20 Productive Things to Do During Your Downtime
Work and a busy schedule can take a lot out of a person. Thankfully, vacation is a great time to slow down, recharge, spend time seeing your loved ones, and do things you wouldn’t normally have time to do.
While it can be tempting to fill your out-of-office schedule with travel and funtivities, there is something to be said about making time to tackle some of the things that have been collecting dust in your mental backlog. 
To help you get ahead for the upcoming year, we’ve put together a list of 20 ideas for productive things to do during your downtime while on vacation. Once you’ve picked your favorites, try using one of these awesome to-do list tools to keep yourself on course.
20 Productive Things to Do During Your Downtime
1) Play around with new technology.
There’s never a good time to learn how to Snapchat when you’ve got a billion other things going on, but learning those new technologies is important. For example, Snapchat gets 10 billion video views per day, according to a Bloomberg report. That’s more than Facebook.
So why not use your downtime over the holidays to download and play around with some of these new technologies? A few that we recommend include Snapchat, Instagram (read this post for some great Instagram Story tips), messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp, and photo editing apps to improve your content creation skills.
2) Write thank-you notes.
Take advantage of the opportunity to make someone’s day by writing them a meaningful, personal thank-you note. It’s a way to distinguish yourself in our increasingly informal, digital world.
Thank-you notes are an easy way to show your appreciation, but there are two roadblocks that cause people to not do it: They don’t have thank-you cards or they don’t know what to write. Let us help out:
Buy blank or thank-you notes in bulk. It’s as easy as searching “thank-you cards” on Amazon and buying your favorite pack. (Don’t forget to stock up on stamps, too!) Or, you could go digital using the Postagram app for iPhone: It lets you type up a quick thank-you note to someone, snap a photo, and then they receive an actual, physical card.
Here’s a thank-you note template from Hallmark.
3) Schedule all your appointments.
Go see your doctor, your dentist, and your barber or hair stylist. Take your pet to the vet for a check-up. Get the oil changed in your car. Think of all those minor inconveniences you just can’t seem to get to when you’re on your regular schedule, and check them off the list. (Or at least schedule them for the future.)
4) Make reservations for future plans and trips.
Whether you have a whole trip coming up or even just a dinner, spend some time doing the thoughtful research you may not otherwise have time to do — and make reservations as far in advance as possible. These things can end up sneaking up on you, so making plans early helps guarantee you won’t lose out on some cool opportunities. Not to mention, it’ll leave you feeling less stressed out down the line.
5) Get your planner or calendar organized for the new year.
Did you get a new planner or calendar for the upcoming year? The holidays are a perfect time to fill it out with the appointments and trips you’ve already planned. When you’re not spending time on everyday work tasks, you can experiment with new organizational formats such as the bullet journal to make sure you’re as productive as possible when you head back to the office.
6) Talk to your friends and family about what you do.
While you should take advantage of the time you have away from work to dial back and focus on other parts of your life, you don’t need to remove work from your mind completely. Talking about what you do with the people you love is different from actually doing it. Work is such an important part of our lives and takes up a huge chunk of our waking hours, so sometimes sharing that with family and friends can actually be a bonding exercise.
If your friends and family aren’t familiar with what you do or are interested in learning more, now’s a great time to fill them in on what you do all day, why you like it (or don’t like it), and what you’re hoping to do in the future. Who knows, you could pick up some great insights from people who are removed from your day-to-day.
(Inbound marketers, feel free to steal some ideas from “5 Ways to Explain Inbound Marketing to Your Family.”)
7) Call your long-distance friends.
You know that list of friends and family members you’ve been meaning to catch up with, but never seem to find the time? Open your phone, find a comfortable spot to sit, and give them a call with your full attention. Now’s the perfect time to connect with people you don’t see regularly but want to stay in touch with.
8) Start building a habit.
Some say it takes 21 days to build a habit. Others say it takes a lot longer. But exactly how long it takes doesn’t really matter. The point is, you have to put the work in up front if you want a habit to stick. So why not use the holidays to get started?
Whether you want to start flossing every day or writing in a journal before bed each night, take the time during your downtime to start habit-forming and set yourself up for success.
9) Learn a new skill for your job.
Most people have a skill they’ve always wanted to learn to advance their career, but simply haven’t gotten around to.
Ever wanted to learn basic coding? Codecademy’s HTML/CSS courses can be finished over the course of a holiday without interrupting family time.
Ever wanted to learn your way around Photoshop? Start by following along with a beginner’s tutorial like the one in this blog post. Unsure how to make anything besides a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel? Experiment with some Excel resources in this blog post. (And if you’re a marketer who’s not sure where to start, here’s a free ebook that analyzes today’s most in-demand marketing skills.)
If you really don’t have the time to dig into a new skill, you can at least use the time to set yourself up for starting to learn one in the new year. Spend some time browsing conferences or classes you could take and figuring out where you can fit them into your schedule.
10) Learn a new skill not for your job.
Skills that aren’t related to your job are usually even more fun to learn. What about learning how to paint art to decorate your home? Taking a new type of workout class? Learning a new language with an app like Duolingo — perhaps for a country you’ll be traveling to this year?
Try to pick something that uses parts of your brain that you don’t usually tap into during the workday. It can do wonders for your happiness, creativity, and wellbeing — and hey, you may even find a new passion or meet people who end up making a huge impact on your life.
11) Catch up on reading.
Here’s a classic but essential vacation tip: Catch up on those books or articles you’ve been wanting to get to so badly. It’s really hard to find time to read when you’re busy with work, but now that you’re on vacation, you can cuddle up with a blanket and a book. If you’re looking for suggestions, check out this list of must-read marketing books from TrackMaven.
12) Listen to podcasts.
Podcasts serve as an amazing way to pass the time on planes, trains, and automobiles during the heavy travel season. The key is picking and downloading what you want to listen to before you go on the trip, when you have WiFi. That way, you’re not draining your battery and data while on the move.
We recommend a good mix of genres: business, comedy, true crime, etc. Here are two lists of exceptional podcasts we’ve put together in the past year: “Want to be a Better Social Media Marketer? Listen to These 10 Podcasts” and “10 of the Best Podcasts About Business and Management.”
13) Organize your inbox.
There are a lot of ways to organize your inbox. If you use Gmail, my personal favorite is the Klinger method for getting to inbox zero and staying there. If inbox zero isn’t your cup of tea, here’s a list of 14 of the best tools for organizing your inbox.
Organizing your inbox isn’t the same as checking email, though. Don’t get sucked in! Organize your inbox, and then log off and enjoy your break. Don’t forget to let your colleagues and clients know you’ll be out — Here are some creative out-of-office messages we love.
14) Volunteer.
Serving others has a long list of intangible benefits, like pride, satisfaction, accomplishment, connections with others, strengthening your community, and improving the lives of others. There are health benefits, too: Along with social benefits, a growing body of research shows there’s a strong relationship between volunteering and physical health.
Don’t have a specific cause in mind? Check out your local library, youth center, animal shelter, homeless shelter, or hospital to see if they’re in need of volunteers. VolunteerMatch.org is another great place to find good causes in your local community for a wide variety of time commitments.
15) Find a quiet space to let your mind wander.
When we’re deep in our work routines, it can be hard to tear ourselves away from our immediate tasks and goals. But not removing ourselves from these things can mean we miss out on seeing interesting new connections and developing innovations. This is especially true during the busy weeks leading up to the holidays.
Take some time to remove yourself from your day-to-day — even from your family and friends — to be alone and reflect. Daydream about being your own customer, or your competitor, or what it’s like to be the product you produce. Analyze how you’ve been spending your time over the past few months and whether you’d like to make changes in the upcoming year.
16) Get exercise in.
I’m not going to get into the benefits of exercise (or we’d be here for a while), but the holiday season is an especially hard time to keep a consistent workout routine. Factors like cooler temperatures, less daylight, busy travel schedules, and food-oriented gatherings can all throw off your schedule. But staying active — even just a little bit each day — can be easy and fun. The American Heart Association recommends 40 minutes of aerobic exercise three to four times per week.
Not an athlete? Physical activity doesn’t have to be intense. Find an activity like walking, shoveling snow, vacuuming — heck, even shopping — that gets the blood flowing. Something is always better than nothing. And when you head back to the office, keep it up — here are 10 ways to sneak in exercise at work.
17) Set goals for next year.
It’s amazing how quickly the New Year can sneak up on you. Set aside some time during the holidays to reflect on the past year and make goals for the new one. Setting goals gives you a baseline for measuring success, and the motivation to stay on course when things get crazy.
Setting goals can be as simple as creating two lists: one of your accomplishments this past year, and one of your goals for the next. To get more specific, you can break larger goals into smaller ones by month. If you want to really dig in to your goals and ground them in reality, try setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound) and make a plan for staying on course.
18) Do any work-related tasks in the morning.
Although it’d be ideal to leave all your real work for when you’re back in the office, some people simply get more stressed out when they’re disconnected. The thought of missing an important email, or even just returning to an inbox that’s bursting at the seams, can be incredibly daunting for some.
If you’re one of those people, use the morning hours when everyone else is asleep to get your work-related tasks done. By the time everyone wakes up, you’ll have checked off a few key to-dos, and will be able to focus on spending time with family and friends.
19) Watch a documentary.
Holidays are a time for binge-watching all the TV you don’t have time for during the work grind, and we won’t begrudge you that. But when you’re ready for a break, check out a new documentary film. There are documentaries on almost every subject imaginable, and you might learn about a topic or issue that inspires you. Thrillist recommends several here.
20) Prepare meals in advance.
It’s typically healthier and more affordable to make your meals than to buy them, but when you’re busy with work, it’s hard to make time to prepare wholesome meals for yourself and your family. If you’re taking a staycation this holiday season, spend some time preparing meals that can be frozen or refrigerated to eat on the go or at the office. Here are some make-ahead breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes, including vegan and gluten-free choices.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
What other ideas do you have for using your downtime during the holidays? Share with us in the comments.
Gboard, now available for Android
Starting today, Google Keyboard on Android is getting a new name — and so much more. Gboard has all the things you love about your old Google Keyboard — speed and accuracy, Glide Typing and voice typing — plus Google Search built in. You can search and send information, GIFs, emojis and more — right from your keyboard. As an added bonus, we’ve added multilingual typing to help you switch languages on the fly.
Search and share, right from your keyboard
It shouldn’t be that hard to search and share on your phone — and with Gboard, it isn’t.
You can search Google and share results right from your keyboard — anything from flight times and weather to news. Gboard also predicts possible searches that may be relevant to you. Text a friend “Let’s meet if the weather looks good” and see a prediction for “Weather”. With one tap, you can share today’s weather with your friend and meet up for your next adventure.
You can also search and share emoji and GIFs. Instead of scrolling and scrolling to find ? or ?, just search “monkey” to find that emoji you want. Or, find a GIF for the perfect reaction. GIF sharing works today in Google Messenger, Allo and Hangouts, with more apps coming soon as developers add image keyboard support.
So the next time you’re texting a friend your favorite cat video or news of the day, you don’t have to leave you app. Just search and send — right from your keyboard.
Smarter and faster typing
Gboard is assisted by machine learning to make typing faster and easier, including improved Glide Typing, predictions and autocorrections. And for our multilingual users, communication on a keyboard has never been easier — Gboard will now autocorrect and suggest from any of your enabled languages, so you can type in multiple languages within the same conversation without manually switching between them. Just select your languages and type.
Gboard will work in more than 100 languages as it rolls out today, and will be coming to more languages over the coming months. Get Gboard from the Play Store to swipe, search and emoji away.
Google Warns Against Automated Queries, What Does This Mean for Third-Party Tools? by @MattGSouthern
Google’s Gary Illyes issued a reminder this week that sending automated searches to Google is against the Terms of Service.
The post Google Warns Against Automated Queries, What Does This Mean for Third-Party Tools? by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Using Kissmetrics to Find Your Most Valuable Marketing Campaigns
So you converted 3.1% of your visitors last month?
Awesome! How many of them spent more than $100 on their purchase? Or how many were on your Enterprise plan?
And how many of the 3.1% added a coupon to their order?
How many of them came from your Facebook ad campaign?
Don’t know?
That’s a problem.
Here’s why surface-level analytics can lead to bad decisions, and how the Kissmetrics Funnel Report can answer some questions that lead to better analysis and decision making.
How Bad Marketing Decisions Can Get Made
Let’s take this scenario:
You, the Director of Marketing for an e-commerce company, recently launched a Fall ad campaign on Twitter, Facebook, and AdWords. A month later you notice that your purchase conversions increase 1%, so you pour more money on all three ad platforms without knowing which campaigns led the most to conversion.
90% of the boost in conversions may be because of the Facebook ad campaign, but without doing research you’ll put more money on the effective campaign and burn money on the 2 ineffective marketing campaigns.
In another scenario, you see that most of your large purchases ($150+) come from AdWords, yet neglect that channel because it brought fewer conversions (when what you’re missing is fewer conversions but higher total purchase volume).
Here’s how to see the whole picture with the Kissmetrics Funnel Report.
Viewing a Funnel With Revenue Data
Continuing with the e-commerce marketing director scenario, let’s say we just ran our Summer advertising campaigns. We had campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, and AdWords. We’ve tagged all three with UTMs, which makes for pretty easy tracking across Kissmetrics and other SaaS platforms. We want to see which campaigns brought customers who spent at least $100.
We’ll need to create a fairly elaborate funnel. Here’s what we’ll do.
The first step is to look for people who came from an advertisement. We’ll have the first event be “Ad campaign hit”.
We’ll add additional conditions to this event. This is where we’ll narrow in on these three campaigns and be able to distinguish between each. We’ve tagged each campaign with a respective Campaign source. Twitter has campaign source twitter, Facebook is facebook, and AdWords is tagged as adwords.
Let’s first enter the Twitter campaign source:
We’ll add an Or condition by clicking here:
We’ll then do the same thing, but this time enter the Facebook campaign source:
Finally, the + button you see on the right allows us to add another condition. We’ll click it, create the same condition but this time use the AdWords campaign source:
Next we’ll add a step the funnel. Since most people visiting an ecommerce website visit a product page before adding an item to their cart and purchasing, we’ll add those next two steps:
The final step, Purchased, needs some conditions added to it. We’ll look for the customers that have made a purchase of at least $100.
First we’ll add the step:
Click that arrow button on the right and we’ll add that we’re looking for purchases being at least $100:
Keep in mind that your naming of events and properties will probably differ than what I’m showing in this example. We don’t have any default events or properties named Purchased, order amount, added item to cart, etc. You can set this up with a little help from a developer.
UTMs and Ad Campaign Hit are tracked automatically, however.
So here’s how our funnel looks:
That’s it! Now it’s time to run the report and see our data:
This is looking at all the ad campaigns together. We have pretty good traffic – a little over 26k people, of which about 2k converted to purchasing. Given that all of these people are spending at least $100, we’ve likely made some solid returns on these campaigns (if we were able to keep costs down).
To select each campaign’s performance, we’ll simply click on each of the three Ad campaign hits. Let’s click the top one, which is Twitter’s ad campaign:
The first couple steps of this funnel perform well, but falls off pretty quickly. Only 88 people purchased, leading to a putrid 1.1% conversion rate. This means that the other campaigns are likely performing better. Let’s check Facebook’s campaign performance:
We can see that this campaign is performing much better than our Twitter campaign, with about 10x the conversion rate. We’ll have to check what we’ve spent on both campaigns. If we’ve spent more on Twitter (with fewer views) we know we should definitely cut off ad spend there or try new a new ad set.
Finally, let’s look at the AdWords campaign performance:
This one is performing even better than AdWords (although both are performing very very well). We achieve a 12.3% conversion rate off about 3,400 visits, making this the highest-converting campaign of the three. We’ll see what we’re spending to see if it delivers a better ROI than the Facebook (and keep in mind that each of these orders are over $50).
What to do with This Data
This data provides great information – we see which campaigns are performing well and which are falling short. We can cut off the ineffective campaigns or try different ads on the platform.
And since these are valuable customers, we’ll want them coming back to purchase again. To remarket to them with ads or drip campaigns, we’ll just click on the Purchased button to find all the people that have purchased:
We’ll click those 2,126 people and we can export the list to MailChimp, a CSV, or create retargeting ads.
Where Are Your Marketing Dollars Best Spent?
Want to get more high-paying customers?
First find out where they’re coming from.
With the Funnel Report, you’ll be able to breakdown each marketing campaign and easily track the performance of each. And with the ability to further drill down by only viewing campaigns with high or low revenue from each, you’ll be better able to track ROI.
About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager at Kissmetrics.
Getting into the Flow: How and Why All Profit-Minded Marketers Should Document User Flows
In the zone. Feeling it. In the groove. Zeroed in. A state of flow.
We’ve all been there (hopefully) at some point in our lives. It’s almost magical. When it all comes together, and everything slides effortlessly from point A to point B. Athletes, writers, speakers, artists, chefs, doctors, musicians, teachers.
And users…if you’ve done your job properly.
The “flow” in this case is the free and easy path a user (i.e. your customer) takes on your website to do something: make a purchase, sign up, download, subscribe, or whatever. They also want it to be effortless.
Also known as the user journey, the flow must reflect their needs and their preferred route. Not yours. You have to put yourself in their shoes.
Flow Interrupted
Think about a time when a website felt clunky, confusing, or downright unfriendly. There you were trying to do something – get information, buy a product, download a case study – and you couldn’t get it done.
The link wasn’t where you expected it. They asked for details you felt were unnecessary. There was no form or button. It all felt counterintuitive.
That’s flow interrupted. It’s like slamming into a brick wall.
That business designed that page with themselves – not you – in mind. Big mistake. Why? Because you most likely bounced. Left. Bolted for greener pastures on a more user-friendly site.
Had they given any thought to user flow, they would have identified and removed those obstacles for you. Blown up that brick wall.
Instead, they’re left wondering why their conversion rate is so damn low.
The Modern Marketer
Your job is to get the right product in front of the right people at the right time. That product may be a physical object, or a service, or a lead magnet like an infographic, ebook, white paper, or email newsletter. Doesn’t matter.
We live in a multi-channel marketing ecosphere. There’s analog (the real world: billboards, flyers, radio and television spots, direct mail) and digital (everything online: organic search, PPC, social media, email). Much of your analog and all of your digital efforts are probably aimed at getting them to your virtual porch.
When they do arrive at your site, how often are they ready to commit (buy or sign up)? If you answered “rarely”, ten points for Gryffindor.
You need to get them through the door and guide them down the corridor to the sale. But here’s the catch: there’s more than one door.
User flows allow you to give them everything they need to make it down their corridor without hitting any walls or dead ends.
To get started, you need to identify their entry point.
Step 1 – The Many Doors of Arrival
Think about a house. If you were giving directions to someone entering a huge mansion on how to find your study (you live in a palatial estate in this example, just because), a lot would hinge on where they come in, right?
Front door. Back door. Sliding door in the media room. Cellar window. Through the vents. It makes a difference.
The same is true for visitors to your website. Users can arrive via a number of different avenues:
Organic search
PPC
Social Media
Email
Direct Link
Referral Link
Depending on their point of entry, they’ll have different wants, needs, and goals. Once you determine the door, you next need to consider the objective.
Step 2 – The Point of it All
You have goals. And so do your visitors. Sometimes they align perfectly, and sometimes you need to find the common ground between them. The trick is to not let your objective take precedence over theirs.
Typically, a business goal is to get the sale, or get the contact details, or get someone to sign up for something.
Think about what you want them to do, of course, but also consider what they want. The user goals are an equal member in this partnership. You want the sale. They want a solution to a problem or to fill a need or desire they have.
That is, eventually they want a solution or to fill a need. Depending on how they arrive, their immediate needs may be very different. Each channel gives you hints as to their intentions, their familiarity with your brand, and what they’re after on this visit.
The Direct Route
A user arriving via a direct link – either entering your URL into their browser, or clicking on a bookmark – is usually after whatever it is you’re selling. They know you already, they probably purchased in the past, and they’re looking for more. Perfect.
Your goal – make a sale – and their goal – make a purchase – are in total agreement. Your user flow here might be a simple homepage > product page > cart > confirm > thank you.
To knock down walls for them, you need to ensure your homepage has clear and visible links to your product and/or category pages, that each product page has an obvious “Add to Cart” button, and that your checkout procedure is fast, easy, and frictionless.
But what about someone coming in the organic door?
The Organic Route
They don’t know you. They may be on a fact finding mission. They may (and probably do) have tons of questions, concerns, and reservations. You’re just one SERP link of many.
Using the direct user flow here would be disastrous. They’re not ready for that.
Their door from the SERP may have them arrive on your homepage, or a special landing page. But then what? What do they want and need most at this stage?
Your ultimate goal stays the same: make the sale. But their goal is quite different in this flow. They want info. Answers. Evidence.
In order to get the conversion down the line, your goal and their goal must intersect, so your objective at this point should be to wipe out any hesitation they may have about you and your brand.
Include clear details about yourself, links to your About and Contact page, FAQs, social proof in the sidebar, and more. Put yourself in their shoes. What do they need to feel better about doing business with you?
The organic user flow might be SERP link > special welcome page > email subscription, or SERP > homepage > about > blog > contact form.
Knock down walls. Keep them moving forward.
PPC door? They want more information of that particular product or service, and a quick way to purchase it. Referral link door? They likely want at least a bit more background on you and your company.
Each arrival channel has its own set of unique wants, needs, and typical objectives. How do you find them?
Step 3 – Ask and Ye Shall Receive
You ask questions. Lots of them.
Think about visitors arriving from each avenue and ask yourself:
What needs, wants, desires, or pain points do they have? Why?
What are they most looking for in a solution? What features matter most to them?
What questions might they have about the product or service? What hesitation or concern might they have? What separates you from the competition?
What do they need to propel them to action?
What is the emotion driving them?
To find the concrete details, look to your existing customers. Ask them, interview them, survey them. Get the information, then craft user flows that deliver what they need at the right moment. That’s the only way to successfully nudge visitors down each hallway.
The trick is to close the gaps, the missing information, at exactly the moment when they need it, and to avoid throwing anything else at them. Too much is as bad as too little.
Be clear, highlight benefits over features, offer evidence to support your claims and value props, and make it easy. Ridiculously easy. Each step should naturally guide them to the next one.
Step 4 – Put it All Together
You’ve got the entry point, their immediate objective, and answers to their most pressing questions and needs. Time to get creative.
Document each user flow so you can see it from start to finish.
Pen/Markers and Paper (it’s a classic)
Whiteboard
Corkboard and Post-Its
Programs like UXPin, Slickplan, Lucidchart, Lovely Charts, Mindjet, or any other flowchart/mind map software
A user flow consists of individual pages where something takes place (they click a link, or submit a form, or download, or add to cart, or whatever).
On every page, at every stage, they see and do something. It’s your job to determine what they need to see in order to get them to take the necessary action. A page may have more than one “next step”, and each one should be mapped out. Focus on the user, their needs, and how they may react to every step.
State Diagrams
You could sketch each step using state diagrams. These represent each page with two simple details: what the user sees (above the line), and what the user does (below the line).
State diagrams boil it down to its essence, and make a streamlined flow for any user arriving via any door. As a marketer, your task is to make the “sees” as dynamic, engaging, and convincing as possible to get the user to “do”.
Ask the questions. Find the answers. Guide them.
Stacked Flows
Basic user flows don’t automatically get you to the end goal: the sale. To do that, you may have to start stacking flows on top of each other.
A user arriving via an infographic you shared on Facebook may have a social media > landing page > email subscription flow. Nothing wrong with that…but the number of people on your email list doesn’t pay the bills.
So stack that flow. Once you have someone’s details and (more importantly) permission to contact by email, they enter a second flow beneath that one:
Receives email > visits promotion landing page > purchase.
The stacked flow here includes the social media acquisition flow, and the nurture flow. Together, they keep the user goal in mind at all times, but eventually leads them to your main goals…the sale, business growth, and more revenue.
User flows are tiered. The first layer may get them to sign up or share their contact details, which brings them to the second layer, where you hope to make a sale. That’s stacked flows at work, and it allows for your goal and their goal to intersect as needed.
Did you know? With Kissmetrics, you can track the effectiveness of your online advertising. Optimize your marketing by knowing which campaigns perform and which don’t. Check out our infographic to learn more.
Monitor and Manage
Once you’ve created and implemented a user flow, you can work to optimize it with A/B testing (using a tool like Optimizely) and/or real user feedback (get people to try your website while you literally watch over their shoulder…does it work for them? Does it seem intuitive? A service like UserTesting can connect you with testers if you don’t have anyone you can ask).
Google Analytics provides a visual Users Flow report under Audience on the Reporting tab. It provides visitor data – by source, country, language, behavior, advertising, social, and more – and how they navigated through your site.
The green boxes are pages on your site, the curved grey lines are the movement between them, and the red lines shows how many users left from that page. The first column will change depending on your selected option (this screenshot is using Source).
Discover exactly how visitors are interacting with your site, and whether they’re hitting dead ends or unnecessary roadblocks. Blow up those walls.
Identify bottlenecks, pages with high exits rates, and pages that should be directly linked based on user behavior. What do the flows tell you? What do users want that you’re not currently providing?
Compare the actual flows that exist with your documented user flows. Do they correspond? Let your users guide you on this.
Documenting user flows can help you build a website that works for all visitors, regardless on which door they come in. It puts you in the mind of your customers, blowing up walls and creating the clear pathways they want to follow. Get them from Point A – arrival – to Point B – conversion – by proactively giving them what they need when they need it.
Use flows for onboarding, navigation, design, and virtually every other decision about your onsite marketing. They’re the ones walking down the corridor.
What do they want/need at each stage? What do you need them to do? How can you gently nudge them that way? Answer those questions, and you’re primed for success. A straightforward, frictionless user flow means satisfied users, more conversions, and a bigger bottom line.
Have you documented your user flows? What tips, tricks, and tools did you use? Leave your comments below.
About the Author: Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, their Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Google My Business adds new photos insights
Compare how many views your Google Maps photos get versus how many your competitors get in Google My Business insights.
The post Google My Business adds new photos insights appeared first on Search Engine Land.
New Google My Business Insights: Compare Photo Views Against Competitors by @MattGSouthern
As of December 15, insights are now available for photos in Google My Business.
The post New Google My Business Insights: Compare Photo Views Against Competitors by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How to Streamline Lead Nurturing Campaigns With Customer Data
Market2Lead reports that “nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle.”
By building an active relationship with buyers, your team is equipped to guide people through the sales journey. An engaged seller can anticipate consumer needs and customize the overall experience.
“With the ability to create and apply customer data assets, it’s possible now to marry the content, advertising and marketing offers into a personalized journey that is relevant to each individual user rather than just large blocks of user demographics,” says Tom Wilde, chief product officer at Cxense.
Integrate data into your lead nurturing campaigns. Let’s explore a few techniques below.
Progressive Profiling
The process of collecting data plays an integral role in lead nurturing. You can’t gain every piece of consumer information in one interaction.
We live in a world where consumers don’t dish out personal details easily. People must trust your brand and know you won’t sell their data to third parties.
Of course, social proof is one way to earn consumer trust. You can post security badges and publish guarantee statements to reassure the shopper.
Another way to gain the shopper’s confidence is with progressive profiling. It’s a “lead acquisition technique that involves requesting one or two pieces of information at a time, starting with basic firmographics (e.g. company size, job title, industry) and leading into deeper, more targeted questions later in the relationship.”
Progressive profiling eases your brand into a relationship with the consumer. Similar to a first date, where you wouldn’t ask for the person’s entire life history, this tactic slowly gets consumers comfortable with releasing information.
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In this example, the visitor first fills out name and email to submit. The next time they fill out the form, those fields (name and email) are filled and two additional fields, Company and Phone Number are added so the visitor fills those in.
For B2B brands, ask prospects for their name and email initially. Then, request for their company’s name and phone number. After that, you may want to know their business industry and budget.
This less intrusive approach alleviates the friction in the lead nurturing campaign. Instead of hesitating to enter details, buyers are more willing to give some information right now.
“Short and sweet produces the best results when it comes to form conversion. So by reducing the number of fields with progressive profiling from 7 to, say, 3, you reduce the pain and increase the conversion rate,” states Bob Ruffolo, founder and CEO of IMPACT.
Experiment with progressive profiling in your campaigns. The more data you gather, the better you can serve your customers.
Tailoring Communication
As your team begins to contact leads, you must know which particular phrases and expressions connect with your audience. Tailoring your communication offers an opportunity to speak directly to the individual.
What you say to your buyers matters. It’s not enough to talk about certain product features or attempt to impress them with industry jargon.
People want authenticity that presents itself in their language. And that language determines whether they continue to stay engaged.
Discover words that connect to buyers by monitoring sales conversations and observing in-person nonverbal cues. Each interaction empowers your team to walk in the shoes of the consumer.
“Collect data at every point of interaction, get to know your customer and focus on how you can help deliver more value. This open feedback loop will create happier customers and ultimately, a better product,” writes Denise Chan, content marketing manager at Mailjet.
Communication centers around what your team brings to the dialogue, too. It’s perfectly acceptable to listen and learn from your consumers, but you also need to add value to their lives.
That valuable offer is usually something that will motivate them to take an interest in your brand. It will build trust and establish a stronger relationship.
Unbounce indulges its prospects with case-filled ebooks that provide solutions to their most pressing needs.
Communication is vital to mastering your nurturing campaigns. Personalization adds to the customer experience.
Know When to Engage
Customer data helps companies shape the lead nurturing process and adapt to buyers’ behaviors and desires. Knowing when, where, and how to interact with consumers gives your team a competitive edge.
By examining behavioral data, your sales teams can discover the best times to conduct outreach calls and send emails. You must accommodate for time zone differences, national holidays, and cultural expectations.
Hubspot reports that “the odds of a lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after an inbound lead converts on your website.”
However, most companies fail to respond to leads in a timely fashion. Research revealed that 42 hours is the average response time among U.S. companies that responded within 30 days.
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Remember that lead nurturing is an ongoing process. So, avoid rushing the lead to the next stage. And encourage your sales team to work together to help prospects. A buyer may be more receptive to a specific representative, or a particular deal may involve a special skill set.
Even with the competitive nature of hitting sales goals, your staff must focus on satisfying the consumer.
“The best piece of advice for lead nurturing that you can follow is to establish realistic expectations early on in the process. Let people know that this is a team effort and that there’s not going to be an immediate windfall of sales opportunities at the beginning,” says John Shea, a sales leader and strategist.
Use data to learn when to approach your prospects. The timing is just as important as what you communicate.
Matching Purchasing Intent to Solutions
What problem is the buyer trying to solve? With customer data, your team can match the buyer’s purchasing intentions to your product solutions.
The University of South Australia found that the timeliness and quality of information combined with trustworthiness have a positive influence on information usefulness, which helps predict consumer purchase intention.
Sometimes, the best option for uncovering intent isn’t by directly talking to consumers. You may need to monitor online communities where buyers express their honest opinions to their friends and family members.
Social media is a good starting point. Search for specific keywords related to your product or sift through direct mentions from your consumers. Invest in a social media listening tool, like HootSuite, to help with this research.
In the tweet below, a customer asks Zendesk if the business plans to offer an Apple Watch app. For this customer service software company, these requests may lead to new services for consumers.
@danburdi No plans yet, but we'll post about it for sure! 🙂 Please follow this link for Zendesk updates: https://t.co/tXEQXabxbQ
— Zendesk (@Zendesk) November 26, 2016
Figure out what intrigues buyers about your product. With multi-use services, it’s essential to learn how people benefit. You may be surprised to learn that consumers have found a different way to gain value.
“Understanding consumer intent and meeting their needs in the moment are the keys to winning more hearts, minds, and dollars…the brands that understand and respond to intent are better positioned to be there and be useful for all of their potential customers, not just those that fit an age and gender profile,” states Lisa Gevelber, vice president of marketing at Google.
Understanding consumer purchasing intent helps guide your interactions with the buyer. Be ready to offer a solution to clinch the sale.
Lead Nurturing With Data
Move your prospects down the sales funnel. Merge data into your lead nurturing strategy for higher conversions.
Use progressive profiling to learn more about your buyers. Tailor communication to sell the benefits of your products. Decide the best time to initiate engagement. And continue to understand why people use your services.
Guide your lead nurturing campaigns with data at the forefront.
Did you know? With Kissmetrics, you can track the effectiveness of your online advertising. Optimize your marketing by knowing which campaigns perform and which don’t. Check out our infographic to learn more.
About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.
Google studying ways to deal with offensive search suggestions & results
Facing criticism over “fake news,” inappropriate search suggestions and more, the search company is looking for long-term and comprehensive solutions.
The post Google studying ways to deal with offensive search suggestions & results appeared first on Search Engine Land.
3 Steps to Grow a Successful Live Chat Program
“We got a $300,000 opportunity this week from live chat on our site.”
I’m filled with pride as I hear our VP of sales make this statement. I worked hard for six months to get the sales team invested in live chat as a sales channel and I’m finally seeing the results.
It wasn’t easy, though. For many weeks, I sat in meetings or sent detailed reports trying to explain that while we had dozens of leads coming in through live chat, they weren’t being followed up on. I sadly watched the leads’ value diminish the longer they sat in the database.
But now that the sales team members were committed, live chat was proving to be a lucrative channel. I had members of the sales team asking me every week to add them as agents. They wanted in. They wanted in, because the most valuable leads are those that are on your website.
People visiting your website are there looking for something. If you can provide them with the answer they are seeking, you are going to win their favor. That’s where live chat comes in. The ability to connect directly with your visitor, at the moment they have questions about your product is an incredible driver of marketing-qualified leads and sales.
However, you only get out of live chat, what you put in: It’s difficult to realize the kind of results above without joint investment from your marketing and sales organizations. So, how do you get everyone involved? Below are the steps to getting leadership, sales, and marketing, on the live chat train.
1) Get People On Board With Live Chat
Identify an Owner and Then Determine the Benefits
You need a live chat champion. The champion will most likely live in the marketing team. Once this person is identified, it’s critical that they set expectations with leadership, the marketing team, and the sales team regarding what live chat will accomplish.
It depends on the stage and structure of your business, but there is a likely a gap that live chat will fill. Define your initial expectations for the benefits that chat will provide. Here are a few suggestions.
Improved understanding of site effectiveness
Better insight on site visitors
Increased site conversion rate
Increased # of leads
Increased # of MQLs
More sales opportunities
Choose one of these improvements as a goal and make it your focus for the roll out and testing of live chat. Then, set a specific amount of time and an approach to your test. At the end of that period, measure your results.
Test It Out
Get started with a trial. Most live chat providers have a trial and SnapEngage offers a 15-Day Free Trial. It’s incredibly easy to setup. The setup typically just requires adding a snippet of code to your website. Once you’re up and running, you can start to validate the improvements you’ve defined almost instantly.
As you conduct your test, there are a few ways to know if live chat is working:
You are chatting daily with your site visitors and chat volume is increasing
The bounce rate on the pages where chat is installed is decreasing
Marketing is driving conversions from visitor to lead through live chat
You learned something from your chat conversations about your market or how to improve your website
Your sales team closed a deal with a lead that came through live chat
The chat agents are consistently using the tool
Illustrate the Benefits
After you have conducted your test, report your findings and the improvements you experienced to the sales and marketing team. Then, project those improvements out over a longer period of time to provide a full picture of what the future with live chat might look like.
As I mentioned, people who use live chat as an acquisition and conversion channel often find it to be one of the most successful drivers of leads in regards to volume and quality. We’ve seen that clients who use chat, experience a 10-20% increase in conversion from visitor to lead. If you experience an increase in your site conversion rate of 10%, show the impact of that over time.
Here’s an example:
Without Live Chat
With Live Chat
Site Visitors/Mo
10,000
10,000
Conversion Rate
10%
20%
# of Leads
1000
2000
Qualification Rate*
36%
36%
Close Rate*
27%
27%
# of Customers
97
194
Ave. Revenue/Customer/Yr
$1000
$1000
Revenue/Yr
$97,000
$194,000
*http://blog.capterra.com/average-b2b-conversion-rate/
That’s a huge increase in revenue opportunity–nearly $100K per year–just by improving the conversion rate with live chat.
If you can illustrate these kinds of benefits to sales and marketing leadership, they will be pumped.
If you’re looking for more information to present to your sales and marketing leadership on live chat’s ability to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, you can also read our guide, How to Leverage Live Chat to Get More Out of Inbound Marketing.
2) Implement Successfully
Define ownership and accountability
For chat to be a successful channel for your business, accountability needs to be clear. Most importantly, there should be committed chat agents who will respond to inbound chats. Without that, chat provides no value.
Here is the most common accountability structure we see marketing and sales teams use when it comes to live chat:
Marketing or Marketing Operations: Frequently, marketing is the cheerleader of chat. In this role, they are commonly responsible for implementing, training, and measurement.
Lead or Business Development Reps (LDR/BDR): These are the committed chat agents. This team is responsible for managing the inbound chats, qualifying them, and then handing them off to sales.
Sales Account Execs: Once the leads have been qualified and passed along, sales is responsible for the following up right away and moving qualified leads through the sales process.
For companies with existing LDR/BDR teams, chat is a no-brainer. It provides the entry-level employees with a less intimidating way to interact with prospects and the opportunity to get familiar with the product and frequently asked questions they might encounter, but in a controlled environment, which prepares them for the phones.
For companies without an existing front line for sales, you can enlist sales reps, marketers, or office admins.
Another option is to do what SnapEngage does and make everyone responsible for chat. This approach provides an incredible inside view on the market, the questions prospects are asking, how people are navigating the website, and the first impression of the site and product.
Install Properly
Customize the design of your live chat tool
Having all the design elements on your site working in harmony helps to present a unified structure and visual appeal. It has also been shown to help drive engagement. Make sure that live chat aligns with your existing web presence and brand style guide.
Place chat on the most qualified pages
It’s possible to choose where your live chat panel appears and where it doesn’t. Taking a strategic approach to where you place live chat on your website will help gradually introduce your team to live chat and also help focus resources on your most qualified leads.”
Instead of installing across the entire website, install chat on only your most qualified pages. These are the pages that people who are further down the funnel are visiting, such as the product page, the pricing page, schedule a demo, or start a trial areas of your website.
Make it personal
Add names and pictures of your agents to make the experience more personal. It’s important to provide a human touch. By adding pictures and names, you establish credibility, which improves the likelihood of conversion.
Train Your Agents
It may sound obvious, but it’s important that you familiarize your chat agents with all of the features and settings. You can expect that live chat tools will have a general guide to chat. But beyond the general overview, it’s useful to find the unique tools that are going to create efficiency and collaboration for your team. Most live chat tools have features such as:
Keyboard shortcuts to help make chatting more efficient
Canned responses to ensure that your chat agents are leveraging existing marketing content to answer common questions
Territory (or other) assignments and chat transfers to send chats to the proper team member
Integrate with your CRM
Much of the power of chat for marketing and sales comes with integration. SnapEngage integrates with several marketing and sales software providers, like HubSpot. These integrations allow you to store all of your prospect and customer communication history, including chat activities, in one place.
It also provides the seamlessness of assigning leads to the proper team members and the ability for those team members to see a history of lead interactions (including detailed transcripts), so you always know what’s been said. It’s also possible to include chat activity as a lead scoring criteria to support your lead qualification process.
3) Measure and Improve
Continual measurement and improvement is critical to the success of a live chat program. As you roll out the program, be sure to define accountability and set up a scorecard to measure performance on a regular cadence.
Each group and individual should have a clear understanding of who is accountable for what. Again, the most basic action that the group needs to be accountable to is responding to chats.
Also determine who will own measurement. When it comes to measuring how successful live chat is, you can start at a high level and look at volume and quality.
# of chats
% of visitor to chat
# of leads (from chat source)
% of chat to lead
If you want to go a bit deeper, you can follow your chat activity down the funnel and track a few sales-related metrics.
# of sales opportunities (from chat source)
% of lead to opportunity
$ in pipeline (from chat source)
# of closed sales (from chat source)
$ in sales (from chat source)
Other, more specific things to monitor and measure are chat performance by different criteria such as:
Site page
Visitor geography
Chat agent
Product
Etc.
You can derive a ton of valuable data about the effectiveness of live chat that will only help you optimize and improve your marketing and sales performance. It’s important to recognize that a live chat program isn’t a “set it and forget it” program.
Continual improvements can make a huge difference and will continue the interest and investment in live chat as a marketing and sales channel.
