your content.
At Demand Curve, we’ve worked with over 500 startups, meticulously documenting growth tactics for all growth channels. We also incorporate what we’ve learned from our agency, Bell Curve, which works with Outschool, Imperfect Produce and Microsoft to name a few.
To understand how to use email marketing effectively, we interviewed email marketers at this year’s fastest-growing startups. This post covers the most profitable tactics they use that capture 80% of the value using 20% of the effort.
If people don’t open it, nothing else matters
The subject line of your email is the most important, yet most marketers neglect it until after crafting the body of the email.
The subject line of your email is the most important, yet most marketers neglect it until after crafting the body of the email.
Increase the open-rate of your subject lines by making them self-evident. You don’t want people guessing why you want them to pay attention to your email. If the subject line is unclear or vague, your subscribers will ignore it.
One trick is to write like you speak. Try using subject lines that use informal language and contractions (it’s, they’re, you’ll). Not only will this save character count, it will also make your copy more friendly and quick to read.
Subject lines should be relevant to your subaudiences. Marketers generate 760% more revenue from segmented email campaigns than from untargeted emails.
A good subject line will increase the chances of your email being read. Image Credits: Demand Curve
If you’re collecting emails from multiple areas on your website, chances are the context will be slightly different for each. For example, people who subscribe after reading an article on ketogenic diets should receive emails that further educate them on keto and seeds products relevant to that lifestyle. Sending them information and product recommendations for vegetarians would not be relevant and could lead to them unsubscribing.
To ensure you’re sending relevant emails to the right audiences, segment your audience using tags and filters within your email marketing platform. Each platform will do this slightly differently, but all modern platforms should allow you to do this. When crafting your email subject line, ask yourself: “Would this email make sense to receive for this segment of subscriber?”
Your subject lines should be short and concise. About 46% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, which means the subject line must be short enough to fit on a smaller screen while getting your point across. Fifty characters is approximately the maximum length a subject line can be before it gets cut off on a mobile screen.
Founders, help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.
Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.
Keeping your subject lines short also makes them easier to scan when your subscriber is looking through their inbox. Including emojis in your subject line can cut down your character count and emulates how friends send text messages to each other. Including emojis in your subject lines will make your email feel less corporate and more friendly.
Designing emails that get read
Once your subscriber opens your email, there are three outcomes that can follow: read, skim or bounce.
Subscribers that read your emails are the most valuable, because they will consume the full contents of your email. Skimmers will only read the headlines and look at the images you include. Subscribers who bounce will open your email, but if nothing catches their attention right away, they will simply delete or close your email.
You’re going to want to design your emails to minimize the number of bouncers, satisfy readers and provide enough high-level information that skimmers still understand your message.
To minimize the number of bounces, choose an email design that catches the eye and is relevant to your brand. Take the Casper email below for example. The starry night background and moon illustration is directly relevant to the mattresses they sell. Visually branded email designs will help elevate your brand perception.
Design your emails to appeal to all kinds of readers. Image Credits: Demand Curve
To optimize for skimmers, write action-focused headlines. Use designs that draw the eye of your reader to key elements. As you can see in the Headspace example, the image of the rising sun pushes your gaze upward to the headline and the call-to-action button. Skimmers should be able to understand the context of the entire email and take action without needing to read the body.
To convert more readers, fulfill the expectation set by the subject line. Readers will be looking for any promises or hints you gave them in your subject line. Be sure to deliver on this promise in the body. Do so in an aggressively concise way — just because they’re reading doesn’t mean they don’t value their time.
Call to actions that convert
The goal of your body copy is to drive people to your call-to-action button (CTA). Your CTA is crucial, because it’s how you convert an email subscriber into a paying customer. To increase the conversion of your CTA, make a valuable promise in your body copy and headers that’s only delivered through your CTA.
Good CTA copy typically begins with a verb that teases what the reader will encounter next:
- Get your free sample.
- Redeem discount now.
- Browse the full inventory.
Low-converting CTA copy is vague or nonactive:
- Learn more.
- See inventory.
- Download.
Your email should only have one CTA. Any more and your conversion will decrease due to unnecessary decision-making. Ensure that the page on your site that your CTA leads to fulfills the promise you made in your body and CTA button.
Recap
Once the focus of the subject line is clear and the desired outcome is chosen, everything else should be crafted to carry the reader step by step through the email, eventually taking them to the desired action.
It’s a good idea to work backward from the desired outcome you want the reader to perform. If the desired outcome is for them to click on a CTA button, frame your subject line, headers and body copy as a valuable promise that can only be achieved by clicking the button.
Consider the experience of your email through the eyes of all three types of subscribers: readers, skimmers and bouncers. Use visual and written prompts that make the purpose of your email clear to all three categories. Failing to do so could lead to unsubscribes and lost revenue.
Email has the highest return on investment than any other marketing channel because you have a captive audience who has opted-in to you communicating with them. Email can drive six times more conversions that a Twitter post and is 40 times more likely to get noticed than a Facebook post.
Powered by WPeMatico
5 companies doing growth marketing right
What do all companies, regardless of industry, say they want? Growth. Lighting-fast, continuous growth. The good news is you can quickly learn which growth marketing strategies work by studying other companies’ success and adapting it to your own business.
Most technophiles remember Dropbox’s referral program — the one that helped it grow 3,900% in 15 months. Its philosophy was simple: reward customers with free storage space for referring other customers. In 2008, it was an absolute revelation. A golden ticket.
Tell a story with your business’ proprietary data. You’re the only one with this information, and that makes it valuable.
In 2021, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company without a formal referral program. It’s a standard growth marketing trick. If you study other companies’ tactics, you’re going to be able to shortcut growth — it’s as simple as that.
The race to grow faster is more pressing than ever before. When you consider the speed with which venture capital funds need to return dollars to their investors and that consumer acquisition costs have increased by 55% over the last three years, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth.
Of course, you should still run your own experiments, but it’s just more capital-efficient to emulate than to trial-and-error from scratch. Here are five companies with growth strategies worth emulating — including the most important lessons you can begin applying to your business today.
Have you worked with an individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?
Help us identify the best startup growth marketing experts!
1. Doing SEO right: Flo
SEO is going to spend this summer shaking in its boots. Google began rolling out a two-week core algorithm update on June 2, and it’s unleashing a page experience update through August. These updates usually come with significant volatility that makes organic Google rankings jump all over the place.
However, one clear winner of the 2021 SEO footrace is Flo, a women’s ovulation calendar, period tracker and pregnancy app. According to GrowthBar, a SEO tool I co-founded, Flo’s organic traffic has soared 192% over the past two months and it ranks on page one for some staggeringly competitive women’s health keywords.
If SEO is a strategy you’re pursuing, there are two key growth lessons to take away from Flo’s recent success.
1. Authority matters now more than ever. Healthcare websites fall into a category of sensitive sites that Google classifies as Your Money, Your Life (YMYL). Because of oodles of fake news and suspect web content, Google has rightfully raised its bar for expertise and factuality. Go to any one of Flo’s more than 1,000 blog posts (yes, content is still king) and you’ll see that nearly all of them are reviewed by gynecologists, primary care physicians or some other type of women’s health expert. Its site also has pages devoted to its writers and medical reviewers, content guidelines and peer-review specifications. Flo takes its information seriously. From the 2020 election to QAnon to vaccination side effects, Google is on high alert. Whatever your niche, you need to establish credibility to win Google searches.
Powered by WPeMatico
Instagram’s TikTok rival, Reels, rolls out ads worldwide
Instagram Reels are getting ads. The company announced today it’s launching ads in its short-form video platform and TikTok rival, Reels, to businesses and advertisers worldwide. The ads will be up to 30 seconds in length, like Reels themselves, and vertical in format, similar to ads found in Instagram Stories. Also like Reels, the new ads will loop, and people will be able to like, comment on, and save them, the same as other Reels videos.
The company had previously tested Reels ads in select markets earlier this year, including India, Brazil, Germany and Australia, then expanded those tests to Canada, France, the U.K. and the U.S. more recently. Early adopters of the new format have included brands like BMW, Nestlé (Nespresso), Louis Vuitton, Netflix, Uber and others.
Instagram tells us the ads will appear in most places users view Reels content, including on the Reels tab, Reels in Stories, Reels in Explore and Reels in your Instagram Feed, and will appear in between individual Reels posted by users. However, in order to be served a Reels ad, the user first needs to be in the immersive, full-screen Reels viewer.
Image Credits: Instagram
The company couldn’t say how often a user might see a Reels ad, noting that the number of ads a viewer may encounter will vary based on how they use Instagram. But the company is monitoring user sentiment around ads themselves, and the overall commerciality of Reels, it says.
Like Instagram’s other advertising products, Reels ads will launch with an auction-based model. But so far, Instagram is declining to share any sort of performance metrics around how those ads are doing, based on tests. Nor is it yet offering advertisers any creator tools or templates that could help them get started with Reels ads. Instead, Instagram likely assumes advertisers already have creative assets on hand or know how to make them, because of Reels ads’ similarities to other vertical video ads found elsewhere, including on Instagram’s competitors.
While vertical video has already shown the potential for driving consumers to e-commerce shopping sites, Instagram hasn’t yet taken advantage of Reels ads to drive users to its built-in Instagram Shops, though that seems like a natural next step as it attempts to tie the different parts of its app together.
But perhaps ahead of that step, Instagram needs to make Reels a more compelling destination — something other TikTok rivals, which now include both Snap and YouTube — have done by funding creator content directly. Instagram, meanwhile, had made offers to select TikTok stars directly.
The launch of Instagram Reels ads follows news of TikTok’s climbing ad prices. Bloomberg reported this month that TikTok is now asking for more than $1.4 million for a home page takeover ad in the U.S., as of the third quarter, which will jump to $1.8 million by Q4 and more than $2 million on a holiday. Though the company is still building its ads team and advertisers haven’t yet allocated large portions of their video budget to the app, that tends to follow user growth — and TikTok now has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S.
Both apps, Instagram and TikTok, now have more than a billion monthly active users on a global basis, though Reels is only a part of the larger Instagram platform. For comparison, Instagram Stories is used by some 500 million users, which demonstrates Instagram’s ability to drive traffic to different areas of its app. Instagram declined to share how many users Reels has as of today.
Powered by WPeMatico
To win post-pandemic, startups need remote-first growth teams
Growth leaders used to build key relationships across a company while working together in a real-life office. Those relationships could carry over through the pandemic, but let’s say you’re a new company and you’re remote-first.
How do you build this complex collaboration from scratch?
Growth marketer and investor Susan Su tells us that the solution is not just more software tools. In the interview below, she says that after the pandemic, startup founders will need to develop a mentality that places growth at the center of company strategy.
Consultants and agencies can be great additions to this effort, especially if they have previously solved the types of problems you face. (In fact, TechCrunch is asking founders who have worked with growth marketers to share a recommendation in this survey. We’ll use your answers to find more experts to interview.)
Su is currently the head of portfolio strategy for Sound Ventures, previously a growth leader at Stripe and the first hire at Reforge. She also shared a few thoughts on market opportunities after the pandemic in the full interview below. E-commerce is mainstream for good, she says, even as we all try to step away from screens more often. However, many social and mobile sectors are mature, and it’s going to be even harder for startups to compete as real-world activities absorb more time.
Don’t forget: Susan Su will also appear at our Early Stage virtual event on July 8 (and answer questions directly).
How are you seeing startups manage changes in user engagement as more people exit pandemic lockdowns and adjust their daily lives?
As we exit the pandemic, I expect that we’ll see a natural and obvious spike in some consumer activity that will roll up to midsized businesses and enterprises. Just like with the onset of the pandemic, we’ll see uneven results across sectors:
E-commerce boomed during the pandemic but was really an augmentation of an already-accelerating trend toward digital commerce and streamlined logistics. I don’t think we backtrack from e-commerce because habit formation around online shopping has been building for years; we would be backtracking to an age long before 2020, and that’s not going to happen.
New social-mobile experiences also boomed during the pandemic, but there’s still a valid question around whether 15 months or so is enough time to become part of the ingrained infrastructure of daily life. We are living in an age of mature platforms, so every new service is stealing time away from an existing service. As with pre-pandemic growth, their success rests upon fast-accumulating network effects and great, sticky core product experience. Now that we have parks, friends and dinners out calling to us again, it’s a real test of how compelling some of these new value propositions really are, and whether they can continue to demonstrate their relevance in a more hybridized online-offline world.
That said, the pandemic was an enormous constraint on human society and [the] economy, and these kinds of constraints often breed innovation that doesn’t go away. We will evolve, but we can never go back. It sounds cheesy but it’s true.
Some aspects of the pandemic, like remote work, appear to have radically changed certain industries. How will these societal changes impact how the typical startup thinks about growth?
Growth will always be growth — that is, a process of iterative experimentation to identify and solve customer problems, and then scale those solutions in order to reach and convert bigger and bigger audiences. Platform changes like iOS 14 or Facebook’s periodic algorithm adjustments will have a bigger impact in the near term on the technical functioning of growth, and these aren’t specifically pandemic-related.
One area to watch is how growth teams are built and operated. Growth is a horizontal function that touches many different parts of the org, including product, engineering, marketing, comms and design. Many startup teams have already been working with collaboration tools even while they sat in the same office, but growth is about more than just using tools. The most effective growth leaders succeed by building relationships across the organization; it’s like the fable of Stone Soup — you’re creating this meal that will feed everyone, but you also need each person to bring a pinch of salt, or a dash of pepper, or one carrot, and that requires socialization and relationship-building. I’ll be very interested to see how new growth leaders onboard remote-only teams and what approaches they take to this “networking” need within the function.
From the days of growth hacking on social platforms, growth marketing is now an established part of the world. But it’s not necessarily the main expertise of a startup founder, even if it needs to be. So, how should they think about addressing growth marketing in 2021? What are the essentials they should do in their roles?
Every founder needs to have a growth mentality. They don’t need to memorize all the right buttons to push in an ads dashboard, but they need to be familiar and comfortable with the core work of gap-finding. That said, founders are by definition entrepreneurial — their company exists because they saw an opportunity that no one else did, and this is the fundamental work of growth as well.
Founders will fail if they adopt a mentality that someone else can or should do it for them. The founder’s job is to supply ambition and opinions, and then magnetize high-quality talent to come and pull the levers and bring their creative vision to life. There are many people who can do growth marketing — that is, they know how the platforms work, they understand the rules and the playbooks. But there are very few who can come up with truly visionary strategies that change the game altogether — those people become founders, and those companies become household names. So for a founder, I’d say the most important growth work is to continue to know your market and customer better than anyone else in the whole world, have an opinion about what’s missing, and work to bring the best talent to come in alongside you and be a thought partner, not just a button pusher.
Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?
Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!
With limited resources, how should early-stage companies think about what to focus on?
This is going to depend on the goals of your company. Are you planning to raise money and need to demonstrate certain KPIs? Are you bootstrapping and need to keep the lights on? Resources should always be allocated to the most strategic purposes, with the longest-term view you can afford. For some companies, this could mean forgoing revenue to focus on viral or word-of-mouth-driven user acquisition to demonstrate to future investors that there’s something special here. For other companies, perhaps in lower volume categories like enterprise, it’s about bringing a few strategic logos into the family as a signal to later customers and other stakeholders, including future employees and investors.
One thing that early-stage companies should always be focused on is building a top-shelf employer brand. You will only ever be as good as the talent you attract to your company, and interestingly growth can actually play a role in this. The best designers, engineers and product people are often flowing toward the companies that have the best growth. In that way, it’s a highly strategic role and function.
What do startups continue to get wrong?
You can’t truly outsource growth or any other core function; you can’t tack on customer acquisition after product development. At the end of the day, if you really think about it, all a company is, is a customer-acquisition engine. This needs to be core; wake up every day and think about growth, not just to hit revenue or user KPIs, but to build the company that the best people are clamoring to work at. It’s not about finding someone sufficient to solve your near-term problems; it’s about framing problems in a way that’s so compelling to the most creative, hardest-working people so that they can’t get it out of their heads. Go for talent moonshots, and figure out how to close them. The rest will fall in line from there.
When should a founder feel comfortable getting help from an outside expert or agency?
Anytime. Agencies are great. They are an extension of your talent, and the best agencies aren’t selling you — they have to be sold on your problem because they have their pick of companies just like yours. That’s the agency or outside expert you want to work with, because they’ll have a priceless perspective from the other best-in-class founders and teams they’ve worked with that they can bring to your challenge. Any agency can run Facebook ads (it’s not rocket science), but you want to find the team that’s solved the gnarliest problems for your hero companies. Then you’ll get not just an ads manager, but a teacher.
Powered by WPeMatico
Productivity startup Time is Ltd. raises $5.6M to be the ‘Google Analytics for company time’
Productivity analytics startup Time is Ltd. wants to be the Google Analytics for company time. Or perhaps a sort of “Apple Screen Time” for companies. Whatever the case, the founders reckon that if you can map how time is spent in a company, enormous productivity gains can be unlocked and money better spent.
It’s now raised a $5.6 million late-seed funding round led by Mike Chalfen, of London-based Chalfen Ventures, with participation from Illuminate Financial Management and existing investor Accel. Acequia Capital and former Seal Software chairman Paul Sallaberry are also contributing to the new round, as is former Seal board member Clark Golestani. Furthermore, Ulf Zetterberg, founder and former CEO of contract discovery and analytics company Seal Software, is joining as president and co-founder.
The venture is the latest from serial entrepreneur Jan Rezab, better known for founding SocialBakers, which was acquired last year.
We are all familiar with inefficient meetings, pestering notifications chat, video conferencing tools and the deluge of emails. Time is Ltd. says it plans to address this by acquiring insights and data platforms such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoom, Webex, MS Teams, Slack and more. The data and insights gathered would then help managers to understand and take a new approach to measure productivity, engagement and collaboration, the startup says.
The startup says it has now gathered 400 indicators that companies can choose from. For example, a task set by The Wall Street Journal for Time is Ltd. found the average response time for Slack users versus email was 16.3 minutes, comparing to emails which was 72 minutes.
Chalfen commented: “Measuring hybrid and distributed work patterns is critical for every business. Time Is Ltd.’s platform makes such measurement easily available and actionable for so many different types of organizations that I believe it could make work better for every business in the world.”
Rezab said: “The opportunity to analyze these kinds of collaboration and communication data in a privacy-compliant way alongside existing business metrics is the future of understanding the heartbeat of every company — I believe in 10 years time we will be looking at how we could have ignored insights from these platforms.”
Tomas Cupr, founder and Group CEO of Rohlik Group, the European leader of e-grocery, said: “Alongside our traditional BI approaches using performance data, we use Time is Ltd. to help improve the way we collaborate in our teams and improve the way we work both internally and with our vendors — data that Time is Ltd. provides is a must-have for business leaders.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Sensor Tower makes its first acquisition with deal for market intelligence company, Pathmatics
Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower has made its first acquisition. The company this morning announced it’s acquiring Pathmatics, a market intelligence company which will now combine its paid digital and social media platform with Sensor Tower’s business. Deal terms were not detailed but include an undisclosed growth investment from Riverwood Capital into Pathmatics.
The acquisition will allow the companies to offer an expanded set of digital and mobile advertising insights to their respective customers, including new social insights for TikTok, YouTube mobile and Snap this year, powered by Sensor Tower.
The companies also will introduce digital TV (over-the-top) insights, expanded coverage for mobile apps and ad insights, and will extend Pathmatics’ social and digital coverage globally.
The deal follows Sensor Tower’s first significant fundraising last year, with $45 million also from Riverwood Capital. Though Sensor Tower had been profitable since its launch, now serving more than 350 enterprise-level customers for its app and ad intelligence products, it chose to raise the additional capital in order to further grow its business, with investments in hiring, marketing, infrastructure and other expansions.
With Pathmatics, it’s buying a company that’s also been on its way up. The company had seen over 100% year-over-year growth for its own market intelligence business since launching in 2011. It now has over 250 brands, media and advertising agencies as customers, as well as over 7,000 users of its platform, representing over 200% software-as-a-service growth since 2018.
The two businesses are teaming up at a time when digital advertising is also on the rise, in part due to the shifts in the market attributed to the pandemic. As more businesses began operating online last year, advertisers increased their digital ad spending by 12.7% to $368 billion, per eMarketer. And digital advertising will account for 58% of media spending in 2021.
We understand Sensor Tower acquired both the IP and its more than 60-person team from Pathmatics as a result of the acquisition. The entire team will join Sensor Tower, with the executive suite now being a combination of both companies’ leaders. Sensor Tower co-founder Alexey Malafeev will remain as CEO while Gabe Gottlieb, CEO and co-founder of Pathmatics, will become chief strategy officer.
Historically, Pathmatics had provided brands and agencies with all creative used by advertisers, spend and impression, and path to publisher and viewer, to help them reduce waste from their budgets, improve their own marketing and predict their competitors’ next move.
Going forward, both sets of customers will be able to opt into the other company’s solutions, including mobile, social media and digital insights. Longer-term, the two companies will work together to bring more products to the market for their over 600 combined customers across 50 countries. Among these is a plan to add Pathmatics’ Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other digital ad intelligence capture into Sensor Tower, as well as an effort to augment Sensor Tower’s data set with ad insights beyond app installs.
These features will make the product a better fit for larger brands looking into all aspects of the competitors’ campaigns, ranging from how they’re advertising for app installs to how they’re building brand awareness.
The deal officially closed on May 17, 2021, Sensor Tower says.
Santa Monica-based Pathmatics had raised $7.7 million to date from Upfront Ventures, BDMI and Baroda Ventures.
“As the global economy increasingly shifts to digital, it’s imperative that companies can understand and
navigate the entire digital landscape — from mobile to web and desktop — using accurate and insightful data,” noted Ramesh Venugopal, principal at Riverwood Capital, in a statement about the acquisition. “The combination of Sensor Tower and Pathmatics presents a unique and valuable offering to customers allowing them to take advantage of a broad range of datasets with increased focus on consumer privacy and deep digital insights that leaders in every industry will need,” he added.
Powered by WPeMatico
Argentina’s Digital House raises over $50M to help solve LatAm’s tech talent shortage
Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding.
Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software developer Globant. Riverwood Capital, a Menlo Park-based private equity firm, and existing backer early-stage Latin American venture firm Kaszek also participated in the financing.
The raise brings Digital House’s total funding raised to more than $80 million since its 2016 inception. The Rise Fund led a $20 million Series B for Digital House in December 2017, marking the San Francisco-based firm’s investment in Latin America.
Nelson Duboscq, CEO and co-founder of Digital House, said that accelerating demand for tech talent in Latin America has fueled demand for the startup’s online courses. Since it first launched its classes in March 2016, the company has seen a 118% CAGR in revenues and a 145% CAGR in students. The 350-person company expects “and is on track” to be profitable this year, according to Duboscq.
Digital House CEO and co-founder Nelson Duboscq. Image Credits: Digital House
In 2020, 28,000 students across Latin America used its platform. The company projects that more than 43,000 will take courses via its platform in 2021. Fifty percent of its business comes out of Brazil, 30% from Argentina and the remaining 20% in the rest of Latin America.
Specifically, Digital House offers courses aimed at teaching “the most in-demand digital skills” to people who either want to work in the digital industry or for companies that need to train their employees on digital skills. Emphasizing practice, Digital House offers courses — that range from six months to two years — teaching skills such as web and mobile development, data analytics, user experience design, digital marketing and product development.
The courses are fully accessible online and combine live online classes led by in-house professors, with content delivered through Digital House’s platform via videos, quizzes and exercises “that can be consumed at any time.”
Digital House also links its graduates to company jobs, claiming an employability rate of over 95%.
Looking ahead, Digital House says it will use its new capital toward continuing to evolve its digital training platforms, as well as launching a two-year tech training program — dubbed the the “Certified Tech Developer” initiative — jointly designed with Mercado Libre and Globant. The program aims to train thousands of students through full-time two-year courses and connect them with tech companies globally.
Specifically, the company says it will also continue to expand its portfolio of careers beyond software development and include specialization in e-commerce, digital marketing, data science and cybersecurity. Digital House also plans to expand its partnerships with technology employers and companies in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. It also is planning some “strategic M&A,” according to Duboscq.
Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founder & co-managing partner of Riverwood Capital, noted that his firm has observed an accelerating digitization of the economy across all sectors in Latin America, which naturally creates demand for tech-savvy talent. (Riverwood has an office in São Paulo).
For example, in addition to web developers, there’s been increased demand for data scientists, digital marketing and cybersecurity specialists.
“In Brazil alone, over 70,000 new IT professionals are needed each year and only about 45,000 are trained annually,” Alvarez-Demalde said. “As a result of such a talent crunch, salaries for IT professionals in the region increased 20% to 30% last year. In this context, Digital House has a large opportunity ahead of them and is positioned strategically as the gatekeeper of new digital talent in Latin America, preparing workers for the jobs of the future.”
André Chaves, senior VP of Strategy at Mercado Libre, said the company saw in Digital House a track record of “understanding closely” what Mercado Libre and other tech companies need.
“They move as fast as we do and adapt quickly to what the job market needs,” he said. “A very important asset for us is their presence and understanding of Latin America, its risks and entrepreneurial environment. Global players have succeeded for many years in our region. But things are shifting gradually, and local knowledge of risks and opportunities can make a great difference.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Boost ROI with intent data and personalized multichannel marketing campaigns
Coronavirus is causing large and small businesses to drastically cut marketing budgets. In Forrester’s self-described “most optimistic scenario,” the analysts project a 28% drop in U.S. marketing spend by the end of 2021. Even Google is cutting its marketing budget in half. As marketers move forward, Forrester predicts marketing automation platforms will grow despite an overall decline in marketing technology investment.
Automation platforms help marketers scale their communications. However, scaling communications is not a substitute for intimacy, which all humans crave. Because of the pandemic, it is harder than ever to get attention, let alone make a connection. More mass email blasts from your marketing automation platform are not going to get you the connections with prospects you crave. So how should marketers proceed? Direct mail captures 100% of your audience’s attention. It provides a sensory experience for your prospects and customers, and that helps establish an emotional connection.
Winning marketers are strategically merging automation and digital data with the more intimate channel of direct mail. We call this tactile marketing automation (TMA).
TMA is the integration of direct mail or personalized swag with a marketing automation platform. With TMA, a marketer doesn’t have to think about creating direct mail campaigns outside of digital campaigns. Rather, direct mail experiences are already fully integrated into the pre-built customer journey.
TMA uses intent data to inform content, messaging and the timing of direct mail touchpoints that maximize relevancy and scalability. Multichannel campaigns including direct mail report an ROI 18 percentage points higher than those without direct mail. Plus, 84% of marketers state direct mail improves multichannel campaign performance.
Read on to see how you can merge digital communications and direct mail to deliver remarkable experiences that spark a connection.
Incorporate intent data
Personalization is a key ingredient of a remarkable experience. Many marketers automate processes by introducing marketing software and then call it personalization. But, oftentimes it’s just quicker batching and blasting. Brands can’t just change the first name on a piece of content and call it “personalized.” Real personalization is necessary and vital for real results. Our consumers expect more. The best way to introduce real personalization within a marketing mix is to use intent data and trigger-driven campaigns.
Powered by WPeMatico
Email creation startup Stensul raises $16M
Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding.
When the company raised its $7 million Series A two years ago, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin told me about how it spun out of his previous startup, FanBridge. And while there are many products focused on email delivery, he said Stensul is focused on the email creation process.
Dinkin made many similar points when we discussed the Series B last week. He said that for many teams, creating a marketing email can take weeks. With Stensul, that process can be reduced to just two hours, with marketers able to create the email on their own, without asking developers for help. Things like brand guidelines are already built in, and it’s easy to get feedback and approval from executives and other teams.
Dinkin also noted that while the big marketing clouds all include “some kind of email builder, it’s not their center of gravity.”
He added, “What we tell folks [is that] literally over half the company is engineers, and they are only working on email creation.”
Image Credits: Stensul
The team has recently grown to more than 100 employees, with new customers like Capital One, ASICS Digital, Greenhouse, Samsung, AppDynamics, Kroger and Clover Health. New features include an integration with work management platform Workfront.
Plus, with other marketing channels paused or diminished during the pandemic, Dinkin said that email has only become more important, with the old, time-intensive process becoming more and more of a burden.
“We need more emails — whether that’s more versions or more segments or more languages, the requests are through the roof,” he said. “The teams are the same size … and so that’s where especially the leaders of these organizations have looked inward a lot more. The ways that they have been doing it for years or decades just doesn’t work anymore and prevents them from being competitive in the marketplace.”
The new round was led by USVP, with participation from Capital One Ventures, Peak State Ventures, plus existing investors Javelin Venture Partners, Uncork Capital, First Round Capital and Lowercase Capital . Individual investors include Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest, Okta CMO Ryan Carlson, former Marketo/Adobe executive Aaron Bird, Avid Larizadeh Duggan, Gary Swart and Talend CMO Lauren Vaccarello.
Dinkin said the money will allow Stensul to expand its marketing, product, engineering and sales teams.
“We originally thought: Everybody who sends email should have an email creation platform,” he said. “And ‘everyone who sends email’ is synonymous with ‘every company in the world.’ We’ve just seen that accelerate in that last few years.”
Powered by WPeMatico
2 strategies for creating top-of-funnel marketing content
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
More posts by this contributor
Even when you’re excellent at making the sale, you still need people to know you exist in the first place.
Content is excellent at making the case for your product or service, but it also excels at providing value to potential customers in a more tangential way, introducing them to your brand and building awareness and authority.
Here’s how utilizing content marketing and digital PR can make huge strides in getting your brand name out there.
Ranking on-site content for awareness keywords
When on-site content you created ranks well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), that doesn’t just mean you get more traffic (although that’s certainly a major benefit).
You’re also getting your brand name in front of searchers because you’re appearing in the results. You’re building authority because Google appears to believe you have the best answer for their query. You’re giving the searcher and answer to their question and beginning to build trust.
So how do you know which keywords/topics to target and what kind of content to create? You perform keyword research, which basically means examining what keywords people are searching for, how many people search for them per month and how hard it’ll be to rank for them.
Google Ads Keyword Planner provides this information, but you can also use Chrome plugins like Keywords Everywhere and Keyword Surfer or free tools like Ubersuggest.
Image Credits: Ubersuggest (opens in a new window)
When your goal is to build awareness, it’s important that the keywords and topics you target have high volume. In other words, they’re searched a lot. Awareness objectives mean reaching as many people as possible so more people know that your brand exists and begin to understand what it’s about.
Powered by WPeMatico