Our monthly reports consist mainly of numbers. How much did we earn, what did we spend our customers’ money on, how many visits did our website have…

However, a journey consists of more than numbers. But from experiences, questions, moments of happiness and disappointments.

As you may already know, we don’t want investors. We go the way of “bootstrapping”, i.e. growing by our own efforts. Instead of getting bigger, we prefer to get better.

But are we really “bootstrapped” if we are still making losses after almost three years and Stefan, our founder, has to plug the holes with his own money? How long can that work, especially in times of looming recession?

There are many ways to save money. You can reduce marketing, for example. But you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. If everyone is cutting back on marketing, you should go all in. It will be more effective than ever before.

We hardly have any leeway when it comes to our IT and administration costs. There is nothing we can do without at the moment.

That leaves salaries.

It has taken years to build this team, and each and every individual contributes to its success. We want to avoid layoffs by all means.

What is left then?

The solution followed in a one-on-one meeting. Stefan said that we were not yet in a critical situation, but could get into one if we did not act now. We could still act from a position of strength.

Then Stefan asked me if I could imagine giving up part of my salary for a limited time.

As an employee, it’s a strange situation when your boss asks you if you can cut your own salary. Especially when he says, “Any number is fine. You know best how much you absolutely need”.

How would you react?

This may be difficult for many, but the decision was easy for me: As an employee, I know how much we actually make. I know how high our costs are. I know my boss’s salary (spoiler alert: CHF 0 to date). Do you also have this information at your workplace?

I cut my own salary from $5,500 so far to $5,000 in November and $4,500 from December (I live in Hungary, so we had agreed on the salary in USD at the time).

A pay cut is not a good feeling and can weaken your belief in success. It can feel like a step backward or maybe even the beginning of the end.

But I have all the data and I know what we are capable of and that our products have a promising future. So I am sure that this situation is only temporary and that we can overcome it together.

Update November 2023: In November 2023, we successfully reversed Joey’s pay cut in full. Read more about this in our Open Startup Report November 2023.

Der Beitrag When your boss asks for a pay cut erschien zuerst auf Friendly.

Background: Friendly Automate is based on Mautic, the most popular open source marketing automation software. Friendly is one of only six official partners of Mautic.

Almost a week ago, the long-awaited version 4.0 of Mautic – and therefore also of Friendly Automate – was released. In this article we present the most important new features.

1. Create emails more easily

With our brand new email builder, you can create beautiful, responsive emails with ease while having all the options to customize your content. It’s a true drag-and-drop system and will change the way you create your emails.

Some customers will already know the editor from the newer versions of Friendly Automate 3. The version 4.0 has again many improvements and bug fixes.

2. New email templates

Friendly Automate now comes with a set of new email templates that you can use 1:1 or use as the basis for your own customized template.

Sometimes less is more. The new Truly Personal template looks like a normal, handwritten email:

And: we have a new tutorial on how you can easily create your own templates – created by our new employee Kathrin Schmid!

3. Find the best email sending time

Marketing Automation relies heavily on email sending. Now you can easily evaluate what time your emails are most likely to be opened. Just add this chart to your dashboard:

4. More flexible contact import

a) Skip existing data

When you re-imported existing contacts, fields with existing data were overwritten with the new data.

Now you can specify whether the existing data should really be replaced. If you set the corresponding option to “no”, an existing field will be skipped if it already contains data. This gives you more control over what happens to your data during import.

b) Unique fields for companies as well

So far you could set fields for contacts as “unique ID”. This means that this field acts as a key. For example, if you define email address as “unique ID”, there can’t be two contacts with the same email address. If you import a contact with the same email address again, the contacts will be merged.

Now this is also possible for companies! If you set e.g. the company name as “unique ID”, there will be no second company with the same name – and contacts will be assigned to the correct company.

c) More precise merging of contacts

You can set more than one field as “unique ID” – e.g. email address AND phone number.

Previously, contacts were merged if one of these unique IDs matched. Now you can specify that contacts are only combined if both IDs match:

5. Helpful hints

In version 4.0 you get more and better hints to avoid mistakes.

a) Hint for required fields

You can create as many custom fields as you want for contacts and businesses in Friendly Automate – and set them as required fields.

If such a field is left blank, an error message appears next to the field when saving. If the field is further down, the message was often only visible after scrolling – and it was initially unclear why saving did not work. Now, the corresponding message appears directly next to the save buttons:

b) Hint for embedded segments

For example, if you use one segment (that is a filter for contacts) as a filter in another segment, both segments must be published. Otherwise it will not work.

Previously, however, there was no warning message if you withdrew a segment from publication that was used in another segment. Now you will be alerted.

6. More logical buttons

The buttons for saving contacts, workflows, emails, etc. have a more appropriate order and color scheme:

7. Getting lost can look good

Typos in a link happen again and again. Now you can define how this not found page (404 page) should look like. Just set it up in your settings!

8. Flexible tag management

Tags are an easy way to add information to contacts. This can be interests, source of acquisition or previous purchases.

Previously, it was only possible to add or remove tags from specific contacts. Also, the contacts could be filtered by tag, of course.

However, it was not possible to completely remove or rename certain tags from the system, or to display all tags as a list. Version 4.0 finally got a flexible tag management that allows exactly that:

One more thing: an App Store!

Last, but not least, Mautic respectively Friendly Automate includes an App Store! With it you will be able to install useful extensions with one click.

The feature called “Marketplace” is released in Friendly Automate 4.0 in a first version. Unfortunately, this version does not (yet) allow direct installation, but only provides an overview of the apps.

The goal is to give developers the opportunity to prepare and test their apps. In a future version, it will also be possible to install apps directly from the store.

You can find the Marketplace in Friendly Automate under Settings > Marketplace.

P.S. We will gradually roll out the new version to our customers as soon as we have tested it sufficiently. If you are already a customer and would like to be among the first to receive the new version, just get in touch with us

Der Beitrag Friendly Automate 4.0 Released: Here Are the 8 Most Important New Features erschien zuerst auf Friendly.

For me the best way is an interested one-to-one conversation with your potential customer. You enjoy a freshly brewed coffee together and just talk about how you can work together.

Unimaginable in times of the Internet given the huge number of potential customers. Unless you can bend time. Or you can automate.

Mass vs. Individual

If you can’t talk to all your leads personally, you can still establish individual communication with them.

There is a chance that your online marketing campaign will look like this if you focus on mass communication. You send out a nice newsletter twice a month and show all your visitors the same campaign banner on your homepage:

However, most of your leads may have different characteristics. They are in a different phase of the buying cycle, they have a different relationship with your brand and they may have a different interest at the beginning. So is it really a good idea to address everyone with the same message?

So Many Missed Opportunities

If you don’t send the right message at the right time through the right channel and with the right frequency, you’re missing valuable opportunities for more revenue:

Studies show that 70% of potential customers are not immediately ready to buy. The average customer journey has 12+ individual contact points.

Deliver the right message at the right time to the right person

Marketing Automation collects data on your leads and automates the delivery of the right message at the right time to the right person on the right channel:

This does not mean that you have to create 5-10 different newsletters to use marketing automation.

It means that you can trigger the right automation sequence when your potential customer needs a little push.

I would like to present a few examples of this:

From Unknown Visitor To Loyal Customer

By using the right triggers at the right time, you can advance your contacts in your sales funnel.

Unknown visitors without a known email address are hard to communicate with. But these unknown visitors can be turned into interested leads by using lead magnets and freebies.

As soon as you have possibilities to communicate with your leads, you can start an automation. You could do this by sending leads regular e-mails with information that might be of interest to them.

You can handle objections about price, quality or anything that might prevent them from completing their first order.

You can turn them into first-time buyers by giving them individual offers without jeopardizing your overall sales with general discounts.

As soon as someone opens their wallet, a special relationship starts. You have the chance to offer a great service, prove yourself and amaze your customer with your product or service.

Marketing automation will help you maintain the relationship. It gives you the tools to turn a first-time customer into a loyal customer by continuing to provide relevant offers and maybe special discounts based on their order history.

Reduce Churn and Raise Profitability

Winning new customers is one way to grow. A usually much cheaper option is to lose fewer existing customers.

Become aware of how much money you spend on advertising and customer acquisition. There is no easier way to get a better ROI than not losing a customer.

Marketing Automation collects data from website visits, email openings and clicks, giving you a complete picture of your individual customers’ current engagement levels. When engagement levels drop, automated retention campaigns allow you to reactivate customers and generate revenue that would otherwise be clearly lost.

Treat Your Contacts as Individuals

Most companies use some kind of web analytics to understand customer interest based on the data collected on the website.

If you send newsletters, you can also draw conclusions based on the emails that are opened and clicked. Not all page visits are equal. A recurring visit to your pricing page, repeated clicks on your terms of delivery, long time spent on certain products show clear interest.

Marketing automation takes the hard work out of the process by summarizing the contact’s activity into actionable information. With lead scoring or persona building, you can communicate differently with your contacts and ensure that your message is relevant. It’s easy to segment and create automations for specific groups of contacts based on their behavior.

Make Better Use of Your Sales Team

Automation can have an enormous effect not only on your income but also on your expenses.

A great advertising campaign could make champagne bottles pop in your marketing department.

At the same time, it can lead to your sales team having to work with numerous unqualified leads generated by irrelevant traffic.

Marketing Automation allows you to pre-filter certain contacts and have them pushed into your sales CRM only when they are qualified and ready to talk to a person.

This can work in both directions. Closed deals in your sales CRM can trigger automations that provide real value to the customer after the sale.

The Untold Secret Side Effect of Marketing Automation

Because email traffic is increasing every year, email service providers try to cut the noise.

They sort your email into different tabs like Primary, Promotions and Updates.

The filters are developed further every day. At first they were based on the content, that is, what was written in your email. Then it was the reputation – that means how well you have behaved as an email sender so far.

Today it is the relationship that matters most. It is determined by whether a person opens your emails and clicks. And that depends on how much data you collect, how well organized that data is and how you use it. In other words – how accurate your communication is. Better communication means better deliverability, more successful campaigns and higher ROI.

So marketing automation allows you to build better relationships with your contacts – automated and scalable.

Marketing Automation is closest to an honest, one-to-one conversation with your potential customer, while you enjoy a freshly brewed coffee together.

If you would like to learn more about how marketing automation can improve your business, please arrange a free initial consultation.

Der Beitrag What Is Marketing Automation? erschien zuerst auf Friendly.

Note: this article first appeared in the official blog of the open source software Mautic, on which Friendly Automate is based.

DIY and recipe blogs visits skyrocketed, and I also found myself listening to podcasts discussing how to make the most of the quarantine times.

While researching how to use the time the best, it came up that this wasn’t the first time civilization hit the pause button. I’m sure you also heard, Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1592 when he was quarantined during the great London plague. In another version of the story he wrote Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth as well during his lockdown times.

What a tryhard.

Turning To Translation

It is a consensus that keeping a tight, colorful schedule with recurring tasks helps you to survive the time in quarantine. With all the time on my hands and no talent in dramatical writing, I turned to the next coolest thing: translating. I used to translate movies and games into Hungarian for living years ago.

Being a daily user of Mautic and working for an agency that builds Mautic-based solutions for clients, my first thought was to translate it into Hungarian. By opening it to a new market, new developers could join the effort and contribute to the success by bringing their fresh ideas to the table. A benefit for everyone.

You see, there are a couple of countries on this planet that suffer from island mentality. Japan would be one of them, and that is because they are on an actual island. You can be sure that no product can be successful unless it’s translated into Japanese.

Hungarians are similar (and not only because we write the last name first as Japanese people do), they have one of the worst foreign language knowledge in all Europe. It is like a cultural island.

An international movie in Hungary won’t be ever successful without being dubbed, and Mautic cannot be successful without being translated. The issue is not with my talented developer countrymates’ language knowledge, but with the average marketing person who is the end user of Mautic, or the contacts who want to see the unsubscribe text in Hungarian.

I was thinking, if I have to do something every day not to go crazy, why not translate Mautic in the next 3 weeks?

Getting Started With Translating Mautic

The whole text was 4616 strings long and a couple hundred were done already. I ran through those, and realized that I might have to re-translate some of that as well. If I wanted to finish in 21 days, that makes it around 200 strings per day. That is not so bad!

I would never think it is so much fun to translate this software, which is partially made possible thanks to Transiflex, the translation tool. The whole text is broken up into bundles, which makes it digestible. You feel great after completing a bundle. You can filter by topics and dates, which gives you the ability to choose the area you want to progress with. You can always see how long a bundle is, so you can choose one according to the time available.

There is a gamification side of the tool as well. You see the progress on a leaderboard, and every day you pass another country, you feel good about yourself! At least if you are as competitive as me!

One day I completed 500 strings, just because I wanted to pass another country on the list. I was up until 2am! Bye, Finland!

When I started, I went for the oldest strings, which opened up the history books: I learned all the failed ideas of Mautic, witnessed by those long obsolete strings about chat and other abandoned features.

Once the ancient times were passed I reached a point in time, where someone must have realized that help text is really important, and suddenly every single button and function was explained. Translating those felt like getting a free training in Mautic. I would recommend it to everyone who wants to learn this software seriously.

I managed to keep myself to the schedule, and it took me around 3 weeks to finish everything.

4616 strings are actually 16,000 words. That is an equivalent of a short novel. It makes me no Shakespeare, but if I managed to spark an interest in Hungary, that results in great plugins, and amazing contributions, then my effort already made sense.

And that Shakespeare story. Turned out to be a hoax!

Der Beitrag 4,616 Sentences in 21 Days: How I Translated Mautic Into Hungarian During the Lockdown erschien zuerst auf Friendly.

But in a world where everyone does email marketing, you need to stand out to make sure this claim stays correct.

Sending a static monthly/weekly/daily newsletter will not help you to build relationship with your customers. In fact if not done right, you might see a constant decline in the open rates leading to lower conversions. This can greatly hurt your ROI.

You can only build relationships with sending customised emails to your clients based on their actions, interest and stage of your relationship. You want to talk differently to a person that just checked out your website and a person who is already your customer.

I often hear – “But I’m already converting”.

Yes, you are grabbing all the low hanging fruits, but you are leaving money on the table. Most customers need more work, but you don’t have to work more – you can automate that.

This is where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing automation should mirror your manual sales process, it should be customised to your company. But there are 5 automation campaigns, that fit almost any business. And I would like to share them here:

1. Welcome To Our Great Business

If a potential customer walks into your brick and mortar store, you greet them, show them around and introduce your business in couple of sentences.

You can do the same thing during the welcome email campaign. Introduce your company, services in couple of sentences, offer solutions to problems, brag about your achievements, ratings. Let your customers know, that you are a great business, that cares about them.

Another good strategy is to have a team spotlight with pictures and maybe bios. A look into behind the scenes, like:

In the next welcome email you can see how Joe uses the chance of undivided attention from the subscriber, and deep dives into the brand story, and fires up ways to segment customers. More about this in the next steps.

2. Nurture Your Leads, Get Friendly

You have the opportunity to continue the conversation in multiple emails, unlike in a store, where the shop assistant can only say 1-2 sentences before over-annoying the clients.

While you discuss your products/services from different angles, you can monitor what wakes interest in your readers. You can build personas based on their interest and continue your lead nurturing accordingly.

Did you see what Joe did in the previous example?

By placing the two links into one sentence so close to each other, you are offering a choice to the customer. They will click on the topic they are interested in, and you can use this information of their interest for building out the persona of the contact.

You can set up a filter in your nurturing campaign, and create personas in an intelligent way.

Your personal building campaign would consists from these type of blocks:

As you can see we are verifying two links in this example with a simple click-check:

If the contact clicked on the blog article, in the next step we add the vegetarian tag to this contact. You can repeat this and add multiple tags of course.

This is how the tag is adjusted:

Building personas helps you to target better, as we will discuss in the next step.

3. First Purchase Campaigns

Once you mapped out what may trigger the sale for the potential customer, you can focus on that in your communication. Is it the price? The payment terms? A certain property of the product? Send the proper sales arguments automatically.

This is the campaign, where you can communicate special offers, while you exclude your current customers. Your goal is to turn your customers into first time buyers. Once you deliver something, you’ll have a special relationship and you can turn them into return customers easier.

Here is a first purchase campaign example by Bliss, where they took a seasonal item, combined it with the best sellers. All items were a bit discounted to push the customer to move something into the cart.

4. Recover Lost Sales

Adding a product or service to the shopping cart is a clear way to express willingness to buy. Visitors doing so most likely can be turned into paying customers. Like it or not, some visitors will not make the decision to buy something right away. The reasons can be different, like:

• review competitor’s pricing
• first want to search for coupons
• want to be sure, that you are trustworthy merchant
• looking for reviews
• need spouse’s approval

You can address all of these points in an abandoned cart campaign. And you should, because according to the Baymard Institiute, this rate can be up to 50%. Even if you can’t turn everything into a sale, but 10% of it would would result in a 5% growth. Not too shabby.

Also don’t forget of the added benefit: by monitoring what triggers the sale after abandonment can contribute to improving your sales process, which results in more conversion in the first place.

This example focuses on shipping costs:

You don’t have to mention the product, it is not always the point. Once the customer liked you. They liked the personality your website reflected. You can try to appeal them the same way:

You can also throw an incentive on the table to address a price point:

The following example focuses on all the possible issues why the sale is abandoned at once:

To make a campaign like this is easier than you think.

If you have a separate page for the step before payment (added to cart) and after successful payment, then you can set up an abandoned cart campaign easily. You can just filter for the specific page hits in Friendly Automate, or any other tool you are using.

Once you place clients in the abandoned cart segment, you can any time communicate with them.

You can address all issues the client might have in a sequence of emails:

Once the purchase is successful, they will automatically disqualify from the segment, and your communication will stop.

Again: you have the opportunity to handle return customers differently, make them feel they are special, and treat the accordingly. Sales automation is not built for a sprint, it is helping you during a marathon.

5. Ask for a Review

Reviews are underestimated sales tools. In the world of anonymity, where it takes literally 5 minutes to spin up a web shop or create a sales page – legit reviews are the way to get ahead of your competition.

These reviews will help you to stockpile ammunition for your welcome series, increase your ranking, get more leads and strengthen the relationship with your customers.

Couple of rules apply:

1. They are doing You a favour. So keep it simple and make the review process fast and painless.
2. Use the communication to build your brand. You can ask for review and land a message at the same time.
3. Give them a small reward. You’ll get better response rate if you do so. You can create rewards which can be used for their next purchase, which generates extra income for you.

See the following example by CourseHorse:

Conclusion

Automation Is About Harvesting the High Hanging Fruits

If you have ever harvested apples, you know, that the top of the tree is the place where all the juicy ripe stuff is. Whoever brings the first ladder to the tree will have the opportunity.

The above mentioned automation examples help you to build a more intelligent business by reaching out better, lower churn rate, raise the number of purchases per visitor, raise basket value and build loyality.

You Are Using Automations Already

I bet you have out of office message set up, canned responses in Gmail or Outlook.

The initial investment into marketing automation used to be high, now there are tools, like Friendly Automate, which lowers the cost of entry dramatically.

And it got super-easy too: it doesn’t have to be more complicated than setting up a canned response or setting up an out of office message.

Want to have more examples?

We can get them to your inbox.

All automated.

Der Beitrag The 5 Marketing Automation Workflows That Every Company Should Have in 2020 erschien zuerst auf Friendly.