JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

HubSpot is the marketing leading sales and marketing software platform for small businesses. While not the ideal fit in every single case, for the majority of business owners we work with it is the platform we'll recommend. 

Email marketing is often overlooked by many, especially by small to medium sized enterprises. However, what business owners do not realise, is that this method of marketing is an extremely cost effective solution that as a matter of fact, holds just as much power as the next online marketing technique does!

Regardless of what you may have heard or what your perception of it may be, email marketing is as important for businesses today as it ever has been. In fact, according to Hubspot, email marketing gives a Return on Investment of over 4,300%! There’s no wonder over 76% of marketers use email marketing as one of their main marketing methods. From a business’ point of view, email marketing presents a great opportunity as it allows them to effectively market to their ideal customers due to the fact that so many people have an email account and most check their emails regularly. They also allow businesses to personalise their message for each contact.

Inbound marketing is all about achieving the strongest, most trusted leads that your sales team can use to form relationships and achieve deals. One of the most useful features of an inbound marketing CRM platform (such as Hubspot) is the contacts area. This can be used to store the data of thousands of potential customers, from your website viewers to your partners and everyone in-between. This is where you turn your leads into customers, so having an area that your marketing and sales team can share will help you find and attract your perfect leads, determined by your buyer personas.

But when adding new contacts should you be manually inputting them or can you rely on website automation? Let's take a look at our options...

You've heard about it, you know plenty of marketers are infatuated with it, but at the end of the day what is marketing automation?

Any respectable digital marketing expert will tell you that the best performing small to medium-sized companies (both B2B and B2C) use marketing automation tools to boost their productivity, however, the majority of business owners are still dubious of marketing automation services for the following reasons:

Marketing automation is a tool that more businesses are seeing the potential in every day. Hubspot reported that businesses using marketing automation to nurture leads received a 451% increase in qualified leads so it's not hard to see why many businesses owners are taking advantage of this system. Marketing automation is always evolving and new software, systems and features are being developed every day. Because of this new automation trends appear all the time and some popular methods are replaced by improved tactics.

Let's talk about what marketing automation actually means...

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation technology and software helps to streamline repetitive marketing tasks to increase productivity and efficiency within both the sales and marketing sectors of your business. The aim is to ultimately attract new leads, generate sales and increase revenue in the easiest way possible.

Reverse IP software uses a network's unique IP address to create a basic profile of who your online visitors are. An IP address (otherwise referred to as an Internet Protocol) is a number used to identify each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network.

Email marketing is widely considered by many to have the best return on investment out of any marketing strategy. So much so in fact that “three-quarters of companies agree that email offers "excellent" to "good" ROI” (Econsultancy, 2016). If you're currently using email marketing as part of your marketing arsenal then you will more than likely have felt the benefits of it. However, there are still many businesses out there that struggle getting to grips with their email marketing.

Throughout the life of a website, there may be fluctuation in the conversion rates. If you aren't tracking them they may seem completely erratic. Why are my conversions suddenly up? Why are they suddenly down? However usually they aren't erratic at all and it's actually something you’re doing to cause the increase or decrease in conversions. This is why it's so important to gather information on where your leads and enquiries are coming from! When you get increases you need to know what worked so that you can replicate the experience and make the raised visits, the usual visits.