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Best WordPress Plugins for Boosting your Email Marketing Efforts

Being a modern business owner, you can’t overlook the effectiveness of an email marketing, especially when it comes to generating quality leads and higher ROI. It is one of the most easy ways to reach a large number of targeted web audience. It doesn’t matter how big or small your marketing campaign is, email marketing has always played a crucial factor in driving potential customers.

However, there are many business owners who think that this form of marketing is either obsolete or ineffective. But, according to the fact, most of the B2B companies have generated an average ROI of $38 for each $1 spent via email marketing. In fact, email is three times more effective than Facebook, Twitter or any other social media to acquire new customers.

There is also a strong prediction that more than 3 million of the population will become active email users by the end of 2020. It means you will need to take this marketing method very seriously – no matter what you are promoting or selling.

And the best part is that WordPress comes with some of the worthy email marketing tools and plugins to make your work easier. So, if you are a WordPress user, you can automate your email marketing campaign by integrating the best WordPress plugins. These plugins will help you achieve your targeted business goals with ease.

In this blog post, we bring you the top 7 WordPress plugins that will boost your email marketing and help you generate more revenues for your business.

1. MailChimp For WordPress

MailChimp is one of the leading email marketing tools, with over 15 million active customers ranging from small businesses to giant organizations.

With MailChimp, you can automate your email marketing campaign, design and send email newsletters using beautiful ready-made templates in a matter of few minutes.

And the best thing is that MailChimp also offers a free yet robust plugin for WordPress site owners. MailChimp for WordPress is a great plugin that lets you tie in with your existing MailChimp account on the fly.

With this plugin, you can create beautiful and custom-ready opt-in forms, sign up forms to let visitors convert into potential subscribers on the fly.

Apart from this, you can send and track emails, view insights, manage subscribers, and craft beautiful email templates using MailChimp for WordPress.

Even, it integrates well with other powerful plugins such as Contact Form 7 and WooCommerce to let you take your marketing campaign to the next level.

[button url=”https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

2. SendinBlue Subscribe Form and WP SMTP

This is SendinBlue’s official plugin for WordPress that encourages you to leverage your email marketing strategy to inform, connect and grow your customer base in an affordable way.

The plugin helps you create engaging and customized subscription forms that you can add to your posts and pages, without any heavy lifting, You can even track emails via the wp_mail() function, divide your contact lists to generate higher revenues for your business.

Boost your marketing campaign by creating and sending professionally-robust newsletters using its simple and intuitive drag and drop builder.

You can also choose the design layout from its official template library. Plus, you have full access to performance analytics, such as clicks, opens, bounce rates, and conversion rates – this will definitely improve your marketing campaign via emails.

[button url=”https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailin/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

3. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is another spectacular email marketing plugin for WordPress, with over 3 million active installs. It’s user-friendly, accessible and flexible features make it super easy for WordPress beginners to take off their email marketing campaign, without any third party tool.

Creating multiple contact forms become easier with the introduction of this powerful plugin. Even, you can tweak your form and the mail content using simple markup.

The plugin comes with a ton of exciting features including Ajax- powered submitting, Akismet spam filtering and CAPTCHA to let you increase your chances of growing subscriber’s list. Plus, it supports MailChimp to help you get the most of your email marketing efforts.

[button url=”https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

4. SumoMe’s List Builder

Convert your real-time visitors into potential customers and subscribers using this prevailing WordPress plugin. It helps you build beautiful pop-up forms that appear on timers, clicks or before a visitor tends to leave a web page.

From the massive pool of the WordPress plugins, SumeMe’s List Builder has come up as one of the powerful and most advanced email capture tools on the web.

The plugin helps you catch your visitors just before they leave your site with a lightbox that occurs to let people submit their email address – all thanks to its smart mode technology.

Apart from converting web visitors, you can also have a full control over your pop-up design. You can change the text color, background color, font size, button color and a lot more to merge the design of your pop-ups with your WordPress site.

The plugin also supports popular marketing services such Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse, Active Campaign, etc.

[button url=”https://sumo.com/app/list-builder” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

5. SendPress Newsletters

Boost your email marketing campaign by integrating SendPress Newsletter plugin into your WordPress site. It is a simple, intuitive and user-friendly plugin that allows you to create customized newsletter templates for your next email marketing campaign.

The plugin makes it super-easy for you to import post content from your site to the newsletter so that your subscribers get all the updated information about your site on the go.

Since the plugin is built on WP UI, it makes is easy for you to collect and manage your subscribers. Also, you can add unlimited subscribers to your email list.

[button url=”https://wordpress.org/plugins/sendpress/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

6. MailPoet Newsletters

Build beautiful and professional-looking newsletters and send them to your potential web customers and subscribers to generate more revenues using MailPoet Newsletters plugin.

It is a great WordPress plugin that gives a robust platform to create automated emails, autoresponders and post notifications to accelerate your email marketing campaign. With its signup widget, you can convert web visitors into potential subscribers within a few clicks.

In fact, adding blog posts, images and popular social icons in a newsletter becomes extremely easy with this plugin. You can even tweak the colors and fonts of your newsletter to make it more attractive and personalized.

[button url=”https://wordpress.org/plugins/wysija-newsletters/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

7. OptinMonster

OptinMonster gives an easy way to convert web visitors into potential customers and subscribers. If you want to expand your email list, then this plugin is for you. It helps you create eye-grabbing capture forms, without generating a single piece of coding.

The plugin comes with an advanced Exit Intent Technology that captures user behavior and display him a pop-up just before he leaves your site. There is also a simple and intuitive drag and drop builder that helps you create visually appealing optin forms that are developed to generate higher conversions.

Plus, you can access to the insights to see which form converting visitors into subscribers and how many of them need modification in terms of design and functionality. Overall, OptinMonster is an incredible tool that can take your email marketing efforts close to your targeted goals.

[button url=”http://optinmonster.com/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download[/button]

Conclusion

These are the seven most compelling WordPress plugins that will help you market your brand, grow your customer base and increase your subscriber’s list via your email marketing campaign. These plugins will make it easy for you to achieve your ultimate business goals effectively and efficiently.

9 Social Media Marketing Tips to Deliver Better Results

Social media has quickly morphed into one of the most important marketing channels. Within a few short years, it has moved from being a mere fad into the most powerful marketing tool on the planet. Facebook, for example, is just over a decade old but no business can afford not to have a Facebook marketing strategy.

But, social media marketing has now moved beyond being simply about likes and followers.To succeed, there is a lot to learn.

The following are nine social media tips guaranteed to deliver better results.

1. Focus on Specific Social Media Networks

A few years ago, conventional wisdom dictated that you should be on as many social media networks as possible. Now, we know better. The wisdom this time around is quite to the contrary. Experience has shown that various demographics are active in different social media sites. With the exception of Facebook, that seems to transcend all demographics, other social networks have shown affinity to particular demographics. For example, teenagers hang out on Snapchat and millenials under 30 love Instagram. So, the strategy should be to identify the favorite social networks of your target audience and only focus on those. This is critical for success because social media marketing has become expensive. Focusing only on the social sites frequented by your audience ensures you use marketing resources in the most effective way.

2. Tailor Your Content for Each Platform

If you are posting to more than one platform, do not make the mistake of posting the same content on all platforms. Posts that are good for Facebook don’t always deliver results on Twitter. Users on social networks like Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat are into visual content. You must tailor your content appropriately.

3. Don’t Sell Stuff

This is the biggest mistake you can make. The fact is that you want to turn your audience into a lead eventually but you can’t turn a social profile into an online store. Instead, you should post content that increases engagement to the point that your audience feels compelled to check out your product offering. Before you start pushing products, remember that people go to social media to find interesting content, catch up with friends and socialize.

4. Get Visual

Everyone loves eye candy. When print media was dominant, magazines went out of their way to design striking cover images to whet the appetite’s of their readers. Visual content is the way to go. If you want success, have a strong visual content strategy. In particular, live video is doing very well on social media and this is a trend that will continue into the future.

5. Run Contests and Promotions

Contests and promotions are a great way to increase engagement on social media. Contests and promotions have a high likelihood of being shared. Be creative, see what other companies have done and create contests that go viral.

6. Lead with Educational Content

According to a HubSpot study, 100 of the top non-celebrity Twitter accounts have built large audiences by posting educational content. Educational content is much more effective at building audiences than social media conversations. Providing readers with content that they find useful is a great way to build trust.

7. Give Away Free Stuff

Who doesn’t love free stuff? Reel in audiences by giving away something of value. It doesn’t have to be your main product. It could be stuff like free videos, ebooks, webinars, non-premium content or anything else of value that you could reasonably give away.

8. Respond Promptly and Helpfully to Audience Communication

We live in an era when anyone can screenshot a conversation and share it on social media. This is a customer service nightmare for companies. Even a small company must invest thousands of dollars on training it’s frontline staff to avoid gaffes that can end up as PR disasters. You must respond in a timely, respectful and helpful manner to all social media comments, inquiries, complaints and suggestions.

9. Invest in Social Listening Tools

To drive the narrative and avoid other people writing the narrative for you, you must practice social listening. You must keep a close watch over your brand’s mentions, competitor mentions and other keywords that are relevant to your industry. There are a number of nifty tools that you can use for social listening. Data gathered from social listening will provide you with valuable insights that will inform your social media strategy.

Conclusion

We started off by stating that social media has quickly evolved to become one of the most important marketing channels. In conclusion, we also need to add that social media marketing is also changing rapidly. What is true today is old stuff tomorrow. So, while these nine tips are relevant today, to continuously deliver better results, you must keep a close watch on developments in the social media industry.

PDF files can be converted into Word files to better suit text manipulation

Word documents are the staple of text manipulation. The Microsoft provided Office suite has helped many generations over the years, and is the go-to service for when it comes to either drafting up a quick document or writing a full-blown 10 page document. Often times people are put in a situation where they are given a file that is not in Word format, and asked to edit that document. This can be quite an inconvenience. As someone that predominantly uses Word (if that’s the case) you might think that editing text in other formats shouldn’t be that hard since editing in Word isn’t hard at all.

Unfortunately things are a little more complicated than that. Editing text in a PDF file for example can be quite stressful and certainly not as productive. The reason we’ve chosen PDF for this example is because PDF is one of the best format available overall. Due to its popularity and sheer convenience, it’s understandable how some people might constantly use it and also send other people documents to edit thinking they’re PDF-ready.

Many users end up asking how can they convert pdf to word format. The answer is simple. All you need at your disposal is a tool that’s easy to find and knows how to do what you ask of it. To be more specific, you’re looking for something that can convert PDF documents to Word documents and won’t obliterate this month’s paycheck. You’re in luck because such converters are available all over the internet.

While searching for these converters, you will prominently find two types:

The paid type which requires either an upfront or monthly pay in exchange for its more or less competent services;
The free type, which might come in a not so cool of a packaging but can do its job great and give you what you need. There might also be some free solutions that are bad, but you can surely find a good one in a matter of two minutes by Googling it.

There are also the ones that you must download and install, but that’s not the case with every converter. A lot of them are accessible directly from the internet and only require that you upload whatever PDF file you are trying to convert.

After you’re done converting, simply use the appropriate option from the ones provided so that your new Word document is safe and sound in its new location. You might also be able to get other options if you access a website that provides them.

[button url=”https://www.convertmypdftoword.com/” postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Visit tool[/button]

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9 Features Of Sketch That Can Optimize Your Design Workflow

Positioning itself in the world of web design and development, Sketch is a perfect pick for designers and techies looking to speed up the design workflow. A well-acknowledged name in the web design industry, Sketch is constantly attracting designers with it’s features.

Overview

With the latest released versions, Sketch 2 and 3 which bring along an added simplicity and intuitiveness as compared to Photoshop, more and more designers have been switching to it. Sketch, as a graphic designing application, features a pixel preview which allows designing interfaces and icons with the usage of Multiple Pages, Artboards, Symbols and Shared Styles to quicken and simplify the overall designing process

Designed especially for modern designers, Sketch is being loved because of its multifarious tricks. In order to strengthen the overall process, Sketch is featured with some outstanding features that not only save time but give a real competition and threat to Photoshop. Let’s see how Sketch has dominated the market with its compelling features-

Artboards

The creation of multiple artboards has become a piece of cake with Sketch designing application. If you are planning to design a responsive site, Sketch’s Infinite Canvas. By default, Sketch offers Canvas that is fruitful to take the advantage of Artboard presets. The presets can be chosen directly from the sub-toolbar by clicking on Artboard button. Using these presets, designers can easily organize their work via a predefined dimension. Artboards are perfect for designing views on mobile and can automatically be resized to accommodate the height and width of layers.

Exporting

Exporting is one amongst the appealing features of Sketch, which makes exporting all the files in an easier way. All users need to click the “Export” button situated at the bottom-right corner for exporting the icon buttons in mobile navigation. These icons can further be saved for the web either in SVG or PNG format. This incorporates almost everything in relation to displaying the assets on varied screen sizes.

Pixel Precision

When designing for mobile, Pixel perfection plays a critical role. With Sketch, you automatically get to shape your Pixel edges and prepare assets for different screen sizes and pixel densities. Sketch allows you to easily position the pixels in your design with Pixel Precision functionalities. It is an easy to implement feature which produces sharp outcomes exact to your business needs. It also offers the ability to edit and preview each Pixel.

Sketch-Easy Grids

The grid method is the easiest to design images in a clean, precise and straightforward way. “Create Grid” requires you to click on the four boxes given in the sub-tool bar. Doing so will display a pop-up menu where you can specify the total number of rows and columns you want to arrange the selected objects into. Next step is about selecting “Boxed Option” for defining the areas encompassed with every object and spacing into them. Composing an image in the easiest ways is possible using this approach. Sketch supports- “Regular Grid” and “Layout Grid”.

Templates

Sketch allows users easily creating a new file using the feature “template”.

Here’s how

Go to menu item file and choose new from the template.

The current file can also be saved as a template to start each project from the initial stage.

This process yields beneficial results, especially when designing for iOS. Any file with a status bar and navigation bar can be created easily and saved as a template.

Shortcuts

The advanced Sketch shortcuts will massively help you enhance your UI design process. One can also create their own shortcuts via OS X System Preferences.

Vector-Based

Surviving in the age of Mobilegeddon, it becomes important to have a vector-based design. When coming up with innovative ways to display content on the screen, designers should look forward to high-definition versus normal definition display, narrow screen vs wide screen and many other things. It is equally important to have a design which restyles all the formats; however, coming up with a different picture for each device range is a painstaking process. With Sketch, the problem gets solved easily as it allows you to freely resize objects.

Smart Guides

Smart Guides is one of keyboard shortcuts available with Sketch. They allow you to snap-align all the layers. The “ALT” key can be used to easily see the guides and spacing between objects.

Color Picker

Sketch requires pressing CTRL+C to quickly choose a color of your choice from anywhere. Simple and virtuous. Isn’t it?

To summarize

Sketch is all about offering the power, flexibility, and speed which you would have always dreamt of in an easy-to-use designing package. Made specially for modern graphic designers, Sketch incorporates plenteous workflow, extensions, and features that are focused on producing better results, thereby producing high-quality artwork from the start till the end.

Applied and Trusted Ways To Secure WordPress Site From Attack

While running a WordPress site, Security is something which should always be taken into consideration. In order to ensure that your site and data are secure, you need to have a solid foundation that keeps your site away from hackers and spammers. With a strong community of users and developers to further improve the platform, businesses have started hiring WordPress developers who actually understand the ins and outs, make regular updates to fix bugs, security holes, and vulnerabilities. Additionally, there are some practical ways available using which you can secure your WordPress site from attack and increase the security. Let’s give a look

Utilizing latest WordPress versions

The most obvious security measure you can take is running the latest version of any platform being used to display business globally. With over 80-85% of WordPress installations running outdated, this is one important aspect covered under WordPress security that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Whenever a WordPress site gets updated, it brings along itself a rich set of features, improved bug fixes and security fixes to keep your site safe against easy to exploit susceptibility.

Installing Updated Themes and Plugins

Running the latest version of CMS alone is not enough, instead updating it with the latest themes and plugins can safeguard your site. WordPress is featured with capabilities to extend the functionalities of your site by providing thousand of themes and plugins. Security plugins should be checked before use to see if they are updated frequently. When choosing themes and plugins, you need to be selective to opt for the one matching the functionality of your business. By doing so, you will automatically be reducing your site’s attack surface.

Restricting Login Attempts

There are a few plugins available that can handle the job well by monitoring the number of incorrect login attempts. These plugins once installed keep your site safe against brute force attacks. Some of the popular ones are- Limit Login Attempts, User Locker, Better WP Security, Login Lock, iThemes Security and so on.

Choosing The Right Hosting Platform

According to the research findings made online, approx 40% of hacking attempts are caused due to a security vulnerability on a hosting platform. Therefore, when choosing a hosting company, emphasis should be given on the one that-

Includes WordPress Optimized Firewall
Has Malware scanning and intrusive file detection
Supports the latest version of PHP and MySQL
Provides Account Isolation

There are several hosting companies that offer daily internal backups as well to keep your site renovated with the added functionalities.

Using Secured Username and Password

The usage of uncommon, not so particular, and difficult to guess usernames and passwords across all your accounts secures WordPress login in the most efficient ways. You should also enable 2-factor authentication (2FA) on your WordPress site. Rather than relying on a single password alone, 2FA adds an extra layer of security to your WordPress accounts. This, in turn, provides strong authentication and dramatically enhances your site security.

Using .htaccess for WordPress Security

Wp-config.php is one of the most important files on your blog, which has all the information required to access your important database, password, username, server name, and so on. Protecting the wp-cofig.php is extremely important. The .htaccess root file located at the root of WordPress installation should always be made secure by backing it up. These files in a way act as one of the best tools by preventing unwanted access.

Changing Database Prefix

WordPress database contains every single information making it easy for the hackers to target. Spammers run automated codes for SQL injections. The best way to protect your database is by changing the database prefix which is set at wp_ by default. While installing WordPress on your site, you need to open your wp-config.php file located in WordPress root directory and change the table prefix line from wp_ to wp_a56789_ to neutralize the security risks.

Password Protecting the WordPress Admin Directory

One of the possible vulnerabilities is the ability of a hacker to gain access to admin directory. The best way to help out is adding username and password protection after which the site owner will be prompted for password protection and username twice while accessing the admin area. The first prompt will be from the server trying to access admin while the second will be from WordPress itself.

Summing It Up

With emerging and existing ways to harden WordPress Security, businesses need to adopt the best ones which can be implemented in a minimum time period. Known as one of the popular CMS on the web, WordPress security counts to be a serious concern. By following the ways given above, you are not only preventing malicious activity but also web servers from being accessed by an attacker. By keeping WordPress website security as one of the top priorities, you will get a better control over web content and also trust from the targeted audiences.

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