Your company’s value proposition articulates why customers should work with or buy from your company over a competitor. But exactly how does it do that? And how do you develop a value proposition that’s compelling enough to make an impact and increase conversion rates? 

In this article, we’ll cover what a value proposition is, why it’s important, and how to create a strong value proposition statement. 

What Is a Value Proposition?

A value proposition is a statement that communicates why customers should choose your products or services. 

More than just a product description, an effective value proposition explains how the product or service you provide creates value in a customer’s life. 

The best value propositions are clear, concise, and to the point. And they should be written in a language that customers will easily understand and resonate with. After all, a value proposition is your promise to customers of the value they are going to receive from your business. If they don’t understand your promise, how are they going to trust you?

Why Is It Important to Have a Great Value Proposition?

As illustrated with the LIFT Model by WiderFunnel, there are six key conversion factors to consider when evaluating the digital experiences you’re providing customers. 

The LIFT Model draws on a few factors including clarity, relevance, distraction, urgency, and anxiety. But at the heart of the model is the value proposition. 

Having a strong value proposition is essential for any business as it highlights key characteristics that separate you from competitors. If your customers know what separates you from the rest, it’s much easier for them to trust you. This, in turn, makes it easier for you to close a sale more consistently.

How Do You Develop a Great Value Proposition?

It’s important to create a Value Proposition Canvas before your write your value proposition statement. 

The Value Proposition Canvas is a visual tool created by Alex Osterwalder. Use this tool to help you position your product or service around the needs and wants of your customers. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to make a Value Proposition Canvas: 

Step 1: Create a customer profile to represent your target customer segment

It’s important to start with this section first so that the wants and needs of your customers can influence the overall canvas. 

Look at these three areas: 

Jobs to be done  

What is the job your customer needs to complete? What is the problem they’re trying to solve with your product or service?

Think beyond functional tasks. Include social and emotional tasks.  

 

Pain points 

For each job, what are the negative experiences associated with getting that job done? What are the risks or undesired costs? 

Group several jobs that may share similar pain points. You can also sort these in order of intensity. 

 

Gains 

What is your customer expecting to gain from using your product or service? 

Use research to explain what your customers expect from your business to purchase your product. 

 

Step 2: Create a value proposition map for your products and services

In this section, work out how to address your customer’s needs. In other words, describe what your business can offer to your customers. 

There are three sectors to look at: 

Products and services 

List the products you make or the services you provide that will help your customer complete their functional, social or emotional jobs. Only include your products and services that will create the most gain and alleviate the most pains for your customers. 

Rank these in order of how important they’re likely to be to the customer.

 

Pain relievers 

How does your product or service help the customer overcome their pain points? How does it eliminate negative experiences, mitigate risks or reduce undesired costs?

 

Gain creators 

What features do your products or services have that make the customer happy?

Consider the customer’s financial and social goals as well as their psychographics. 

Step 3: Determine how your value proposition fits within the customer profile

In this step, determine how your value proposition fits within the customer profile. Use a ranking process to do this. Prioritise products and services based on how well they address the customer profile.

 

Elements of a Value Proposition 

Now that you’ve completed the Value Proposition Canvas, you now have a framework for crafting your value proposition statement. 

There are three main elements that you should include in your value proposition: the headline, the sub-headline, and a visual element.

 

Headline

The headline of your value proposition should articulate the main benefit the customer will gain from purchasing your product or service.

The headline can be as creative and catchy as you want it to be. But remember to keep it clear, concise, and to the point. 

 

Sub-headline

The sub-headline or paragraph should flesh out the information you highlighted in the headline. Use this section to explain in detail what your company offers, who it serves, and why. 

Visual element

Enhance your message with a video, infographic, or image to capture your audience’s attention. 

 

You’re All Set!

Several factors can inform and influence a customer’s decision to engage with your business. A value proposition will help you understand your customers better, highlight what separates you from competitors, and articulate why customers should trust you. We hope that these tips and tactics guide you in crafting your unique value proposition! 

The DGA team is composed of dedicated experts in digital conversion and strategy. With over 10 years of experience in digital marketing, our passion lies in helping businesses grow. Whether you want to learn more about your customers or need help developing a unique value proposition, we’ve got you covered.

Here’s something we’ll never get tired of saying: an exceptional website is the backbone of a successful online presence.

However, running a website is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. To drive engagement, users must first and foremost be able to quickly and easily find your website. If your web pages are not optimised, your website is virtually invisible to search engines. And if users can’t find your website, it simply won’t convert.

Google processes over a whopping 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide (Internet Live Stats, 2022). That means competition on search engine results pages (SERPs) has never been steeper.

This may or may not surprise you, but it takes more than just a visually stunning website to successfully separate you from the competition and increase conversions.

Now you’re probably thinking, “how exactly do I boost the visibility of my website?” That’s where web optimisation comes in – a set of practices designed to improve the appearance, clarity and structure of web pages to drive business goals.

In this article, we’ll cover three of the biggest key ingredients to help you achieve top-tier search results, increase engagement, and boost conversions: content, design, and segmentation.

 

What Is Web Optimisation?

But first, let’s quickly cover the basics of web optimisation. 

To put it simply, web optimisation is a set of practices that often involve controlled experimentation to improve a website’s ability to drive business goals. 

Depending on your business type and goals, you’ll have different objectives you’ll want to optimise for. If you run an e-commerce store, for example, your key objective is probably to increase sales. To achieve this, you could conduct A/B tests where you get the most traffic and optimise elements on that page to engage visitors and highlight your business values with the ultimate goal of getting them to click “Buy Now”. 

Website optimisation is also often referred to as search engine optimisation or SEO. This involves practices that boost the discoverability of a website to improve search result rankings for key search terms.

Search engines determine the quality of a website based on several factors including content, site speed and performance, meta information, and many more.

Effective web optimisation requires a lot of time, effort, and dedication. You’ll need to re-evaluate all existing components and content to ensure your website is optimised for search engines and, more importantly, delivers an exceptional user experience.

Here are three of the biggest ways you can optimise your website:

1. Content: Keep It Short, Sweet and Relevant 

People are attracted to great content that tells a story, especially if it’s highly relevant to them. That’s why it’s important to make sure that any blog post, image, video, or resource you create is geared toward your target audience. 

When creating content, remember to use shortened copy, descriptive language, and marketing buzzwords to make it easy to understand and quick to digest.

It’s also critical to optimise your content for search engines. You can do this by adding relevant page titles, integrating relevant keywords to your copy, and developing meta-tags that highlight key concepts. 

Hit the home run with split A/B testing. This will allow you to trial your content and let you identify what engages your customers and what doesn’t. Use your findings to tweak your content to perform better.  

Optimised web content will help you reach more people, build brand trust and loyalty, and boost conversion rates over time. Want to start optimising your content? Check out our Content Marketing service page to learn more.

2. Design: Keep User Experience Top of Mind

We’re suckers for beautifully-designed websites – and your customers probably are too! 

Your website is often the first experience customers have with your brand. First impressions matter when growing an online presence, so make it count. 

When building your website, it’s crucial to keep user experience top of mind. Better UX means increased satisfaction.

Before you can start improving user experience, you need to understand what your users’ challenges, expectations and goals are. To gain these insights, you can conduct user testing, focus groups and surveys.  

Once you have a better understanding of what drives your users, you can then review the way your website uses colour, space, images and overall layout. Adjust any of these elements to align with your goals while making your website fast, efficient, and easy to navigate for your users. 

Making small but smart changes to your web design makes a huge difference in conversion rates.

Our team of experts can produce high-performing web designs that are fast, efficient, and keep users coming back. Interested to learn more? Check out our Performance Website Design service page.

3. Segmentation: Keep It Audience-Focused 

A crucial step to effective web optimisation is audience segmentation. After all, if you don’t know the people who matter to your business the most, how are you going to deliver the right messages and build strong connections? 

Audience segmentation enables you to focus on people who are most critical to reach. This also allows you to create smart content and design effective web pages for guiding each audience to the desired action like subscribing to a newsletter, for example. 

You will see much better results if you focus on one subgroup’s conversion rate rather than looking at a web page’s overall conversion rate. 

If you don’t have the time and resources, collaborate with our team to conduct target audience research and segmentation for you. To learn more, visit our Full Audit service page.

Time to Optimise

Running a website is not a one-and-done event. Stoke your online growth with effective web optimisation and keep the fire burning with relevant content, smart design and audience segmentation. 

Get the ball rolling by re-evaluating your website performance, then implement the strategies we covered above to get noticed by search engines and start driving more traffic to your web pages. 

Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools for improving opportunities and processes. Historically, manufacturers have used Six Sigma as a framework to increase performance and decrease process variations. As you might have guessed, this improved a lot of areas including profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services. 

In recent years, the Six Sigma framework has been adopted by other industries and adapted to their needs. And as we do, marketers also hopped on the Six Sigma bandwagon!

When applied to digital marketing, Six Sigma allows marketers to see problems through the eyes of customers and improve upon existing process problems. 

The problem-solving approach that drives Six Sigma is referred to as the DMAIC, a five-phase method: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control.

 

Along with the DMAIC method, there are various Six Sigma certification levels, referred to as “belts” (yes, exactly like martial arts belts), that marketers have adapted to help categorise problems based on their complexity and how much effort is required to solve them. 

In this article, we’ll cover quick wins that you can start implementing in your digital marketing efforts based on project complexity.

 

Balancing Strategy with Quick Wins

Quick wins are opportunities for fast success that require minimum effort but offer significant benefits. These opportunities provide a foundation to build on, generating further and quicker victories that align with your long-term objectives. 

Quick wins are categorised into three levels: Black Belt Projects, Green Belt Projects, and Yellow Belt Projects.

Black Belt Projects

Black Belt Projects are highly complex business problems. These projects tend to be more labour-intensive and require higher-order data collection and analysis tools to solve. These problems are worth looking into because they offer astounding business benefits once they are done and dusted. 

Black Belt Projects could take up to six months (or more) to complete. An example is a poor, outdated website that doesn’t have the proper structure, lacks quality and is confusing to users. 

The solution? A custom website re-design and large-scale search engine optimisation (SEO). But before you can execute the re-design and implement SEO, you’ll need a website audit to analyse page performance and identify what needs to be changed. 

This will not only provide a visually-appealing website but also attract quality traffic, boost conversion rates and drive revenue. 

Green Belt Projects

Green Belt Projects are moderately complex business problems. You’ll need to leverage the DMAIC method to identify the cause of the problems and figure out a solution to each of those problems for significant business benefits. 

These projects could take up to four to six months to complete. An example is a lack of social media presence that contributes to poor customer engagement and brand loyalty. 

The solution? Build a robust social media strategy that includes business goals, target audience insights, competitive analysis, and a social media audit. From there, you can start creating content that is optimised for the social media platforms that you choose and is tailored to your target audience. 

Growing a social media presence is vital to making authentic connections with audiences. Authenticity builds trust and over time, trust increases consumer receptiveness and drives sales.   

Yellow Belt Projects

Yellow Belt Projects are less complex business problems. They are what we like to call low-hanging fruits. These should be quick to solve with simple data analyses and can be completed within a few weeks. 

An example is a low-performing landing page that isn’t converting leads. The solution? Analyse landing page performance by looking at key metrics like page views, bounce rate, traffic source and conversion rate. You’ll also need to review the page structure, content relevance and quality, and your calls to action. 

Use your findings to optimise elements on the landing page to improve performance, convert leads and maximise returns.

 

Take Advantage of Opportunities 

Start implementing Six Sigma quick wins in your digital marketing projects and improve upon existing process problems. And take advantage of these opportunities to build a foundation and generate quicker wins that align with your long-term, strategic business goals.

At DGA, we are passionate about helping businesses grow and thrive. Visit our Digital Services page to find out what solutions we can provide.

Fun fact: the first electronic mail was sent in 1971. That’s right, email has been around for over 50 years, predating the internet! 

Over time, email has evolved from being an inter-office messaging channel to a primary digital marketing tool today. With 4 billion daily users and growing, it’s safe to say that email is not going anywhere anytime soon. 

The introduction of cool, contemporary digital marketing channels like social media has led many to believe that email isn’t as effective in reaching customers as it used to be. And you’ve probably heard that email marketing is dying, or already dead, more times than you can count. So, is email marketing really out of the game? Our sources say no.

Email generates a whopping 4200% return on investment (HubSpot, 2022), making it one of the most effective ways to attract and retain customers to this day. 

Still not convinced that email is worth investing time, effort and resources in? Buckle up, because we’re about to blow your mind with astounding email statistics.

 

Types of Email Marketing

 

Before we jump into key statistics and some ways to refine your email marketing strategy, let’s talk about five common types of email marketing:

1.Welcome Emails

A welcome email is one of the first impressions a brand makes. It’s the first step in forming a relationship with new prospects, and a friendly welcome message may just be the push they need to interact with your business. 

If it’s nailed right out of the gate, a welcome email can provide prospects with a positive first experience and lead to increased customer retention.

2.Email Newsletters

Stay top of mind and keep your brand relevant with email newsletters. They are a great way for connecting with prospects as well as nurturing existing customers with company news and events, product announcements, upcoming projects and more.

Sent regularly, email newsletters are effective in helping businesses retain happy customers and collect valuable insights for future campaigns. 

3.Lead Nurturing Emails

Often overlooked, lead nurturing is all about taking customers on a journey that may impact buying behaviour. To be successful, it’s important to define your buyer personas to reach your target audience more effectively.

Lead nurturing emails provide more advantages than just an individual email blast because they are more timely, automated and personalised. Email automation technology makes the process possible and simple by sending scheduled emails to leads based on their brand interactions.

As the name suggests, lead nurturing is all about reaching out to leads during every step of the customer journey. The goal of lead nurturing is to establish a connection and build trust over time so your leads are more likely to become paying customers. 

A few high-impact lead nurturing strategies include abandoned cart reminder emails to recover otherwise lost revenue, and retention emails that help brands keep existing customers happy by providing them with longer lifetime value.

4. Promotional Emails

Also known as a standalone email, a promotional email contains information that is sent to your database to promote a specific campaign. They work very similarly to a landing page in that they help set up the context to introduce the main call to action. This can ultimately result in immediate and significant revenue generation.

5. Sponsored Emails

A sponsored email is when you pay a third party to send a blast to their database on your behalf. Sponsored emails can be a great way to reach a different group of audience and gain new potential leads. The biggest flex of sponsorship emails over others is that you can be specific in defining the segment of the audience you want to reach. Used well, this type of email can give you an impressive ROI.

 

Email Marketing Statistics

The following stats are only the tip of the iceberg in the email marketing world. It’s important to keep in mind that your email marketing performance will vary significantly depending on the message, content and execution. With that said, we’ve scoured the internet for some impressive stats on email marketing that will blow any doubts out of the water.

• There are 4 billion daily email users and is expected to grow to 4.6 billion users by 2025 (Statista, 2022) 
• More than 306 billion emails are sent and received every day (Statista, 2021)
• Across all industries, the average email open rate is 29.87%, the average click rate is 1.32%, and the average bounce rate is 10.12% (Constant Contact, 2022) 
• 31% of B2B marketers report that email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads (Content Marketing Institute, 2020) 
• Marketers generate a 760% increase in revenue when they use segmented email marketing campaigns (Campaign Monitor, 2019) 
• 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months (HubSpot, 2022) 
• Brands that A/B test their emails generate an ROI of 48 to 1 (HubSpot, 2022) 
• A mobile-responsive email design can increase unique mobile clicks by 15% (MailChimp, 2019) 
• 99% of email users check their inbox every day with some checking as much as 20 times a day (OptinMonster, 2020)
• Email reaches about 85% of the people you send it to (OptinMonster, 2020)
• About 60% of consumers subscribe to a brand’s email list to get promotional messages and deals compared to 20% that follow brands on social media (MarketingSherpa, 2016) 
• About 67% of consumers use mobile devices to check their email (OptinMonster, 2020)
• 68% of consumers say that email is the most preferred and most personal way to engage with their favourite brands (Bluecore, 2016)

Email Marketing Best Practices

There is an abundance of tips and best practices available to get the most out of your email marketing efforts. Here are 5 best practices that you can start incorporating into your marketing mix today and launch your email engagement to the next level.

1. Get to Know Your Audience

You need a deep understanding of your audience before you can start emailing them. Start by asking yourself how and when does your audience prefer to communicate, what are their likes and dislikes, and what distinguishes them from the general population?

Once you’ve addressed these questions, you can move on to building an engaged email database.

2. Build Your Email List

You need a database of contacts before you can start sending emails. Whether you’re starting from scratch or you already have an established email list, it’s important to verify that every name on that list was added organically.

You also need to check that each individual subscribed by their own choice and consent. This is so you can weed out any bogus, rented or purchased email addresses from the list and not risk getting blacklisted by major internet service providers. 

Getting recipients organically is the only way to build an engaged recipient base, and keep your open and click rates as high as possible.

3. A/B Test to See What Resonates

Test, test, and test some more. It’s important to A/B test every part of your email. We recommend testing only one element at a time for more conclusive results. Test key elements first such as the subject line or the primary call to action. 

You also need to make sure you have a significant sample size in your testing for it to be applicable. Once you find a winning element, move on to the next test.

4. Personalise Your Emails

Hyper-personalisation has increasingly become an important aspect of digital marketing. For good reason – personalised messages perform better than those that are not personalised or targeted. 

This is true for emails as well. Emails are simply better when they’re personal. Batch-and-blast emails just aren’t going to cut it anymore. Increase your email conversion and engagement rates by including personalisation with the help of intelligent platforms and targeting technology. 

5. Optimise Your Email to Mobile

On average, about 67% of users open their emails on a mobile device. This means you need to adapt your email marketing to accommodate smaller screen sizes. According to Adestra, if your email looks funky on mobile, it’s likely to be deleted within 3 seconds. Ouch.

Avoid losing any potential customers by adopting an email layout that works across all devices. Opt for minimal content length and start including call-to-action buttons, full catalogues and full menus within the body of the email to cut down the path of conversion, create the least amount of friction, and encourage mobile users to engage.

 

6.Automate Your Email Marketing

As your business flourishes, your pool of contacts will also grow. And when your email list grows, it’ll get more complicated to take a highly-targeted and personalised approach. 

Don’t panic! Luckily, there are tools available that can optimise and automate targeted email touchpoints for you. Using email automation tools allows you to schedule all emails depending on the business parameters that you provide. 

Setting up automation not only makes it easy to find the right audience and engage with customers, but it also increases efficiency and reduces unnecessary interaction with your team members.

 

So, is email marketing a thing of the past? It’s pretty clear that email marketing is still going strong and is here to stay. It remains to be one of the most relevant and effective ways to reach audiences across all demographics.

Ready to propel your business forward with email marketing? You can count on the DGA Team to do the heavy lifting for you! To find out how to grow your traffic, check out our service page: Email Marketing.

And then the world came to a halt.

2020 was a year like no other. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, a wave of pervasive uncertainty took over and caused disruption across the world. 

At the height of the pandemic, businesses were forced to reassess and shift priorities quickly. Some flourished. Some suffered. Thousands of small businesses had to shut their doors permanently. Many more lost revenue simply because face-to-face sales interaction was no longer an option.

Consistent communication is key to success. But always remember to focus on selling solutions, not products.

It’s safe to say that the pandemic has changed the way consumers seek information, communicate with brands and purchase products. Ultimately, businesses needed to recalibrate and embrace the digital marketplace to stay afloat.  

As we enter a post-pandemic future and adjust to a “new normal”, businesses have an opportunity to respond to challenges and find new ways to connect with customers, create trust and build brand loyalty.

 

Below are five strategies to kickstart your digital presence and thrive in a post-pandemic marketplace:

1. Embrace the Power of Human Connection

It’s no secret: human connection lies at the heart of physical, mental and emotional well-being. If the pandemic has taught businesses anything, it’s that human interaction and staying connected is necessary, and that it’s crucial to build relationships with customers founded on trust. 

When building your digital presence, make it easy for your customers to connect with your brand and with others. Leverage the power of social media here. For example, if you own an online plant shop, you can set up livestream Q&As, launch a community page, or use Instagram stories to ask questions and invite your followers to answer. 

Consistent communication is key to success. But always remember to focus on selling solutions, not products. Listen to what your customers need and then create solutions for them. This is the first step to building an authentic connection and creating long-term trust.

2. Know Your Customer Segment

Utilising customer segmentation is vital to succeeding in today’s digital marketplace. To optimise your digital marketing efforts and deliver an exceptional experience, you must target specific consumers based on who they are and what their needs are. 

Several factors can be used to segment customers, but the most common include age, gender, location and buying behaviour. 

Your digital marketing efforts and messages need to be personally relevant and aligned to a target customer’s circumstances and values. If you create genuine human connections with your prospects, they will be more likely to engage with your brand and stick around for more.

3. Deliver Hyper-Personalised Experiences

Our reliance on technology skyrocketed overnight as we started working, learning and socialising remotely. The digital surge has also transformed the way people shop. And, naturally, these changes have raised consumer expectations in terms of what brands could provide with digital experiences. 

Businesses are suddenly faced with the challenge of engaging customers who are seeking more authentic, connected and immersive digital interactions. What’s more, customers now expect anticipatory, personalised digital experiences across the entire customer journey, not just at the beginning or at the end. 

Make sure that your digital efforts are meeting customers’ rising expectations with frictionless digital experiences that are relevant to them. Leverage digital tools to help you achieve this. Use real-time analytics, build the right data foundation, and align goals across the customer journey.

 

4. Stand Behind Great Values

Consumers are becoming more environmentally and socially conscious. It goes without saying that quality, convenience and price play a huge part in consumer choice. But sustainability, ethical sourcing, social responsibility and trust are increasingly becoming important to how consumers select products and services. 

Standing behind a great brand just won’t cut it. You need to stand behind having great values. But do so with the right intentions.

 

5. Leverage the Latest Digital Tools

Ever-evolving digital transformation and technologies hold the promise of bringing significant positive changes to your business. But you need the right tools to crack open a whole new world of opportunity and catalyse change for sustained results. 

Plunge into social media and start building authentic connections with your customers. Leverage segmentation tools and real-time data analytics to get to know your customers better. Implement content marketing and targeted pay-per-click campaigns to deliver more relevant, hyper-personalised digital experiences. 

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many digital tools available to help kickstart and accelerate your digital marketing efforts today.