Zapier • 23rd April 2024

Jotform vs. Typeform: Which is best? [2024]

Back when I was scrolling through my first website in the mid-'90s—I'm almost certain it was SpaceJam.com—web forms were still in their nascent stage. Websites were treated more as one-way communication devices, like newspapers.

Forms changed all that. At first, forms were clunky HTML elements that you had to pinch-and-zoom to interact with on small screens. Eventually, Jotform, Typeform, and other came along to improve the user experience and boost conversions.

Jotform and Typeform are both h

Zapier • 22nd April 2024

17 testimonial advertising examples to inspire your next campaign

My all-time favorite testimonial ad campaign is from Surreal, a breakfast cereal company. If you were in London in 2023, you might have seen billboards proclaiming "Serena Williams* eats our cereal." Then came the hilarious disclaimer: "*She is a student from London and we paid her to eat it but the point still stands."

The best testimonial ads are deeply tailored to their target audience: they can be tongue-in-cheek, like Surreal's fake Serena endorsement, or entirely serious. While plenty of

Zapier • 18th April 2024

Claude vs. ChatGPT: What's the difference? [2024]

When OpenAI released the first iteration of in late 2022, it quickly became the fastest-growing app ever, amassing over one hundred million users in its first two months. GPT-4, an improved model released in 2023, is now the standard by which all other large language models (LLMs) are judged. Recently, another LLM has begun challenging ChatGPT for that title: Anthropic's .

I've used ChatGPT since its release and have tested Claude regularly in the months since its beta. To compare these two AI

The CMO • 9th April 2024

How Marketing and Sales Can Work Together: A Guide

Marketing and sales teams have a decades-old arrangement: marketing attracts interested prospects, and sales closes them.

But this arrangement has been crumbling for years. The average B2B buyer now spends 70% of the buyer journey doing their own research before ever talking to vendors (6Sense, 2024).

What used to be “the marketing funnel” and “the sales funnel” have merged into a single buyer journey.

But marketers and sales reps still aren’t working together seamlessly. Fixing this issue is

The CMO • 29th March 2024

How To Build A Personalization Strategy (+ Tactics & Tools)

Personalization is no longer optional for businesses or consumers. According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect personalized experiences, and fast-growing companies are reaping the rewards for their efforts, pulling in 40% more revenue from personalization than competitors.

Despite these glowing statistics, Gartner reports that 63% of marketers struggle with personalization. In fact, Twilio Segment found that Just 24% of businesses say they are successful at it.

If you haven’t quite nailed y

The CMO • 22nd March 2024

15 ABM Best Practices to Failproof Your ABM Program

You'll would agree that the days of “spray-and-pray” marketing are over. Highly targeted account-based marketing (ABM) is increasingly the standard for B2B marketing. That’s good for customers, who are more likely to be contacted about solutions they actually need.

Most companies see a boost after adopting ABM.

According to data from Forrester, 58% of marketers see larger deal sizes, and three-quarters of marketers see a higher ROI with ABM than any other marketing approach (ABM Leadership All

The CMO • 21st March 2024

30 ABM Statistics to Prove ROI and Get Buy-In

Account-based marketing (ABM) is frequently hailed as the most effective form of B2B marketing. Despite that, marketing budgets still haven’t shifted accordingly. Most ABM leaders say that less than 25% of their overall marketing budget goes to ABM efforts (Ascend, 2023)

Sound familiar? If so, this article is for you. I’ve collected a set of compelling ABM statistics that will put the success of your ABM program in context—and help you make the case for a budget increase.

ABM can strengthen cu

Zapier • 18th March 2024

Microsoft Bookings vs Calendly: Which is best? [2024]

is a massive suite of tools ranging from household names like Word and PowerPoint to more obscure apps (ever heard of Clipchamp?). Microsoft Bookings, which is included with Microsoft 365, is an alternative to better-known meeting scheduler apps like .

Let's get this out of the way: you probably haven't seen Microsoft Bookings on many lists. Rather than competing directly against powerful apps like Calendly, its raison d'être has more to do with offering essential features to get users to stay

Zapier • 29th February 2024

TidyCal vs. Calendly: Which is best? [2024]

In the dark ages of scheduling meetings—a mere decade ago—back-and-forth emails were the standard. Then came along with its "smart scheduling" technology, which blocks out the times you aren't available and lets meeting attendees book whatever time works for them. Over time, it inspired . is one of them, offering fewer features but significant cost savings.

I'm a long-time Calendly user, and I recently spent time in TidyCal to compare the strengths of each tool. If you're choosing between them,

Zapier • 16th February 2024

ActiveCampaign vs. tinyEmail: Which is best? [2024]

is an incredible piece of software, but it's most assuredly not for newbies. I consider myself tech-savvy, but ActiveCampaign's automations tool is intimidating enough that I was happy to let a consultant create workflows for my marketing agency. The demand for this kind of support is strong enough that ActiveCampaign features on its website.

So I can understand why there's a deep hunger among users for a simpler way to manage email marketing. , which focuses on beginner-friendly email marketin

Zapier • 6th February 2024

ConvertKit vs. ActiveCampaign: Which should you use? [2024]

For years, I used ActiveCampaign as part of my web agency's sales process to track sales prospects and send follow-ups. More recently, as a writer, I've found myself firmly in ConvertKit's demographic of creators, and have experimented with its range of features.

Both and are solid marketing tools, but they excel at different things. For this article, I explored the latest features of both apps and spent time testing each one to compare them head-to-head. Here's what I found.

Here's a high-lev

Zapier • 25th January 2024

How to send a test email in Mailchimp

If you've ever sent an email with the subject line Subject goes here, you know the importance of test emails. Spelling and grammar mistakes—or, even worse, pricing errors—can be costly and embarrassing. Then there's formatting: without testing, it's easy to send an email that seems perfect within Mailchimp but looks glitchy in your audience's inboxes.

In this article, I'll show you the step-by-step process for sending a Mailchimp test email (complete with screenshots). I'll also outline the tro

The CMO • 19th January 2024

What is Brand Marketing? Beyond Logos and Taglines

Since its launch in 2008, Airbnb has steadily converted the idea of staying in strangers’ homes into a legitimate (and often even preferable) alternative to hotel stays. But as competitors surfaced, the brand struggled to distinguish itself.

The CMO • 18th January 2024

Making Your Brand Stand Out: A Guide to Brand Activation

In 2020, Adobe challenged filmmakers worldwide: create a short film using only Adobe’s stock video footage. The result? The Adobe Stock Film Festival, which had over 1.5 million viewers and resulted in a 50% bump in brand awareness for Adobe—and 3,000 new Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions.

Adobe’s film festival is an example of what’s known as a ‘brand activation’: an event that gets people talking about your brand and influences customers to purchase. It's brand marketing on steroids.

Read o

Zapier • 18th January 2024

What is lead scoring? [+ Lead scoring best practices]

My most recent buying experience looked less like a straight line and more like a plate of spaghetti. Here's how it went down: while listening to a podcast, I came across the founder of a product and ended up following him on Twitter. Later, I joined his product's email list; eventually, I signed up for a free trial. Then I stopped using the product for a while, before realizing I needed it after all. Finally—a full year after first hearing about it—I made the purchase.

My long-and-winding cust

Zapier • 17th January 2024

How to use Meta's Facebook Business Manager [2024]

Facebook's billions of daily users definitely make it an attractive place to advertise. One drawback to Facebook's scale, though? Its wide range of platforms and products—from personal Facebook profiles to Instagram ad accounts for business—can make it chaotic to navigate. Facebook's solution to the clutter is Facebook Business Manager, which helps you manage and collaborate on Facebook pages, Instagram profiles, and ad accounts.

Facebook's parent company, Meta, rebranded the tool to Meta Busin

Zapier • 8th January 2024

Synthesia AI: Using Synthesia to generate AI videos

In the AI and robotics industries, there's a phenomenon known as the "uncanny valley": the observation that until a synthetically-created human is flawless, people will probably find it a bit spooky. We're not out of the uncanny valley yet, but we're getting close—and plenty of software companies are putting together practical uses for AI-generated human avatars in the meantime.

One of them is Synthesia, which focuses its AI video technology on enterprise use cases like employee onboarding and

The CMO • 15th December 2023

Social Media Automation: The Ultimate Guide For Scaling Brands

When Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder of Twitter, typed out the first ever tweet (‘just setting up my twttr’) in 2006, he published it in real time. But by the late 2000s, social media marketing software like Hootsuite allowed users to schedule posts to Facebook and Twitter (and at the time, to MySpace and Google+) weeks or months in advance. Through this, social media automation quickly became a core part of many brands’ digital marketing strategies.

But automation is easy to do poorly. Too many brands

Zapier • 14th December 2023

MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign: Which is right for you? [2024]

are rarely as different as MailerLite and ActiveCampaign: MailerLite prides itself on ease of use and caters to small businesses, while ActiveCampaign includes advanced automation features and a fully capable sales CRM.

Still, some people end up with the wrong tool. I was one of them: after using ActiveCampaign for around two years, I switched to MailerLite. In this article, I'll walk you through the pros and cons of each platform to help you decide which is best for you.

A few years ago, I de

The CX Lead • 11th December 2023

Inbound Vs Outbound Call Centers: A Comparative Guide

Despite the rise of AI bots and customer self-service, the humble phone call continues to be a key communication link between brands and customers. 86% of consumers would rather have a real human help them through customer service issues. In response, brands maintain a roster of 17 million contact center agents worldwide to support them.

Even B2B SaaS brands, with their relatively tech-savvy and self-service-inclined audiences, are not immune from the need for call-enabled contact centers. The

Zapier • 7th December 2023

MailerLite vs. ConvertKit: Which should you choose?

Email marketing tools usually come in one of two flavors: small business or enterprise.

MailerLite falls in the small business bucket. But ConvertKit, which is specifically built for online creators, is an exception. Its narrow focus allows ConvertKit to populate its platform with creator-focused features you can't find anywhere else. Even so, there's enough overlap between MailerLite and ConvertKit that it can be hard to decide between them.

I've used MailerLite for years and have tested Conv

The CX Lead • 7th December 2023

Understanding Call Whispering: A Comprehensive Guide

Call center agents have something in common with secret agents: a reliable coach in their ear, helping them as they chat with customers. Call whispering, as this technology is known, lets managers listen in on agents’ calls, provide them with guidance, and even take over the call if necessary.

Such technology is sorely needed: only 21% of employees feel like they have the feedback needed to do their best work. Call whispering, when used to its full potential, gives feedback to contact center ag

The CX Lead • 7th December 2023

Six Strategies To Improve Agent Performance in Call Centers

Call centers employ nearly three million people in the US alone, and the average call center handles 4,400 calls per month. With millions of agents talking to millions of customers, the stakes are high: small improvements in agent performance can create significant ripple effects across key metrics like customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. How well-equipped your agents are can also have an outsized impact on your call center’s employee turnover.

With this in mind, improving call cente

Zapier • 29th November 2023

MailerLite vs. Mailchimp: Which email marketing app is best? [2024]

Mailchimp has reached near-GoDaddy levels of : when I worked at a marketing agency, clients either had Mailchimp or they had nothing. But there are plenty of other options for . One of them is MailerLite, which I switched to myself a couple years back.

I've used both platforms extensively, and have also evaluated their features in-depth for my and . In preparation for this head-to-head showdown, I created campaigns in both MailerLite and Mailchimp to compare the design, ease of use, automation,