We explore how intelligent omni channel marketing technology can help marketers better manage their marketing strategy. Plus, the perils of walking the line between creativity and efficiency. And at the very end, the very own Brian Massey, gives a formula to start prioritizing our traffic-driving investments.
Digito Marketus:
This is a species of primate known generically as digital marketers. During the day, it’s natural habitat is tall square nests built for it, called offices. These are social animals that travel in groups called “departments.” They work alongside other species, such as Neandersales and Blockus ITeas.
This clever species forages through forests of audiences dining primarily on the fruit of the prospect tree, which they share with a symbiotic species, the Neandersales.
This species is known for working in places with scarce resources. They have evolved to flourish with very little. As such, they must be highly creative AND they must be efficient..
They are advanced enough to use tools that help them make fewer mistakes, giving them time for more creative pursuits.
If you’re listening to this podcast, you are either Digito Maketus or manage a department of them.
My guest today studies this species for a living. And — surprise — she actually is a member of the Digito Marketus.
Lindsay Tjepkema (Chep Ka MA), Director of Marketing for the Americas at Emarsys, is a marketer who markets to marketers and specializes in successful omnichannel marketing.
Podcast: Digito Marketus is a species commonly known as “Digital Marketers”
Lindsay Tjepkema | Using Marketing Technology to Create a Seamless Omnichannel Experience
On this episode of Intended Consequences, we come to understand how this fascinating species walks the line between creativity and efficiency, crayons and spreadsheets, design and databases.
We’ll talk about how she uses the Omni Channel Marketing Technology in her multi channel marketing strategy to deliver user experiences that put the customer first.
We lure Digito Marketus out of its nest– using a trail pens, thumb drives and t-shirts emblazoned with corporate logos — and ask some important questions.
What is it that drives your creativity? What are the roots of your experience that lead you into this role? And how do you balance this creative desire with the need to be efficient and customer data-driven?
On every episode of this podcast, we give you one technique to challenge you as a marketer, manager or business owner. So, accept the challenge and take your business or practice to new heights. It’s at the very end of the podcast.
Intro to Omni Channel Marketing Technology
I think marketers really just need to know what’s available to them and how to use it so that they can be more successful when handling multiple channels.
During this podcast, I want to ask that you actively participate in this conversation. What I mean by that is – while I’m asking Lindsay questions, I want you to ask yourself those questions. For example, when it comes to omni channel marketing what does success mean for your organization?
And to dig even deeper, Lindsay and I go into this question of “why is it that marketers seem to struggle to get to the next level of success? Are you struggling?
This conversation with Lindsay will start with me first asking how she measures success on her digital channels.
If you want to connect with Lindsay Tjepkema or Emarsys and Host of the Marketer + Machine podcast. You can check her out at emarsys dot com and her podcast.
We talked about knowing the value of a lead on this episode. If you sell stuff online, it’s easy to know how much a transaction is worth. But what if you generate leads or email list subscribers? Are you creating an omnichannel considering your touch point personas?
When you get back to the office (a formula to start prioritizing your traffic-driving investments)
When you get back to the office, try to put a dollar value on your leads or subscribers — even if you’re an eCommerce business, you must be using an email list.
THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE ACCURATE. What you want is a dollar value that you can use to prioritize what you’re investing in. It will require you to look in Analytics and possibly the customer relationship management system your sales team uses.
It’s basically, the revenue generated from your Website divided by the number of leads you generate.
It requires you to understand how many leads or subscribers you’re generating and then how much revenue you are getting from that.
Don’t let silos get in the way. When you don’t have real data, estimate.
At the end of the day, you’ll be able to say, “we generated 100 leads last month. That’s $2500 dollars in our pocket!
Let’s see why knowing your customer is key to marketing and conversion success and from this insight you can begin to find opportunities for growth.
Valentin Radu is a businessman, a successful businessman, who believes knowing your customer is fundamental. He has built the first online car insurance company in Romania and sold it to within a few years.
So, if you’re Valentin, what do you do for an encore?
You build the tools you wish you had when you were building your business and offer them to other businesses so that they can be successful.
You can lead a horse to water, but he still won’t look good in a bikini.
Valentin Radu believes we spend too much time chasing new customers, when we should be spending our time and energy on our “true lovers”. Listen and see if you agree.
The Human Biases Holding You Back. Learn more about human biases, how they work together, and why it impacts your role as a marketer.
Gain Executive Buy-In. How do you know what made your customer buy to begin with? Who is your buyer? And when you get the answers to these questions – how do you get buy-in from leaders in the organization to make the pivots needed based on the data?
Understanding What Drives. It’s important to know which calls to action tend to drive the most clicks, and which pages (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are getting the most ad traffic.
It turns out that these exciting tools bump up against something less procedural, and more… human.
Imagine this: You are offered a magical machine that lets you read the thoughts of the people coming to your website. Not the personal stuff, just the stuff that applies to your business.
You can see how they solve problems. You can try different designs, different copy, different calls to action to see if they find it easier to buy. And you don’t have to redesign your website.
You can hear what they are trying to do and what is confusing them.
You can point them to the information they need at any time.
And the magic tools wouldn’t violate their privacy in any way.
You might be skeptical, of course. But would you be resistant to this?
The answer is, that you probably would be. This is human. There are a number of biases that all humans harbor. These biases — confirmation bias, availability bias, novelty bias, survivorship bias — work together to keep us doing what we’ve always done, even when we clearly need change.
Fortunately, humans are also social animals. Our biases can be up-ended by the behaviors of others. When we talk about using social signals to change human behavior, we are talking about Culture.
In a company, culture is a huge, powerful lever. This also makes it difficult to move, especially if you are not a leader in your company. You can feel like Sisyphus, pushing that bolder up the hill. Over and over agin.
The opportunity, however, is great. Marketing has always been about knowing your customer. We’ve never had access to more information about our customers. Will you be an agent of knowledge or will you remain mired in your biases?
Understanding Your Customers
When a visitor arrives on your site what is it that you want them to do? Well most marketers would say first, you want them to buy. And then you want them to come back.
This is the charge.
So how do we take our customers — our site visitors — and turn them into ‘true lovers’ as our guest today, Valentin Radu from Omniconvert calls them?
Getting them to buy and come back is the charge. But here’s the challenge.
How do you know what made your customer buy to begin with? Who is your buyer? How do you know the action they took when they first landed on your site? How do you get the freedom as a marketer to experiment, to look at the data, to understand the data in order to make decisions to increase conversions?
And when you get the answers to those questions, how do you get buy-in from leaders in the organization to make the pivots needed based on the data?
Knowing your customer is key to marketing and conversion success.
Experimenting with Your Marketing
These are the questions we explore in this episode. Experimenting with your marketing is the only way that you can truly know what is working. It’s the only way you can succeed. Marketing and status quo cannot go together. At least for my listeners.
You might be thinking, that all sounds great Brian, but how do I influence change to allow for more more experimentation and effect true company growth?
Omniconvert is a CRO tool that helps marketers increase conversion rates. From surveys to overlays – it’s a marketers sandbox. You can find out more by connecting with me or head on over to omniconvert dot com.
When you get back to the office.
When you get back to the office, I suggest that you start using a little data in your decision-making process. You can start with some data that is already “laying around.”
When was the last time you looked at what your PPC and Facebook ad team were doing? Many digital marketers don’t spend a lot of time with the advertising, but there are some real gems of growth here.
And most of us are doing some sort of advertising.
Call down to your ad team and ask them for a spreadsheet of all of the ads they’ve been running. Go back six months or even a year. Ask for the ad text, the number of impressions, the number of clicks, the cost per click and the link URL. This is easy for them to generate. If they can track conversions, definitely ask for conversions for each ad.
Then spend some time with this data. You’ll understand:
Which calls to action tend to drive the most clicks.
What pages are getting the most ad traffic. You’ll want to go and see how these pages are performing in analytics.
How many ads are sending traffic to the home page.
From this, you can begin to find opportunities for growth.
Are you using words like the best clicked ads? Are you sending good clicks to bad pages? And is there a better place to send traffic than the home page? The answer is yes, by the way.
Then share your findings with at least one other person.
You have just begun culture change. You radical, you.
When considering investing in a web business, consider the following.
Traffic source: Is it dependent on free search?
Proft
On-going development: Does it require additional investment?
Dependence on Third-party API’s: Facebook, Twitter and others can change access to data at any time.
There are other considerations for website due diligence as well.
Calculate Revenue per Visit
The Revenue per Visit (RPV) is the revenue generated by a site divided by the number of visitors. If this number is small, you may have trouble building traffic, because the cost of the traffic is higher than the revenue.
For a better analysis, consider measuring Profit per Visit.
Avoid Traffic Arbitrage
If the site is not something you would use, you might have a business built on traffic arbitrage. Arbitrage is acquiring traffic, and then sending it advertisers or affiliates for more than you paid.
This is not a web business.
Does the Website have a Future?
Sites with a limited future are not a good long-term investment. When performing website due diligence, be careful of sites that are at the mercy of time or other businesses.
Websites that focus on a single event have a built in expiration date.
Sites that fix something in someone else’s product can be eliminated by upgrades to that product.
Sites tat provide a product that is simply “better” than the competition can be marketed out of existence
Websites that depend on loopholes should be avoided, as loopholes can be closed.
Avoid trying to figure things out after you buy.
— Bryan O’neil, Flippa.com
Website Due Diligence: 7 Business Buying Myths
O’Neil offer seven myths about buying a business that you should avoid.
Myth #1: The site’s backlink profile is important
Dependence on organic traffic is dangerous.
Myth #2: Financial verification is most important
Businesses with good financial verification can fail if they don’t have a future.
Myth #3: Escrow can save you from a bad decision.
Escrow is where you give money to a third party during a period of inspection and verification.
Do your due diligence before you enter escrow. Don’t make yourself a target for scammers.
Entering escrow also tie up your capital, limiting your options.
Myth #4: Website due diligence is just too expensive.
Due diligence is expensive, especially if done by a third party.
But, when you compare it to the purchase price, it can be quite affordable.
Calculate your Website Due Diligence Percent:
DDP = Cost of Due Diligence / Purchase Price of Website.
Myth #5: Screen shots are viable proof of financial performance.
Business owners can forge screen shots showing success. This is a sign of a scammer.
Make the seller jump through hoops.
— Bryan O’neil, Flippa.com
Myth #6: Your broker can do due diligence.
Avoid any broker that claims they have done due diligence for you.
Brokers work for the SELLER.
Myth #7: You can rely on apps to do your website due diligence.
Nope. You need the human element in the process.
Due Diligence when Buying Websites by Bryan O’neil of Flippa.com
Here is my instagraph infographic of his presentation on due diligence mistakes when buying Websites.
Due Diligence when Buying Websites by Bryan O’Niel
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
Do online reviews really matter, and do they make a difference to your business? The answer is yes, they absolutely do.
Consumers increasingly use reviews left by other consumers as part of their pre-purchase research efforts, and a bad review can have serious effects on your sales.
Herd shopping psychology plays an ever effect on consumers’ behavior online. Groupon is a wonderful example of that, with deals kicking in only if a certain amount of people pay for them. Research shows that the more people have already opted in on a deal, the likelier it is new visitors will commit to it.
User reviews are not so far removed from this phenomenon.
Over 80% of people said that positive reviews would encourage them to purchase a product. The same number of people changed their minds about purchasing after reading as little as one or two negative reviews.
Fake & Negative Reviews
Unfortunately, fake reviews exist, and they exist in a massive abundance. Competitors have been known to leave bad reviews on products posing as disgruntled customers, That is why more needs to be done to help consumers identify a fake review.
You are bound to get a negative review at some point during your business career. That’s simply the reality and nature of the world. It can be devastating for a business, but most people recognize that everyone makes mistakes. A couple of bad reviews aren’t going to put the nail in your coffin and close your business down.
Here are just some of the facts why online reviews are not to be ignored:
68% of millennials trust online reviews, with positive ones producing an 18% average uplift in sales
Consumer reviews are more trusted than descriptions that come from other manufacturers, nearly 12 times more.
90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business which means these decisions being made are made quickly, without much hesitation.
The top five industries to be affected negatively by online reviews are restaurants, hotels, doctor’s offices, hospitals and hair salons.
Negative reviews aren’t all bad; these have been known to create a buzz around your business and increase its exposure, unlike fake reviews that have been so outlandishly obviously fake and ridiculous that they go viral.
Want to learn more about how online reviews can make or break your business? Check out our infographic.
User Reviews are the King
About the Author
Josh Wardini, Editorial Contributor and Community Manager at websitebuilder.org. With a preliminary background in communication and expertise in community development, Josh works day-to-day to reshape the human resource management of digitally based companies.
When you think of the machine that is your online business, what do you picture? Do you see something organic? Something mechanical?
I think it’s helpful to pick a vision. The marketing and sales functions are too complex. The tools and channels are changing faster today than at any time in history. Thanks, internet.
Vizualize your marketing machine to make good decisions about where to invest.
Visualizing the process helps us focus on the pieces one at a time, instead of being overwhelmed by the mass of moving parts that feed our pipes, funnels and drips. When we work with clients, we tend to talk about knobs.
Here’s what I mean.
Our Marketing Machine Looks Like A Scientific Instrument
The most powerful metric for an online marketing ecosystem is acquisition cost.
The lower your acquisition cost, the higher your profit.
The lower your acquisition cost, the cheaper all of your advertising becomes.
The lower your acquisition cost, the more places you can afford to advertise.
But acquisition cost isn’t a dial you set. It’s the product of several dials.
The Acquisition Cost Spectrophotometer
We control acquisition costs using a device called the “Acquisition Cost Spectrophotometer” (ACS). This powerful device has two dials.
1. Traffic cost
2. Conversions — Typically leads or online transactions
We plug the ACS into any incoming channel — search engines, email, referrals, social media and so on. Then we begin to play with the knobs.
If we increase the traffic costs, but the conversions stay the same, we increase our acquisition cost, and the little red warning light turns on. If we dial down the traffic costs and keep the conversions the same, acquisition costs go down, and the red warning light goes off.
So, if we can increase conversions without increasing traffic costs, we get all the benefits of a lower acquisition cost. And for the paid search channel, we can actually lower the traffic costs by raising the conversion rate because Google rewards ads with effective landing pages by placing them higher on the search results pages.
Mathematically, the acquisition cost is calculated as:
Total Traffic Cost/Conversions
OR
Total Traffic Cost * Conversion Rate
If we put our metaphor down for a moment, we know that each of these “knobs” actually involves an entire process. Our “Traffic Cost” knob is controlled by an advertising and media team focused on getting the highest quality clicks for the fewest dollars.
Our “Conversions” knob is a metaphor for a team of data scientists, developers, designers and test techs focused on delivering the right experience to entice action.
All the marketer needs to do is determine if they should be investing in traffic or conversions, then fund the teams accordingly.
Vectron Conversion Analyzer
These are the primary knobs you turn when optimizing for conversion.
The Vectron Conversion Analyzer doesn’t actually exist, but we can visualize ourselve adjusting the knobs as we optimize our site.
When focused on optimizing a website for a given traffic channel, there are a number of knobs we control. I visualize a “Vectron Conversion Analyzer” as a metaphor for our process.
This amazing device allows us to control a number of “ingredients” that can lead to more conversions for any given traffic source. If you read this column, you’ll be familiar with most of the knobs on this little gem.
Value Proposition
The headlines, text, and images that spell out the value being offered by your company and products. Answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”
Layout and User Experience
The way the design draws a visitor’s eye to the important parts of each page and the cues that move them step-by-step along their exploratory journey.
Should important information be moved above the fold? Is there a visual hierarchy that tells the visitor what is important?
Credibility And Authority
A site design’s first job is to make the site seem credible. It should communicate that the company and products represent an authority in the solution space that it occupies.
Trust And Security
The visual cues that tell a visitor that the site will treat any information exchanged with care and veracity.
Social Proof
What do others like me think about this company, site and products?
Splitting The Signal
The Vectron machine splits the traffic up, allowing us to test different settings at one time. This is how we determine two very important things:
1. What is lacking from the site that visitors expect.
2. By how much each change increases the site’s performance.
AB Testing gives you the feedback on your conversion optimization work.
Visualizations That Help You Prioritize
We rarely have the budgets to invest in every part of our marketing machine. Having a metaphor by which you can visualize the pieces working together offers a powerful way to decide how to invest over time.
Using the visualization at the top of this page, you may not have any luck seeding your brand clouds with advertising until you’ve built brand awareness. When it rains, you should invest in the downspouts that drive leads into the soil of marketing.
If your sales close ratios aren’t flowering, you may need to look at the quality delivered by ads and conversion together. Once you have a low acquisition cost, you can again invest in more expensive advertising channels to seed your brand’s rain clouds and bring the rain.
With a limited amount of money in your marketing budget, spend it on things which are going to give you the best return on investment. These email marketing facts tell you why email remains a great way to spend your money.
Unfortunately, many people wrongly think that this type of marketing is dead. The amount of emails I get in my inbox each day says otherwise. Here are some facts about email marketing to prove my point:
205 billion emails are sent each day. This is expected to rise to 246 billion by the end of 2019.
Email is still one of the most widely used methods of communication despite the wide range of platforms and apps available.
Although Facebook is an important tool for marketing, email marketing is the most direct and personal way to reach and interact with your target audience. People are more likely to sign up for your email list than they are to interact with you on Facebook. In fact, companies still employ third-party email marketing services to assist them with this aspect of eCommerce.
Your customers want updates. Don’t just settle for one sale per customer, you want multiple sales. Your customers want to hear from you and want email updates about your brand. Don’t let them forget about you, give them what they want!
Emails have a larger ROI. For every $1 spent on email marketing, an average $38 is returned – this is very important if you have a limited budget.
Want to learn more about email marketing? Check out our infographic below.
Your website visitors need value propositions because, given too many options, most people’s decision making process shuts down and they default to making no choice at all.
Out on the internet, consumers have a million choices. And most of the time, all of the choices look the same to consumers.
This drives people crazy. How are they supposed to know which choice to make?
They try to figure it out, but doing so often leads to analysis paralysis which then leads them to not make any choice at all.
Have you ever had one of those nights where dinnertime was fast approaching and a unanimous decision had to be made on what to choose for carryout…. only nobody could decide what to get?
You might hear a lot of ….”just not burgers again”. Or…” please not pizza”. Everybody has something that they’ve just had too much of and they don’t want the same old thing…again.
Everyone is looking for that something….that oomph for dinner…that dish that just makes you feel good. Something different. Because a good meal can change a bad day.
And then all it takes is for one person to mention Chinese and the thought of trying to eat rice and wontons with chopsticks while drinking piping hot tea and cracking open a fortune cookie to find out your fate afterward seals the deal.
Now we know that for most of us, eating with chopsticks is almost impossible. But c’mon, it is kind of fun. And not all of us drink hot tea with dinner. And we know that those strips of paper inside our fortune cookie aren’t really going to predict our future. But it’s kind of fun, right?
It’s so simple and yet so genius. It probably doesn’t cost more than 30 cents for the chopsticks, fortune cookie and tea combined – but it adds a unique value to your eating experience.
For decades Domino’s pizza offered one of the best value propositions around. Get your pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free.
It’s probably the only time you’ve wished your pizza would get there a couple minutes late so you could eat for free. It’s a little like playing pizza lottery. One too many red lights and heavy traffic means 31 minutes and you win.
What Is a Unique Value Proposition?
A unique value proposition is something that you offer that stands out from your competitors.
When consumers hear the same offerings over and over and over, they begin to tune them out. If it requires a lot of thought to choose one over the other with not a lot of differentiation, they tend to experience cognitive overload. They begin to shut down.
Until a product or service enters the picture that makes their ears perk up again.
Something uniquely refreshing, adds value and doesn’t make them think too hard.
When visitors arrive on your website and they are greeted by a strong unique value proposition, it stops them in their tracks and keeps them from immediately clicking over to your competitor’s website.
It also helps them to commit to engaging further with your website.
Visitor motivation is always going to be the number one driver in consumer decisions. If they’re not hungry – they’re not going to eat at your restaurants. If they don’t want to be followed every moment of the day with emails, text and social media – they’re not going to buy your smartphone.
But visitor motivation is not something we can control. We can harness and steer it. But we can’t control it. That’s in our visitor’s hands.
However, a unique value proposition is something that we can control. That’s why it’s imperative that you invest in drilling down, uncovering and revealing a really good one.
Identifying Your Strongest Value Proposition
Not every value proposition is created equal. And as you’re about to find out, just being “different” or “unique” isn’t enough.
First, dig deep and write down every possible way in which your business and offering is unique. Every possible way. Don’t leave anything out. Just like no question is a dumb question – the same holds true for brainstorming for value props. Include them all. You just might have a hidden gem and don’t even know it.
It’s been a long held belief that if you just come up with something really unique and different then that is enough to define a unique value proposition.
But what if nobody wants it?
A toy that teaches kids the nutritional value of eating broccoli is great for parents. But if the kids still don’t want to eat their greens – it’s useless.
So when you nail down your UVP, make sure that it’s something that your audience really wants.
Secondary Differentiators
Once you’ve identified your strongest value proposition, don’t stop there.
Also, identify secondary differentiators. These secondary differentiators will help support your unique value proposition. It will help to strengthen it when it comes to visitors making a choice whether or not to choose you.
These secondary differentiators can be things like free shipping, membership rewards – anything that provides added value.
Display Your Unique Value Proposition Prominently
Sometimes businesses have already have a pretty cool value proposition but it’s hidden from the world. I was analyzing a website recently and didn’t discover their unique value proposition until I was reading their About us page.
It was awesome. But it shouldn’t be hidden only on their About Us page. Only a certain percentage of visitors will read that page.
It should be smack dab on the Home page.
Most people aren’t willing to invest 5 minutes on 10 different websites to see if they have a unique offering. Their time is too valuable and to spend 50 minutes total browsing websites only to find out at the end that nobody provided anything with unique value is too much of an investment.
They’re likely to only spend a few seconds before deciding if they should stay.
So make sure you convey your unique value proposition immediately.
Other Ways To Differentiate Value
Having a unique value proposition that sets your business and your offering apart from your competitors is a crucial first step. But there’s also other areas where you need to highlight your value props.
When you provide different services and products to your prospects those services and products need to be differentiated by their unique value. Why? Because it helps them to better understand which one they should choose. Remember, if they don’t know or can’t make a choice, they might not choose anything.
Not only will you be differentiating your products and services from each other so prospects can make a choice. But you’ll also be specifically differentiating them from your competitor’s specific products and services as well.
And what about your About Us page? Are you differentiating the value of your team? Your team members are like no other team. Make sure that you are highlighting their very unique value too.
Delivering a Strong Value Proposition
I hope you have a little bit better of an understanding as to why a value proposition is so valuable. Not only does it give you an advantage over your competition, it also helps your visitors to sort through all the marketing messages they receive. Without it, it can be very hard for them to make a choice.
Value proposition’s are effective in that they stop visitors and grab their attention. Once they see something they like, they are now more willing to commit to reading more of your message and delving deeper into your site.
So take the time to identify your strongest unique value proposition. Add on secondary differentiators to support it and make it stronger. And remember to find the unique value in each and every one of your products and services – or in any other area when you can.
Returning customers are worth more than you think. So, here are 4 easy to implement ways to increase customer retention and customer retention rates.
If you’ve listened to any of the top conversion experts lately, you’ve likely noticed them distancing themselves from the word “conversion”.
While the goal of “conversion optimizers” is ultimately to increase revenue, the term is often misinterpreted in a market where acquisition receives an unhealthy level of focus.
Today, we want to spend a little time talking about something that is as important to optimization as the rate at which you acquire new customers.
Customer retention.
You probably already know the statistics. Acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more costly than retaining an existing one. A joint study by YotPo and Riskified shows that while returning customers make up only 15% of all the shopping online, they account for a third of all online shopping revenue and spend 3x more than one-time shoppers.
And yet the focus on customer acquisition remains strong.
We get it. We spend the majority of our time talking about acquisition here at Conversion Sciences, but it’s important to remember that converting 50% of our visitors isn’t worth a whole lot if we can’t retain any of them.
4 Ways to Increase Customer Retention and Customer Retention Rates
You can’t have growth without retention, so today, we’re going to be discussing 4 straightforward ways to improve your own customer retention.
#1. Focus on Value over Loyalty to Retain Customers
First things first.
There’s a lot of talk in the retention space about creating “loyal” customers. Everyone wants loyalty, and many businesses mistakenly believe that if customers are members of a loyalty program, they are in fact “retained”. But as Taddy Hall notes, many people participate in loyalty programs simply for the chance of occasional savings and are part of the competitors’ loyalty programs as well. In other words, they are presumably “retained” by “four or five competitors in the same industry”.
Data from COLLOQUY, a provider of loyalty marketing research, shows that although the average American family holds membership in 29 loyalty programs, they are only active in 12 of them. In other words, only one third of the loyalty programs actually translate to customer retention.
If this sounds an alarm in your minds… good. It should!
Creating a membership program and slapping the word “loyalty”on it is in no way an automatic means to increasing customer retention rates. Frankly, loyalty isn’t even what we should be aiming for.
Ultimately, value is what creates loyalty, and by extension, value is what we should focus our efforts on creating. When you offer more value than your competitors, loyalty is a natural byproduct.
So, How do we Define Customer Value?
That’s an insanely cliche word – “value” – so let’s wrap some meat around it. As Katrina Lerman writes for AdAge “we are loyal to the companies and retailers who show us they understand us through the products they offer and the customer experiences they create.”
Let’s say I have an app called Imgur that I use to scroll through interesting images and visual resources and occasionally favorite them. Now let’s say that myself and about 50,000 of my online friends have been clamoring for Imgur to add a particular feature we want – for example, the ability to add folders to our collection of favorites so we can sort them by category for easy reference.
Imgur could do one of two things:
Add value to their app by creating a feature a large segment of the community has been persistently asking for over the last few years
Or redesign the interface for the 3rd time this year.
One adds real, tangible value. One doesn’t.
I put this way to improve customer retention as #1 for a reason. When you approach customer retention through the lens of loyalty, you end up in weird places. But if you approach it through the lens of adding more value, you are targeting a goal that consistently results in increased retention.
(sarah plz)
#2. Show up… with humans.
We are living in the age of automation, and that means that more than ever, there is a premium on human interaction.
The first one, believe it or not is that they answered the phone. ((That’s right, people answering the phone!))
You would think that this would be obvious right? But I think there are so many people, that in their heads they’re already this billion dollar business and, “Hey man, answering the phone doesn’t scale, so we’re trying to make it so that nobody can contact us. You just use our online forms.”
But because of this, at music conferences they would overhear one musician telling another, especially in the early days when not a lot of people had heard of CD Baby yet, “Oh you’re not on CD Baby yet. Dude, CD Baby is awesome. You know what? They answer the phone. You can call them and they answer and you can talk to a real person!”
They’re like, “No way!”
“Yeah way! Amazon won’t do that.”
And they weren’t talking about their cool graphic design, or their fancy CSS Stylesheets on their website. No. None of the other stuff mattered.
They answered the phone. And that was enough to get his friend to sign up.
The other humanizing example, was a geeky little thing they did one day. It only took two lines of computer code to intercept outgoing emails and put the person’s first name into the from header, not just the to header. So, if an email was going to Sarah, for example, it would say the email was from CD Baby loves Sarah.
But people loved it and then they would forward it to friends, and friends would tell friends, and friends would come and buy CDs from them. Just because a humanizing touch.
They had a policy that “changes need pizza.” The reason for this is because every time a new album came into the store, it would take about 45 minutes of work to lay it on the scanner, scan the album art, photoshop it, drop the CD into the bin, rip it fully and then take the little clips, and do all the stuff, and fix their bio.
And every now and then, somebody would contact them two weeks later and say, “Uhhhh, can I change my choice? I want to send you a different album art cover, or I want to change the way my tracks are done.”
And they would say, “Alright no problem, just send us a pizza.”
And they would reply, “What?”
“Yeah. Look we’re happy to do it, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass. We’re going to have to go out to the warehouse and find your CD. If you don’t mind, just send us a pizza and we’re happy to do it.”
And they’d say, “You’re serious.”
“Yeah, serious. Here’s the phone number of the local pizzeria, they know us, just tell them you want to buy CD Baby a pizza. They already know our favourite pizza, so you just call them up with your credit card, say I want to get CD Baby a pizza. The pizza shows up, we’ll do anything you want.”
The real point was, this is humanizing. I think too many of us start businesses and you want it to look big, and you start to say things on your website, like “we” instead of “I”. Even though it is just you. We try to do these things to make it look corporate. But when you do these things to humanize it and remind people that it’s just a real person back here — we’re just real people with a lot of work, so get us a pizza, we’ll do it — People love that.
“Oh my god dude, you have to sign up to CD Baby.”
“Why?”
“Dude, they changed my album because I sent them a pizza.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, way. You gotta sign up.”
On one occasion, a customer asked for a plastic squid. When the customer saw a real plastic squid in the package of his order, he went nuts and posted this video on Youtube.
Showing up for your customers is one of the most powerful ways to build retention.
#3. Take customer service seriously.
Speaking of showing up, customer service is the hallmark of customer retention. This can never be emphasized enough. According to Customers that Stick, 82% of consumers in the US said that they stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer experience.
Many businesses tend to focus on attitude and personality when training for customer service. They think friendliness is the defining factor when it comes to a great customer service experience.
On some level this is true, as can be seen from the above statistics, but there’s another piece you can’t forget. Competence and problem solving skills are often more instrumental to the customer leaving satisfied than simple demeanor.
As Fast Company co-founder Bill Taylor explains, you should focus on hiring people with good attitudes and then focus your training on equipping them to deliver a high level of service to customers.
“Now that’s an effective prescription for innovation! Over the years, as I’ve studied high-impact organizations that are changing the game in their fields, they’ve adopted a range of strategies and business models. But they all agree on one core “people” proposition: They hire for attitude and train for skill. They believe that one of the biggest challenges they face is to fill their ranks with executives and front-line employees whose personal values are in sync with the values that make the organization tick. As a result, they believe that character counts for more than credentials.”
A lot of businesses hire cheerful staff and then just throw them into the ring with only skeleton training. If you want top level customer service, you don’t just need top quality people. You need top quality people who have received top quality training.
#4. Go deeper than explicit complaints and requests.
Providing quality customer service is the baseline rather than the goal. According to “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner (accessed from Helpscout), a typical business hears only from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. If you want to fully understand what your customers want, you’ll need to dive deeper than provided feedback.
As Carmine Gallo discusses, brands that can anticipate a customer’s needs and meet them without needing to be asked are often the ones that garner customer loyalty. To illustrate, he shares a personal anecdote from a family vacation:
I recently brought my family to a 5-Star San Diego resort, The Grand Del Mar, named the #1 hotel in the United States by Trip Advisor. It sits on a beautiful property in the hills, but there are plenty of gorgeous locations in San Diego. It’s the “attentive” service that Trip Advisor featured in its review and has earned my loyalty. But exactly what does the staff do that sets them apart and, more important, what can all businesses learn from their customer service techniques? The Grand Del Mar’s customer service ‘secret’ became very clear to me on this recent visit—the staff finds small ways to unexpectedly delight their customers and they do so by anticipating unexpressed wishes. Here are just a few of many examples I noted:
– My daughters discovered a small sand area near the pool. Within seconds—not minutes—a staff member casually walked by and, without saying a word, dropped off sand toys for the kids. The kids looked up and there they were, seemingly out of nowhere.
– The valet brought up our car and asked where we were heading. “Legoland,” the kids shouted! By the time I had finished loading the trunk, the valet had placed four water bottles in the car. “It’s hot today. You’ll need these,” he said.
– Vanessa and I decided to treat ourselves to a special occasion dinner in the hotel’s premium restaurant. The hotel offered an inviting play area for children, called The Explorers Club. The dinner was running a bit longer than the kids club would remain open and the restaurant’s location was a 5-minute walk back to the main hotel. “I noticed that you had courtesy cars at the lobby. Can we request one to pick us up as soon as we’re finished?” I asked the waiter. “It’s already been done. The car is waiting,” he responded. “And we informed the club that you’re on your way.
At the end of our stay, the hotel desk employee asked if we had our boarding passes and if we needed directions. I asked the person why everyone seems to anticipate the needs of a guest. “It makes us stand out,” he said. The employee was exactly right. The reason why this level of service leaves a positive impression—and why you, as a leader, must coach to it—is because it happens so infrequently that customers will pay a premium for it. I’ve studied the best brands in the area of customer service and all of them train employees to anticipate unexpressed wishes. It’s a key component to an exceptional customer experience.
Conclusion: 4 Straightforward Ways To Increase Customer Retention
Remember that retention isn’t a step. It’s a lens. If you aren’t building your acquisition and optimization strategies through the lens of costumer retention, any retention efforts you make will be superficial at best.
Provide value. Show up with some humanity. Take customer service seriously. And go deeper than initial feedback.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
There is a moment in time when your lead is in the perfect position to convert.
They have just told you they want to hear from you, and they are actively checking their email inbox for a message from you. The message you send them in this moment has a higher likelihood of being read then any message you will ever send them again.
Confirmation emails are probably the most wasted resource in all of email marketing. Like other transactional emails, they receive significantly higher engagement than typical bulk mailings from the same businesses.
Confirmation email open and click rates
Unlike other transactional emails, however, confirmation emails provide you with ample flexibility to engage the user with your brand. You can invite the user to “confirm” and then engage with your brand in whatever capacity you deem best.
Today, we’re going to help you stop wasting this unparalleled goldmine and start sending confirmation emails that drive conversions for your brand.
What Is A Confirmation Email?
Before we continue, let’s define what we mean by “confirmation email”.
A confirmation email is an automated email triggered by a user action and intended to confirm to the user that their action has been successfully completed. Examples of triggering events include subscriptions, purchases, inquiries, etc.
What makes confirmation emails such a powerful marketing tool is that the user typically expects to receive them and will often actively look for them.
Like with any conversion optimization strategy, the first step to optimizing confirmation emails is to identify your objective. What do you want the user to do when they receive your confirmation email?
While objectives can be as adverse as the businesses targeting them, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on three specific objectives:
Immediately move the lead forward in your funnel
Position the lead for long-term conversion
Engage the lead with a personal connection
Let’s take a closer look at each objective.
1. Immediately Target The Next Conversion
This is the most straightforward objective and probably the best option “on average”. When someone signs up for anything triggering a confirmation email, they have taken a step forward in your conversion funnel and are likely in prime condition to be moved even further forward in that funnel.
The only downside to this objective is that you have little time to build trust between past conversion and new pitch, which will affect how we use it throughout our funnel. Early Funnel Implementation
If we use this earlier in our funnel, we need to make sure that we aren’t asking for much, since we haven’t had time to build trust in our brand. For example, if the user downloads a free lead magnet, you can pitch a low-cost “tripwire” product in your confirmation email.
Another great example of this concept in action comes from Dollar Shave Club. With their simple business model, you might think there is nowhere further to go once you’ve become a member, but as you can see in the below confirmation email, that’s not the case:
Confirmation email from Dollar Shave Club
As soon as you’ve become a customer, The Dollar Shave Club attempts to move you further in the funnel by making you a referrer. This is a low investment ask on their part. It costs the customer nothing to make referrals and they will be rewarded for doing so, which makes it a great early-funnel strategy. Late Funnel Implementation
This immediate conversion strategy can also be utilized later in the funnel, where you have already had time to build trust with the user. At this point, you can go for much larger purchases or much higher investment conversions. Offering something exclusive or time-sensitive can be especially effective here.
For example, let’s take a SaaS company offering several pricing tiers. After converting a lead or past customer to their highest priced tier, they might include an exclusive offer for 1-to-1 consulting on implementing or optimizing their service. Alternatively, they could offer a turnkey solution to a problem the software is designed to help solve.
2. Position The Lead For Long-Term Conversion
Attempting to immediately trigger the next conversion won’t work for every business model. Sometimes, getting the lead to take that next step requires a good deal more nurturing than you can deliver in a single email.
In this case, the goal is to utilize the lead’s momentary warmth to position them for long-term conversion. This could look like establishing authority or expertise, identifying additional information for advanced segmentation, setting clear expectations for future emails, or any number of things.
When asked what they’d like to improve, 64% of email marketers said they’d improve personalization, yet split tests have shown that asking for more information from readers tends to result in a lower lead conversion rate. If you ask for that additional information in the confirmation email, however, you can improve personalization without sacrificing lead volume.
This could be as straightforward as including a few extra data entry fields for users to fill out before hitting “confirm”. Or it could be a bit more subtle, like in this example from MailChimp.
Notice the additional optoins under “activate your account”. If a user clicks on any of those options, it will log additional information about them in MailChimp’s database and likely trigger a different followup sequence.
Targeting additional information in the confirmation email is a really easy way to get more information about your leads, setting you up for a higher conversion rate down the road.
3. Engage The Lead With A Personal Connection
The final objective we’ll discuss is in some ways a subset of #2 in that it’s more of a long-term play. At the same time, the focus is a bit different and will really only apply to certain business models, which is why I’m making it’s own category.
Engaging the subscriber with a personal connection is an objective unto itself.
Many people are subscribed to hundreds of email lists, most of which they will never check or read and will probably unsubscribe when they do happen to see one of your emails.
When get them to engage with you on a personal, 1-to-1 level, however, you become more than just another random brand spamming them with emails they’ll never read. You become a person they are interested in connecting with and following.
Brian Dean offers a great example of this:
Confirmation email from Brian Dean
Just like the rules of interpersonal connection dictate, he isn’t focused on himself and asking you to be interested. He is asking about YOU – the subscriber. What are YOU struggling with?
He also does some of the things we talked about in the last section.
He tells you what to expect
He provides additional value
He tracks what information you click to for better segmentation
He encourages you to respond to his email
And while this doesn’t work with faceless brands, it does work with personalities, especially when the personality is actually willing to engage with you.
I think I’ve sent Brian 4 or 5 emails over the last few years, and he’s responded to 3 or 4 of them, and that’s a big part of why he’s my “go to” resource for SEO, why I reference his work all the time in my articles, and why I frequently recommend his course.
Conclusion: Start Optimizing Your Confirmation Emails
Your confirmations emails can be a major asset in your email marketing funnel.
Don’t waste them.
The ideas we’ve discussed today will get you started, but be willing to run some split tests and dig a bit deeper. There are numerous options we weren’t able to list today, any of which might be a goldmine for your business.
And of course, if you’ve already found some winners, let us know in the comments!
Is there magic in the animated video that is all-the-rage on the web? Should you invest in this style of video to communicate powerful messages to your visitors? Will this investment translate into higher conversion rates?
We set out to collect some data to help answer these burning questions. After all, we’re scientists.
To give you an example of what we’re talking about, here’s a video created for us by NinjaTropic to to introducing readers to AB testing as part of our comprehensive AB testing guide.
This video summarizes AB testing in just under a minute and a half. The goal of this particular article is to establish us as the source for information on this transformational tool of websites. This should make our visitors more eager to subscribe, learn and grow.
In other words, we want to generate leads that will one day turn into sales. Just like you.
Why did we think that an animated video would outperform a simple “talking head” video? Because science told us it might.
Using Animation in Video Marketing to Generate Leads and Sales
Here’s a more traditional video that explains what we’ve learned about animated video and why you should consider it.
Based on their popularity, it seems that video of a “drawn” cartoon with voice over is a great way to keep viewers engaged. We wanted to know why that was, and we wanted to know if that meant they would also be more likely to convert if they were on your website and being asked to take an action.
We ran an eye tracking study, which sought to answer these things, and what we found out was very interesting.
For hand-drawn video, the motion of the pen drawn on a whiteboard while somebody’s speaking, or of a cartoon moving, pulls the attention of the visitor. It has a very high level of engagement.
Something else we thought was very interesting was that when you include cartoons of people, which is pretty common in these kind of videos, they get the same kind of attention that a real human face attracts. The effects of the cartoon face is very much the same as a videotaped face, like the one of me talking above.
The human mind is drawn to faces and eyes, we like to watch them. Even if there’s something else going on, we always seem to return to the eyes.
Does Animated Video Convert Better?
When we did this study, we also coupled it with a split test. We tested this kind of video with talking head video like this, and with what we call slide video, which you might see given in a webinar, with static images.
What we found out was that if you put this video on a landing page, in which you have a call to action and a form to complete, the animated video converted better. In other words, more people were willing to go and fill out the form and take the next step than with talking head video or slide video.
So, if you’re considering video that’s going to call people to action, you really should consider animated or whiteboard video for your landing page. While hand-drawn video can be more expensive to produce, companies like NinjaTropic are driving the cost down with advanced tools and experienced animators.
The real question is whether any additional production cost is more than the increase in leads and sales you may get from it. The only way to know is to test it.
