This is a guest post from Diane H. Wong; a web developer who specialises in marketing and enjoys sharing her knowledge with others. She has her own column at Do My Writing.

The primary goal of every business is revenue. It’s therefore reasonable to say that the goal of every website is more conversions, leads, sales, or whatever action you want your visitors to take.

To get more action from your visitors, you need to make frequent changes aimed at increasing the effectiveness of your website and all its elements. You may consider using a website builder because you can continuously change and improve the design and functionality of your site.

It’s normal to be wary of making changes so you don’t switch the wrong button and hurt your website more instead.

Good news is, there are proven ways to play safe and still grow. Conversion optimization has its safe playing too that is, those practices that have been tested and proven to work generally.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Our free conversion rate and website optimization process template
• Actionable ways to optimize your website for increased conversion rate
• Basic conversion rate optimization mistakes to avoid
• 2 bonus marketing strategies to increase your conversion rate
• Increase your conversion rate with Process Street

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This is a guest post from Stella Lincoln who works as a Business Executive at Academist Help. She is a passionate blogger and owns the blog Educator House. Lincoln has many years of experience in digital marketing and specializes in search engine optimization (SEO).

In this era of globalization and digitization, marketing takes many forms. We at Process Street recommend one marketing strategy: Make sure you strongly focus on email marketing, or more specifically, your email conversion rates.

Why?

Email marketing is a successful strategy. Done correctly it can bring in the highest Return On Investment (ROI) relative to other marketing channels. Email marketing offers a return of 30x your initial investment.

Wow.

But let me emphasize, such a high ROI is only possible if you get your email marketing right.

How do you get your email marketing strategy right?

One aspect is through email Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Through intuition, I am guessing you are ready to optimize your email conversion rates – after all, you came here. Well, reader, you can use this article as your top-tip list for all things CR and email optimization.

In this article, we give you our 12 top ranking tips to optimize your email conversion rates. You can click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that given section. Alternatively, scroll down and read all we have to say.

• Optimize your email conversion rates: CRO meaning
• Optimize your email conversion rates: Email optimization and why it is is important
• Optimize your email conversion rate with these conversion rate optimization best practices
• Use Process Street to optimize your email conversion rates

Let’s get started!
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It’s no secret that attracting, satisfying, and retaining customers is becoming increasingly challenging.

The sheer amount of choice and demand for fast, flawless service demands businesses to formulate and execute effective ways to deliver excellent customer experiences.

Without acknowledging the importance of the customer experience at every touchpoint, companies miss out on great opportunities to develop a strong brand identity; opportunities that cannot afford to be missed in a business environment where first impressions are pivotal.

A slew of recent research studies provides us with the data to support this perceived demand to enhance customer experiences.

McKinsey research found that 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated—and a large part of that has to do with showing the customer you (as the brand) care about them, and value their business.

It’s also been found that 58% of consumers are willing to spend more on companies that provide excellent customer service throughout the buying process.

To cap it off, the Digital Marketing Trends Report by Econsultancy and Adobe asked companies to indicate the single most exciting opportunity for their organization in the upcoming year – and, yes indeed, customer experience came out on top.

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The following is a guest post by Deepti Jain, an engineering student who has a knack for writing and is currently working at AeroLeads as a content writer.

Social Selling is a buzzword these days.

I doubt it surprises people anymore given how huge social media is.

I don’t think people realize just how big it is.

According to Statista, 3.02 Billion of the world population will be using social media by 2021.

I know it gets a bad reputation sometimes and folks involved in B2B businesses are often a bit skeptical of leveraging social selling.

What they don’t realize is that they are missing out on a lot of leads, ROI, revenue, yadda yadda yadda.

In fact, Neil Patel, the marketing guru, recently discussed in his blog how he generated $332,640 in 3 months from Instagram alone.

Did this change your stance on social selling?

Hah! I knew it would.

However, if you are still not sold on the idea of social selling, then also don’t fret.

Today, I have rounded up some solid reasons why social selling is important for every salesperson.

Let’s begin!

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This is a guest post from Kyle Anderson; a freelance tech journalist whose typical day is spent scouring the web for the latest developments in the world of business tools and software. He loves any type of software that automates his life! For his pastimes, he is an avid lover of travelling, poetry, and photography.

When it comes to prospecting and the wider sales process, there’s never a shortage of tools you can use to make your work easier and more efficient. One of the most versatile of them is Outlook, a Microsoft tool that is popularly known for email and business calendar management.

However, Outlook is not limited to just these two functions.

You can easily unlock its hidden power by integrating it with compatible add-ins and other extensions. In the end, you’ll be able to complete a broad range of business functions including market/customer research, communication with your clients, document sharing, accounting, and more.

In this Process Street post, we take a look at how you can run a successful outreach campaign for your sales cycle using Outlook and its supported add-ins.

We’ll cover:

• Lead qualification Outlook Add-ins
• Email template Outlook Add-ins
• Meeting scheduling Outlook Add-ins
• Contract signing Outlook Add-ins
• Accounting and invoicing Outlook Add-ins

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Being able to sell is a skill.

You know this if you’ve ever tried working in sales.

My first efforts working in a sales capacity were slow.

There were no management structures in place in that small startup to support me, train me, or guide me.

I was going it solo.

There was a lot to learn and, in a role which thrives on confidence, a lot to be anxious about.

Learning the basics of how to sell is important even if you feel you have the natural skills to do well in the area.

For me, learning the basics of the trade came from a little book. A little red book. Jeffery Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling, to be precise.

After recommending our audience Gitomer’s text in my best sales books roundup post, I managed to sit down with our best selling author and sales champion to explore the craft.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover:

• To learn how to sell, you have to learn to communicate well
• The Little Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
• How to make sure you get things done
• Build your personal brand and support it with social media
• How to use humor as an effective tool
• How to understand what’s required for sales leadership

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We all enjoy coming up with solutions. Unfortunately, if the solution needs to be internalized by a group of people to improve team execution, it can be a frustrating and time-consuming effort to get everyone on board.

Let’s say you have clearly identified that a process inefficiency is causing a bottleneck in sales productivity, and have built a solid process to address the issue. You’ve got the green light from senior management, they think it looks fantastic and can’t wait to see the impact it has.

Now, the real work begins – communicating the value of the process to your sales team and convincing them to implement it in their day-to-day work. Not as easy as it may sound.

Well, in this post I hope to relieve you of at least some of the stress that comes with sales process adoption by highlighting 9 tried and tested tips that will address 2 key obstacles you’ll face:

1. Convincing sales reps that the process works and helps them achieve their sales goals.
2. Providing the tools that enable reps to easily integrate the process into their day-to-day activities.

Successfully tick both those boxes, and you will be well on your way.

Let’s get started.

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Retaining valuable customers is a necessity

In one of her hit songs, Adele famously sings the words “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead”.

Minus the sentimental value, this also applies to the world of business. It is a simple reality that customers come and go and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

On the other hand, sometimes it lasts. Sometimes you can retain a customer for a long period of time and build a fruitful, trusting relationship that enables both of you to be more successful.

There has been some fascinating research done in recent years to highlight just how important it is to keep your customers happy.

Beyond the well-known Pareto principle that states 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its customers, Harvard Business School Professor, Sunil Gupta, has provided further evidence to show the importance of retaining customers that provide high levels of profitability.

Furthermore, Bain & Company have found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, and it is widely agreed upon in the SaaS world that the cost of acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-25% more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Needless to say, making a concerted effort to retain your customers is just as, if not more important than acquiring new ones.

Execute account management processes flawlessly

Retaining customers, particularly high-value customers, is nothing short of essential for the growth of SaaS and other subscription-based companies, and to do so requires excellent account management.

That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created this set of checklists; to help you flawlessly execute various processes from conducting a thorough analysis of your competitors to the daunting task of preventing a valuable customer from churning.

Ever found yourself struggling with the sales-to-service handoff process or upselling? We’ve got those covered, too.

In this post, I’m going to provide a brief outline of each checklist and summarize why it’s a good idea to integrate them into your account management processes.

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Sales is one of the core aspects of how a business functions.

Without sales, your brilliant product will just sit there, neglected and unused.

But no one is born as a brilliant salesperson, just as no one is born with an innate knowledge of how to run an effective outbound strategy.

We learn these things on the way. A lot of the time, we learn from the sales jobs we’ve had. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. Why not learn from the best salespeople, the highest performing companies, and the extreme examples?

In this Process Street article, we’re bringing expertise galore to your bookshelf or Kindle. We’ll go through our 7 key recommended reads, and follow that with 38 more sales books to satisfy your niche, industry, or needs.

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Building an initial sales approach is something loads of us have attempted to do at some point or other.

Sales ends up being one of the key ways companies grow and scale. We all know this.

But there’s a big difference between doing effective outreach for your startup on a high-touch basis where you’re still understanding customer needs and figuring out approaches, and turning this knowledge into a sales machine with a full sales team that can operate in a financially efficient way.

Understanding yourself in the market and growing to be the company you want to be require different slightly strategies.

This growth from tiny solopreneur kind of structures to managing teams with effective documented practices is what this article will be all about!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to take a look into some expert insights from Close.io‘s recent webinar with their CEO Steli Efti, Process Street’s CEO Vinay Patankar, PandaDoc‘s Director of Inside Sales Mike Paladino, and Groove‘s VP of Sales Mike Sutherland.

We’re going to pull out the key questions to help scale your sales in a way that works:

• What do you want to scale?
• Is now a good time to scale?
• How do you build a process for scaling?
• How do you get a sales teams to follow the process?
• When and how do I add people to a sales team?

And finally, we’ll give you 10 free process templates for different areas of sales for you to start using in your business today.

You can watch the whole webinar here: How to build a scalable sales process (Q&A webinar)

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