Best Email Marketing Services

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What if I told you there was a single marketing channel through which companies are finding a 3,800% ROI? 

That’s earning $38 for every dollar spent.

This magic marketing channel is called email. Yes, just good old email. And that insane average return on investment is one of many email marketing statistics that have held true for years now. 

The biggest surprise to me is how many companies aren’t taking advantage of email marketing.

I hear it’s too much work to design newsletters, manage a growing number of contacts, personalize messages, and keep the campaign moving forward.

There’s this perception that email is a time-sink, but it doesn’t align with the statistics. 

If it were really too labor intensive to run an efficient email marketing campaign, the average ROI wouldn’t even be 1/1000 of what it is, year after year.

The key is finding the right email marketing service. Don’t wait to start building better campaigns in less time.

The Top 5 Options For Email Marketing Services

  1. Constant Contact – Best for ecommerce
  2. Zoho Campaigns – Best for simple campaigns
  3. Sendinblue – Best ease-of-use
  4. Marketo Engage – Best for segmentation and personalization
  5. Pardot – Best for B2B marketing

How to Choose The Best Email Marketing Service For You

Email marketing services are packed features to help you save time at every step of a campaign.

Every step.

My favorite products get you minutes back on every task. Professional templates, drag-and-drop email editors, list management tools—they make all the hard parts easy.

On top of that, many of the most time-consuming campaign processes can be automated with an email marketing service.

The minutes you save turn into hours quickly, especially if you’re churning campaigns on a large scale.

More effective campaigns. Less effort. That’s the goal.

Let’s walk through the core features available with email marketing services so that you understand which product is going to deliver you the best results for you.

Ease-of-use

Unless your marketing teams double as developers, it’s essential to find a tool that anyone on your team can use.

As you browse, pay attention to the templates and pre-set workflows offered by each email marketing service. Are you excited to use these or do you intend to create your own custom templates? Some email marketing services lose their reputed ease-of-use once you step outside their pre-defined pathways.

It’s a definite plus if your solution comes with visual design tools to build emails and workflows. A simple-to-learn editor can be used right away by the people who need it. They don’t need training, and aren’t stuck waiting on someone who’s comfortable with the editor.

The best email marketing services also provide support, documentation, and walkthroughs to educate users and ensure that their product is truly self-service. 

If reviews indicate that customer support is sluggish, or that answers are hard to find, that’s a red flag.

Integration and Implementation

An important question to ask: How easily is your email marketing service going to mesh with your existing stack? 

Solutions that integrate with products you use are going to speed deployment and encounter fewer issues moving forward. This is especially true of your existing CRM and any other customer data sources.

Some products, like Sendinblue, come with their own CRM as part of the package, which can be nice for companies that aren’t looking to purchase multiple products in service of their email campaign.

Email Deliverability

The emails you send need to reach your recipient’s inbox. End of story. 

Without a high deliverability rate—I would be worried about anything below 95%—your email campaigns are dead in the water.

All good email marketing services ensure high deliverability in two ways. 

On the backend, they authenticate emails with DKIM, SPF, and SenderID, while also working with internet service providers to make sure that customer IP addresses aren’t blocked. 

Plus, quality platforms will provide ready-made email templates that are both visually appealing and compliant with privacy and anti-spam laws.

On the user side, email marketing services help you craft compelling subject lines and content that encourages customers to actually open your message. They also provide tools for managing subscribers so you can keep a clean list and avoid the spam folder.

Email Automation and Customer Journeys

One of the biggest defining (or limiting) features of an email marketing service is the level of sophistication your workflows can manage.

Entry-level tools can help you automate welcome series of emails for new subscribers, and other similarly straight-forward processes. 

If you want to start adding conditional or logical triggers that branch the customer journey into more personalized paths, you are going to need a more substantial tool.

You are also going to need to know a lot about your audience. Products that have really good list segmentation features will pick up tons of information on your customers, which in turn makes your automation more accurately targeted.

Segmentation really drives your ability to automate personalized emails, for example. You can set workflow triggers that respond to customer engagement, shopping habits, and other tendencies to ensure that customers are only receiving messages they’re likely to care about.

Subscriber Management

Quality email marketing services come with a lot of tools to manage the subscribers on their list. They will help you:

  • Import lists: Seamlessly integrate contact lists from CRMs and other databases.
  • Keep a clean list: Identify and remote inactive subscribers and spam traps that reduce deliverability
  • Generate leads: Create new contacts with pop-ups, landing pages, and other multi-channel tools that start an ongoing conversation.
  • Segment your list: Automatically group subscribers based on many criteria, including everything from what time zone they live in to how they signed up, and everything in between.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Email marketing strategies must be agile. 

Every service reviewed in this article comes with the ability to track traditional KPIs like:

  • Bounce rate
  • Click through rate
  • Conversion rate
  • Deliverability
  • Forward/share rate
  • List growth rate
  • Open rates
  • Unsubscribe rate

By keeping tabs on these metrics, companies can tweak their campaigns accordingly. 

Many email marketing services offer A/B testing, which allows you to test different versions of emails or subject lines to see what performs better. 

Look for that, because it’s super helpful for adjusting campaigns in the right direction over time.

More advanced email marketing services will help you tie traditional metrics to revenue, letting you see ROI per email sent and other business-critical metrics.They’ll also let you see how content is performing with features like click heatmaps, which show where your customers are spending the most time. 

You’ll probably have to spend more for those features, but they can provide crucial information that pays for itself.

Marketing automation software, like Pardot, provides multi-touch attribution models that let you visualize each touchpoint in the entire customer lifecycle. Marketing attribution drives business growth and informs your future campaigns by spotlighting the key elements of each customer relationship.

The Different Types of Email Marketing Services

Most products in this category want to provide email marketing services for companies of all sizes, so they offer a range of plans from a budget-friendly package to enterprise-grade service tiers.

Email Autoresponders

Exemplary products: Zoho Campaigns, Sendinblue (Free & Lite)

On the lightweight side of the spectrum, you’ll find services that augment your email marketing campaigns with easy-to-use tools for automation, email editing, and subscriber management. 

You’ll see these products billed as email autoresponders or email automation.

They don’t change what you do so much as they help you do it better, faster, and at scale.

Because they are so simple, the best email autoresponders are incredibly intuitive, inexpensive, and can start delivering results almost immediately.

Email Marketing Platforms

Exemplary products: Constant Contact, Sendinblue (Premium & Enterprise)

Email marketing platforms are a one-stop shop meant to help you build, track, manage, and optimize campaigns.

They are going to capture, store, and segment your customer data much better than a standalone email autoresponder. And with the richer picture of your audience, you can build much more complex email workflows.

You can get really granular when it comes to personalized customer journeys, for example. In Constant Contact, you can automate emails with shoppable product recommendations based on a person’s buying habits.

Doesn’t that sound great? 

What’s really nice is that these products are very easy to use and deploy. Campaign performance tracking features are built right in and provide a ton of visibility and control instantly. Some will integrate with tools like Google Analytics to get actionable data.

You can see what’s working, what’s not, and make changes on the fly.

Marketing Automation Software

Exemplary products: Salesforce Pardot, Marketo Engage

Marketing automation software includes email marketing services as part of a broader suite that accounts for every channel of communication. 

Organizations can expand their reach across email, SMS, social, SEO, websites, webinars, and paid media. Information from across all these channels is centralized in intuitive dashboards that drive real-time, evidence-based campaign decisions.

With marketing automation software, you can build out multi-branch email campaigns and customer journeys, tracking progress across every stage.

These products tend to be quite a bit more expensive, and understandably so. If you are looking to run simple to moderately complex email campaigns, you’re fine with an email marketing platform.

On the other hand, if you start to run into problems at scale or email workflows can’t handle your needs, it may be time to consolidate your processes with a marketing automation solution.

#1 – Constant Contact — Best for Ecommerce

Constant Contact offers some of the best email marketing services alongside top-notch solutions for ecommerce, event hosting, website building, and multi-channel marketing.

They average a 97% deliverability rate. This is only possible because the mature platform blends powerful behind-the-scenes functionality—like blocklists, proactive monitoring, and multiple forms of authentication—with an intuitive UI that helps teams craft effective messages that don’t bounce.

You can get Constant Contact up and running very quickly, and it will eliminate much of the legwork associated with email marketing. 

Automate product recommendations, for example, by sending shoppable emails based on the items a customer has in their cart, the weather, or tendencies of like-minded shoppers.

Trying to accomplish this task without an email marketing service would be extremely time-consuming. With Constant Contact, the process can be automated by just about anyone.

Some of the other reasons millions of people use constant contact include:

  • Unlimited email sends
  • Custom and branded templates
  • Campaign performance tracking
  • Subject line A/B testing
  • Drag-and-drop email editor
  • Rich ecommerce capabilities
  • Subscriber management, segmentation
  • RSVP, survey, and poll

Constant Contact helps with lead generation, too, via landing pages, customizable pop-up forms, and free hosting for a mobile-responsive website. This includes a blog, where you can leverage your email content as posts for SEO.

There are three pricing tiers for Constant Contact email marketing services and the amount you pay is based on the number of contacts. The plans are:

  • Email: Starting at $20/month
  • Email Plus: Starting at $45/month
  • Pro: Starting at $195/month

Constant Contact Email and Email Plus are two of the most popular email marketing services available today.

Constant Contact Pro uses AI-driven marketing automation to provide personalized product recommendations, smart subject lines, behavioral segmentation capabilities, and more advanced workflows.

I would consider a Pro subscription if you are thinking about marketing automation, but aren’t ready to pull the trigger on a heavyweight product like Pardot or Marketo.

#2 – Zoho Campaigns — Best for Simple Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is a lightweight, cost-effective email marketing service that comes with all the must-have features.

In Zoho Campaigns, everything has been trimmed (but not watered down), so you can still accomplish 80-90% of what you can do with an email marketing service that costs three to four times as much. 

The ease-of-use is on par with agile project management software like Trello. Not only can non-technical users navigate Zoho Campaigns, they can master their domain.

Intuitively control the following features:

  • Drag-and-drop email editor and template builder
  • Email autoresponders
  • Email automation
  • Merge tags
  • Subscriber management
  • A/B testing
  • Team collaboration
  • Real-time analytics

Keep in mind that Zoho Campaigns also has integrations with popular CRM, ecommerce, and contact management products. 

Tying these data sources in can help you better target and personalize your email campaigns, yet Zoho Campaigns will remain fairly easy to use. 

Integrating Google Analytics, for example, can enrich the amount of customer data you pick up on each interaction, providing data visualizations to help you make sense of relationships over time.

Pricing is straightforward for Zoho Campaigns:

  • Email-based Plan: starting at $2/month
  • Subscriber-based Plan: starting at $4/month
  • Pay-as-you-go Plan: starting at $6/month

The Subscriber-based Plan is my favorite because it includes email automation, which doesn’t come with the Email-based or Pay-as-you-go Plans. At $263/month for 100k contacts with the Subscriber-based Plan, the automation will pay for itself many times over.

You can also try the Zoho Campaigns free forever version. It’s limited to 2,000 subscribers, but you get a lot of the marketing and content management features, as well as the chance to see if you like the interface. 

#3 – Sendinblue — Best Ease-of-Use

Sendinblue is a unified CRM, chat, Facebook, SMS, and email marketing platform. It’s loaded with features that are super easy to learn.

In other words, lots of tools with very little training.

Unlike other options on this list, every Sendinblue subscription (including Free and Lite) comes with a sales CRM, marketing automation, real-time reporting, advanced segmentation features, and more.

How’s that for out-of-the-box function? But wait. There’s more.

With popups, landing pages, and chatbots, you can build out your contact list with minimal effort, turning website visitors and Facebook passerbys your next lead.

And once people are on your list, Sendinblue gives you a ton of great tools to nurture leads, build out customer journeys, and communicate effectively every step of the way. The key features include:

  • Unlimited contacts with any plan
  • Mobile-friendly visual email editor
  • Retargeting ads
  • Campaign performance tracking
  • A/B Testing
  • Customizable signup forms
  • Transactional emails
  • Email API, SMTP relay, and other core API features
  • Advanced email automation

Sendinblue offers a free forever version, and paid plans at several pricing tiers:

  • Lite: Starting at $25/month
  • Premium: Starting at $65/month
  • Enterprise: Contact sales

The amount you pay is based on your tier and the number of emails you send each month. You can store as many contacts as you want without affecting the price, which is not true with most other platforms.

Notably, Sendinblue’s pay-as-you-go plan includes the same great features as whatever tier you choose, except the phone support. This is also something you won’t find in other options, like Zoho Campaigns.

There is no prior knowledge or technical skill necessary to start using Sendinblue, and their free forever plan is one of the best available. 

#4 – Marketo Engage — Best for Segmentation and Personalization

Marketo Engage, from Adobe, is a full-service marketing automation solution ready to support your strategy across any channel. 

Centralize and analyze customer data in an intuitive environment that allows for email campaigns with fine-grained segmentation and dynamic personalization. 

You can customize intricate workflows with behavioral triggers that wouldn’t be possible on other platforms because they can’t capture as much information as Marketo does. 

Every feature is full-bodied. A/B/n testing, for example, lets you pilot multiple versions of the same site or email rather than just binary A/B testing, which is where many other products stop.

There’s also Adobe Sensei, which uses AI and machine learning to personalize content. Sensei analyzes the performance of all your assets, learns which content works best for whom, and updates emails accordingly.

Other great features that come with using Marketo for email marketing include:

  • Drag-and-drop workflow builder
  • Lead and account scoring
  • Deep engagement and performance analytics
  • Attribution and ROI dashboard
  • Customer lifecycle management
  • One-click campaign cloning
  • Champion/Challenger testing
  • A/B/n testing

You’ll have to contact Marketo to get a price. It’s going to have a higher total cost of ownership than a dedicated email marketing service, but if you want superior segmentation and personalization , this can get a lot more done.

#5 – Pardot — Best For B2B Marketing Automation

Pardot is the marketing automation platform from Salesforce that’s built specifically for B2B marketing.

Do you need to hear more, or are you already sold? It’s as good and as deep as you think it is.

Pardot has 2,000+ integrations, a rich feature set, and a surprisingly intuitive UI. To be honest, the platform is a few steps ahead of its competitors in the dedicated email marketing space. 

It’s going to take some time and effort to build out the backend, but once everything is set up, Pardot gives you unrivaled visibility into your campaigns.

If you feel like the sophistication of workflows is lacking with your current setup or your analytics and data visualization tools aren’t giving you the insight into campaigns that you need, Pardot is the ticket. 

Some of the advanced email marketing features include:

  • B2B Marketing Analytics
  • Engagement history dashboards
  • Merge fields
  • Visual lead nurturing designer
  • Social profiling
  • ROI reporting
  • Multi-touch attribution models
  • Developer sandbox

Pardot is not a cheap option, but it is money well spent in service of a high-growth campaign. 

There are four pricing tiers:

  • Growth: starting at $1,250/month
  • Plus: starting at $2,500/month
  • Advanced: starting at $4,000/month
  • Premium: starting at $15,000/month

Other marketing automation solutions, like Marketo, are going to be in this neighborhood price-wise. There are certainly email marketing platforms you can get for a fraction of the cost, but they’re not going to give you anywhere close to the oversight and customization Pardot affords.

Summary

If you are just starting out, I would try out one of the best email autoresponders to get a feel for which email marketing features are going to be most important to you. 

Zoho Campaigns is another really great starting point. These tools are easy to use and many have free forever options.

For companies that need more visibility into their campaigns but don’t want to struggle with a new platform, Sendinblue will be great. It’s also not prohibitively expensive, even at the premium tier.

Constant Contact is another great option in the SMB price range, especially for ecommerce. It comes with some of the functionality you find with marketing automation software, but there’s no loss to it’s ease of use.

If you need the marketing automation and business intelligence functionality of Pardot or Marketo, budget it in. After a certain point, dedicated email marketing services aren’t going to handle the automated journeys you have in mind.

If Pardot and Marketo give you sticker shock, but you still want true marketing automation, check out Freshmarketer, or one of the other best marketing automation software solutions.

The post Best Email Marketing Services appeared first on Neil Patel.

Amazon Marketing Consulting

Amazon’s so big that it has become an entire marketing channel.

You could build your entire business on just Amazon.

Many entrepreneurs do. It’s crazy how many 7-figure businesses are running on Amazon right now.

The downside?

Lots of folks know about the Amazon opportunity.

There are 353 million other products on Amazon already.

Granted, you don’t have to compete for all of them. But that’s still an insane number of products.

No matter how obscure your niche, you’ll have top-tier competition.

How do you stand out in such a highly-competitive marketplace?

Find an Amazon marketing consultant.

3 Ways an Amazon Marketing Consultant Can Help Grow Your Business

Most Amazon consultants focus on one goal: getting you more customers.

That is, after all, why most businesses get on Amazon.

They want access to Amazon’s customers.

Here are the main ways that a consultant can help.

1. Store Setup and Product Listings

Some sellers on Amazon set themselves up for failure from day one. 

And they do this with poor store setup and product listings. 

If you, a seller on Amazon, get the foundational areas like excellent store setup and product listings wrong, other efforts to grow your store will fall flat. 

No doubt, signing up for an Amazon Seller account takes only a few minutes.

But it takes a lot of work to get Amazon’s algorithms to know what category you should be in and when to show your products higher than others. 

An Amazon marketing consultant will properly set up your store and build your product listings to get you more customers. Not only will your products get more views, the product descriptions will also help you convert more of those prospects into customers.

The best Amazon consultants will help you: 

  • Choose the right seller account type for your store. 
  • Make your product descriptions as enticing as possible. 
  • Ensure that Amazon knows exactly which categories and terms you should be in.
  • Get the back-end set up properly so it’s as easy to manage as possible. 

They’ll also help you avoid these mistakes: 

  • Don’t accidentally get featured in the wrong categories which could hurt your store. 
  • Make sure all products comply with every Amazon guideline. 
  • Your listings avoid common mistakes that annoy customers, which could increase the number of negative reviews if you don’t catch them early. 

Get the foundation of your store done right. Then everything else gets a lot easier. 

2. Product SEO in Amazon

It’s one thing to have your store properly set up and your products accurately listed. 

But it’s another ball game to have them actually appear on Amazon. 

According to a study by Feedvisor, about 74% of ecommerce shoppers go to Amazon first for any purchase they want to make. 

Do you know what that means?

Amazon has become a search engine for products. Amazon SEO is now a real thing. And it’s just as important as Google SEO. For ecommerce businesses that are on Amazon, it’s probably MORE important. 

Amazon even developed its own SEO algorithm called A9

You could try to learn all the ranking optimization tricks on your own.

Or you can partner with an Amazon marketing consultant to help you save time, money, and make the most of your scarce resources. 

They’ll help you: 

  • Find the best categories and keywords to focus on.
  • Optimize your products for rankings.
  • Get the reviews you need to compete.
  • Break down your competition so you can learn what’s working today. 

3. Amazon PPC Management

Amazon turned on the firehose of PPC.

Not only is it making them a ton of money. It can also make you a ton of money.

For the first time, you can pay a small fee to get in front of the most valuable customers in your entire market: customers ready to make a purchase right now.

With the right product, you can easily take $1 and turn it into $2 with Amazon paid ads.

However, paid media on Amazon is also complicated.

Like any PPC platform, it requires a ton of specific know-how and tons of work to keep it optimized.

You could try to manage all this on your own.

Or you could get an Amazon consultant to do it for you.

PPC campaigns are a great type of marketing task to outsource. The work is repetitive and usually the same workflow across businesses. Consultants can easily take this off your plate and give you a nice ROI at the same time.

Even if you could do this yourself, I recommend finding a consultant to help. Your time is better used elsewhere.

Most consultants get really good at bid management and ad optimization. Use them for these areas.   

How to Get Started With An Amazon Marketing Consultant

First, what should you have before engaging an Amazon marketing consultant? 

  • An Amazon store or a store that’s about to go live. 
  • Products you want to sell and sourcing or manufacturing are sorted out. 
  • Key competitors and search terms for your market.
  • Budget set aside. 

An Amazon consultant can help with setting up your store and getting you customers. You’ll need to sort out everything outside of Amazon.

Basically, they’ll help you develop and implement marketing strategies to drive sales and revenue. 

When you visit the website of a top Amazon marketing company, you’ll usually find a contact form to schedule an initial call.

Even if you’re not sure if you need help yet, I recommend getting a call done. You’ll have a much better idea with how consultants can help you once you’ve done a few calls.

You can also ask them loads of questions like:

  • What budget would you recommend?
  • What are the key trends that you see in your most successful clients?
  • What should I do ahead of time to set this project up for success?
  • What would make us a bad fit to work together?

Yes, the consultant will treat the call like a sales call. It’s their chance to close you on a proposal. But it’s also a chance for you to learn a lot more about the space from a real expert. And the best consultants will happily teach you as much as they can. That’s how they prove their expertise.

After you’ve done a few of these calls, move forward with the one that you think is the best fit. Since this project should generate real revenue for your business, I’d go with the one that has the best chance of succeeding, even if they’re a bit more expensive than others. The good consultants will easily pay for themselves.

Measuring the ROI of Amazon Marketing Consulting Services

The ultimate measure for any marketing service is how much demand and sales it drives. For Amazon consulting, this same rule applies. 

Specifically, you should track: 

  • Views for your store and products
  • The number of new products sold
  • Conversion rate of impressions to sales
  • Total revenue
  • Average order value

I recommend that you track your totals, not just revenue and purchases from specific campaigns.

Marketing channels and campaigns often bleed into each other. For example, an increase in Amazon PPC budget will often lead to an increase in your organic Amazon sales. Trying to get perfect attribution is super difficult.

So get a good baseline before the consultant starts. Then compare the overall performance of your store afterwards.

Let’s go deeper on each metric.

Conversion Rate

This is a measure of how many impressions you’re getting for your store and products compared to how many of those impressions led to sales. 

For any consultant working on your product listings, it’s probably the most important metric to watch.

When optimizing products, you should see it go up.

And when working on product rankings, you want to see your conversion rate stay stable. If it drops while your impressions go up, it’s a sign that you’re getting less-qualified traffic. It’s possible that the extra traffic is still worth it, you’ll need to dig in. 

Product impressions

Any Amazon consultant should be able to get your products more impressions.

It’s always nice to get a conversion win right away but the real money is getting your products in front of more people. 

This is what separates great Amazon consultants from the ones that are just average. Great consultants will have a plan to double, triple, and quadruple your impressions over time. They’ll also be able to execute on that plan.

This can take a lot of time and money.

But within the first few months, you should be able to see at least some signals that things are going in the right direction.

Total revenue

At the end of the day, marketing is about increasing revenue.

The ROI needs to be there.

After a few months, check your total monthly revenue and compare it to your baseline before you started working with the consultant.

Is it moving in the right direction? Have you generated enough profit to pay for the consultant fees?

You might not be generating enough extra revenue yet but there should be a path to a positive ROI.

The great consultants will have set expectations with you at the beginning. Things should be playing out like they planned. 

4 Point Checklist For Finding the Right Amazon Marketing Consultant

Below are six things to check when finding the right Amazon marketing consultant to help drive growth for your store. 

1. Thought Leadership on Amazon Marketing

Since most of what an Amazon marketing consultant would do is help you to drive sales for your store, it’s essential you find one with practical knowledge on how to do it.

Every marketer knows the power of thought leadership.

For the best Amazon consultants, I’d expect to see some of their content already published.

It’s a great way to get a feel for how they build Amazon stores, their favorite tactics, and how they’d fit with your own company. 

For example, I have a guide, detailing persuasion tactics to upsell products on Amazon and a full course on how to drive more sales on Amazon

2. Real Amazon Marketing Expertise

Many marketing consultants who didn’t offer services specific to Amazon stores have jumped on the bandwagon, seeing how much the marketplace is growing. 

The result?

They apply the same generic marketing practices, thinking it will automatically work on Amazon. 

If you don’t want to fall for this and waste your money, ensure that the consultant has true expertise with Amazon marketing. They should plenty of:

  • Deep answers to all of your tactical Amazon marketing questions 
  • Case studies with Amazon marketing
  • Clients and testimonials from Amazon marketing projects

3. Expertise on How Amazon Impacts Other Channels

If you have an ecommerce business that focuses 100% on Amazon, feel free to ignore this criteria.

But most businesses go after multiple channels.

Especially ecommerce businesses. They usually have Amazon product listings and their own ecommerce story.

Great consultants will get your different channels to help each other.

That’s right, you can can get each channel to make your other marketing channels stronger.

Here’s a few examples:

  • Using discounts and promos to get Amazon customers to sign up for subscription deliveries on your website.
  • Getting your biggest fans to help with Amazon reviews.
  • Tapping into your audiences to kick-start new products on Amazon.

With a little creativity, you can hit goals a lot faster by using assets you already have.

The best consultants look for these opportunities and take advantage of them.

4. A Proven Process for Execution

The really great consultants have a formula for rolling out their Amazon marketing campaigns. It’s how they deliver results over and over again, for every client.

Less experienced consultants may depend on the brilliance and wit of a single person.

That can work great as long as that person focuses on your marketing. But what happens when they move to another client?

Campaign performance usually suffers.

Look for a consultant that has a team behind them that can reliably execute on your project month in and month out.

The odds of accomplishing your goals goes way up.

During your initial discovery calls, dig into their process, how they manage deliverables, and train new team members. You should be shocked on how thorough it all is.

Start With an Amazon SEO Consultant

Don’t know where to focus?

Get help with your  Amazon SEO first. One project could get you more impressions, more sales, and more revenue on an ongoing basis.

The ROI of that single project can be massive.

So if you’re not sure what you really want, start there.

The post Amazon Marketing Consulting appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Create PPC Campaigns for Real Estate Marketing

Even if you have a smaller real estate business, you don’t have to rely on third-party databases to get traffic to your listings through real estate marketing.

With pay per click (PPC) advertising, you can bring people directly to your real estate website, where you own the medium and are in control of how you present yourself. This means rather than your listing appearing—and perhaps being lost—among a sea of competitors, you can showcase your entire portfolio without viewers being distracted by others’ listings.

PPC campaigns aren’t usually difficult to set up. With a few tweaks, you may reach your target audience more efficiently and bring motivated buyers to your website.

PPC Real Estate Marketing Trends

With six million homes sold in the U.S. in one year, it’s no wonder competition between real estate agents is tough.

As you would expect in such a competitive market, real estate marketing plays a huge role, and the tactics businesses use are always developing.

Today, we see many realtors using trends such as virtual staging, drone photography, inbound marketing, and automation of lead verification. New trends come and go, the need for a good website never changes—and neither does the need to bring traffic to your site.

This is where pay per click (PPC) comes in.

One of the difficulties with bringing traffic to your site is competition from huge online real estate databases like Zillow (236 million monthly users) and Realtor.com. Let’s take a look at a search query for “buy homes in Naperville IL.”

Real Estate Marketing Google search example

As you can see, those large sites are dominating the search engine results pages (SERPS).

However, ranking organically isn’t the only way to get to the top of the SERPs, and PPC may grant you a route to the top of the listings. Through a successful PPC campaign, your website could feature at the top of the page for your chosen keywords, potentially bringing in a large volume of traffic.  

You pay a small fee for each click, but if you’re utilizing the latest real estate marketing trends well, then you could see a solid ROI. PPC allows you to bring traffic to a medium you control, which puts you in control of your marketing.

Selecting Keyword Phrases for Your Real Estate Marketing PPC

PPC could allow your website to appear at the top of the SERPs for virtually any keyword. Your real estate marketing isn’t going to benefit from featuring an irrelevant search term, though. This means you need to find the keywords that work for you and bring in people who convert into leads.

To do this, start by understanding your target audience.

  • What does their customer profile look like?
  • What information are your potential customers looking for?
  • How do they search for that information?

Think about your audience and write out a list of all the ways they might search for your business.

For PPC to work for you, you also need to ensure your landing pages reflect the keywords you’re advertising for. When someone clicks on your ad, the page they land on needs to directly address why they clicked in the first place. Take a look at your current pages and list all the keywords reflecting the content you have on your site.

Once you’ve built up a list of keywords, it’s time to narrow it down so the keywords you bid on are relevant to both your audience and the pages they land on.

Part of succeeding at this is understanding where someone is in the buying cycle. For example, someone searching the keyword “best Chicago suburbs” might be at the beginning of the cycle, where the buyer intent is much lower than later on. Later in the cycle, they may search for “buy houses Naperville IL,” meaning they could quickly become a lead. This distinction should help you understand each keyword’s value and focus your real estate marketing PPC on boosting ROI.

After you’ve narrowed down your list, go to Ubersuggest to find out the cost per click and level of competition for each keyword.

Ubersuggest for real estate marketing

Optimize Your Site for PPC Campaigns that Use Local Keyword Phrases

With all our examples so far, we’ve used what’s known as a “location modifier.” For instance, in “buy houses Naperville IL,” the terms “Naperville” and “IL” allow us to target a specific area. Nothing is stopping you from advertising for “buy houses,” and you’d probably get plenty of traffic—but there’s no point if you’re selling houses in Naperville and the user wants to buy one in Ft. Lauderdale.

Local keyword phrases are vital to real estate agents because they’re selling a product with a fixed location. As location is one of the driving forces behind real estate purchases, many people use these modifiers in their searches.

When you use local keyword phrases, your landing pages must match the search intent. If your advertisement says “houses for sale in Naperville,” then it has to deliver on its promise. Many people will click back to Google if it’s showing houses for rent or homes outside of Naperville.

Setting Max CPC Budgets for Your PPC Campaign

When you set up your real estate marketing campaign, you’re going to be asked to set a budget and decide the maximum you’re willing to pay per click for a specific keyword (max CPC). Remember, you’re not tied into anything—it’s something you can adjust as you go and optimize to get the best results.

To get an idea of your budget, set out the goals you want to achieve with your PPC campaign. For a simplified example, to make $5,000 a month from your advertising and the average value of your houses is $100,000 with a 1% commission, you need to sell five houses a month through your PPC.

The average cost per click for keywords related to real estate is $2.37 with a conversion rate of 2.47%—so, to sell your five houses, you might need just over 200 clicks at the cost of $494. While your numbers might vary from the industry average, you can always adjust your budget based on your average conversion rate and cost per click.

It’s also worth remembering that it’s not all about the price you pay per click, as your advertisement’s quality also plays a part. Google wants to send people to high-quality results, and if your ad achieves this, it’s more likely to be favored by the search engine’s algorithm.

Another way to maximize your budget is by boosting your click-through rate (CTR.) The average CTR for real estate ads is about 3.71%— but if you’re writing excellent ad copy, then you may find even better results. But remember, these are just industry averages, and your experience may vary. An ad budget of hundreds (or even thousands) doesn’t guarantee a sale, but PPC is worth a try for most markets.

Deciding Which Ad Platform is Right for Your Real Estate Marketing

When we think of search engines, our minds are naturally drawn to Google because it’s the biggest, with 3.5 billion searches per day. However, there are lots of different search engines and lots of other ad platforms.

Which ad platform you use should be decided by your business goals and your target audience. For example, if you’re selling sleek condos to millennials, your advertising will look very different than if you’re targeting seniors looking for a second home.

This differentiator is where you could help your real estate marketing campaigns by selecting the right platform.

Social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are vital sources for real estate marketing, and they offer great PPC options. 99% of Millenials and 90% of Baby Boomers begin their real estate searches online, and with billions of people on social media, this could be a perfect way to reach them.

The great thing about PPC on social media is that they are highly visual media. Whereas with Google Ads you might be limited to text, social media allows you to incorporate video, images, and other effects. These tools can help your advertising stand out from the crowd, but you must choose the platform and message that resonates with your audience.

57% of Americans aged 25-30 are on Instagram, compared to 23% of 50- to 64-year-olds. However, the numbers look very different on Facebook, as 68% of 50- to 64-year-olds have accounts. This data shows people search for information differently, and your advertising needs to reflect this. You might find Google is the best way to reach your audience, or you may discover an alternative such as Instagram that offers you the most useful real estate marketing campaign.

Here you can see just how different a promoted post on Instagram could look from the traditional ads you see on Google. These various formats could give you the ability to appeal to particular audience demographics and potentially maximize the effectiveness of your real estate marketing.

Real Estate Marketing which ad platform to use
Real estate marketing SERP

Whichever platform you use, you’ve got to make sure your message suits the medium, and you’re giving people the experience they’re looking for. Various advertising platforms allow you to diversify your marketing, but you’ve got to focus on the techniques that work best for each campaign.

Deciding Which Real Estate Marketing Ad Format is Best

When you come to set up your ads, you’ll find you have lots of format options. The options vary depending on which platform you’re using, but for Google, you’ll have the following choices:

  • Search ads: These are the “traditional” ads at the top of a SERP. These are particularly useful for real estate marketing because they allow you to reach a targeted audience at the precise moment they are looking for your product.
  • Shopping ads: Shopping ads are product-focused advertisements that also allow you to feature at the top of a SERP. However, shopping listings are more commonly used for very specific searches such as “buy Barbie dolls,” where many retailers sell the same products.
  • Display ads: Display ads allow your listing to feature on other people’s websites. While this can be a cost-effective way to reach a broad audience, it’s more difficult to judge where these people are in the buyer cycle because they haven’t made a specific search.
  • Video ads: Video ads play between videos on YouTube and are a great way to incorporate a more interactive aspect to your advertising. Many people use YouTube as a search engine, so it’s another good way to reach motivated buyers.
  • Gmail ads: These advertisements appear at the top of someone’s Gmail inbox and allow you to reach a targeted audience. The difficulty with Gmail ads for real estate marketing is determining buyer-intent. You might be targeting someone because they are interested in real estate, but this does not guarantee they’re looking to buy a house.

The key to these different ad types is finding the ones that best suit your business goals. For many real estate businesses, this is likely to be search ads.

This is because this method may best allow you to understand the searcher’s intent. Someone has put a specific query into Google—“find houses in Naperville”— so you more clearly know what they’re looking for and can judge where they are in the buying cycle.

With options like display ads, you can reach a targeted audience—for example, people looking at a house improvement website—but you don’t have control over searcher intent. As you’re selling something very specific that focuses on location, search ads are a good place to start.

Conclusion 

Pay per click advertising is an essential tool for your real estate marketing. If you’re to take back clicks from online real estate databases like Zillow, then you’ve got to find alternative ways of getting traffic to your website.

PPC is an excellent way to do this, and it could bring large numbers of targeted, highly engaged visitors with a strong buyer intent to your website. From there, you’re in control of the medium and not reliant on a third party who controls your interactions with customers.

If you’re investing in real estate marketing trends like virtual staging and drone photography and you want to maximize their effectiveness, a way you could do this is by getting them in front of a targeted, engaged audience. With good PPC, you could do just that because it may allow you to boost your lead generation significantly—and perhaps sell more houses.

If you do need help with your PPC campaigns, reach out to my team to see how we can help.

Has PPC benefited your real estate business?

The post How to Create PPC Campaigns for Real Estate Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Choose The Right Email Marketing Agency

Nothing converts like email.

Email beats all other marketing channels and can generate $37 for every $1 you invest. 

Even though email marketing can generate a ton of revenue, it’s still not easy.

You need to know which email tools are best, how to use them so you don’t end up in spam folders, and how to create emails that convert.

Even for fully-staffed marketing teams, it can be overwhelming.

Email marketing agencies are perfect for overcoming these challenges.

They know how to use the tools and run fully-scaled email campaigns. They can also distill your brand and offer into great campaigns that generate revenue.

Today, I’ll walk you through how to choose an email marketing agency that’ll help you unlock all the business value email holds. 

Good? 

Well, let’s start from the basics.

Know Your Goals and Desired Outcomes

Before you jump straight to the top email marketing companies and pick one to work with, it’s a good idea to pause first.

Why? 

You’ll get much better results.

Famous email agencies, like the ones I’ll recommend, usually have a track record of overseeing successful email marketing strategies and campaigns.

However, it’s never a one-size-fits-all situation. 

Some agencies only excel when working on specific projects or campaigns. Others drive better results when working with specific kinds of businesses. 

Knowing your goals and desired outcomes with email marketing gives you the right lens to evaluate different agencies and know which one is best for your needs.

Not to mention, it’ll help your agency get started a lot faster. The clearer the goal, the better the outcome.

Let’s take a look at some examples. 

Example #1: Build and grow your email list

Without an email list, you can’t do email marketing. 

And if you have a small list of, say, 33 email addresses, you’ll never get the full benefits of email marketing either. 

The first step is to build your email list.

You’ll achieve this by choosing an agency with experience executing list-building campaigns to get your first 100, 1,000, or 10,000 email subscribers.  

Take yourself, for example. 

You won’t give a company your email address for nothing, right? 

Absolutely not! We all get enough spam as it is.

Similarly, most people would only subscribe to your email list in exchange for something valuable. 

In the digital marketing world, this could be an ebook, a checklist, or other forms of relevant content promoted to the audience whose emails you’re targeting. Consider choosing an email marketing agency with experience creating and promoting amazing content. The better the content, the faster your list will grow.

Example #2: Increase your email open and click-through rates 

Low open and click-through rates will destroy your list. 

If your open and click-through rates are low, you’ll run into a cascading series of problems:

  1. Your audience isn’t seeing your offers. That’s less revenue.
  2. Email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo will notice your low performance. Then they’ll flag you as spam or stop delivering your email altogether.
  3. Now your open and click rates get even worse.
  4. Even if you improve your campaigns later, they won’t deliver nearly the same results.
  5. Improving your email reputation is REALLY hard.

Instead of risking this email cycle of doom, it’s a good idea to partner with an agency that knows what they’re doing.

They can look for early signs that something’s wrong, course-correct early, and keep your email reputation safe.

In this case, look for an email marketing agency that is exceptional at developing strategies and tactics to help increase your open and click-through rates. 

The two examples above were to show that your goals and desired outcome with email marketing go a long way in determining what agency to choose. 

They were also to demonstrate that no agency is a one-size-fits-all for all email marketing problems. 

Set your goals first, then look for an agency that specializes in those goals.

6 Characteristics That Make a Great Email Marketing Agency 

There are hundreds of email agencies out there. Maybe thousands.

And if you visit the websites of these agencies, every single one claims to be the best. 

But what characteristics make an email marketing company great? And how can you vet and choose an agency to work with?

1. Great Content Creation

Think of all the emails you receive from other companies. 

Do you know why you can’t wait to open and engage with some, but would ignore, delete, or unsubscribe from others right off the bat? 

In most cases, it’s because you don’t value the content of those emails. 

Amazing content keeps people opening and reading. Then when you send an offer, they’re willing to consider it.

Great content is the core of any serious email strategy. 

Check to see if they focus on a process for crafting engaging email content. The best ones always do.

2. An Impressive Client Portfolio

Excellent email marketing agencies didn’t achieve that status overnight. 

They worked with dozens or hundreds of brands to execute successful email campaigns. 

Because of this, they should have plenty of top-tier brands in their portfolio. And case studies that show you exactly what was done.

Not all of this can be shared publicly. But when you’re exploring options with agencies, ask for examples during your initial calls. The agency should have plenty of examples to point to. If they struggle to come up with some, look elsewhere. 

It’s a great way to quickly vet agencies of all types.

3. Thought Leadership 

Exceptional email marketing agencies are always on top of email trends. It’s constantly evolving and you don’t want to work with someone that’s using tactics from 5 years ago. 

An easy way to check for this is the agency’s blog, YouTube channel, or their own email list. Within 20-30 minutes of consuming their content, you should learn a ton. And it should all be cutting edge. 

That’s a good sign they’ll be able to apply those same tactics to your email campaigns.

4. Deep Expertise with Email Tools

Great agencies will have used them all.

If you ask them which tools are best, you’ll quickly learn:

  • Which are most popular
  • Strengths and weaknesses of each
  • The handful of tools to avoid

But don’t worry about which tool they recommend. Pay attention to their depth of knowledge when speaking with them. They’ll probably start by recommending a single tool. Then as soon as you ask any follow up questions, they should have plenty of qualifications, nuance, and detail to their answers.

You should get the feeling that the agency knows this stuff cold. If not, find someone that does.

5. Has Specific Rules to Avoid Spam

If you’ve been hit hard by spam flags, you might need an agency that specializes exclusively on reviving domains with negative email reputations.

Most of us don’t need to go that far. 

But you absolutely want to work with an agency that knows how to stay out of the spam box.

Also ask new agencies about how they stay out of spam, their processes to keep things clean, and early warnings that they like to look for.

You should be blown away with the thoroughness of their answers.

If not, keep looking.

6. A Great Company Culture

By choosing an email marketing agency to work with, you’re entering a business relationship with another business entity.

So, before you proceed, check that their company culture fits with yours.

Without a good fit on culture, you’re going to get email campaigns that don’t jive with your brand. You could anger your audience and turn them away. Or play things too safe and leave money on the table.

There’s no right answer on culture, just make sure their culture and yours fit well.

Ask for samples of recent campaigns that they’ve done. They’re likely to do similar work for you.

How to Work With an Email Marketing Agency

Working with an exceptional email marketing agency isn’t like dashing into a grocery store, filling your cart, and dashing out in a few minutes. 

There are steps you’ll need to take that ensure your partnership with one leads to business growth via email marketing. 

1. Align your in-house team

Most email marketing agencies won’t work in isolation but as an extension of your in-house digital marketing team.   

Hence, to ensure a smooth partnership between you and them, you should:

  • Have meetings with stakeholders in your company to align relevant teams on the need to work with an email agency.
  • Communicate how the agency’s work would impact your business and why it is necessary.
  • As needed, appoint employees to work directly with the email marketing agency. 

Doing this ensures team alignment between the agency and your company. Also, it keeps the agency in sync with your values, company culture, and the goals for choosing to work with them. 

2. Discovery session

As you first go out to contact an email marketing agency, they won’t jump straight into sending you a proposal or contract. 

The best email marketing agencies act like doctors who only prescribe after they diagnose. 

And to start diagnosing your challenges and goals with email marketing, expect to fill an inquiry form, followed by a discovery session.

3. Research & strategic recommendations

Before making a specific proposal, any good email marketing agency will do an extensive round of research on your current campaigns. This will include things like:

  • Signing up for your lists and looking at your current campaigns
  • Mapping out your signup flows
  • Checking landing pages and signup offers
  • Looking through social profiles and email funnels from other channels

Once they have a complete picture of where you are today, they’ll be able to put a proposal together.

4. A working contract with project deliverables

A typical work duration with an email marketing agency spans several months. 

To take on that kind of scope,agencies usually prefer to send a formal proposal and contract for you to sign.

Take your time and this stage and go through the proposal in detail. You should feel great about every piece. If you have any concerns, work through them now. It’s really easy to change scope, budget, or goals now.

Once you fee good about it, get the contract signed. 

5. Onboarding

Expect an onboarding process customized for your team after you sign the contract. 

During this step, the agency will usually ask for all your internal document and tool access. Expert to send them invites for your Google Analytics and email tools. Also put together every piece of internal documentation that you have on your email campaigns. The more info they have, the better. 

From here, the agency will get started on the work and should have regular check-in calls along the way.

How to Find The Right Email Marketing Agency For You

To choose an email marketing agency that’s right for your needs, the steps I recommend are: 

  1. Be sure about your business goals and desired outcomes from email marketing.
  2. Consider agencies with the characteristics above. 
  3. Choose an agency with expertise in the area you need help with. And where possible, also prioritize those that have worked with reputable brands.  
  4. Finally, know that email is part of your digital, and by extension, content marketing strategy. Hence, it’s best to choose a company with bandwidth for those. 

To help, we reviewed hundreds of agencies and found these to be the best.

The 5 Top Email Marketing Agencies 

#1 Neil Patel Digital – Best For Email Content

Every time you send an email, people unsubscribe.

That hurts the long-term prospects of your email list. 

Since every email has a real cost and makes your list smaller, it’s best to make them count.

The best way to do this is with great content. Your unsubscribes will be lower, your list will be more engaged, and you’ll generate more revenue in the long-run.

Content, including email content, is one of the core areas of expertise at my agency, Neil Patel Digital

#2. InboxArmy – Best for Full-service Email Management

InboxArmy comes highly recommended, as a full-service email marketing and management company. 

This agency’s services include email strategy development, template design, email automation, and other. 

InboxArmyserves companies such as Airbnb, LandCentral, and Jockey. If you’re looking for serious email pros for your B2C company, I’d reach out to them. 

#3 Fix My Churn – Best for SaaS Onboarding Emails and churn

Fix My Churn works with SaaS companies.

User onboarding emails are a very unique skill set. The content, CTAs, sending logic and tools are completely different. If you want to improve your SaaS emails, you really need experts in this area.

Fix My Churn applies top-level SaaS copywriting skills to create email onboarding and churn-eliminating sequences to turn free and trial users into happy, long-term customers. 

Led by its Founder and SaaS email expert, Val Geisler, Fix My Churn has earned a reputation as an email marketing agency for SaaS companies like Buffer, Aweber, Podia, InVision, and others. 

I’d also consider them if your have any type of subscription offer.

#4 Action Rocket – Best for Enterprise Email

Action Rocket needs no introduction as an email marketing agency for enterprise companies. 

This agency even works with leading email software companies like Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Litmus, and others to shape the email marketing space.

Using its vast years of experience, Action Rocket strategizes and develops custom email and CRM programs for enterprise companies, including Marks & Spencer, the BBC, and others.

If you want serious muscle behind your email strategy, reach out to them.

#5 SmartMail – Best for Ecommerce Email

SmarMail is our recommended email marketing agency for ecommerce businesses. 

Every business model has its own unique challenges with email and ecommerce is no exception.

You need cart abandonment emails, promotional emails, lifescycle emails for repurchases, and receipts with guaranteed email deliverability.

This agency excels at helping online stores acquire, convert, and retain customers by strategizing and launching email marketing campaigns based on automated triggers across buyers’ lifetime cycle: 

SmartMail has an excellent track record, helping ecommerce companies generate about $187 million in revenues. Their clients include French Connection, Skechers, and others. 

Get Email Right to Drive Growth

Email marketing isn’t going anytime soon. It is here to stay.

And it generates a ton of cash. Choosing the right agency will get you that growth a lot sooner.

Set your goals, then start looking for the right agency for you.

Even if you plan on doing email inhouse, the right agency can get everything set up correctly from the beginning. That will save your team a ton of time and prevent disastrous mistakes like getting all your emails stuck in the spam folder.

The post How to Choose The Right Email Marketing Agency appeared first on Neil Patel.

How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing?

If there’s one thing you need from your digital marketing toolbox, it’s efficiency. You need access to real-time data so you can quickly make the most effective decisions and convert those all-important leads into paying customers.   You can start by deploying iPaaS, or “Integration Platform as a Service”. It’s a little tricky to understand at … Continue reading How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing?

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How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing?

If there’s one thing you need from your digital marketing toolbox, it’s efficiency. You need access to real-time data so you can quickly make the most effective decisions and convert those all-important leads into paying customers.  

You can start by deploying iPaaS, or “Integration Platform as a Service”. It’s a little tricky to understand at first, but don’t worry. I’ll break it down for you. So, let’s go over how iPaaS works, starting with some fundamentals.

What Is iPaaS?

Let’s be clear on some terminology before we dive into what iPaaS is.

Chances are you’re already using various apps, or Software as a Service (SaaS), across your organization. Statistics show that small businesses use 40 apps on average, and larger businesses use many more.

SaaS examples include Monday, Trello, Salesforce, and Gmail. You usually need to switch between these SaaS applications to complete tasks, whether it’s assigning someone a project in Trello, or responding to a customer in Gmail.

The problem? It’s time-consuming and inefficient to constantly move between these different systems. Since over 82 percent of customers expect almost instant solutions to their problems, this is time you can’t afford to waste.

How does iPaaS help? It’s simple. iPaaS integrates your SaaS applications and cloud services. In other words, it brings all these different apps together so they’re accessible from one place.

With iPaaS, you can read an email from a prospective customer in Gmail, and immediately assign someone a follow-up task on Trello. You can track inbound and outbound marketing in real-time and quickly update a lead’s status on Salesforce.

From a marketing perspective, what’s most important is why iPaaS can work for you. Here’s what you need to know.

What is iPaaS?

The Benefits of iPaaS

Whatever the size of your company, there are three key benefits of iPaaS:

  1. Cost savings
  2. Business efficiency
  3. Security and compliance

Let’s go over these one at a time.  

iPaaS Could Save You Money

If you’re looking to streamline your IT budget, iPaaS could be a great option for you. Here are three specific reasons why.

Flexibility of iPaaS

First, it’s flexible. It’s pretty easy to scale your services to suit your particular business needs at any given time without overstretching your IT budget.

For example, if you’re experiencing high seasonal demands, you can quickly scale up your iPaaS platform to handle the volume. You can ramp up marketing campaigns and manage high numbers of leads without sacrificing speed or efficiency.

How does this flexibility help you cut costs? Again, it’s simple. The more agile your company is, the quicker you can onboard new customers, and the fewer resources you waste in the meantime.

Autonomy of iPaaS

There’s no need to worry about scheduling software updates because iPaaS handles these updates for you. Automatic updates:

  • Helps minimize your maintenance costs
  • Enhances your system reliability

Put simply, automated updates indirectly reduce downtime. More than 17 percent of small businesses have lost customers through downtime, and 37 percent have lost revenue. The upshot? Automation helps protect your bottom line and your customer base.  

Simplicity of iPaaS

Many businesses find the whole concept of rolling out an iPaaS platform daunting.

My advice? Don’t be. iPaaS solutions are user-friendly. They’re designed with the “novice” coder in mind, so you don’t need specialist IT skills to set up the integration.

Since there’s no need to hire an outside developer to help you deploy the service, you can save money in the short term.  

  • All you’re doing is accessing a cloud-based service. There’s little technical installation required.
  • You can quickly install or delete app integrations without spending extra money.
  • You don’t need system permissions to make changes, either. It’s all designed with cost-effective efficiency in mind.

The best part? Since it’s easy to use, you’ll spend less money training employees on how to work the service.

Your Business Efficiency May Increase with iPaaS

Efficiency is a real selling point for these platforms. Here are the key reasons why.

First, did you know that 80 percent of customers expect consistent information when they speak with different members of your team? iPaaS makes this possible through:

  • Automatic data syncing across systems
  • On-the-go access to data
  • Centralized communications between departments
  • Streamlined campaigns
  • Improved access to real-time data for critical decision making

This means you’re improving your customers’ experience with your company and boosting operational efficiency, all at the same time.

This also makes it easier for you to see exactly what’s going on in your company at all times. Whether it’s tracking weekly targets or assessing customer behavior, you can access everything you need from one simple interface.

It usually takes far less time to deploy iPaaS than installing all your software tools separately.

iPaaS Can Help With Security and Compliance

Did you know that cyberattacks cost the average business $200,000? One of the best ways to avoid costly data breaches is by improving your cybersecurity. Here’s how iPaaS can help.

  • Automatic security updates keep your data and infrastructure safe.
  • It’s easier to protect data since it’s all stored in a central location.
  • iPaaS solutions generally include advanced security tools to find threats, like fraud detection and intruder alerts.
  • You can quickly cancel an employee’s user profile if they leave the business, meaning there’s less chance they’ll still have access to confidential data.
  • iPaaS security tools can offer the levels of protection you need to meet many compliance requirements across industries.

Essentially, iPaaS is great for cyber-safe functionality and connectivity because it makes it easier to perform day-to-day tasks, and it facilitates seamless communication across your company. Most of all, iPaaS helps you comply with various industry security standards.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of iPaaS, you might think it’s the right option for your business. A key question remains: How do you pick the right iPaaS solution for your company?

Choosing Your Ideal iPaaS Solution

Choosing the right iPaaS integration comes down to these two things.

  1. Understanding your company’s specific data needs. For example, some iPaaS tools are best suited to automating contact and lead management, while others work best for automating day-to-day workflows.
  2. Finding a suitable iPaaS platform to meet these needs, at the right price point.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a good place to start your iPaaS provider research. But before you get started, here’s what you should do first.

  • Identify what you need from iPaaS, whether it’s customer analytics, employee management, enhanced security, or something else.
  • Set a realistic price point. How much can you afford to spend on iPaaS? Think carefully about your iPaaS budget, which we’ll cover later.

Once you’ve given those key issues some thought, it’s time to choose a suitable iPaaS integration for your specific marketing and commercial goals. Here’s my step-by-step guide.

Be Sure Your Favorite Apps Can Integrate With iPaaS

Let’s start with something simple: not all iPaaS platforms work with every app. With that in mind, the right solution for you should work with most (if not all) of your day-to-day apps.

First, just list all the apps you’re using right now, and decide which ones you need to integrate. This helps you narrow down your research so you’re only focusing on compatible tools.

To narrow your search even further, you need to think in the medium to long-term. Which apps do you plan on integrating as your business grows? What’s important for your marketing strategy?

Your iPaaS solution needs to work for you in the years to come, not just the short-term.

Decide What You Want to Do With Data in iPaaS

On its own, a piece of raw data doesn’t tell you much. Sure, you might have some customer analytics and a few employee reviews, but unless you translate this data into information, you can’t use it to improve your marketing efforts or grow your business.

Remember, that’s the whole point of iPaaS: integrating data from across your company so you’re turning it into useful information. Once you’ve confirmed which apps you’re using and which platforms are compatible, you need to think about where your data fits in.

  • Establish what data you have, whether it is names, promotional tickets, emails, reviews, or something else.
  • Confirm what data you need to integrate to achieve your business goals, because again, not every iPaaS can integrate all types of data.
  • Identify which apps contain this data, because these apps must be compatible with the iPaaS.
  • Check which iPaaS tool makes it easiest to migrate this data.

Make Sure the iPaaS Is Easy to Use

This one’s important. Some iPaaS solutions are more user-friendly than others, so be sure to consider your employees’ IT skills.

  • The more training your team needs, the longer it’ll take to get the system up and running.
  • Without proper training, your employees might accidentally corrupt or delete important data. If there’s no contingency plan in place to handle the learning curve (such as cloud or hard copy backups), you could suffer permanent data loss.

The real problem? Steep learning curves can affect productivity, which impacts everything from customer service to daily workflows. So, factor in employee technical expertise before you choose a platform.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a user-friendly tool to assess your recent marketing efforts, check out my A/B Testing calculator.

Find Out About iPaaS Security and Updates

Sure, iPaaS is pretty safe overall. However, it’s not foolproof, so here’s what to bear in mind.

  • Check the service provider’s track record. Are customers happy with the service? Does the provider have the experience to manage your sector-specific compliance requirements?
  • You should also check the vendor’s record for downtime and data loss. If it’s an unreliable platform, your data may be compromised, and performance may suffer.
  • Confirm how often updates are installed, and ensure they’re applied automatically.

Security is extremely important, so don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Figure Out Your iPaaS Price Point

iPaaS is a business investment, so you must get it right.

  • Go back to your IT budget and confirm what you can afford to spend.
  • Research the options in your price bracket. List the pros and cons of each platform.
  • Decide if you’re better off paying a fixed monthly or annual fee, or if you’re looking for a more flexible pricing structure. The same provider can sometimes offer different programs for different prices, depending on your needs.

Many iPaaS platforms offer free trials, so it might be worth testing one for 30 days or so before you commit. That said, if it’s a complicated platform, installing and learning it for a free trial period might be more trouble than it’s worth from a financial perspective.  

iPaaS Tools

Are you still wondering where to get started? Let me leave you with some examples of popular iPaaS tools to choose from.

Zapier

With Zapier, businesses of any size can design customized and streamlined workflows. You don’t need tech knowledge either, since there are plenty of premade templates to choose from and integrate as you wish.

For example, you can send notifications to Slack from other apps:

iPaaS Zapier

You can also quickly generate tasks without opening each app individually:

iPaaS Zapier2

The best part? Zapier is wallet-friendly and there’s even a basic free version available.

Oracle Integration Cloud

If compliance is a priority for you, check out Oracle Integration. It has iPaaS templates for many industries, from financial services to healthcare:

Oracle iPaaS

It’s also simple to track leads at every stage of the process from the one platform:

Oracle iPaaS example

You can pay-as-you-go or choose a custom pricing plan.  

Jitterbit

Jitterbit is designed to unify your workflow so you can easily track everything, from marketing performance to subscriber engagement from one location. It’s also compatible with popular services like Salesforce and Microsoft:

Jitterbit iPaaS

You can request a free trial or contact Jitterbit for custom pricing plans.

Conclusion

iPaaS is a great way to streamline data flow within your company, monitor conversions in real-time, and improve your customer response speed. It’s a solid addition to any digital marketing toolbox.

Remember, though, that what’s right for one business may not work for yours. That’s why it’s so important to spend time researching vendors, and ask as many questions as you need before committing to a service contract.  

One final thing: if you need help boosting traffic to your website and optimizing your content to improve conversion rates, don’t forget to check out my consulting services.

Have you deployed iPaaS across your business yet?

The post How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing? appeared first on Neil Patel.

The Three Primary Strengths Of Network Marketing

The Three Primary Strengths Of Network Marketing Multi level marketing, ‘MLM’, and also Multi Level Marketing are all terms that describe the very same sort of service design. This market has actually had greater than it’s share of sleazebag criminals and also hustler that have actually made use of and also abused the principle. If …

The post The Three Primary Strengths Of Network Marketing first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

The Best Luxury Marketing Strategies

Have you ever seen a Facebook ad for Chanel? Or an Instagram ad for Lamborghini? Me neither. That’s because luxury marketing strategies don’t follow the same rules as mass-market brands. Selling to high-end consumers requires a different approach. But that doesn’t mean popular digital channels are off-limits. SEO, PPC, even some social media sites can drive …

The post The Best Luxury Marketing Strategies first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

How Using Emotional Marketing in Content Can Help Drive Way More Sales

Whether you care to admit it or not, the decisions you make today will be driven by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggers to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc.

“By leveraging common psychological triggers all people have,” you might hear, “you can drive more sales.”

While it may feel like we make decisions with our minds, using logic and reasoning, the “mental triggers” we hear about are tied more to emotion than anything else.

Case in point, Antonio Damasio spent time studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed.

While these subjects functioned just like anyone else, they couldn’t feel emotion.

The other thing they had in common was they all had trouble with making decisions.

Even simple decisions about what to eat proved difficult.

While they could describe what they should be doing using logic and reason, most decisions couldn’t be settled with simple rationale.

Without emotion, they weren’t able to make a choice.

This is supported by data from Gerard Zaltman, author of “How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.”

Zaltman found that 95% of cognition happens beyond our conscious brain, instead coming from our subconscious, emotional brain.

ecards emotional marketing

Emotions are an X factor you can’t control, but you can’t afford to ignore them in your content marketing.

Why is Emotion Marketing so Effective?

When you make an emotional connection with your audience, it’s incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome.

You’ve formed an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, that makes them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a certain level of trust that’s virtually impossible to artificially manifest.

Rob Walker and Joshua Glen found firsthand what an emotional connection can do.

In one experiment, they bought hundreds of items from thrift stores and similar locations — all cheaply priced.

The duo wanted to see if they could sell the products using an emotional connection through the power of stories alone.

With 200 writers on board, they generated fictional stories for the products and used those stories to sell the thrift store items at auction on eBay.

significantobjects example | Emotional Marketing

They raised just under $8,000, which was a profit of approximately 2,700%.

And they did it all using that emotional connection through storytelling.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for the logical or the rational in decision making.

This is where marketers often leverage the theory of dual processing in psychological marketing.

The theory holds that the brain processes thoughts and decisions on two levels.

Emotional Marketing dual process

The first level is that of emotion, which processes automatically, unconsciously, and provides a rapid response when we need it with virtually no effort.

The second level is the more deliberate and conscious thought process, where we handle decisions with reason and logic. It happens far slower than the emotional response.

In most cases, we fire back with a ready response from our emotions and then try to consciously rationalize it.

Think about some big-brand rivalries and preferences will surface in your mind.

How do you feel when you look at this major brand comparison?

brand rival in Emotional Marketing

Here’s another common one that has people divided, sometimes within the same family:

brand rival example in Emotional Marketing

And then there’s this brand rivalry we know all too well.

Jobs vs Gates in Emotional Marketing

In each of these, you likely have an opinion almost instantly about which you prefer, but it’s not because you have a logical reason.

It’s typically tied to emotion and/or experience; how you feel using their products, or how the brands left you feeling after an experience or reading a news article.

The brain then tries to rationalize that emotional response.

For example, your emotional response goes straight to Coke and then your brain works to rationalize the decision by deciding that it tastes better in a can, it’s fizzier, has a stronger bite than Pepsi, etc.

So, while you might feel like you’re making a rational choice about your beverage, it’s really just an emotional one.

The most successful marketers know how to lean on the emotional over logic in order to make their content draw in the audience.

That’s why nearly a third of marketers report significant profit gains when running emotional campaigns, but the number of successful campaigns dips if you introduce logic into the marketing.

emotion logic in Emotional Marketing

And those results get sliced in half when marketers switch to logic over emotion.

Emotion Marketing Doesn’t Guarantee Successful Engagement

We experience a laundry list of emotions every day.

Is it really as simple as leveraging some emotion to make content more effective?

Yes and no.

Emotion is certainly important, but there are also other factors like timing, exposure, the format of the content, how it’s presented, who produced or shared it, etc.

Despite understanding the role emotion plays in content, we still haven’t quite perfected a formula for what makes content go viral.

Though we’ve gotten pretty close.

Brands have long tried to inflate the consumer’s emotional response through manufactured content; some met with great success.

Take, for example, Intel’s five-part “Meet the Makers” series.

The videos profile a person around the world who uses Intel’s technology to create new experiences and build new technology that makes a difference in the world.

intel in Emotional Marketing example

Like 13-year-old Shubham Banerrjee, who used Intel’s technology to build an affordable Braille printer.

intel 2nd Emotional Marketing example

And of course, some companies try to leverage emotion and create viral campaigns that just don’t take off.

CIO reported a number of failed viral marketing campaigns, such as “Walmarting Across America.”

In this blog, two average Americans travel across the country visiting Walmart locations, reporting their interactions on a blog along the way.

After countless upbeat entries about how people loved working for the company, it was discovered that the trip was paid for by Walmart and the entire thing was a campaign created and managed by the company’s PR firm.

That didn’t receive a warm reception from the blogosphere, which deemed the content to be a “flog” or fake blog.

Which Emotions Attract the Most Marketing Engagement in Content?

Many emotions fuel our behaviors and our decisions, especially our purchase decisions.

Some more than others — especially when they’re authentic.

A study was done by Buzzsumo analyzing the top 10,000 most-shared articles on the web. Those articles were then mapped to emotions to see which emotions had the greatest influence on content.

The most popular:

  • Awe (25%)
  • Laughter (17%)
  • Amusement (15%)
popular emotion | Emotional Marketing

Conversely, the least popular were sadness and anger, totaling just 7% of the content that was most shared.

Two researchers at Wharton also wanted to dig deeper into virally shared content to find commonalities and better understand what makes that content spread.

What they found was the emotional element, and some very specific results tied to emotions.

  • Content is far more likely to be shared when it makes people feel good or it creates positive feelings such as leaving them entertained.
  • Facts or data that shock people or leave them in awe were more likely to be shared.
  • Instilling fear or anxiety pushes engagement higher, from comments being posted to content being shared.
  • People most commonly shared content that incited anger, leaving comments as well.

While some emotions are more likely to engage than others, every audience is different. What drives one to action may do very little for another.

This modern adaptation of Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion, illustrated by CopyPress, shows the range under eight primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.

emotion wheel in Emotional Marketing

For content to be widely shared and have an impact on your audience, it needs to leverage one or more of these emotions.

The proof is on the web, not only in the statistics I shared above, but also in the popularity of user communities that regularly share content.

Just look at Reddit and some of the most popular subreddits by subscriber count. Each can be tied back to emotions (some more obviously than others) like anticipation, awe, joy, and more.

subreddits Emotional Marketing example

Here’s how some of those emotions can play into the engagement with your audience:

Anxiety May Cause Uncertainty For Customers

You don’t want your audience to make bad decisions. Bad decisions can lead to buyer’s remorse, which can paint your brand and the overall experience in a negative light.

But it can be helpful if you leave the audience a bit more open to influence.

A Berkeley study revealed that anxiety can be linked to difficulty in using information around us to make decisions. When we experience uncertainty, it becomes harder to make decisions and our judgment is clouded.

anxiety example in Emotional Marketing

Still, anxiety can also spur people to act as a result of that uncertainty.

Take a two-year study by Wharton Ph.D. student Alison Wood Brooks and a Harvard Business School professor.

They found that upon increasing the anxiety of certain subjects with video footage, 90% of the “anxious” participants opted to seek advice and were more likely to take it.

Only 72% of the participants in a neutral state, who viewed a different video, sought advice.

Capture the Focus of Your Emotional Marketing Audience With Awe

Awe is comparable to wonder, but it doesn’t always fall under the umbrella of joy or humor.

It’s intended to captivate the audience and keep them riveted.

You often see this kind of hook in headlines that seem so earth-shatteringly significant that no one in their right mind would want to miss it.

Here’s a good example of that kind of awe used in content when Dropbox first launched.

dropbox start | Emotional Marketing example

Co-founder Drew Houston submitted his product to the website Digg, hoping to get some visibility from the social bookmarking site. That headline helped significantly.

Another great example of using Awe to capture attention is a video produced by Texas Armoring Corporation.

To emphasize the quality of the company’s bullet-resistant glass, the CEO crouched behind one of TAC’s glass panels while several rounds were fired at it from an AK-47.

Awe can impact decision making as much as anxiety.

A study from Stanford University found that people experiencing awe are more focused on the present and less distracted by other things in life. They also tend to be more giving of their time.

When you have their attention and their focus, they’re more likely to have time to rationalize a decision.

Drive People to Action With Laughter and Joy Through Emotional Marketing

While joy and laughter can have their lines blurred, they’re really two different emotions when it comes to your content.

Because while laughter often leads to joy, not everything that is joyful is laugh-out-loud funny.

Still, next to awe, joy, laughter, and amusement were the highest contributors to social sharing and engagement in the above studies.

That influence goes all the way back to early childhood.

As babies, out first emotional action not long after being born is to respond to the smile of our parents with our own smile.

social smile | Emotional Marketing

Per psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, joy and amusement are hardwired into us from birth.

His studies tell us that our innate desire for joy increases when it’s shared. That’s the nature of the “social smile.

That explains why these feelings or emotions are such huge drivers behind the virality of content. Happiness, overall, is a huge driver for content sharing.

In fact, Jonah Berger’s study of the most-shared articles in the New York Times (around 7,000 articles) revealed the same kind of results around emotion.

The more positive the article, the more likely it was to go viral.

Brands have worked “joy marketing” into their strategies for decades, aiming to make their audience feel warm, comfortable, and happy.

That’s the intent of campaigns like P&G’s highly successful and viral “Thank You, Mom” campaigns that are injected with a lot of emotion (especially joy) when celebrating the strength of mothers.

pg

Joy can take a lot of forms, though, and it doesn’t have to be commercially intended to elicit a direct sale.

Look at what Beringer Vineyards did with influencer marketing.

Russian Instagram sensations Murad and Nataly Osmann built a following of more than 4.5 million people with photos featuring them holding hands at locations around the globe during their world travels.

They attached the hashtag #FollowMeTo on those posts.

muradosmann example Emotional Marketing

The couple teamed up with Beringer Vineyards to create some images meant to inspire joy, love, and of course the sense of adventure the couple already shared with their hashtag.

beringer example | Emotional Marketing

Immediate Gains in Emotional Marketing From Anger

Anger may be perceived as a negative emotion by some, but it can have positive influences as well as positive outcomes when leveraged in the right way.

A leading researcher in the study of anger, Dr. Carol Tavris, draws a parallel between anger and how it impacted society over the years.

Women’s suffrage, for example, developed from anger and frustration.

Anger can be empowering for the individual, bringing a sense of clarity and positive-forward momentum. It gives people a feeling of direction and control according to a study from Carnegie Mellon.

In the previously mentioned study on content shares in the New York Times, negatively perceived emotions like anger are equally associated with the virality of content.

angershare in Emotional Marketing

In fact, Berger’s study of the New York Times content found that content which incites feelings of frustration or anger is 34% more likely to be featured on the Time’s most emailed list than the average article.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately create controversy by taking shots at readers or picking fights.

The key with using anger in content is to frame an issue that incites anger or frustration in a way that’s constructive.

You have to be thought-provoking and engaging.

This interactive graph from the New York Times is an example of how content can lead to frustration and anger over economic or societal issues.

interactive chart NYT in Emotional Marketing

This piece of content is simple, yet it provokes engagement as well as thought when results are revealed in comparison to what an individual perceives to be the truth.

Using the Right Emotional Marketing Words in Content

The difference between logic and emotion in content comes down to the words we use and how we position statements and information.

It’s just like the laundry list of power words used to improve conversion, or terms commonly used in e-commerce to get customers to buy more products.

ecommerce words in Emotional Marketing

When creating copy and content, you have to be acutely aware of whether you’re taking a rational or emotional approach to the information you’re sharing.

You need to think about the response you want to elicit to help guide your content development to make the right kind of psychological and emotional connection with your audience.

rational and emotional mind in emotional marketing

The context of your copy can remain the same.

By changing the words you use, however, you can make content appeal more to the emotions of the audience and prospective customer.

The simplest approach to finding the right high-emotion words takes only three steps:

  1. Think about the action you want your audience to take when they read your content.
  2. Decide what kind of emotional state will drive that action. What would make them do what you want them to do?
  3. Choose emotionally persuasive words appropriate to the action and the emotion.

What you’ll find in researching the right words is that emotionally persuasive and impactful words tend to be abrupt. It’s the short, concise, basic words that appeal most to our emotions over our intellect.

Just look at this list from the Persuasion Revolution.

emotional words in Emotional Marketing

The majority of this emotionally weighted list (and there are over 350 items) is made up of shorter words.

The rational mind, on the other hand, tends to associate with longer and more complex words.

rational words in Emotional Marketing

You Can’t Assume When it Comes to Emotional Marketing

It’s not easy to make that emotional connection with your audience. You have to know them.

Like anything else in marketing, your decisions and the content you create needs to be based on data. In this case, that data is your audience research.

That same research that tells you what topics to create, where your audience spends their time, and the content they prefer to view, can clue you into how to make that emotional connection.

You just need to expand your buyer personas.

buyer personas demographics in Emotional Marketing

In this case, you want to build up the psychological profile of your audience. You can achieve this by asking the right questions to help steer your content research and production.

  • What do they find humorous?
  • What are the pain points that frustrate them?
  • What topics make them angry?
  • What are common problems they speak about?
  • What kind of content is being shared that clearly pleases them or brings joy?

Your research could turn up a common topic or theme that appears frequently in the content they read and share.

For example, you might discover that a certain segment or demographic in your audience has a strong affinity to family values, or health and wellness.

Turn that into a content campaign that shares the feel-good side of your company.

Delve into the family life of your employees, how your company supports the work/life balance, or better health initiatives.

Google is well known for its company structure, promoting flexible schedules, support of family time, personal projects, and a focus on work/life balance.

The company often shares behind-the-scenes images (visual content) showing off employees enjoying what they do. Here’s an example from Google Sydney’s offices:

google sydney | Emotional Marketing example

That can influence a positive emotional response toward the brand when targeted segments see that content.

Emotional Marketing Works in the B2B Process

Don’t get caught up with the dated idea that emotion is only applicable to consumer-focused businesses.

Emotional marketing has its place in the B2B world as well.

You may be dealing with a longer buying process between one or more organizations, but the decisions are still made (and fueled by) people who are absolutely driven by emotion.

That includes emotions like:

  • Awe: over what a solution is capable of and feeling empowered to bring that solution to the workplace.
  • Anticipation: in finding a piece of the puzzle in a product or service that will help the company achieve its next goal or milestone.
  • Fear: in purchase decisions that could reflect on the individual, resulting in a personal risk associated with a B2B purchase.
  • Joy: in knowing that a B2B purchase is likely to lead to a positive outcome that will reflect positively on the individual.

Emotion absolutely influences B2B purchases, and in some cases, emotion matters even more than logic and reason.

Conclusion

You hold a great deal of influence with your audience when you’re able to tap into their emotions.

Once you understand your audience, you can better determine their emotional state.

From there, make the decision about whether you need to influence and exploit emotions that are already present, or if you want to create or give rise to emotions the audience wasn’t initially expecting or experiencing.

Even the most (seemingly) rational decisions are influenced by emotion — and that applies to everyone.

When you learn how to leverage that emotion in your content, you will see increases in engagement, social action, and conversions within your funnel.

How do you use emotion in your content and copy?

The post How Using Emotional Marketing in Content Can Help Drive Way More Sales appeared first on Neil Patel.