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Communicate More Creatively with Analytics

People sometimes confuse us with robot-like scientists, being lead by data and caring little for the creative side of marketing.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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I like to think that we can be more creative because we add a rigor to our creativity that allows us to try riskier things. If we have some data that says risky might work, we have a methodology through which we can confirm it’s effectiveness with a high level of confidence.

We backstop our creative with data, and this gives us a freedom that few designers and writers have.

In my new column Enhance Your Creativity Through Analytics I show you how we find data to backup or disavow our creative efforts.

Listen here or read it online.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Speaking of Wealth Interview: 6 Big Takeaways on Designing for Conversion

On July 29, 2014, Brian sat down with Jason Hartman, host of the Speaking of Wealth show, to discuss his overall approach to tackling the most important pieces of the online marketing puzzle.  He keys in on some crucial points that all online marketers should pay attention to as you are designing for conversion.

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Here are the key takeaways from the interview, but you should listen to the full 21-minute podcast as well in order to glean all of that “scientific wisdom” that Brian has dropped:

  • #1 mission of any marketer: Understand what makes your visitors tick.  It all flows from here.
  • Popovers work.  People say they hate them, but the numbers don’t lie.  Use them, choosing the right style that feels right for your brand (lightbox, scroll-triggered, exit, etc.).
  • Use Calls to Action wherever you can.  Put them front-and-center on your key landing pages.  Make your “action button” a different color than everything else on your page to ensure it stands out and draws eyeballs in.  Stop agonizing over the color!
  • Never produce a piece of content that doesn’t have the intent of getting more people on your list.
  • Stop distracting your visitors with links to your social media properties.  Once you have done the work to get them to your site, the last thing you should want is for them to quickly bounce anywhere else.  If it doesn’t lend itself directly to getting the most wanted response (e.g. joining the list), leave it out.
  • Dependence upon organic traffic is “mostly dead”, much like Wesley in The Princess Bride.  It’s a new frontier, and it’s time to adapt to this new reality.

Makes your marketing mouth salivate, right?  Well, get on over there and sink your teeth into the goodness, and be sure and stop by to say thank you to Jason Hartman and the team over at Speaking of Wealth.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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2 Questions for the Statistically Significant Marketer Part 2 [Audio]

Questions can be powerful things, if the questions are good and are leading us in the right direction (normally this means toward better results).  When the questions are about the statistical significance of your marketing results, you’ve got a winning combination that will really take you places.

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So, what are a couple of good questions that you can use to help you become statistically significant as a digital marketer?  Brian introduces a couple of doozies in How to be a Statistically Significant Marketer (Part 2) on Marketing Land:

Question 1: Are the results I’m seeing from my online marketing telling me what really happened?

Question 2: Are these results “good” enough to predict what will happen in the future?

You will find part one here: Become a Statistically Significant Marketer.

Brian tackles these challenging questions by introducing us to three characters involved in life-like scenarios that will seem all too familiar to some of us.

Finally, he ends with the question that every marketer has to continually ask at every step along the way:  What do I do next based on the results I am seeing?

Here’s another solid question you can ask yourself:  “Self, is it worth 15 minutes of my time to find out how to begin asking the right questions in my marketing efforts?”  We’re going to help you out here and encourage you to go with a resounding “YES” on that one.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Become a Statistically Significant Marketer [AUDIO]

Statistical significance: It’s not just for impressing your date anymore.

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If you’re involved with an online business, you draw conclusions from things you’ve learned on a weekly basis.

When you say, “We tried that. It didn’t work,” you are claiming to be able to predict the future based on something you did in the past.

When you say, “We stopped sending email because our list got tired of us,” you are saying that the tea leaves of your email list say you should stop sending email.

Often, such statements stop progress. One way to keep from hitting the “We tried that” wall is the ask a simple question: “Was the data statistically significant?”

In this episode of The Conversion Scientist Podcast, I will tell you exactly what statistical significance means, how to measure it and when to believe the data you’re being shown.

Read the Transcript

Image taken from ABTestGuide.com statistical significance calculator.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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You Are What You Wear: Why Conversion Scientists Wear a Lab Coat

Why do superheroes wear costumes when a simple mask would suffice? What is behind the legend of the “Power Tie?”

Why do Conversion Scientists wear a lab coat?

This is one of the questions I answer in my interview with Roger Dooley for the Brainfluence Podcast. Roger is one smart cookie, and our conversation flows to a number of interesting topics.

  • What is a Conversion Scientist?
  • Earning the trust of your potential customers.
  • The counter-intuitive way to generate more telephone calls.
  • Why we spend too much time telling people what we offer and not enough time on their needs.
  • Why Brian says that most designers are going to give you well-meaning, but altogether bad, advice.

You should certainly give this a listen, or pop over the the Brainfluence Blog to read the transcript.

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This interview originally appeared on Roger Dooley’s Brainfluence Podcast.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Use These Surprising Web Tactics to Get More Phone Leads

For many of our clients, phone calls are far more valuable to the business than a completed form. You should prioritize phone calls when:

  1. You have a competent team answering calls. By “competent,” I mean they close phone leads at a relatively high rate.
  2. You have trouble connecting with qualified customers by email or phone when they fill out a form on your site.
  3. The profit from a sale is significantly higher than the cost of answering the phone.
  4. If this sounds like your business, then you should listen to our interview with Tim Paige of Lead Pages.

You get two scientists for the price of one.

Brian Massey and Joel Harvey – The Conversion Scientists – talk about the tactics that they used on a website to make the phone ring without compromising form fills.

Getting the Phone to Ring: How the Conversion Scientists Enticed New Clients to Call with One Simple Change

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This originally appeared on the LeadPages ConversionCast.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Tides of Your Website and Tests that Lie [AUDIO]

Don't stop tests early.

What if this test had been stopped on Thursday?

We encourage every online marketer to begin experimenting with split testing as soon as possible. It is a skillset that empowers marketing to really understand their visitors and generate more revenue from existing traffic.

One of the first hurdles you will have to get through is the “damn lying test” phenomenon. This is when a test has been run and has found a way to significantly increase results. The confidence level reported by the testing tool is 95%. You are going to be a hero.

Then you roll out the change to the site and nothing happens. Conversions don’t go up. Revenue per visit doesn’t move. What’s going on?

It’s the Damn Lying Test. One of the reasons tests lie is that they didn’t take into account the ebb and flow of traffic on your site. Tests must take into account peak and off-peak times. Form most sites, a test must run for a full week and end on seven-day boundaries.

How can you discover the rise and fall of tides in your website?

In Ride The Tides Of Your Website To Make More Money With A/B Split Testing, I discuss the various cycles and how to detect them on your site using analytics.

Listen to me read the column

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I provide graphs and examples to illustrate a variety of website tides:

  • Intra-day cycles
  • Weekly tides
  • Monthly cycles
  • Yearly seasons
  • Device-dependent cycles
  • Sales cycles
  • Artificial cycles

Understanding the rise and fall of the tides in your website will help you design better tests that deliver results you can take to the bank. Use your knowledge of website tides and some discipline to steadily increase the profitability of your site.

Special thanks to Craig Sullivan for inspiring this column with his Digital Elite Camp presentation 20 Simple Ways to Mess Up Your AB Testing.

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3 Must Have Tools for Those Who Depend on Google Analytics [AUDIO]

The staff was assembled, the stage was set. Representatives from every department plus some of the big brass were sitting around the long conference table.
I was about to present the data that showed how successful my marketing campaigns had been for the past month. This was important, because it had been like pulling teeth to get a more data-driven process in place.
IT had to be cajoled into setting up Google Analytics.
Sales had to be bullied into keeping good account of leads and sales.
Now, with the first full month of data in hand, I was going to point to some steady growth. My pitch was confident as I showed the increase in leads and correlated it with an increase in sales. I was going to be a star.
Until someone spoke up from sales.
“We didn’t get that many leads last month. Most of my sales came from affiliates.”
All eyes turned to me. What I would say next would either raise stature or destroy my credibility.
Was it my programs, or was it my analytics that caused this disconnect?
The right answer would have been, “I personally QA’d our analytics setup. These numbers are right.”
Could you have given that answer?

In my most recent Marketing Land article Is It The Site, Or Is It The Analytics? Debugging Google Analytics, I show you how to be certain that your Google Analytics setup is working as planned.
Whether you setup your own analytics or have your tech team do it, you need to know that the data you’re using is right.

Listen to the Article, Read by the Author

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Getting Past the Bouncers in our Brains- Chinwag Psych Conference Presentation

I have to admit, I was a little more nervous than usual presenting in front of an audience of psychologist-marketers.

You’ll see what I mean in the video.

Why would a Conversion Scientist be invited to speak at a Psych conference? Because our testing is designed to tell us things about your visitors that they cannot even explain themselves. This is why split testing is such a valuable tool. Visitors tell us what they prefer by how they act.

One thing testing has taught us is that there are bouncers in the human brain, and these bouncers must be dealt with before our messages will be processed and acted upon.

It’s just 20 minutes or so.

Hat tip to Roy H. Williams and the Wizard Academy for introducing me to the research I present here.

References

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Mehrabian on Amazon

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Brian Massey

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The Conversion Scientist Shares his Secrets with The Web Psychologist [AUDIO]

I do a lot of interviews. I love doing them, especially when they are on my favorite subject: me.

However, I must admit feeling a bit of trepidation at the thought of being interview by “The Web Pshychologist“, Nathalie Nahai. After all, her job is to peel back the layers of your marketing program until she finds the core issues that keep you from success.

I wasn’t sure I wanted my onion peeled.

My fears were confirmed as Nathalie guided me through some revealing questions using humor and genuine curiosity. I revealed some of my biggest secrets.

  • The ingenious test that shows wearing a lab coat makes smarter.
  • The information should you leave out of your website to ramp up your conversions and start making money.
  • Why your marketing messages bounce off of you visitors brain.
  • The biggest mistake your making online right now according to our tests.
  • How to give your customers hope that they can solve their problems.

Yes, these are questions you will want to know the answer to.

Listen to the entire interview

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21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

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