LinkedIn automation tools for your brand in 2023

Struggling to stay on top of your LinkedIn marketing efforts? Building your brand’s presence on LinkedIn takes a lot of work as it involves posting high-quality content consistently. And it doesn’t just stop there because you need to use that presence to prospect and nurture valuable leads. All of this takes out a huge chunk of your time, leaving little room for other important aspects of running the business.

That’s where LinkedIn automation tools come in, helping you streamline your efforts and get more out of your LinkedIn strategy. Let’s find out some of the best tools to help you with LinkedIn automation.

Table of contents:

• What is LinkedIn automation?
• Best all-in-one LinkedIn automation tool
• LinkedIn automation tools for publishing
• LinkedIn automation tools for lead generation
• LinkedIn automation tools for analytics

What is LinkedIn automation?

LinkedIn automation involves using social media automation tools to automate certain LinkedIn tasks. Auto-publishing posts and pre-populating lead generation forms are some examples of LinkedIn automation. These automation activities help you save time and streamline your efforts for higher returns.

Note that LinkedIn prohibits some types of automation activities. So it’s important to only use trusted tools that will ensure you’re adhering to the platform’s user agreement

Best all-in-one LinkedIn automation tool

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a robust set of LinkedIn management tools to assist with automation. These tools let you automate your publishing, response management and analytics. This puts it at the top of our list, making it the best all-in-one tool for LinkedIn automation.

The platform’s publishing features let you draft and schedule your LinkedIn updates to automatically go out at a set time. You can add these updates to a queue and automate them for not just one but multiple LinkedIn Pages. Sprout even lets you automatically target people based on industry, company size and job title.

Sprout simplifies your response management by allowing you to monitor and respond to your LinkedIn comments in one place. The LinkedIn Contact View automatically pulls up a user’s previous interactions with your Page. This gives you the context you need to personalize your response.

One of Sprout’s standout features is the ability to automatically collect performance data for your LinkedIn Page and posts. This helps you analyze your publishing strategy and understand how you can improve it for better growth and engagement.

LinkedIn automation tools for publishing

With LinkedIn’s limitations on most automation activities, publishing is where you have the most leeway. Here are a few LinkedIn automation software solutions to help with publishing.

2. SocialPilot

SocialPilot comes with a comprehensive solution to automate your LinkedIn publishing tasks. This includes the ability to draft your LinkedIn post and schedule it to auto-publish at a later date. Plus, you can draft and schedule a first comment to boost visibility and engagement for your posts.

One of the top features of SocialPilot is its AI Assistant, which helps you automate caption creation. Enter your prompt and select a tone to instantly generate captivating caption ideas. The AI Assistant even provides strategic hashtag recommendations to get your content in front of the right audience.

3. Loomly

Loomly is a social media marketing platform to streamline your publishing efforts. It provides you with an endless feed of post ideas based on trending topics, current events and more. This saves you plenty of time in brainstorming content ideas for your LinkedIn publishing strategy.

The platform comes with a Hashtag Manager to automate your hashtag strategy and drive more visibility for your posts. Use the UTM parameters generator to quickly create custom UTM tags to include in your posts. Once you’ve finalized your post, schedule it for Loomly to automatically publish it at the desired time.

4. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat offers a powerful set of tools to manage your LinkedIn publishing. It provides you with one dashboard to create and schedule posts for multiple LinkedIn Pages. This allows you to prepare several updates in advance and free up time for other important tasks.

You can even optimize your scheduling based on the platform’s suggestions on the best times and days to publish. That way, you don’t have to manually search through your previous posts to see how to improve your publishing schedule.

5. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has one of the best social media publishing tools for LinkedIn automation. A standout feature is the Writing Assistant, which uses AI to enhance your content. All you need to do is create your initial copy and apply a “filter” to automatically improve it. This will help you develop compelling LinkedIn posts to drive more engagement. You can then schedule your improved post to automatically go out at a time of your choosing.

LinkedIn automation tools for lead generation

Prospecting and nurturing leads on LinkedIn is a time-consuming process. Use the LinkedIn automation tools below to improve your lead generating efforts.

6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn’s own Sales Navigator comes with powerful features to automate your lead generation. It provides recommendations on which accounts to prioritize based on several factors. This includes factors such as firmographics, connectivity and recent growth. That way, you can focus your time on nurturing accounts that have the best chance of converting.

Sales Navigator automates the process of identifying buyers based on intent signals. It notifies you when they’ve engaged in certain activities that indicate intent. This allows you to engage them when they’re in the market and more likely to buy.

7. Dripify

Dripify lets you build an automated sales funnel to fully automate your lead generation process. You can build a prospecting sequence using certain LinkedIn actions and time delays. Then select the conditions that will trigger an appropriate automation action. For example, you could set up an introductory message to go out one day after a prospect accepts your connection request. This allows you to proactively manage your lead generation and nurturing efforts.

8. Wiza

Wiza is a powerful email finder tool to improve your LinkedIn prospecting efforts. The tool instantly converts your LinkedIn searches into a clean prospect list. This provides you with valid contact information so you can connect with your most valuable prospects. It even removes emojis, prefixes and suffixes to normalize people’s names.

Wiza further enriches your list with datapoints such as firmographics, career and social media links. This gives you an even more comprehensive look into your prospects to help you enhance your outreach efforts.

9. Expandi

Expandi is a tool for automating and personalizing your LinkedIn outreach efforts. It lets you build automation workflows for different scenarios based on the prospect’s behavior. For each sequence, you can include a combination of nine actions and add a time delay in between.

The platform lets you set up omni-channel outreach automation based on the prospect’s action. Expandi even comes with dynamic placeholders to build hyper-personalized messages for each prospect. This improves the chances of your prospects engaging and turning into valuable leads.

10. Octopus

Octopus is an advanced LinkedIn automation software tool for simplifying your lead generation. It helps you reach your target audience through personalized and automated connection requests. Octopus then automatically sends out “thank you” messages to prospects who accept your request. It helps you ramp up your engagement efforts by messaging hundreds of your first-level connections at once. You can further warm up your new prospects by automatically endorsing their skills.

LinkedIn automation tools for analytics

You can’t optimize what you can’t track. So you need to stay on top of your LinkedIn performance to see what needs improving. Here are a few tools to help you automate your LinkedIn analytics.

11. LinkedIn native analytics

LinkedIn Page analytics give you a comprehensive look into your Page’s performance. The built-in analytics tool automatically tracks your visitors, followers and leads. This gives you a better understanding of the people you’re attracting and how to best engage them.

The analytics dashboard gives you access to post-level insights on your content performance. This shows you a detailed breakdown of how each post is performing in terms of reach and engagement. So you can understand the types of content that resonate with your audience.

12. Keyhole

Keyhole helps you visualize your LinkedIn analytics data using easy-to-read charts and graphs. The platform simplifies analytics with automatic reports on different performance metrics. It automatically identifies your top posts based on engagements, impressions and engagement rate. So you don’t have to scour through every single post to see which ones are the most popular.

It shows you the top industries of your followers and compares their company sizes. It even compiles reports on the top hashtags driving the most engagement for your brand. All these insights help you fine-tune your strategy to maximize your impact.

13. Klipfolio

Klipfolio is the perfect tool for building a custom Linked analytics dashboard to track metrics that matter to you. This custom dashboard will automatically pull up reports to measure your LinkedIn performance. You can add pre-built metrics such as clicks, likes, comments, impressions and engagements. Plus, there are metrics to understand your followers by company size, industry, function and location.

14. Unmetric

Unmetric lets you fully automate your LinkedIn reporting process with the option to choose from 30+ types of reports. The platform gives you a comprehensive picture of your brand’s performance and compare it against up to 15 other brands. It lets you create a schedule to automatically generate reports on your LinkedIn performance. Unmetric then sends the report to your inbox and to the inboxes of relevant stakeholders.

Do more for less with LinkedIn automation

Having a solid LinkedIn marketing strategy is one thing. Effectively executing that strategy is another. Things can easily get out of hand when you’re running on limited time and resources. So it helps to automate some of your LinkedIn tasks to boost productivity and maximize outcome.

Sprout helps you save time with powerful tools to automate your LinkedIn tasks. Use these tools to streamline the time-consuming aspects of publishing and community management. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to see how you can do more with Sprout’s LinkedIn management tools.

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Learn how Etsy’s Share & Save program can earn you more revenue

Cha-Ching - that’s the sound of success after each sale you make on your Etsy shop.

Then soon after that excitement a little sadness kicks in when you now see the fees you have to pay for that sale. An Etsy transaction fee of 6.5%, a payment processing fee of 3% + $0.25. The costs are reasonable considering you are using Etsy’s platform and benefit from the traffic they generate through their brand recognition.

But what if you get that traffic to your store? Shouldn’t your cost be reduced? It is your audience after all.

Well, it looks like Etsy agrees. That’s why in September 2023 they launched their Share & Save program.

So what is Etsy’s Share & Save program? How does it work? And most importantly, what are the savings?

We’ll get into all that and more as we go over everything you need to know about Etsy’s Share & Save program.

What is Etsy’s Share & Save program?

Etsy averages 377 million visitors per month to its online marketplace, but that traffic isn’t solely driven by Etsy. Visitors discover Etsy through organic search (because, they are the #1 online marketplace for sellers), some advertising by Etsy, and from you - the online seller.

Sellers as a whole drive a significant amount of traffic to the website. And the more people visit Etsy, the more they order. So Etsy’s decided to incentivize you, the seller, to drive even more traffic to your shop.

The Share & Save program operates like a cashback incentive when you share unique trackable links outside of Etsy. If a customer clicks the link and completes a purchase from your shop within 30 days, you’ll receive an instant 4% rebate on the total purchase amount.

How is the savings calculated?

The 4% rebate is calculated the same way as a transaction fee.

Let’s say a customer purchases $100 (before taxes) from your shop after receiving a promotional email from you. A refund of $4.00 ($100 * 4%) will be posted to your payment account.

Your refund will be processed immediately after a customer completes their order.

Etsy Share & Save program requirements

There are 4 requirements to earn your 4% refund:

1 - Your customers need to finalize their order within 30 days of clicking your link. 

Etsy uses cookies to track anyone who visits your shop. So when a customer revisits your shop and places an order, within that 30 day window, then you will earn the 4% rebate.

If a customer re-clicks any of your links, that 30 day time period resets.

2 - You only earn a refund for traffic you drive from places outside of Etsy.

While Etsy messages and listing descriptions are a great way to promote your shop, you will not earn a rebate from trackable links clicked in those places.

3 - Eligibility is based on the buyer’s last click prior to making a purchase.

If a customer clicks on someone else’s Share & Save link, an influencer’s link, or an advertisement and then places an order from your shop - you will not receive the rebate from that purchase.

4 - Only links in the format of (yourshopname).etsy.com are eligible for the promotion. If you use a custom URL, you’ll need to forward that URL to your (yourshopname).etsy.com to ensure you get your refund.

How do you join Etsy’s Share & Save program?

To start earning money from the Share & Save program, it’s as easy as 1…2…3….

1 - In your Shop Manager go to “Marketing”

2 - Select Share & Save

3 - Click “Join now”

What kind of links can you share?

You have the flexibility to share trackable links for various elements:

• Specific Listings: Navigate to 'Listings' on desktop or mobile web. Click on the gear icon associated with the desired listing and select 'Share' for convenient sharing.

• Promo Codes: Access 'Sales and Discounts' on desktop or mobile web to select and copy the trackable link for the desired promo code.

On the Etsy Seller App, you can also generate trackable links unique to the app for:

• Reviews: Within the Home or Reviews section of the app, find the review you'd like to share. Tap on the "..." icon and choose 'Share review' for seamless sharing.

• Shop Sections: Head to 'Listings' and select the specific shop section you wish to share. Then, simply click 'Copy link' for easy sharing.

How to track orders placed through your Share & Save links?

Navigate to your Shop Manager to track orders through Share & Save:

1 - Within your analytics you'll find valuable data including the total clicks, orders, revenue generated, and savings achieved through Share & Save. Plus, you can easily copy your personalized trackable shop link.

2 - Any orders placed using a Share & Save link will be marked with a special badge for easy identification.

3 - Access your Payment Account and review the Fees section to track your Share & Save refunds. The refund amount is also detailed in your Recent Activities, giving you a comprehensive view of your financial transactions.

How to promote your Share & Save link?

Once you have your unique trackable link set up in your Etsy account it’s time to start sharing. 

Remember, as long as your Share & Save links are not shared within Etsy, you’ll earn credit for each sale after people click your link.

When you share your link, use the format: (yourshopname).etsy.com

So here are the best ways you can earn money with this program:

Email

Sending emails to your customers is the best way to encourage them to buy from your Etsy shop again.

Think about it - they’ve already ordered from you once. They know your brand, the quality of your products, and your level of service.

So, if you’ve been opting customers into your email list when they place an order on your shop, then you already have a group of customers who are interested in your products. 

If you haven’t, don’t worry, it’s not too late. There are still ways you can import customers who have ordered from you in the past (up to 12 months to be exact). 

Here’s how to import Etsy customers to your email list while remaining compliant with Etsy’s terms of service. You will need an AWeber account to do this.

1 - Set up integration with Etsy.

2 -  In your Etsy settings, select the list you’d like customers added.

3 - In List Settings, customize the confirmation message. This is needed in order to remain compliant with Etsy's terms of service.

4 - Once your Etsy integration is connected and your confirmation message set up, reach out to AWeber's Customer Solutions team and we will take it from there!

Social media post and bios

List your shop or individual products on your social media channels, just make sure you include your unique trackable link. 

If you have followers on any of your social channels, like Facebook or Instagram, this is a great way to promote a plethora of products. If you really haven’t established your social media presence yet, don’t worry about it, you can still promote your products through paid social.

You may even be promoting products on social channels like Pinterest. If you are, look at the Pins that are getting the most clicks and update them to include the Share & Save link.

What does a Share & Save order look like?

When a purchase is made through the Share & Save link you've provided, you're eligible for a transaction fee refund. 

Once an order placed via this link receives a refund, it will be distinguished by a vibrant green "Share & Save" badge displayed alongside the order details.

You will receive your refund instantly and it will be clearly labeled as "Share & Save refund" on your Payment account page.

If you have any questions about the Share & Save program, you search the Etsy Sellers Handbook.

Take Your Etsy Shop to New Heights with AWeber

Unlock the full potential of Etsy's Share & Save program to boost your sales and engage your customers. 

When you integrate your Etsy store to AWeber you’ll be able to:

• Seamlessly manage promotions and stay connected with your audience
• Automatically send emails the moment you publish a new product
• Target specific customer groups
• Analyze campaign performance

Plus, for those Canva lovers, AWeber has Canva built directly into the email builder.

Integrate your Etsy store with AWeber and start maximizing your sales today. 

If you don’t have an AWeber account, you can sign up today.

Happy sharing and selling on Etsy!

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How to measure and communicate the value of social media beyond marketing

You already know the value of social media extends far beyond marketing—it benefits and represents every corner of your organization. But other teams may not know how social media impacts them and can help them grow.

It’s a fascinating time for social media teams. In many ways, social media has “grown up.” Many leaders and execs see the value in social and no longer need to be convinced to invest in a strategy.

However, we’ve entered a new phase where social teams are trying to find the best ways to share social’s value—from customer connections to data—with other teams. After all, social impacts every part of your company and can help teams across your organization meet their goals.

In this article, you’ll learn which metrics can help you communicate how social bolsters other teams, plus, find tips on how to break down silos and share social insights across your organization.

Table of contents:

1. 1. Return on investment (ROI)
   2. Website traffic
   3. Brand awareness
   4. Purchases/revenue from social
   5. Engagement
   6. Customer satisfaction
   7. Lead generation
   8. Customer retention
   9. How to communicate the value of social media beyond the marketing department

Return on investment (ROI)

You know the time you put into social is worth it—and more leaders recognize this now, too. But quantifying social’s impact still matters.

That’s where return on investment (ROI) comes in. It’s one of the best ways to track social media value because it puts dollar amounts to the time and money spent on your efforts. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, in 2024 45% of marketers plan to calculate the ROI of social ad spend to connect the value of social to business goals.

ROI can be measured at the campaign level on each social platform or at an overall social media marketing level. The formula for social media ROI is:

((Earnings – Costs) / Costs) x 100

Let’s say you ran an influencer campaign that led to $50,000 in new purchases. The total campaign cost your company $10,000—including paying for the influencer partnership, ad placements and tools to run the campaign. You would find this campaign’s ROI by calculating:

[(50,000-10,000)/10,000] x 100

This would give you a final ROI of 400% for your campaign. The inputs for assessing ROI vary between companies. Learn more in our guide to social media ROI.

How to use Sprout to track ROI

Sprout has several social commerce integrations available to use, such as Shopify and Facebook Shops. These can help you follow the trail of social media-influenced purchases.

Sprout also offers reports that assess campaign success. The Tag Performance report, for example, enables you to tag and track campaign-specific posts to report on the success of a specific campaign.

Website traffic

Social media drives significant referral traffic to e-commerce websites. When someone clicks through your social post to your website, that click is recorded as referral traffic.

If you don’t already track website traffic driven by social, this is your sign to start. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 60% of social strategists, managers and directors regularly track social media traffic to the website. And for good reason—website visits from social clearly illustrate the impact of social media on business.

To track website traffic, connect your Google Analytics account or look at your website’s native data. Go a step further by using UTM trackers to identify which sources the clicks are coming from. This way, if your website receives a sudden influx of visitors, you’ll know which one of your Facebook posts it’s from.

Website traffic data influences are dependent on how your company operates. For example, if you make a significant amount of sales in the fourth quarter, your website traffic data will reflect this. Or, if you create a blog post that news outlets pick up, that also factors into the data.

Learn how to set up your Google Analytics account in our Google analytics and social media article.

How to find website traffic in Sprout

When you connect Sprout to Google Analytics, you’ll be able to go beyond tracking where your website clicks come from. You can also conveniently build your UTM tracking as you compose your social posts. With this tracking activated, you have a more comprehensive view of your website traffic.

Brand awareness

Brands benefit from being present on social media. In fact, 80% of consumers say brand awareness makes them more likely to buy on social. Building brand awareness comes in various forms; a reshare of a post, a targeted video ad or reviews all count as brand awareness. Online reviews and recommendations from trusted sources are known to influence purchases, boost social proof and can double as resharable content.

Another satisfied visitor! 💔When the tour lasts longer than the relationship. Too soon? Don’t worry, you’ll find…

Posted by National Park Service on Saturday, May 27, 2023

This makes audience reach an important metric to track to identify your social media value.

And social teams know it. According to the Index, 58% of social strategists, managers and directors regularly track reach and impressions—core brand awareness metrics.

Follow these tips to boost your company’s brand awareness on social media.

How to use Sprout to analyze brand awareness

There are several ways to use Sprout to analyze brand awareness on social media. Sprout’s cross-channel reports enable you to assess how each of your channels and posts drive brand awareness in one report.

And with robust listening tools, you can build and track topics that are most relevant to you. You can then view data in Listening Topics to see how well your brand is performing against competitors and your share of voice in your industry.

Using hashtags in your posts allows you to track their performance, too. With specific hashtag types, you can see how each one performs within your Listening Topics—especially the Twitter Trends report (which will soon rebrand to the X Trends report), which enables you to uncover popular topics and hashtags related to your brand. Knowing these will help you craft content to build brand awareness.

Purchases/revenue from social

Connecting sales directly to your social media efforts is a clear way to prove social media value. So much so that the Index found 57% of marketers plan on connecting the value of social to business goals in 2024 by tracking conversions and sales driven by social efforts.

There are a number of ways to measure purchases driven by or made directly on social. Here are three key ways to do this:

1. Track sales with Google Analytics (and in Sprout): We already talked about how UTMs and Google Analytics enable you to track traffic from social—and how you can use them in Sprout. Take this a step further and use these tools to measure sales made from social, too. Using Google Analytics, you can track how much your social media efforts are driving sales and conversions, and which channels are most effective drivers of sales. Conversion reports and top conversion path reports give you a good idea of what channels and activities are driving sales.
2. Tracking sales made through social media shopping: Social platforms have been making their shopping capabilities more user-friendly, with TikTok as the latest social platform to officially launch shopping capabilities to users. And social shopping works: 69% of retailers report selling on Facebook, and 59% report selling on Instagram. Built-in platform analytics make tracking this easy. Meta, for example, offers robust insights in their Commerce Manager to track shopping events on their social platforms and on your website (if you’ve added your Meta Pixel).
3. Tracking conversions made from ads: Social media platforms—especially Facebook and Instagram—offer many creative advertising options and formats. Whether you’re using shopping ads that pull in product information directly from your site or ads promoting your brand as a whole, tracking sales made from your paid social media campaigns is essential. In Sprout, the Cross-Network Paid Performance Report simplifies tracking web conversions, cost per conversion and more driven by ads across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter.)

Engagement

Social media engagement includes clicks, likes, reposts, follows, views and incoming messages. It’s one of the most important social media metrics to track.

Healthy engagement involves brands publishing content their audience is interested in. In fact, according to the Index 45% of consumers say their main reason for following a brand is because they post enjoyable, entertaining content. Tracking engagement ensures you’re monitoring the value of your social media content.

But engagement also involves the brand engaging with customers who interact with their posts. And a little goes a long way.

Need ideas on creating great organic content? Check out these four types of content for driving engagement. Or, use these proven social media optimization strategies to boost social engagement.

How to track engagement in Sprout

Engagement is available as a metric in multiple reports at the profile level, network level and post level. The number is further broken down into the types of engagement, like clicks and comments.

Customer satisfaction

Traditionally, this is a customer service team metric. But social customer care often falls under the marketing umbrella. And given that 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support, measuring their satisfaction is a core piece of social media value.

There are a number of ways you can measure this, including with the most on-the-nose metric—your customer satisfaction score (CSAT). However, this metric requires sending a survey, often via email or customer service chatbots. And while it tells you the overall CSAT rating, it’s not always clear why the customer chose that rating.

So here are a few additional customer service metrics to watch:

• Average first reply time
• Average reply wait time
• Reply or response rate
• Sentiment
• Most received topics

How to measure customer satisfaction in Sprout

Sprout has several ways to measure customer satisfaction. The Inbox Team and Activity reports, which we’ll get into later, shed light on how responsive you are to your customers. But Sprout also offers customer feedback surveys that measure your social CSAT or Net Promoter Score (NPS). This survey can be implemented in your Instagram, Facebook and X private messages to get the pulse of how happy customers are with your help.

Sprout’s Social Listening solution also empowers you to go straight to the source and to understand how customers feel about you, your competitors and your products or services. This is a great tool to use to uncover what improvements must be made to boost customer satisfaction.

Lead generation

Wanting to reach customers in the consideration stage of their purchase journey is a common social media goal. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 44% of marketing VPs and executives regularly track conversion rates and leads generated on social media.

To set up analytics for your lead gen efforts, create unique tracking links (the UTMs we talked about) that track when customers take an action on a link. This makes it easy to track what platforms, posts, ads and promos drive the most consideration-stage interest.

Tracking links also make it possible to identify return visitor activity and people who continue to interact with your website after visiting social. This will show you how well your social activity—and specific channels—are warming up leads. If your social management tool has integrations, you can even take this one step further by tracking specific leads in a CRM platform, like Salesforce.

If you’re stuck on how to grow your brand on social, here are some ideas for lead-gen campaigns.

How to improve lead gen with Sprout

For lead generation efforts, Sprout connects with Shopify and Facebook Shops to tag your product offerings. When a customer inquires about a product, you can easily add a direct link to the reply.

You can also seamlessly communicate with your sales team when you find a lead on social. Tag your sales team on incoming messages from potential leads to help move them down the funnel.

Finally, tracking leads is even easier and more granular when you use Sprout’s Salesforce integration. This empowers you to seamlessly connect your CRM with social data, so you can surface insights alongside your other marketing metrics and spark lifelong customer relationships.

Customer retention

It’s great to attract new customers, but don’t forget about your current ones. It’s also cheaper to retain current customers than it is to score new ones. It can cost up to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one. Existing customers are also 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new ones.

Measuring customer acquisition costs is a metric marketers have their eye on. The Index found 29% of marketers plan to connect the value of social to business goals in 2024 by calculating this metric.

Create useful content and offer after-purchase customer service support to increase retention rates. Employ customer retention strategies like rewards programs and feedback emails.

And simply be responsive on social. It can encourage customers to feel connected to your brand. According to the Index, 51% of consumers say when brands simply respond to customers, it makes them memorable.

How to improve customer retention in Sprout

Sprout’s Smart Inbox is designed to support customer retention. With filters and custom views, never miss a social media message again. The reporting features include useful metrics like response time, unique messages and action rate. Don’t assume your team is replying; gather the data that proves it.

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How to communicate the value of social media beyond the marketing department

The insights you glean from social have the potential to inform and help every team at your org meet their business goals. Today, 76% of social marketers say their team’s insights inform other departments, according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™. And yet, 43% of social teams still feel siloed.

You and your team already know that other teams can benefit from social insights. But those other teams may not understand the value of social media for their goals. Here are a few examples of how you can communicate the value of social with other teams beyond marketing.

Before you start: talk to team leaders to understand their needs

Not every metric or finding will be important to every team. Take time to talk to leaders from each team. What are their goals? What are their pain points? What do they need to be successful, and what does their team care about?

Asking questions early on will help you understand which social insights matter most to each team. Then, you can create tailored reports that highlight exactly what they need to know.

This is also where you can understand how often to share reports with other teams and stakeholders. The majority of social media marketers share social performance reports with executive leadership weekly or daily, according to the Index. And tapping into automation will help you set and forget your reports or scorecards you create.

Sprout, for example, enables you to build custom reports tailored to different teams, and enables you to set a regular sharing cadence.

Uncover customer care performance and opportunities

The Sprout Social Index™ found most marketing teams either split social customer care with the customer service team, or they own it. But regardless of how you divide up responding to customers on social, if your customer service team isn’t tapped into social, they may be missing key opportunities.

For instance, incoming social FAQs can help customer service understand where customers most often need help. This can inspire them to create new FAQ resources, customer self-service tools, chatbot answers and more.

Social media insights are also key for your customer service team to understand their performance, what they do well and what needs improvement. After all, 69% of consumers say they expect a response from a brand within a day. And metrics like your average first reply time or reply rate can uncover how quickly your team responds to messages, and how long customers are left waiting.

Using a tool like Sprout’s Inbox Team and Activity reports quantify how quickly customer care agents respond to customers and their response rate. This clearly illustrates whether their responsiveness meets customer expectations—or even exceeds them.

Predict market shifts for your product team

In our fast-paced world, being proactive vs. reactive is essential. And social media is the best source to identify trends…if you know how to tap into the conversation.

Social listening is an often untapped tool that product teams can greatly benefit from. By tapping into the wider conversation on social, beyond just your channels, social listening empowers you to identify trends and market shifts proactively.

Clothing brand River Island is a shining example of a marketing team that changes the game for its product team with social insights. They used social listening to discover that fringe jackets were coming back as a big trend. This is social data in action—while these insights are invaluable to the product team to stay ahead of trends, they also inform the social team what they should push on social.

Social listening also puts a microphone up to what your ideal customers are saying about your products and competitors’ products. Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening Tool empowers you to uncover these conversations, helping you unearth customer pain points that need fixed, and opportunities to differentiate your brand and products from the competition.

Create a reference for your creative team on visuals that resonate

It’s no surprise that 79% of social strategists, managers and directors regularly check engagement metrics. But these metrics are helpful for teams beyond social, like your creative teams.

When I managed social media for a non-profit, the visual team asked me if they could see how their photos and videos performed once posted. Not only would engagement metrics give them insight into what was performing well—it was also a good indicator of what types of visuals our audience reacted to.

If you work with a team that provides you with graphics, photos, or videos, share engagement with them to help them understand what resonates with your social audience.

Pulse check audience sentiment for your PR team

Hopefully, you and your PR teams never experience a social media crisis—big or small. But if you do, it’s always better to catch it early where you can still get ahead of the narrative.

Social media is where that chatter starts and takes off. But it’s not always on your channels first. To understand how your brand is being talked about and perceived, you need to zoom out.

Using social listening is one of the best ways to catch a potential issue bubbling up early. It empowers you to identify keywords people are using while talking about your brand, sentiment dips and more—which is invaluable information for your PR team.

Collaborating with your PR team can also help you create a social media crisis plan that involves social listening to keep tabs on the conversation.

Show your entire organization the value of social media marketing, and how it can help them

Social media offers a wide range of value for brands and businesses alike. But while the value of social media to business goals as a whole is clear, it’s up to you to show other teams what social can do for them.

By honing the right metrics, creating tailored reports for each team and understanding what social insights matter to each team, you can help grow your whole org—one department at a time.

Making social data more accessible and useful cross-org will only become more important. If you’re looking for data to help make the case that every team needs social insights, download and read our latest Sprout Social Index™ report.

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How to craft an effective AI use policy for marketing

Technology, like art, stirs emotions and sparks ideas and discussions. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing is no exception. While millions are enthusiastic about embracing AI to achieve greater speed and agility within their organizations, there are others who remain skeptical—pretty common in the early phases of tech adoption cycles.

In fact, the pattern mirrors the early days of cloud computing when the technology felt like unchartered territory. Most companies were uncertain of the groundbreaking tech—concerned about data security and compliance requirements. Others jumped on the bandwagon without truly understanding migration complexities or associated costs. Yet today, cloud computing is ubiquitous. It has evolved into a transformative force, from facilitating remote work to streaming entertainment.

As technology advances at breakneck speed and leaders recognize AI’s value for business innovation and competitiveness, crafting an organization-wide AI use policy has become very important. In this article, we shed light on why time is of the essence for establishing a well-defined internal AI usage framework and the important elements leaders should factor into it.

Please note: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice. Please review our full disclaimer before reading any further.

Why organizations need an AI use policy

Marketers are already investing in AI to increase efficiency. In fact, The State of Social Report 2023 shows 96% of leaders believe AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities can help them improve decision-making processes significantly. Another 93% also aim to increase AI investments to scale customer care functions in the coming three years. Brands actively adopting AI tools are likely going to have a greater advantage over those who are hesitant.

Given this steep upward trajectory in AI adoption, it is equally necessary to address the risks brands face when there are no clear internal AI use guidelines set. To effectively manage these risks, a company’s AI use policy should center around three key elements:

Vendor risks

Before integrating any AI vendors into your workflow, it is important for your company’s IT and legal compliance teams to conduct a thorough vetting process. This is to ensure vendors adhere to stringent regulations, comply with open-source licenses and appropriately maintain their technology.

Sprout’s Director, Associate General Counsel, Michael Rispin, provides his insights on the subject. “Whenever a company says they have an AI feature, you must ask them—How are you powering that? What is the foundational layer?”

It’s also crucial to pay careful attention to the terms and conditions (T&C) as the situation is unique in the case of AI vendors. “You will need to take a close look at not only the terms and conditions of your AI vendor but also any third-party AI they are using to power their solution because you’ll be subject to the T&Cs of both of them. For example, Zoom uses OpenAI to help power its AI capabilities,” he adds.

Mitigate these risks by ensuring close collaboration between legal teams, functional managers and your IT teams so they choose the appropriate AI tools for employees and ensure vendors are closely vetted.

AI input risks

Generative AI tools accelerate several functions such as copywriting, design and even coding. Many employees are already using free AI tools as collaborators to create more impactful content or to work more efficiently. Yet, one of the biggest threats to intellectual property (IP) rights arises from inputting data into AI tools without realizing the consequences, as a Samsung employee realized only too late.

“They (Samsung) might have lost a major legal protection for that piece of information,” Rispin says regarding Samsung’s recent data leak. “When you put something into ChatGPT, you’re sending the data outside the company. Doing that means it’s technically not a secret anymore and this can endanger a company’s intellectual property rights,” he cautions.

Educating employees about the associated risks and clearly defined use cases for AI-generated content helps alleviate this problem. Plus, it securely enhances operational efficiency across the organization.

AI output risks

Similar to input risks, output from AI tools poses a serious threat if they are used without checking for accuracy or plagiarism.

To gain a deeper understanding of this issue, it is important to delve into the mechanics of AI tools powered by generative pre-trained models (GPT). These tools rely on large language models (LLMs) that are frequently trained on publicly available internet content, including books, dissertations and artwork. In some cases, this means they’ve accessed proprietary data or potentially illegal sources on the dark web.

These AI models learn and generate content by analyzing patterns in the vast amount of data they consume daily, making it highly likely that their output is not entirely original. Neglecting to detect plagiarism poses a huge risk to a brand’s reputation, also leading to legal consequences, if an employee uses that data.

In fact, there is an active lawsuit filed by Sarah Silverman against ChatGPT for ingesting and providing summaries from her book even though it’s not free to the public. Other well-known authors like George RR Martin and John Grisham too, are suing parent company, OpenAI, over copyright infringement. Considering these instances and future repercussions, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has set a precedent by forcing companies to delete their AI data gathered through unscrupulous means.

Another major problem with generative AI like ChatGPT is that it uses old data, leading to inaccurate output. If there was a recent change in areas you’re researching using AI, there is a high probability that the tool would have overlooked that information as it wouldn’t have had time to incorporate the new data. Since these models take time to train themselves on new information, they may overlook the newly added information. This is harder to detect than something wholly inaccurate.

To meet these challenge, you should have an internal AI use framework that specifies scenarios where plagiarism and accuracy checks are necessary when using generative AI. This approach is especially helpful when scaling AI use and integrating it into the larger organization as well.

As in all things innovative, there are risks that exist. But they can be navigated safely through a thoughtful, intentional approach.

What marketing leaders should advocate for in an AI use policy

As AI tools evolve and become more intuitive, a comprehensive AI use policy will ensure accountability and responsibility across the board. Even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has minced no words, cautioning AI vendors to practice ethical marketing in a bid to stop them from overpromising capabilities.

Now is the time for leaders to initiate a foundational framework for strategically integrating AI into their tech stack. Here are some practical factors to consider.

Accountability and governance

Your corporate AI use policy must clearly describe the roles and responsibilities of individuals or teams entrusted with AI governance and accountability in the company. Responsibilities should include implementing regular audits to ensure AI systems are compliant with all licenses and deliver on their intended objectives. It’s also important to revisit the policy frequently so you’re up-to-date with new developments in the industry, including legislation and laws that may be applicable.

The AI policy should also serve as a guide to educate employees, explaining the risks of inputting personal, confidential or proprietary information into an AI tool. It should also discuss the risks of using AI outputs unwisely, such as verbatim publishing AI outputs, relying on AI for advice on complex topics, or failing to sufficiently review AI outputs for plagiarism.

Planned implementation

A smart way to mitigate data privacy and copyright risks is to introduce AI tools across the organization in a phased manner. As Rispin puts it, “We need to be more intentional, more careful about how we use AI. You want to make sure when you do roll it out, you do it periodically in a limited fashion and observe what you’re trying to do.” Implementing AI gradually in a controlled environment enables you to monitor usage and proactively manage hiccups, enabling a smoother implementation on a wider scale later on.

This is especially important as AI tools also provide brand insights vital for cross-organizational teams like customer experience and product marketing. By introducing AI strategically, you can extend its efficiencies to these multi-functional teams safely while addressing roadblocks more effectively.

Clear use cases

Your internal AI use policy should list all the licensed AI tools approved for use. Clearly define the purpose and scope of using them, citing specific use cases. For example, documenting examples of what tasks are low risk or high and which should be completely avoided.

Low-risk tasks that are not likely to harm your brand may look like the social media team using generative AI to draft more engaging posts or captions. Or, customer service teams using AI-assisted copy for more personalized responses.

In a similar vein, the AI use policy should specify high-risk examples where the use of generative AI should be restricted, such as giving legal or marketing advice, client communications, product presentations or the production of marketing assets containing confidential information.

“You want to think twice about rolling it out to people whose job is to deal with information that you could never share externally, like your client team or engineering team. But you shouldn’t just do all or nothing. That’s a waste because marketing teams, even legal teams and success teams, a lot of back office functions basically—their productivity can be accelerated by using AI tools like ChatGPT,” Rispin explains.

Intellectual property rights

Considering the growing capacity of generative AI and the need to produce complex content quickly, your company’s AI use policy should clearly address the threat to intellectual property rights. This is critical because the use of generative AI to develop external-facing material, such as reports and inventions, may mean the assets cannot be copyrighted or patented.

“Let’s say you’ve published a valuable industry report for three consecutive years and in the fourth year decide to produce the report using generative AI. In such a scenario, you have no scope of having a copyright on that new report because it’s been produced without any major human involvement. The same would be true for AI-generated art or software code,” Rispin notes.

Another consideration is using enterprise-level generative AI accounts with the company as the admin and the employees as users. This lets the company control important privacy and information-sharing settings that decrease legal risk. For example, disabling certain types of information sharing with ChatGPT will decrease the risk of losing valuable intellectual property rights.

Disclosure details

Similarly, your AI use policy must ensure marketers disclose they’re using AI-generated content to external audiences. The European Commission considers this a very important aspect of the responsible and ethical use of generative AI. In the US, the AI Disclosure Act of 2023 Bill further cemented this requirement, maintaining any output from AI must include a disclaimer. This legislation tasks the FTC with enforcement.

Social media platforms like Instagram are already implementing ways to inform users of content generated by AI through labels and watermarks. Google’s generative AI tool, Imagen, also now embeds digital watermarks on AI-generated copy and images using SynthID. The technology embeds watermarks directly into image pixels, making them detectable for identification but imperceptible to the human eye. This means labels cannot be altered even with added filters or altered colors.

Integrate AI strategically and safely

The growing adoption of AI in marketing is undeniable, as are the potential risks and brand safety concerns that arise in the absence of well-defined guidelines. Use these practical tips to build an effective AI use policy that enables you to strategically and securely harness the benefits of AI tools for smarter workflows and intelligent decision-making.

Learn more about how marketing leaders worldwide are approaching AI and ML to drive business impact.

 

DISCLAIMER

The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice; all information, content, points and materials are for general informational purposes. Information on this website may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. Incorporation of any guidelines provided in this article does not guarantee that your legal risk is reduced. Readers of this article should contact their legal team or attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter and should refrain from acting on the basis of information on this article without first seeking independent legal advice. Use of, and access to, this article or any of the links or resources contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader, user or browser and any contributors. The views expressed by any contributors to this article are their own and do not reflect the views of Sprout Social. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are hereby expressly disclaimed.

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Halloween email marketing: 10 ideas and examples to scary good sales

Tis’ the season for pumpkin spice coffee, college football, and overuse of the pumpkin emoji.

But did you know that it’s also a time for some of the biggest business holidays of the year? Cyber Monday, Black Friday, even the majority of Christmas shopping. (That’s right, fall doesn’t end until December 20th!)

So take a small break from your Black Friday/Cyber Monday planning. Why would you do that you may ask? Well consider this: Halloween spending is projected to reach $12.2 billion this year.. Now that’s a lot of candy corn.

The most frightening holiday of the year is more than just child’s play, it’s Americans’ third favorite holiday and a chance to connect with your email audience in a fun and effective way.

Ready to create a spooktacular Halloween email campaign? 

Here are 10 Halloween email ideas and examples to make your Halloween emails scary good.

Halloween subject lines that haunt and delight

One of my absolute favorite things about sending Halloween related emails is the creativity I can express in my subject lines. 

You should be doing the same. Have some fun with your subject lines this season. Show your creativity with a spooky good subject line (see I’m even doing it here).

To give you some inspiration, here are a few Halloween subject line examples I’ve come across which I think are pretty clever:

• Boo-yah: Save 35% on Halloween costumes & accessories till noon!
• No tricks, just treats
• Boooooooooooo
• Spooktacular dinners for the week 🧛🏻
• What's a ghost's favorite dinner? 👻
• 🎃 Scary big deal (use at your own risk)
• Trick OR Treat? Why not both?
• A little treat to go with all the tricks this weekend!

Still need some subject line inspiration, just ask AI to help. I generated these ideas using the AI email assistant in AWeber.

1. Spooky Savings: Get Fit this Halloween with our Exclusive Discount!

2. Trick or Treat Yourself to Fitness: Enjoy a Spooktacular Discount on our Coaching Services

3. Halloween Special: Get in Shape and Save Big with our Fitness Coaching Discount

4. Boo-tiful Bodies Await: Scary Good Discount on Fitness Coaching Services

5. Unmask Your Potential: Halloween Discount on Personalized Fitness Coaching

6. Unlock Your Fitness Goals this Halloween: Exclusive Discount Inside

7. Creep into Fitness: Enjoy a Frighteningly Good Discount on our Coaching Services

8. Don't be Scared of Getting Fit: Halloween Discount on Personal Training

9. Spine-Chilling Savings: Get Fit for Halloween with our Coaching Discount

10. Trick or Train: Scary Good Discount on Fitness Coaching Services

Here was the prompt I used to generate these ideas:

“give me a few halloween related subject line ideas for my email offering a discount for my fitness coaching services”

Be pun-ny (funny)

Follow that creativity from your subject line, into your email. Don’t be afraid to get a little pun-ny this season. 

Here’s an absolute classic Halloween email from Lush. They’re telling a Halloween story in their email that ties beautifully to their relaxation products.

I love the attention-grabbing headline “Spooky slumbers”. But they don’t stop there, just read the first line of the copy “Little monsters won’t go to bed?”. 

If you have a product or service that ties into a Halloween theme, promote it in an email and tie it to the season, you may just see an increase in sales from that email.

Halloween nostalgia

Halloween is a nostalgic time for most people. Just think back on those days where you dressed up as your favorite TV show character or superhero. You just can’t help feeling a little sentimental, can you?

If your emails can make people feel something, you’re going to connect with them in a meaningful way. 

This email from Pottery Barn Kids does just that with an image that is cute and fun – and makes you want to buy a costume for your kid right now (or yourself, no judgments).

Add some Halloween fun

Not sure what to do or what to offer. Then just keep it simple by adding some Halloween fun into your emails.

You can spice up your emails by adding a pumpkin or ghost graphic.

Jack Threads took a photo of a pumpkin they carved and made it the background for this promotion email. Great idea and amazing carving skills.

Add some Halloween animation

Capture the Halloween spirit with a bewitching animated GIF.

Picture this: a mischievous black cat casting playful spells, a jack-o'-lantern's grin that flickers mysteriously, or ghostly apparitions floating in the moonlit night. 

Just like carving pumpkins and donning costumes, adding an animated GIF brings a dash of playful enchantment to your emails.

Just take a look at this silly, yet fun GIF Postable added to their Halloween email.

Here are some Halloween GIFs you can download for free.

Create urgency

Sale FOMO is real.

By creating a sense of urgency, your customers will be motivated to take an action so they don’t miss out. 

Take this Halloween email example from Tattly which is offering a one day (31% off for the 31st of October) promotion. Nice way to tie Halloween into the promotion.

Headline and subject line harmony

Have you ever opened an email expecting one thing, only to see something entirely different when you open the email? It’s off-putting.

If your subject line doesn’t align with your email content, subscribers are more than likely to delete your email, or worse, mark it as spam. Yikes!

To avoid this worst-case scenario, use headlines with large text to catch people’s attention right away and make sure your headline works with your subject line. It also increases the chance that your subscriber will actually read and click on your email.

This email from Williams-Sonoma uses a simple headline that reinforces the message of the subject line and it plays on the Halloween theme and explains the value of their sale. A win-win.

Subject line: Trick-or-Treat! 30% Off Halloween Tabletop, Candy, Bakeware & More

Halloween marketing ideas 

Now that we’ve shared our Boo-tiful (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself) email tips, what type of Halloween marketing ideas should you include in those emails.?

Halloween promo code

Offer an exclusive saving using a promo code. But the hook, make that promo code Halloween related.

That’s exactly what Baron Fig did in their email with their “GHOSTS22” promo code for 20% off all orders of $60 or more.

Halloween newsletter

Sending a Halloween newsletter is a great way to engage your audience and tap into the seasonal spirit. It allows you to share special promotions, highlight themed content, and connect with your subscribers by aligning with a widely recognized and festive theme.

Here’s a perfect example from Land O Lakes. The company known for their butter, send this Halloween newsletter showing their readers how to make delicious candy corn cupcakes (who’s hungry).

Create a holiday-inspired product or service

Creating a Halloween-inspired product or service presents a fantastic marketing opportunity, tapping into the excitement and consumer interest surrounding the holiday. 

By offering a product or service tailored to the Halloween theme, you not only cater to a specific market demand but also infuse a sense of seasonal fun and novelty. This could potentially boost your sales.

How awesome is this email from Rover? They created Halloween plush toys. But what I love about the email is the image of the dog holding the bloody knife. I don’t have a dog, but that image compels me to buy something.

How are you marketing during the holidays?

Ready to create some email magic? ✨ Share your best holiday marketing tips in the comments!

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