All Things Growth and Marketing

User State Models

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.

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Context

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.

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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.

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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?”

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Science of Marketing

Fact: offering customers more choices kills conversion rates.

A scientific study proved it.

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.

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Newsletter List Cleanup

If you are an email marketer, chances are that the majority of the articles you read are about growing your list, getting more opens, clicks, etc.

But what if your list is growing thanks to all those tips for improvement, but the open and click rates actually deteriorate? Are you doing something wrong? Not necessarily.

The thing is that leads age – they become uninterested in what you have to offer for a variety of reasons (job changes, bankruptcy, already found a better product/service, etc.) Or they just don’t bother to open your emails.

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Swearing in Copy

Can you remember the last time your parents scolded you for swearing?

Throughout childhood, we’re conditioned to believe that swearing is inappropriate and crass. You could offend someone, it makes you seem uneducated, it’s unprofessional in the workplace… the list of reasons we’ve been told not to swear goes on and on.

But how bad is swearing, really? Is there a chance that it could be beneficial in business and optimization? As with most things people have told you that you absolutely should not do, there’s a chance you should be testing it.

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Elite Camp is a 3-day traffic and (mainly) conversion event. It’s among the very best CRO events in the world, and of course in Europe. This year was already its 7th year – and the format has proven to be so successful that the event has been replicated in many other countries.

Elite Camp 2016 had an enviable line-up of heavy hitters and rock stars. Here are top insights from every speaker of this year’s event.

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