If there were only one email campaign we could send for 350+ of our online retail and eCommerce customers for rest of their lives it would be this one….
The cart abandonment campaign.
It’s no big secret that video often improves conversion rates.
And with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all making recent upgrades to their video capabilities, it may almost seem like a no-brainer to blast your next marketing video everywhere you can.
Not so fast.
Every platform is different and therefore no single video is right for every platform. That’s not to say your business shouldn’t be using every platform, but let’s be smart about it.
Drip, drip.
Did you hear that?
That’s the sound of potential customers leaking out of your sales funnel.
Drip, drip…
Another customer gone.
After fighting tooth-and-nail to launch your SaaS business, the last thing you want is a leaky sales funnel to undermine all your hard work. Because even a small leak can snowball into a gushing cascade of leads, leaving your business bone-dry.
William A. Foster once said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”
Yet, we continue to see businesses pushing leads through doors, pushing customers through funnels… just hoping that they’ll create a high quality, engaged audience by accident.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. A high quality, engaged audience is anything but accidental. It requires that optimizers put in the effort to create user state models, dig into cohort analysis and correlative metrics, run experiments for different user states, etc.
It’s not the easy choice, but if you’re looking for long-term revenue growth, it’s the only choice.
When trying to boost conversions, whether it’s on a signup screen or a landing page, it’s a default for many optimizers to generate hypotheses based on best practices and what’s generally “known” to be a problem.
A landing page that doesn’t display well on mobile is a perfect example. Someone might shout “it’s not responsive” and then resize the page properly for mobile use.
But that won’t solve the real issue… because the truth about most low converting landing pages on mobile isn’t just that they don’t resize properly, but that they have been written, designed, built… with no mobile context in mind.
As a digital analyst or marketer, you know the importance of analytical decision making.
Go to any industry conference, blog, meet up, or even just read the popular press, and you will hear and see topics like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics everywhere.
Because many of us don’t come from a technical/statistical background, this can be both a little confusing and intimidating.
But don’t sweat it, in this post, I will try to clear up a some of this confusion by introducing a simple, yet powerful framework – the intelligent agent – which will help link these new ideas with familiar tools and concepts like A/B Testing and Optimization.
If you’re like most marketers, you don’t live in an ivory tower.
You try to follow “best practices” with your marketing campaigns and site, but with your limited resources, you have to spend your time on the tactics that make the biggest difference.
Unfortunately, most best practice recommendations don’t take real life into account. Not every company has a well-managed CRM, a call tracking platform, a solid testing strategy and a big testing budget to boot.
While this sort of setup is obviously ideal, most marketers have to make do with far less.
Their CRM is a joke, calls aren’t being tracked and their testing strategy and budget is…well, let’s just say it’s hypothetical.
If this sounds like you at all, at some point you may have found yourself wondering, “What should be my top priority—the one thing that will get me the most bang for my buck?”
Google might be the holy grail of analytics, and there’s little question that you need it plugged in if you want to track your website’s success. But that doesn’t mean Google Analytics is telling you the full story.
In fact, your analytics could be telling you outright lies.
Fact: offering customers more choices kills conversion rates.
Fact: you can prime customers to behave in certain ways with certain phrases, images or ideas.
Researchers have shown it’s true.
Fact: if you give potential customers a small gift, you’ll create a debt that customers will eagerly repay.
Robert Cialdini wrote about that years ago in his popular book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
These ideas (and dozens of others) are so widely accepted that almost no one questions them.
But maybe we should.
If you’re a budget brand, there’s nothing wrong with a website that looks kinda cheap.
But if you’re selling expensive watches or clothes? Well, that’s not the message you want to be sending.