Why Chatbots Are the Future of Marketing: The Battle of the Bots

How AI-powered chatbots are transforming marketing and sales operations

bot marketing

There’s a huge difference between a bot answering “yes” or “no” questions and a bot that provides meaningful experiences. Koan is an application meant to help strengthen the bonds within your team. This app will help build your team bot marketing with features like goal-setting and reflection. Sage HR is an HR tool that automates attendance tracking and employee leave scheduling. The Slack integration lets you track your team’s time off and absence requests via Slack.

The Whole Foods chatbot lets users search its database of recipes—a smart choice for a grocery chain. If Messenger is right for your audience, the next thing to consider is what actions you want users to take when interacting with your chatbot. You should also consider how many steps would be needed to arrive at a solution for each query. They use the chatbot to give the customer a quick response and prepare for the next step by asking them to keep the necessary details handy. In this way, they streamline the process for the customer and the customer care agent by reducing the need to repeat information. You can order pizza by simply sharing an emoji, then Domino’s chatbots route those orders and ask additional questions if necessary.

Chatbots are one of the most common types of artificial intelligence (AI) we interact with estimates saying that 91% of internet users interact with a chatbot on a daily basis. And, when you consider that 56% of people would rather send a message than call customer service, it just makes sense for businesses to jump on the chatbot trend. Keep reading for a complete guide to chatbot marketing that will get started with chatbots so you can reduce costs and boost business.

It allows businesses to work fast and efficiently without having to pay for staff to do the manual work. Instead of hiring a full team, you can focus on recruiting employees to perform critical tasks. One of the biggest benefits of AI marketing technology is it can automate data-based decisions in an instant. It can show you how your customer would react to your message or tell you the best strategy to use for your email marketing campaigns. Optibot, their AI tool, scours and analyzes all the customer data provided to generate actionable insights.

If you’re using a bot to change an airline reservation, the bot should know if you have an unused credit on your account and whether you typically pick the aisle or window seat. Artificial intelligence will continue to radically shape this front, but a bot should connect with your current systems so a shared contact record can drive personalization. But, if you’re able to provide actual value in the places they already spend their time, everything changes.

Let’s look at what to avoid, so you don’t fall into any traps with your marketing automation chatbot. These are some inspirations for your chatbot digital marketing. Chatbots for marketing can help you segment traffic and advertise your products to the right audience. This is important as research shows that around 77% of a company’s return on investment (ROI) comes from segmented and targeted communication. Within six months, they earned 15 million content engagements and 6.1 million post links. With these kind of metrics, River Island proves to be fashion-forward and future focused.

It performs basic functions like grammar and spell checks but goes a step further by rewriting sentences, so it reads better. Its most important feature is its capacity to ensure the tone and style of the writer is preserved despite the rewrite. This is important for brands that want to maintain their authentic voice in all of their communications. It can suggest keywords, exact word count, links, images, and more.

With its intuitive tool, even beginners can easily create high-quality videos without the need for actors, filming teams, or expensive equipment. The platform boasts photo-realistic AI avatars that can be customized to resonate with your brand’s identity. This is complemented by a rich template library, making it easier than ever to engage customers and prospects alike.

This is essential because demographics differ for each social network. For example, social media demographics show Gen Z and Millennials made a shift from using to Instagram and make up two-thirds of Instagram users. Chatbot marketing enables you to engage with customers in an interactive way. While others are built for customer care and marketing-specific brands. In order to make sure that every lead who booked a call was prepared to become a client, she created the following qualification parameters using a chatbot. To show you how this works, we’ll use the example of Cat Howell, who used this process in her agency.

Then, to help you make sense of all the data, you can use its flexible user interface or select one of its dozens of live visualizations to analyze the data for you. With its detailed insights and timely analysis, Brandwatch CI Platform helps organizations remain agile and responsive in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. You can build a Facebook Messenger chatbot that will interact with users through a product quiz. Then, create some ads for your Facebook page that will direct potential customers to the chat on Messenger. This way, you can increase engagement, show off your products in a fun way, and improve click-through rates to your ecommerce store. London-based fashion company River Island uses chatbots to help streamline their customer service.

Research would be convenient, purchases streamlined, and service personalized. Vedant Misra, artificial intelligence tech lead at HubSpot, discusses why you should leverage consumer data to create more useful bot interactions. But, the ultimate mission of a bot is to provide a service people actually want to use. As long as you think of your bot as just another communication channel, your focus will be misguided.

By creating a unique auto-response for each reply option, your Twitter chatbot can continue the conversation and guide people to the next steps. Royal Dutch Airlines uses Twitter for customer service, sending users a helpful message showing their departures, gates and other points of interest. Create more compelling messages by including emojis, images or animated GIFs to your chatbot conversation. Not only does media bring more personality to your messages, but it also helps reinforce the messages you send and increase conversation conversion rates. Spend time making sure that all conversations fully satisfy customer needs by anticipating what your customers will want to know. When the conversation gets several layers deep, it may be time to push that user to a live representative.

What are the ingredients of a modern marketing technology stack? We asked some of the world’s fastest-growing companies to find out. If you’re not using Intercom yet, first sign up for a free trial. If you visit our pricing page, our bot will pop up almost immediately, asking how we can help. Answer the questions, and you’ll be offered a suggestion for the plan that fits you best, plus the opportunity to chat with someone from our team to learn more.

Here are some tools that can help you develop your chatbot marketing strategy to fulfill your social media, website and customer support ticket needs. Being able to start a conversation with a chatbot at any time is appealing to many businesses that want to maximize engagement with website visitors. By always having someone to answer queries or book meetings with prospects, chatbots can make it easy to scale lead generation with a small team. Rule-based chatbots are programmed to respond the same way each time or respond differently to messages containing certain keywords. AI chatbots use machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP)  to understand the intent of the message received and adapt the responses in a conversational manner.

These chatbots serve as a way for site visitors to get the help they need and find the information they want if they can’t figure it out on their own. They can do so all without needing to speak to one of your in-person representatives. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. And just like they can help the Jedi or the Rebel Alliance, so too can they help your business. Bots are great for automating various marketing tasks that you’d otherwise have to do manually. As users interact with your chatbot, you can collect key information like their name, email address and phone number for follow-ups. You can also give Drift access to your calendar to directly set up meetings or demos.

Bot marketing, as you might expect, is the process of integrating bots into your digital marketing efforts, particularly on your website. Those bots can carry out a few different kinds of tasks related to your marketing campaigns, as we’ll cover below. Sprout’s Bot Builder enables you to streamline conversations and map out experiences based on simple, rules-based logic. Using welcome messages, brands can greet customers and kick off the conversation as they enter a Direct Message interaction on Twitter. Using a tool like Sprout Social allows you to build and deploy new Twitter chatbots in minutes. Sprout’s easy to use Bot Builder includes a real-time, dynamic previewer to test the chatbot before setting it live.

Your marketing chatbot needs to have a voice that matches your brand. So, if you’re a funeral products store, then your bot probably shouldn’t be playful. But, if you’re an ecommerce store selling kids’ toys, then make your chatbot cheery and humorous.

Automating messaging with chatbot marketing

DeepL is a powerful AI tool that translates documents and files into several popular languages of your choosing. It not only translates the text word for word, but it adds subtle nuances and words that some of the biggest translation tools like Google and Microsoft, have difficulty grasping. The end result is fluent text that is accurate and easy to read. HeyOrca emerges as a distinctive player among AI Marketing tools, catering specifically to the nuanced needs of social media teams and agencies. At its core, HeyOrca facilitates a seamless collaboration and approval process. One of the standout features is the Captivating Content function, which crafts compelling captions using advanced AI tools tailored to your brand voice.

Marketing bots push customers through your sales funnel because you can provide speedy engagement and support and access extensive customer data. We’ll be focusing specifically on chatbots on social media channels in this post. Additionally, you can use these bots to pull data on your site visitors. As chatbots talk to users, they can ask survey-like questions about the users’ demographics, locations, interests, and more. Many users will respond voluntarily, providing you with useful data that can enhance your marketing.

  • Bots provide a scalable way to interact one-on-one with buyers.
  • You can order pizza by simply sharing an emoji, then Domino’s chatbots route those orders and ask additional questions if necessary.
  • HelloFresh manages to show off their brand voice by playfully introducing the bot as Brie.
  • Customers can use RI-bot to check on orders, ask about a product, locate a store and more.

Somehow making a single purchase meant brands had permission to email you every day from now until eternity. Vedant Misra, artificial intelligence tech lead at HubSpot, explains how personalization drives repeat users. …and it’ll guide you through the voltage options and place the order. When the lead is hot, a chatbot can send a notification to encourage the client to place an order or recommend some items they might be interested in. Find out more about the advantages of chatbots for your business.

This AI integration aids in capturing recipient attention, encouraging action, and streamlining team communication. Aside from monitoring brand reputation, it also lets you assess marketing campaigns and address issues that may come up before it gets out of hand. Your job is to understand the interactions your audience is already having with your brand. Then, harness the chat interface in a way that yields maximum impact with minimal fluff.

This integration lets you learn about your coworkers and make your team happy without leaving Slack. Faqbot is an automated 24-hour customer and sales support bot for answering frequently asked questions. The few seconds it takes to set it up will allow Faqbot to help your customers while you get some rest.

Popular Features

Instead of just offering the discount in the chat, Brie takes it a step further by automatically redirecting to HelloFresh’s Hero Discount Program page. The page highlights the discount program, along with testimonials and frequently asked questions. Using the bot to push this program is a great example of how brands can track and assess the ROI of these helpful digital assistants.

The information you gain from this data can inform other chatbot marketing strategy tactics, future campaigns and your product roadmap. AI chatbots use machine learning, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing (NLP) to communicate with users in a natural, humanistic and conversational way. Natural language processing then allows chatbots to replicate human patterns of speech and understand context. Marketing bots are used to optimize workflows, automate repetitive tasks, deliver efficient customer support and nurture qualified leads to conversion. Read this article for the best marketing bots in 2024, the types of marketing bots and why these bots matter to businesses. For example, with our upcoming Enhance by AI Assist feature, customer care teams will be able to swiftly tailor responses to improve reply times and deliver more personalized support.

GPT-3 AI technology was developed by OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk. It’s the first AI tech that has passed the Turing Test, which ensures that the written copy would sound as humanlike as possible. The Beacon’s AI Outreach Tool was born from the fusion of technology and passion, with a clear objective to redefine brand outreach for creators. Co-founded by former creators and tech entrepreneurs, John and Lisa, the tool capitalizes on their knowledge of the creative industry and their technological expertise.

You can also tweak the bot’s decision tree—from triggers to messages it sends your potential clients. So, it’s good to keep track of performance to make the changes in a timely manner. The first successful use case for chatbot Messenger marketing is Lego’s Christmas newsletter campaign. They used marketing chatbots to help parents decide on a perfect Lego set for their children. The bot asked the potential customers about their kids’ age and interest, then showed a selection of products.

The decisions come from collected data that has been analyzed and interpreted with the market trends. Every business wants to save money when running marketing campaigns. An AI marketing tool may require initial investment, but it pays in dividends by giving you cost savings.

Regardless of how complex your workflow is, Proof Bot will supercharge your processes through automated features for team collaboration and communication across all departments. Sales outreach is a common B2B strategy to nurture and engage leads so they can purchase from your brand. If leads consistently have positive experiences with your brand and you nurture them through personalized content, conversion is much more likely. You’ll know which products to boost, which products need different advertising content, and which aspects of your sales and marketing funnels to optimize.

bot marketing

Karma is a team management and analytics bot that tracks your team’s accomplishments and performance while promoting friendly competition. The Slack integration lets you view your team performance stats and https://chat.openai.com/ reward high-achieving coworkers. The Slack integration lets your team receive notifications about your customers’ activity. It also lets you learn where new prospects come from and generate more leads.

Flick AI Social Media Assistant is a powerful marketing tool designed to streamline the brainstorming, writing, and planning process for social media content. By offering a 7-day free trial, users can experience a new way of creating engaging and on-brand content with ease. The platform’s FAQ Wizard and Reply Assistant streamline customer support, ensuring responses are both efficient and on-brand. Smart Views and Tracker provide Chat PG valuable insights into customer satisfaction, helping you prioritize requests and improve communication. Additionally, the Conversion Booster feature is engineered to increase sales by encouraging conversions through user behavior analysis. Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, helps businesses cultivate lasting relationships and drive conversions through sophisticated multi-channel campaigns and marketing automation.

When you partner with us for our web design services, you’ll get help creating a website that ranks high in search results and drives conversion among your site visitors. We’re a “do-it-for-me” agency, so while you’ll have final say on everything, we’ll do all the work. Bots are a great way to spruce up your web design, but they can’t fix all your problems. It takes an experienced team to put together a website that engages your target audience, and WebFX has just the team for you.

Intercom’s new and improved reporting features

Chatbots are available 24/7, allowing them to service more customers whenever they need help. Bots can answer frequently asked questions, provide discount codes—and so much more. They can also create tickets for a human agent to address during working hours. When social bots resolve simple issues, human agents can focus their attention on more complex problems.

If your customer service team has more incoming requests than they can handle, it might be because they’re only taking them through the phone. Live chat bots can open more request lines, lower call volume, and allow service and support representatives to balance more questions at a time. Users are able to search for companies and bots inside Facebook Messenger by name, so you’ll probably get some users that way. But, as with any new pathway into your company, you’re likely to find that adoption of this communication channel within your customer base won’t happen without some promotion. Facebook is trying to make that easier for businesses and organizations as well.

Their use will keep growing in the future, and they’ll be more visible in different industries for marketing purposes. But chatbots will not replace traditional marketing, rather, they will be an addition to it. You need to constantly work on, improve and update your chatbots. This technology is not something you can set up, launch, and expect great results. It will always need improvements and updates, as well as reviewing the results to keep track of the performance.

Suggested readingLearn how to use Tidio chatbot performance analytics to quickly check your bot’s metrics. Also, check out the best chatbot ideas to use for your business and personal needs. Alongside your email newsletter, send short updates to your website visitors to keep them updated. You can include anything that will be relevant to your clients—new releases, products on sale, and upcoming offers. Suggested readingLearn how to write a warm welcome message to the clients and find out more about chatbot personality from our research.

bot marketing

And if you do have a customer base who clamors for data-rich answers, then use the examples above to inspire your chatbot dreams. Just like you do with the way you write as your brand on social media, you’ll want to think about the voice and tone of your chatbot as well. Perhaps this is simply a natural extension of your brand’s voice and tone. Open-ended conversations can lead to confusion for your bot and a poor experience for the user. If you don’t have the luxury of highly-advanced language processing, then an open-ended question like “how can we help you today” could go any number of directions. Annette Chacko is a Content Specialist at Sprout where she merges her expertise in technology with social to create content that helps businesses grow.

Babylon Health uses AI-powered bot technology with Symptom Checker, which is available via the app and their website. For starters, their Messenger chatbot is self-aware—in the sense that HelloFresh immediately acknowledges you’re speaking with a chatbot, as opposed to a customer service rep. How many agents would you have to hire to answer customer inquiries 24/7? Chatbots can help you save both time and money by automating conversations and removing the need for a human to answer every single question. That means you can save time and money while still serving more clients and free your agents up for the more complex problems. You can focus on strategizing and executing your next marketing campaign by delegating certain tasks to automated bots.

Basic rules-based chatbots follow a set of instructions based on customer responses. These chatbots have a script that follows a simple decision tree designed for specific interactions. These seamless user experiences ensure that customers remember your brand for great customer service and that you get more engagement by keeping interactions interesting. Chatbots typically operate within SMS text, website chat windows and social messaging services—like Messenger, Twitter, Whatsapp and Instagram Direct—to receive and respond to messages. A marketing bot is a form of marketing automation that business use to get more customers and support existing customers with time-saving automation.

If standing out among the 100,000 other bots on the platform wasn’t difficult enough, we can assume Messenger will only feature bots that don’t detract people from the platform. In other words, bots solve the thing we loathed about apps in the first place. Today, messaging apps have over 5 billion monthly active users, and for the first time, people are using them more than social networks. This way, the recommendations will be more personal and accurate. You will also be able to collect some data on the potential customers that you can use later to promote your products and services.

Find the best possible responses

Once you ask the first round of questions, start mapping out what the conversation journey may look like. You can do so with a tool like Sprout Social’s Bot Builder or start with building paths in Google Drawings. This will also guide you in determining the user experience and questions your chatbot should ask. For example, an existing customer on Twitter may have different questions than a new customer reaching out to you on Instagram.

Relic Agency introduces custom AI bot for destination marketing – Utah Business – Utah Business

Relic Agency introduces custom AI bot for destination marketing – Utah Business.

Posted: Tue, 09 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

You’ve probably seen them before, a little chat widget somewhere on a website that allows you to ping customer service with questions. Here’s exactly how to create a marketing bot that rus a drip campaign. Drip marketing takes users through a cycle of messages that lead up to a conversion action. When you’re thinking about a use case for Facebook Messenger, make sure you’re thinking about it from the standpoint of the customer or user, not from the company’s standpoint. “Bot” is a generalized term used to describe any software that automates a task. Chatbots, which anyone can now build into Facebook Messenger, automate conversation — at least the beginning stages of it.

It’s important to research your audience, so you can select the right platform for your chatbot marketing strategy. Your chatbot marketing strategy can be as complex or rudimentary as you’d like based on your industry, customer profile and budget. Similarly, chatbot marketing can boost sales when set up to proactively send notifications about offers and discounts to speed up the purchase process. The Sprout Social Index™ shows that more than 23% of customers expect a brand to respond to their query within two hours. By automating responses to common customer queries that don’t require human support, you save time and resources that can be utilized in more meaningful ways. Built to automatically engage with received messages, chatbots can be rule-based or powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

If BB can’t answer a question, the bot will connect you with a live agent. The chatbot also offers emoji direction services, which give travelers information based on their location. The bot will show directions to a destination of choice once the user sends a relevant emoji and their location on Messenger.

Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection. The chatbot offers quick replies as a means of making it easier for customers to initiate a conversation and then helps them move forward. For example, leading eCommerce platform Shopify uses a simple automated message on their support handle before connecting the customer to a human representative. Chatbot journeys can quickly become complex maps of conversation.

  • 7 min read – Six ways organizations use a private cloud to support ongoing digital transformation and create business value.
  • This gives you first-mover’s advantage as you learn and embrace marketing bots.
  • It helps collect data from different platforms to provide a unified view of all the information in one dashboard.
  • From making X-wing repairs to assisting Trade Federation visitors, these droids serve a wide range of functions.
  • Video marketing is booming, especially for social media marketing, which is …

Mobile Monkey is a sales outreach marketing bot offering personalization and data enrichment functions. You want to avoid these chatbots to deliver organic customer interactions. But before you get too confident in your marketing bot’s suggestions, use A/B testing to determine what content and marketing strategies best nurture your leads. You can understand how customers interact with your website and products, what challenges defer them from purchasing and which content engages targeted buyers the most. As I mentioned before, marketing bots track loads of consumer behavioral patterns and data. With the high engagement rate with bots, you also have a good chance of getting your message noticed for surveys.

Without a certain level of specificity and pre-planning, then it becomes infinitely harder for a chatbot to deliver a believable experience — much less the right answer. We ended up researching a number of different world-class chatbot experiences to learn from. Here is a list of 10 lessons for anyone about to get into chatbot marketing — like us. One of the most common uses for sales bots is customer assistance on your website. You’ve no doubt seen chatbots before — you visit a website, and as it loads, a small support widget appears in the bottom corner of the screen. The primary benefit of marketing bots is that they help automate your marketing, freeing you to focus on other aspects of running your business while still satisfying your target audience.

If more complicated answers are required, they can be forwarded to a customer service agent. Chatbots also help ensure that customers won’t feel ignored when they want to reach out to you. The platform also offers a Monthly Calendar Generator, creating engaging and customized posts effortlessly. Additionally, the Carousel Maker allows users to create on-brand carousels quickly, aiming to improve social media engagement. TIDIO AI equips your business with advanced AI features to improve customer service and boost sales. Its best selling point is that it’s designed to make premium AI features affordable, allowing you to enhance your support without the extra costs.

Anything you can do to reduce friction is going to increase sales and this is a huge benefit for eCommerce. Chatbots can be used in tons of messaging apps from Facebook Messenger to WeChat to WhatsApp, and more, so no matter where your customers want to talk to you, your chatbots can be there. Brands don’t need coding experience to leverage these marketing bots. You can access lead generation tools like an email finder, LinkedIn connections export, LinkedIn profile scraper, and many more. These marketing bots are super beneficial to brands because personalized marketing strategies boost your chance of converting leads. Marketing bots have the technology and automation functions to provide real-time suggestions based on how customers interact with your brand.

I need a Dribbble invitation

As you can see, I need a Dribbble invitation (player).

I have joined this incredible community some time ago but I am disappointed that I can’t post anything there. I’ve seen a lot of pages online that offers “free” invitations but there is mostly scam, as they request likes, posts or other things just to get a small chance to “win” the invitation.Check Out Mountainview Recovery Photos

I don’t know if it is for real or not, I haven’t tried yet, but if you have a Dribbble invitation and you like my work and style, please make me happy. I will advertise you on my website for doing this.

Thank you!

Affordable 3D Presentation Services

Our 3D presentation services are specially designed, in order to provide the best solution for our customer’s needs.

If you need a 3D presentation movie, a scene animation or just the image of a product or building that has not been realized yet, we can help you. We just need the specifications of the product that you need to present and some descriptive details. Basically we make 3D presentations for any kind of product, regardless of its destination: for an advertising campaign, for a website, application or video game.

When your business partners can’t view your product, a 3D presentation may be the best solution. Save time and cost required to see that product in another city, for example, and have much lower development costs than production itself. With the help of the 3D presentations you get a better spatial perception of your product, you can see any detail and you can reduce the production costs by identifying potential problems before the actual execution.

If you have already a building/property that you want to better value it by a new interior redesign, a 3D presentation will help you to get the best decision. Not always your creative and nonconformist ideas can be put in practice. Therefore it is better to know before how will look your new arrangement. You can save time, money and energy that you may consume making a design that finally you may not like.

Any 3D presentation involves 4 steps: modeling, texturing, illumination and rendering. Depending on your project requirements we can emphasize more any of these steps.

What are 3D presentations and what advantages have?

3D presentations are obtained from a three-dimensional graphic creation process using computers and special software. This can be done in the form of still images or videos. The stages of making a 3D project involves: modeling of the objects in the scene, texturing, scene lighting and rendering.

3D Presentations offers a number of advantages over 2D presentation (obtained by drawing and illustration). These include:

  • the ability to obtain images from any angle
  • the colors (textures) and lighting can be easily changed
  • can be done unlimited changes on the settlement and geometry of the objects, at any time, without significantly affecting the execution time of the project
  • the resulting images are realistic and very accurate, based on the exact dimensions of all objects in the scene, using natural perspective
  • can be made animated sequences of the scenes by using interactive 3D technologies

Where and when are 3D presentations used?

The renderings are digital images, made entirely by following a modeling process and digital creation. Therefore they can be easily used in any form, on any media:

  • initial presentation web site
  • complete website
  • digital brochures
  • catalogs and other printed materials
  • identification panels (for construction sites)
  • posters, banners
  • e-mail newsletters

Most times the client needs 3D architectural presentations while the project is still under development. Therefore the 3D production can be divided into several stages that can be synchronized with the phases of construction and promotion. 3D presentations allow great flexibility in their execution. Thus, we give higher priority to certain parts of the project, by developing together with you, real time. In addition there is always the opportunity to make changes without starting the project from scratch.

How we make the prices?

The 3D presentations are complex projects that often involve a series of preparatory or post-processing steps. Generally speaking there are no two projects alike, so we should consider all aspects in order to provide the final price.

First we should know if you need one or multiple renderings or an animation. Then we are interested in the environment you want to display presentations (web, print, posters, projections, etc.). Depending on this we set the dimensions in pixels of the final image.

Another important step is to establish the scene complexity, the level of detail you want and the final image quality.

The price also depends on the elements creation of the project. If we do creative work for various elements of the project or even all the creative work, the cost can be significantly higher than in the case you already have these aspects.

Finally, the price will be decided by the estimated work time, the necessary resources (graphic designers, computing power, etc.) and the number of the final images you want. Anyway, our price will be affordable!

Terms:

rendering, rendering: the process of obtaining an image from a 3D scene
render farm: a series of powerful computers connected together in order to increase the processing power thus decreasing time rendering
3D architectural rendering: the result of a 3D architectural project
3D animation: video result obtained from a 3D scene (fly-through video)

Cheap web design?

I see a lot of offers for cheap web design services, like Get a website for $100! or Free websites, but how much free or cheap are such services?

A website is not just a web presence for your company or an online business card how many are thinking. A website is basically a powerful marketing tool with endless possibilities to get your business known, to sell your products and to share and communicate information with your potential customers.

A website should not be cheap, nor expensive, but efficient! It should be wrapped around your company needs, incorporate the brand strategy, create awareness around your customers, sell and help you to have more and more returning customers.

Even if we talk about e-commerce, presentational websites, portals, news, social or portfolio sites we talk about business! And business means continuous investment. Your website should not be just an acquisition but a strategic measure to expand your offline activity online or to create something meaningful for your business. If you plan to invest just $100 on your business than maybe you should not bother. You can buy a nice chair or a nice painting for your office instead 🙂

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that your website should be expensive! I say that you need to be seriously involved in a web project for your business in order to really succeed! The biggest companies are investing millions in their web services, thousands hours of design and development work and tens or even hundreds of people involved. Scale this down to your business level and have a thought on how much you can do for a good online investment.

Get real web design prices! 🙂

A typography study on known websites

Typography is very important for websites, mainly because is the best way to help users to read easily and to focus on the important parts of the text. Another aspect of the typography is that it makes the text beautiful and can give the user the needed mood to read and understand the message.

Here is a quick research on what fonts and font sizes are using some of the best known websites by designers:

apple.com

Apple is using Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans Unicode as primary fonts, starting with a font size of just 10px for the footer links, 12px for some elements like the secondary menu, 14px – 16px for paragraphs and 22px – 24px for most of the headings, excepting those displayed as pictures.

google.com

Google is a lot more classy, using Arial as primary font and small font sizes (12-13px). Even YouTube is using the same standards. Other Google pages are using another font: open sans and more appealing headings and styles.

smashingmagazine.com

This well known website uses Proxima Nova with fallback to Helvetica Neue and Arial. The headings font is Skolar. The font size for paragraphs is 16px, and 32px for the headings.

twitter.com

Twitter is using Helvetica Neue with Arial fallback for the content pages. The most common font sizes are 14px and 16px for paragraphs and 40px – 20px for headings.

graphicriver.com

Graphicriver as well as other Envato websites is more conservative by using Tahoma and small fonts (13px) for paragraphs, but for the big headings is using ProximaNovaSoft font and 38px size, while other headings have 24px and Helvetica Neue.

 

Pinterest is the fastest growing website?

You didn’t known much about Pinterest until a few months ago, don’t you? Then you may not know that it is the fastest growing website in the world!

Pinterest interface

Here is some history:

The project started back in December 2009 and the first beta release was made in March 2010. Although the start up was slow and painful (one of the founders personally wrote the first 5000 invitations), Pinterest had it’s first 10,000 users after just 9 months. After that, the investors tried to sell Pinterest to a magazine publishing company from New York, but the deal was not even discussed because of no interest from the publisher. They had no way of knowing what’s about to come next!

On March 2011 the Pinterest team released an iPhone app that brought a lot of traffic, much more than anticipated, following that on December 2011 Pinterest will enter in the top 10 largest social websites, with 11 million visits per week.

Nowadays the company raised $120 million in funding, is moving in a large building and is passing $1.5 billion on the stock market. Awesome isn’t it?

And for your own knowledge, most of the Pinterest’s traffic is made by women: just over 80%!

I personally use Pinterest for inspiration, curiosity and image sharing. I find it very intuitive and easy to use, but more important very relaxing. Maybe this is why it is growing so fast. Now I am just curious what will happen next.

Simple web elements – free download

It is very useful when I need something nice but free for my working project or just to learn how others do it, and I search on Google and find it! Now is my turn to start giving something back to the community, and here it is!

Simple Web ElementsI’ve done a simple web elements design that seems to be very appreciated on deviantArt, counting over 2000 downloads in 6 months. You can download it for free here by clicking on the Download File link.

The included elements are:

  • buttons
  • form elements (select, textarea, checkbox, radio)
  • newsletter box
  • error messages
  • slider

I hope to enjoy it and feel free to comment here or on my deviantArt page. I have more interesting stuff to share with you in the near future, and I also recommend you to share all the valuable stuff you can. Someday good things will happen because of that 🙂

Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing…

Outsourcing is probably the best solution in the world for cheap but quality web design and development services.

The advantages of web design outsourcing are many for both contractors and clients:

  • the ability to provide services at a cheaper price while still keeping both the quality  and profitability
  • both parts can communicate by email, voice or chat anywhere on the globe – there is no need to be physically in touch
  • there are a lot of freelancers and companies available
  • there are many specialized websites that are connecting the clients with the providers
  • you can work securely using milestones and escrows
  • as client you can get a lot of proposals to choose from, before starting the work on the project.
  • there are a lot of projects and clients on the market
  • outsourcing is very scalable, so you can work for short periods of time or long term, with one ore more customers or providers

There are also some drawbacks about outsourcing:

  • the lack of control, people involved being less attached to the project
  • there can be problems with privacy and security when working with overseas teams
  • communication can be a problem because of the language differences and time zone.

Here are the best online outsourcing websites: