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With the evolution of technology, customer preferences have evolved, changed, and expanded. You have to work harder than your biggest competition to grab their low attention span. This is why you require innovative technologies to stand out in your customer’s inboxes.

The inboxes of your audiences are already crowded. How do you then engage with your subscribers and make them click, read and take action?

One of the best approaches is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in email marketing. What is AMP and how do you use AMP email marketing to accelerate growth for your business? Let us understand in detail.

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages in Email Marketing?

AMP aka Accelerated Mobile Pages in email marketing is an integration (initially developed by Google) for a web page-like experience inside emails. It allows your marketing team to create interactive and dynamic digital experiences for your users within those emails and enhances engagement.

Using the power of AMP, you can directly embed interactive elements like image galleries, forms, carousels, etc. These components are what will make your users click and engage with you.

These elements also make it easier for the users to engage and interact without having to leave the inbox on a different app. This way, the results would lean towards higher engagement, improved customer experience, and increased brand visibility. 

How to Leverage the Power of AMP in Your Email Marketing Strategy?

Here are some of the major benefits of AMP that you can get an advantage out of for your email marketing strategy:

1. Increase in Conversions

The longer a prospect takes to make a decision, the lower the likelihood of conversion. AMP email addresses this issue by allowing subscribers to complete transactions directly within the email itself, reducing decision-making time. This functionality proves instrumental in generating leads and increasing conversion rates, ultimately transforming prospects into customers.

2. Real-Time Updates

You can also include live, real-time updates in your emails using AMP. This feature was specifically developed for displaying real-time pricing, showcasing inventory availability, publishing event updates, and overall ensuring that your users get the correct and relevant information timely.

3. Personalization at Scale

Also, when you are using AMP, it allows the dynamic content to adapt to the user patterns and their interactions. This capability actually helps marketers for delivering personalized recommendations. 

Such tailored experiences resonate with the users and eventually drive revenue for your business.

Now, let us explore how to best utilize AMP for your email marketing strategy.

Best Practices for Implementing AMP

When you are utilizing AMP, you need to leverage the maximum potential out of it to get the best ROI for your brand. How can you do that?

1. Get started with segmentation

In order to get the maximum impact of AMP for your email marketing strategy, you have to categorize emails into different groups based on various criteria, such as past purchase history, level of engagement, geographical location, and more. 

This personalization tactic proves effective as it enables the delivery of valuable and pertinent messages to specific groups, fostering higher customer engagement and boosting email-driven conversions.

2. Use interactive elements

AMP provides a range of interactive components and elements and if used wisely and thoughtfully, they can make a significant impact. You must focus on the components that align with interactive emails, email marketing strategy, and objectives.

1. Forms: You can embed interactive forms within emails, allowing recipients to submit information, provide feedback, or participate in surveys and polls directly from the email.
2. Carousels: Carousels enable you to display multiple images or content blocks within a single space, allowing recipients to scroll or swipe through the carousel to view different offerings or information.
3. Accordion Menus: Accordion menus allow you to present collapsible content sections within an email. Recipients can expand or collapse these sections to access additional details or navigate through different sections of the email.
4. Countdown Timers: Countdown timers can be added to create a sense of urgency or to promote time-sensitive offers. These timers visually display the time remaining for a particular event or offer.
5. Ratings and Reviews: You can include interactive rating and review elements within emails, allowing recipients to provide feedback or rate products, services, or experiences directly from the email.
6. Continuously test and optimize

As with any process or strategy, even when you are using AMP, testing and optimization are crucial to the process. A/B testing, multivariate testing, and optimization through improvements are a must.

Through A/B testing, you can understand the impact of AMP components and elements on the open rates, click-through rates, as well as conversions. You can use the insights gained through testing for refining your approach.

By doing this, you can achieve continuous improvement in the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

4. Always provide support for non-AMP versions

There are email clients that do not support AMP. Here, you need to ensure that you have a fallback option. This way, the clients and recipients who are not compatible with AMP can also still access your content, and engage with your brand.

5. Always comply with the best practices and follow the guidelines

When it comes to using AMP, you have to comply with the guidelines set by the email service providers along with the AMP specifications. Ensure that the email client supports and enables AMP for email functionality. Not all clients may offer support for AMP (like Outlook and Amazon Simple Email Service), so it’s crucial to confirm compatibility beforehand.

This will ensure that the emails you send out as a part of your campaign are properly rendered, and compatible with the recipients, and improves client engagement by also following the best practices and guidelines.

Conclusion

Integrating AMP into your email marketing strategy can boost your engagement significantly. When you are leveraging the interactive capabilities of AMP, you are offering a dynamic, personalized, and immersive experience to your users.

Of course, it is important to always follow the best practices to get the maximum output out of AMP technology. AMP comes with a list of benefits that you must take advantage of for your email marketing strategy. By following the best practices, you ensure that it makes a significant impact on your brand.

Featured image by Dirk Wouters from Pixabay

The post How to Use AMP Email Marketing to Boost Engagement  appeared first on noupe.

An Apple VR headset has been one of the most widely-rumored devices of the last few years, and it was finally settled as Apple unveiled its AR headset at WWDC today.

We’re halfway through 2023 already, and the number of incredible apps, tools, and resources for designers is mounting.

Social media marketing has changed the way that businesses connect with consumers. Businesses that use social sites like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook can post trending, engaging content that piques the interest of potential customers and builds a buzz around their brand. 

However, creating content that connects with your audience can be difficult. Consumer trends change quickly in the digital world and it’s easy to look out of touch if businesses aren’t constantly updating their approach. 

Companies that want to improve their social reach can connect with customers by tailoring their content to meet the genre expectations of each social platform. This can help marketers build a connection with a multi-generational audience, too, as different demographics have vastly different preferences in the digital world. 

Characteristics of Social Media Marketing

Understanding the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing is key for any business that wants to improve its social following. While traditional marketing can be repurposed for social content, it’s usually best to adopt an entirely different strategy to target social sites. 

Digital marketing is an innately audience-focused approach to content creation. It’s less expensive than traditional marketing and can help businesses reach a global audience. Digital marketing on social media can significantly improve consumer connection, too, as social platforms offer businesses a two-way conversation in the form of direct messages, comments, and shared content. 

However, no two social platforms are the same. Each site has its own unique conventions and norms that dictate consumer preferences and content creation. These platforms can be categorized into five types of social media, including: 

• Social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter);
• Photo sharing (Instagram and Pinterest);
• Video sharing (YouTube and Vimeo);
• Interactive media (TikTok and Snapchat);
• Blogging and Community Building (Reddit and Tumblr).

While there is overlap between these categories, distinguishing between them can help marketers produce creative content that connects with users. Once marketers understand the differences between social sites, they can start to plan and produce content that redirects users to omnichannel services for improved customer communication. 

Embracing Creativity

Creativity is a skill that can be refined with practice and the right approach. Businesses that want to be more creative with their content marketing should adopt an honest, research-driven approach to ideation. Even small changes, like encouraging internal collaboration, can have a huge impact on reach and engagement online. 

Marketing departments that have run out of creative marketing ideas can use the “Wonderland” game to produce unique and engaging content. The “Wonderland” game is an ideation technique used to discover connections between unrelated things. Marketers use Lewis Caroll’s iconic brain teaser “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” as inspiration to form their own questions. This can result in remarkable, eye-catching content ideas like: 

• “What I learned about content marketing from my grandma”
• “How I increased my open rate by 174% with a roll of duct tape”.

Even if marketing departments take a different direction, the “Wonderland” game is a great way to spark conversation and generate ideas. Ideally, the “Wonderland” game should be used in tandem with other social media trends like influencer marketing and video-based content. This ensures that posts are relevant to current consumer preferences. 

Embracing creativity is particularly important for businesses trying to reach a multi-generational audience. Content creators will have to get creative to adopt a Gen-Z or baby-boomer mindset when crafting digital content. 

Generational Marketing Tactics

Generational differences have a huge impact on customer preferences and digital behavior. Trend-driven marketing content may resonate with younger users but will likely put off older consumers who are looking for easy-to-understand posts. 

Ideally, businesses should use their social presence to target one or two generations online. This simplifies the content creation process and maximizes the impact of a business’s social media strategy. This is particularly important for businesses that want to use social media to break into a new market segment. 

Companies that want to connect with new users should use high-profile social pages to direct their content creation strategies. For example, if a business wants to create a buzz amongst Gen-Z consumers, it can follow Doritos’ example and post content that utilizes trending sounds and content. 

Using high-performing pages as a guide is a great way to streamline the content-generation process and create materials that connect with audiences. This will free up time for engagement and ensure that marketers can spend most of their time tracking key metrics and utilizing analytic data. 

Utilizing Analytics 

Social media is a treasure-trove for consumer data. Content creators who want to produce materials that connect with consumers must use data analytics to refine their approach and spot emerging trends. To get started, marketers should familiarize themselves with the basics of: 

• TikTok Analytics;
• Google Trends;
• Instagram Insights;
• Meta Business Suite.

These services are in-built analytic services that track key metrics like follower count, growth, engagement rate, and views. They’re largely user-friendly and can be used to direct future marketing strategies based on the performance of previous posts. 

Marketing professionals that want to amplify the impact of their social media content can look to external services like HootSuite, SproutSocial, and Brandwatch to improve their consumer connection. These sites help businesses track useful metrics and improve common key performance indicators (KPIs) like: 

• Growth rate percentage;
• Theoretical reach;
• Social share of voice;
• Engagement rate percentage.

These KPIs give marketers quantitative data to track and measure consumer connection. They give content creators a benchmark to measure performance and can even be used to plan future posts. This is particularly important today when stiff competition makes capturing a piece of the social pie harder than ever before. 

Conclusion

Creativity is key to successful social media marketing. Adopting an honest, research-driven approach to ideation and content generation can help businesses produce unique and engaging content that resonates with a multi-generational audience. 

Today’s marketers must become savvy data analysts, too. Data analytics are essential when refining existing campaigns and measuring performance. By tracking KPIs, businesses can improve their social media campaigns and produce content that authentically connects with consumers. 

Featured image by Pratik Gupta on Unsplash

The post Creating Social Media Marketing Content to Connect With Consumers appeared first on noupe.

This article is a sponsored by iA

So, you’ve created a thing. That thing could be anything, say a product the world never knew it needed or maybe a stellar SaaS app that makes everyone way more productive. You had a brilliant idea and took the initiative to make it happen. It’s time to put it on the market!

But wait… how much money are you going to charge for this thing? That’s often a way more difficult question to answer than it might seem. I mean, slap a price on the tin, and that’s it, right?

The truth is that pricing a product or service is one of the more challenging aspects of product development. Pricing is an inexact science, and chances are you will not get it right the first time. But where do you even begin?

That’s where the team at Information Architects — commonly known as iA — found itself when tasked with pricing a new product called iA Presenter. iA already had a hit product on its hands, the popular iA Writer app, with its claim to fame being a minimal, distraction-free writing interface. iA Writer is already a mature offering, having been available for many years and having undergone several significant iterations since its initial release. How does a new offering like iA Presenter fit into the picture?

Let’s use iA Presenter to study the considerations that go into product pricing. Its status as a brand-new product that sits alongside an existing product with an established history makes iA Presenter an interesting case study on pricing. Plus, the iA team was generous enough to share a bunch of the research and work that went into their pricing for iA Presenter.

Finding Pricing Parallels

The first step to pricing might be looking at what others are doing. Chances are that you are not the only player in the market, and you can certainly learn by observing what others are doing. I know that’s what I did when getting into the pricing of a SaaS-based app. There were plenty of competitors in that particular market, and mapping them out in a spreadsheet was a nice way to compare the similarities and differences — not only in the prices themselves but the pricing models as well. Some were one-time purchases, but many were recurring subscriptions. Some offered free trials, while others relied on a generous return policy. Some required a credit card upfront, and others allowed you to jump right into the app. You get the idea. There’s more to pricing than meets the eye.

The key is to find parallels between what others are doing and what aligns with what you’re doing. If everyone else is selling subscriptions, then maybe that’s clear enough for you to do the same. Or perhaps it’s more of an opportunity to differentiate your product, offering a pricing model that might appeal to an overlooked segment of the market.

The purpose of finding parallels is to prevent sticker shock by setting a price that is far outlier from what the rest of the market has already set.

iA says it extremely well in a blog post that’s incredibly transparent with their findings:

“As you can see, the pricing ranges from $5 to $25 per user. There are outliers on the upper scale. Some of them offer a free model for individuals or low-usage cases. As you already know, they can do that because they have venture capital or run on an ad-based model (Google). Google and PowerPoint come as part of a suite.”
—iA, “Presenter Pricing (I)”

Ah! There’s always a story lurking in the details. Outliers can exist, and they might actually be on the low end of the spectrum. Competing on price alone always feels like a risky call; just ask any company that’s had to play along with Walmart’s aggressive tactics to be a low-price leader.

Identifying Opportunities

Perhaps the most important lesson from my own pricing research is that finding parallels in the market will also provide a clearer picture of what value your product provides. Does your product do something that the others don’t? Is it so much easier to use than the rest that the user experience is where the value comes from?

Add those things to the spreadsheet! The spreadsheet becomes more of a matrix than a competitor list. You can use it to surface what’s unique about your product and lean into it when determining the overall value your product offers compared to everyone else.

Again, the iA team throws a bit of a curveball based on its recent experience:

“Whether a price is low, high, or right depends on what [customers] compare it to. Customers will compare apples and oranges”.
—iA, “Presenter Pricing (I)”

Did you catch that last point? You may need to find pricing parallels with products that are tangentially related to your market because you can’t control what you might be compared to. My own pricing journey was on a hosted calendar, and while it has way less in common with something like Google Calendar, customers would inevitably compare our offering to it because Google Calendar is such a common point of reference when talking about anything related to online calendars.

Starting The Conversation

The topic of pricing usually comes up during product development but could certainly come much sooner. The closer the finish line for development gets, the more the reality sets in that there’s work to do to get the product to market, and pricing is one step that simply cannot be skipped — how else will customer compensate you for the pleasure of getting their hands on a product?

You could start spewing numbers until one resonates with you, but that’s rather subjective. Will your customers see the same value in the product that you do? It’s worth checking, and sometimes it works to directly ask your customers — whether it’s existing customers or a target audience you’ve identified.

That’s what iA did when they published the question “How Much Would You Charge for iA Presenter?” in the aforementioned blog post from November 2022. The post provides oodles of context for readers to get an idea of what the iA team was already considering and what they’ve learned from an initial round of research on different pricing models.

What I like about this approach is the transparency, sure, but also how it leads to two other things:

• Setting expectations
  iA had already introduced iA Presenter in another post that precedes the call for pricing opinions. But in bringing pricing to the forefront, the team is giving existing and potential customers a heads-up of what’s to come. So, even if they settled on a high price point that is an outlier in the market, at least everyone is already familiar with the thinking behind it.
• Data
  Posing the question means they had opened the door for customers to weigh in. That’s the sort of feedback that can be designed as a survey, with the data helping inform pricing experiments and identify insightful patterns.

Parsing Information

Have you ever had to design a survey? Good gosh, that can be a frustrating experience. The challenge is to get useful feedback that leads to insights that allow you to make better decisions. But the process is all too easy to mess up, from choosing the wrong type of form input for a particular question or, worse, injecting your own biases into how things are worded. Surveys can be as much a balancing act as product pricing!

That’s why I find iA’s approach so interesting. They had the idea to ship not one version of the survey but three. This is what they shared with us:

“We divided our newsletter’s subscribers into different groups of roughly 5000 people each and sent them different versions of the form. The first group received the Version 0 of the form, and each time we updated this one, we sent it to a different group.

In retrospect, it’s clear why, but we didn’t expect the form design to affect the price suggestions so much. A lot has been written about A/B testing, form design, and questionnaire design. But here we were right in the middle of a form/questionnaire experiment and saw how directly the design affected the results. It was amazing to see all of this happening in real-time.”

It was a genius move, even if it wasn’t obvious at first. Sending three versions sent to different segments of the audience does a few things:

• It considers different scenarios.
  Rather than asking its audience what pricing model they prefer, iA assumed a pricing model and put it in front of users. This way, they get a reaction to the various pricing scenarios they are considering and gain a response that is just as useful as directly asking.
• It challenges assumptions.
  The iA team put a lot of legwork into researching pricing models and evaluating their pros and cons. That certainly helped the team form some opinions about which strategies might be the most effective to implement. But even all the research digging in the world doesn’t guarantee a particular outcome. Evaluating responses from a clearly defined target audience using three versions of the form allowed iA to put its assumptions to the test. Is a subscription-based model really the best way to go? Now they know!
• It reveals customer biases.
  Anything you ask will have a degree of bias in it, so why not embrace that fact and let the customers show you their biases in the process? One version of the iA Presenter survey was based on a subscription pricing model, and the team found that some users hate subscriptions so much that they refused to fill out this form and were quite vocal about it.

I love the way iA sums up the patterns they found in the survey results and how those results were influenced by differentiating the surveys:

“We offered a form that required you to fill out monthly and yearly subscriptions plus ownership. […] We offered a second version that didn’t require you to fill out all fields. What happened there raised brows. The price suggestions changed. They got lower. We continued changing the form, and every time, the result changed.”

And with that, iA had unlocked what they needed to determine a price for iA Presenter. From a follow-up blog post that reports their findings:

“All data combined, you decided that iA Presenter should charge the industry standard of 5.- for a single license. Multiplying 5.- times twelve for a year and times three to make it worthwhile would make iA Presenter make a 150.- app.”
—iA, “Presenter Pricing (II)”

Aligning Data With Strategy

Great! iA was able to determine a specific price point with some level of scientific certainty. It would be easy enough to slap that on a price tag and start selling, but that doesn’t do justice to the full picture the data provides. Specifically, iA learned that the price point they determined would not align with all of the audience segments they surveyed.

Here’s more of what they were willing to share with us about their audience’s feelings on pricing:

• The collective audience suggested charging the industry standard of $5 for a single license.
• Some think that the $50 price for the existing iA Writer app is high. $100 is not that much in Switzerland, but in some countries, $100 can be a big chunk of a monthly salary. That means local pricing adjustments ought to be considered.
• Suggestions for business subscriptions varied between $10 and $20 per month per license.
• Students want a free tier of access.

iA is lucky enough to have an internal source of useful data, thanks to the long sales history it has with iA Writer. They found that new customers tend to prefer a subscription model, while existing (or “convinced”) customers show a preference for a single purchase.

So, it’s more like they were looking at different pricing tiers instead of a flat rate. Their audience is all over the map as far as what their pricing expectations are, and a pricing model that offers choices based on the type of customer you are (e.g., business vs. student) and where people are geographically is likely to cast a wider net to attract more customers than they would get from a single price point. So, even if verified students are able to get the product for free, that should be offset by the price points for single-license customers and businesses.

Wrapping Up

What we’ve looked at are several important considerations that go into product pricing. The work it takes to determine a price goes way past subjective guesses. Pricing is one of the “Four Ps of Marketing” that influence a product’s market position and how customers perceive it.

Setting a price is a statement of the product’s quality and the value it adds to the market.

That’s the sort of thing you can’t leave to chance.

That said, it’s clear that determining a product price is far from an exact science. The challenge is to elicit the right information that leads to insights that are more reflective of and aligned with the expectations of the target audience. Will they pay the price you want?

There are many other considerations that go into pricing, to be sure. You might discover that the price the market is willing to pay is unsustainable and does not cover enough of the costs that went into product development or the ongoing costs of maintenance, developing new features, marketing, support, salaries, and so on. You don’t want to enter yourself in a race to the bottom, after all.

iA Presenter makes for a great case study on product pricing. The fact that it’s the type of software that those of us in the web design and development community often work on makes it an extremely relevant example. Plus, iA put so much effort into research and was generous enough to share it with us that it provides a nice recent snapshot of a real-world situation.

And, hey, now that you know everything that went into setting prices for iA Presenter, you should check it out. Do you think they made the right choice? Will the multi-tier pricing strategy work next to market competitors who are more mature and are able to practically give away their stuff for free, like Google Slides? We’ll find out soon as iA Presenter is officially out of beta and has been released to the public on June 1st. You can follow along with their ongoing journey of shipping a new product on their blog or by signing up for their newsletter.

No doubt you’ve had to style a menu before. And when you do, you often have had to reach far down in your CSS arsenal of tricks or rely on JavaScript to get anything near the level of customization you want. It’s a long-running headache in the front-end world.

Well, thanks to the efforts of the Open UI community, we have a new element to look forward to, and its purpose is to provide CSS styling affordances to selection menus in ways we’ve never had before.

We’re going to demonstrate an initial implementation of in this article. But we’ll throw in a couple of twists while we’re at it. What we’re making is a radial select menu, something we could never have done with CSS alone. And since we’re working with experimental tech, we’re going to toss in more experimental features along the way, including images, the HTML Popover API, and the CSS Anchor Positioning API. The result is going to wind up like this:

• : This is the selector itself. It holds the button and listbox of menu options.
• button: This part toggles the visibility of the listbox between open and close.
• selected-value: This displays the value of the menu option that is currently selected. So, if you have a listbox with three options and the second option is selected, the second option is what matches the part.
• marker: Dropdown menus usually have some sort of downward-facing arrow icon to indicate that the menu can be expanded. This is that part of the menu.
• listbox: This is the wrapper that contains the options and any elements that group certain options together inside the listbox.
• : We already let the cat out of the bag on this one, but this part groups options together. It includes a label for the group.
• : A value that the user is able to select in the menu. There can be one, but it’s much more common to see a — and, by extension — a with multiple options.

The other way is to slot the content ourselves in HTML. This can be a nice approach since it allows us to customize the markup any way we like. In other words, we can replace any of the parts we want, and the browser will use our markup instead of the implicit structure. In fact, this is the approach we’ll use in the radial menu we’re making.

The way to replace parts in the HTML is to use the slots. The markup we use for a slot lives in a separate tree in the Shadow DOM, replacing the contents of the DOM with what we specify in the Shadow DOM.

Here’s an abbreviated example in HTML. Notice how the and listbox are both contained in slots that represent the HTML we want to use for those parts.

<selectmenu class="my-custom-select">
  <div slot="button">
    <span behavior="selected-value" slot="selected-value"></span>
    <button behavior="button"></button>
  </div>
  <div slot="listbox">
    <div popover="auto" behavior="listbox">
       <option value="one">one</option>
       <option value="two">two</option>
    </div>
  </div>
</selectmenu>

By using slots and behavior as attributes, we can tell the browser how it should behave and how it should interact with keyboard navigation. If managed carefully, this will also mean that we get good accessibility out of the box because the browser will know how to behave based on what we define.

Ready? OK, let’s start by setting up our markup for our radial .

The Radial Selectmenu Markup

We will start by creating our own markup for this basic example. We will use pretty much the same approach as used in the explainer of the Selectmenu element because I think it demonstrates the vast flexibility we have to style this element using similar markup.

<selectmenu class="selectmenu">
  <button class="selected-button" slot="button" behavior="button">
    <span behavior="selected-value" class="selected-value"></span>
  </button>
  <div slot="listbox">
    <div popover behavior="listbox">
      <option value="one">one</option>
      <option value="two">two</option>
      <option value="three">three</option>
      <option value="four">four</option>
      <option value="five">five</option>
      <option value="six">six</option>
    </div>
  </div>
</selectmenu>

You might notice from the markup that we’ve added the selected-value behavior in the button. This is perfectly fine, as our button will always show the selected value by doing this.

And, just like the example in the explainer, we are using the Popover API inside of our listbox slot. When we look at what we have in Chrome Canary, and see that it already works fine. Take note that even keyboard navigation already seems to be handled for us!

We can add the following formula for our options when the popover is open by adding a transform to our options:

[popover]:popover-open option {
  /* Half the size of the circle */
  --half-circle: calc(var(--circle-size) / -2);

  /* Straighten things up and space them out */
  transform:
      rotate(var(--deg))
      translate(var(--half-circle))
      rotate(var(--negative-deg));
}

Now, when the popover-open state is triggered, we will rotate each option by a certain number of degrees, translate them along both axes by half the circle size, and rotate it once again by a negative amount of degrees. The order of the transforms is important!

I said we would rotate the options “by a certain number of degrees” because we have to do it for each individual option. This is totally possible in vanilla CSS (and that’s how we’re going to do it), but it could also be done with a Sass loop or even with JavaScript if we needed it.

Let’s add this to our popover style rules:

[popover] {
  --rotation-divide: calc(180deg / 2);

  /* etc. */
}

This will be our default rotation, and it’s a special case for when we only have one option. We’ll use 360deg for the rest in a moment.

For now, we can select the first option and set the --rotation-divide variable on it:

option:nth-child(1) {
  --deg: var(--rotation-divide);
}

Great! Why you would use a select when there is only one option, I don’t know, but nevertheless, it’s handled gracefully:

Styling the other options takes a bit of work because we have to:

• Divide the circle by the number of available options and
• Multiply that result for each option.

I’m so glad we have the calc() function in CSS to help us do this. Otherwise, it would be some pretty heavy lifting.

[popover]:has(option:nth-child(2)) {
  --rotation-divide: calc(360deg / 2);
}

[popover]:has(option:nth-child(3)) {
  --rotation-divide: calc(360deg / 3);
}

[popover]:has(option:nth-child(4)) {
  --rotation-divide: calc(360deg / 4);
}

[popover]:has(option:nth-child(5)) {
  --rotation-divide: calc(360deg / 5);
}

[popover]:has(option:nth-child(6)) {
  --rotation-divide: calc(360deg / 6);
}

option:nth-child(1) {
  --deg: var(--rotation-divide);
}

option:nth-child(2) {
  --deg: calc(var(--rotation-divide) * 2);
}

option:nth-child(3) {
  --deg: calc(var(--rotation-divide) * 3);
}

option:nth-child(4) {
  --deg: calc(var(--rotation-divide) * 4);
}

option:nth-child(5) {
  --deg: calc(var(--rotation-divide) * 5);
}

option:nth-child(6) {
  --deg: calc(var(--rotation-divide) * 6);
}

/* that’s enough options for you! */
option:nth-child(1n + 7) {
  display: none;
}

Here’s a live demo of what this produces. Remember, Chrome Canary is the only browser that currently supports this, as long as the experimental features flag is enabled.

See the Pen Radial selectmenu with Anchoring API – Open UI [forked] by @utilitybend.

Do We Need All Those :has() Pseudo-Classes?

Yeah, I think so, as long as we’re using plain CSS. And that’s been my goal all along. That said, JavaScript could be useful here.

For example, we could add an ID to the element with the popover attribute and count the children it contains:

const optionAmount = document.getElementById('popoverlistbox').childElementCount;
popoverlistbox.style.setProperty('--children', optionAmount);

That way, we can replace all the :has() instances with more concise styles:

option {
  --rotation-divide: calc(360deg / var(--children));
  --negative: calc(var(--deg) / -1);
}

For this demo, however, you might still want to limit the --children custom property to a maximum of 6. I’ve found that’s the sweet spot before the circle gets too crowded and needs additional tweaks.

See the Pen Radial selectmenu Open UI with JS children count [forked] by @utilitybend.

Let’s Animate This Thing

There are a few more CSS features coming up that will make animating popovers a lot easier. But they’re not ready for us yet, even for this example.

We can get around that with a little trick. But please keep in mind that what we’re about to do will not be the best practice when we get the new animating features. I wanted to give you the information anyway because I think it’s a nice enhancement for what we’re making.

First, let’s add the following to our popover selector:

[popover] {
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  /* etc. */
}

This makes it so our popover will always be displayed block and ready to go wherever it is placed, and we have established a stacking context.

We will lose the benefit of our top layer popover and will have to play around with a z-index to get the effect we want. Juggling z-index values — especially with a large number of items — is never fun. It gets messy fast. That’s one of the ways popovers were designed to help us.

But let’s go ahead and give our button a z-index:

.selected-button {
  z-index: 2;
  /* etc. */
}

Now we can use animations to reveal the options by using the :not() pseudo-class. This is how we can reset the transform when the popover is in its closed state:

[popover]:not(:popover-open) {
  z-index: -1;
}

[popover]:not(:popover-open) option {
  transform: rotate(var(--deg)) translate(0) rotate(var(--negative-deg));
}

And there you have it! An animated radial :

See the Pen Radial selectmenu with Anchoring API and animation [forked] by @utilitybend.

Let’s Add Some Images While We’re At It

There was quite a bit of discussion about this in the Open UI community, but the selected value does not take innerHTML as an option as, for one, this could result in IDs being duplicated. But I sure do love a good old role-playing game, and I decided to use the as a potion selector.

This is completely based on everything we just covered, only adding images to demonstrate that it is possible:

See the Pen Open-UI – Select a potion (Chrome Canary) [forked] by @utilitybend.

With a sprinkle of JavaScript (for this totally optional enhancement), we can select the innerHTML of the element and pass it to our .selected-value button:

const selectMenus = document.querySelectorAll("selectmenu");
selectMenus.forEach((menu) => {
  const selectedvalue = menu.querySelector(".selected-value");
  selectedvalue.innerHTML = menu.selectedOption.innerHTML;
  menu.addEventListener("change", () => {
    selectedvalue.innerHTML = menu.selectedOption.innerHTML;
  });
});

Conclusion

I don’t know about you, but all of this gets me super excited for the future. Everything we looked at, from the Selectmenu element to the CSS Anchor Position API, is still a work in progress. Still, we can already see the great number of possibilities they will open up for us as designers and developers.

The fact that all of this is coming by way of built-in browser features is what’s most exciting because it gives us a standard way to approach things like customized menus, popovers, and anchoring to the extent that it could eliminate the need for frameworks or libraries that we use today for the same things. We win because we get more control, and users win because they get lighter page loads.

If you’d like to do a bit of research on Selectmenu or even get involved with the Open UI community, you’re more than welcome, as we need more developers to create demos and share their struggles to help make these features better if — and when — they ship.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

• “Level Up Your CSS Skills With The :has() Selector”, Stephanie Eckles
• “Creating A High-Contrast Design System With CSS Custom Properties”, Brecht De Ruyte
• “Write Better CSS By Borrowing Ideas From JavaScript Functions”, Yaphi Berhanu
• “How To Build A Magazine Layout With CSS Grid Areas”, Jennifer Brehm

Let’s face it. We’re currently living in some turbulent times, under a constantly expanding shroud of volatility and uncertainty. Today, it’s becoming more difficult to manage personal and household expenses on a single income stream. But if you’re working online, you’re in luck.

Cutting corners and trying to create a reasonable budget may help. But it isn’t a permanent solution. What you need is to diversify your online income stream. And if you’re a freelancer or trying to find multiple passive income streams online, you can do that in many legitimate ways.

In light of this, we’re going to talk about how to build multiple income streams online along with managing those income streams. We will also talk about how you can track and manage your earnings.

So, without further ado, let’s get to it!

Some Brilliant Ways You Can Maximize Your Online Income Stream

Become an online tutor

If you want to multiply your earnings as a freelancer, there’s nothing better than offering services as an online tutor.

The market size for online tutoring in the US currently stands at $2.1 billion and is rapidly growing. Plus, compiling your knowledge into digestible online lectures will be easier if you’re good at something.

Additionally, there are plenty of authentic and reputed teaching websites where you can teach at flexible hours. After gradually building your target audience, you can easily create your independent website to convert your lead traffic directly. If you picture yourself working as an online tutor but want to move on to coaching or online training later on, you might want to invest in the right set of tools. With that in mind, know that online coaching software might prove useful later on to assist you in keeping all information and activities in one location, making running the business simpler.

Sell the photos you take

Selling digital artwork, stock images, and photos is another way to earn money online. Some reputed and globally embraced websites allow you to subscribe, upload pictures, and earn commissions when sold.

Moreover, you can even introduce this service on your website for interested parties. With the number of content people churn out daily, everybody needs high-quality stock images.

So, this can be a great way of earning money. However, keep in mind that you won’t get rich overnight.

Do micro-jobs

Micro jobs are an excellent way of augmenting your online income. Plus, they’re less demanding and less time-intensive. And over time, you can rack up quite a decent penny. A great example of a micro job can be filling out online surveys. Some survey platforms may even pay up to $50 per survey.

Similarly, another excellent and passive way of earning money is to subscribe to a data-sharing app. However, unlike micro jobs, the best thing about using a data-sharing app like Honeygain is that you won’t have to do anything actively.

The app pays you for using your internet. It’s crowdsourced, secure, and even has a good referral program that pays great commissions to users.

Powerful Financial Planning Strategies for Beginners

Understand where the money flows

The best way to start building a long-term and successful financial plan is to understand where your money goes 365 days a year.

One of the best ways to do this is using credit or debit cards. You see, it is challenging to track cash payments. With credit/debit cards, you can track where you’ve spent money and how to save money.

Utilize separate bank accounts

If you have multiple income streams, keeping savings and salary account separate for your expenditure and the other for saving and tracking your expenses is wise. Using one bank account could make things a bit tricker and potentially messy when drafting a budget.

Don’t forget to pay yourself

Whenever you receive your revenue, pay yourself the profits first. Then keep the rest of the money in a different checking account.

Don’t just go spending your profits on paying bills, shopping, or other miscellaneous expenses. Do all this from the percentage your pay yourself. This is how you will build financial discipline. 

Important Tips for Tracking and Managing Your Finances

Develop a realistic budget for your monthly expenses

One of the most effective ways to stay atop your finances is via precision-based, realistic budgeting.

You’ll be able to track your spending habits and will learn to make do with the money you pay yourself. Apart from becoming better at financial planning, budgeting also instills a sense of responsibility.

You become more accountable and aware of what you’re spending and where you’re spending it. Gradually, you will learn how to control your impulses and, instead, route all that money back into your business.

Minimize recurring expenses

If you’ve subscribed to multiple services (and you don’t use most of them), it’s time to disconnect. Monthly subscriptions can rack up quite an amount if not checked or used—an amount you can save.

And do it just for the general principle. Why waste money on things you don’t use?

Bottom Line

All in all, these are some excellent ways you can increase your online income and learn how to stay financially responsible.

Featured image by micheile henderson on Unsplash

The post Generating  Multiple Streams of Online Income: A Financial Planning Guide appeared first on noupe.