It’s easy to make a confusing website. It’s hard to make a simple website.

The things that we create — websites, user interfaces, business plans, articles — are the product of our minds. How we think impacts how our product looks, feels, and functions.

When making a website, things can get dicey. So many different groups are providing their input, making requests, asking for changes, insisting on features, and making the whole thing pretty darn complicated.

By the time the website gets to the end user, the website a hopeless, confusing mess.

It’s time to change all of that. The KISS rule helps to stamp out confusion and turn your website into a simple, seamless, powerful, well-oiled machine. (Your users are going to love you.)

The Surprising Truth About Simple Websites

First off, let me whet your appetite for simplicity.

You’ve probably heard that smart people love simplicity.

Einstein, who discovered that E=mc2, was a major fan of simplicity. There is nothing simple about mass-energy equivalence or special relativity, but Einstein was able to express it in five characters.

What does Einstein have to do with your website?

It’s simple. You can distill the complexity of your website into something way more simple. Humans love simplicity. Our brains are wired to love simplicity.

Simplicity Makes People Happy

In one study, scientists asked subjects to pick up a two types of objects: easy-to-hold objects (simple), and hard-to-hold objects (complicated). The subjects were hooked up to electromyographic equipment to measure facial response to the objects. Scientists found that the easy-to-hold objects made people smile slightly. In other words, simple objects made people happy.

Simplicity Makes People Think Better

Another test discovered that simple fonts and print helped people reason more clearly. The more complicated or hard-to-read the font, the harder it was for subjects to process information and impaired reasoning skills. Another way of saying it is that simplicity makes people smarter.

Simplicity Makes People Spend Money

A final study should convince you. Yale researchers in partnership with Stanford and University of Michigan scholars, wanted to find out if people were more likely to spend money in response to complicated descriptions or simple ones. As you would assume, the simple options won. If consumers felt that an option was simple or easy, it made them more likely to spend their money.

Google’s research discovered that simple websites — those with low visual complexity and high prototypicality — were much more appealing than complicated websites. One of the most surprising findings of the study was that people can tell whether a website is simple or complicated in 50ms (just .05 of one second).

Maybe that’s why Google, the most-visited website on the planet, is also one of the simplest websites on the planet.

Yep, that’s it — the most popular website of all time:

The concept behind simple websites is cognitive fluency. Cognitive fluency is “a measure of how easy it is to think about something.”

As you’d guess, we like to think about things that are easy to think about. Our brains get tired easily. If there’s an easier way to think about something, we choose it.

Take a simple example: Stocks with easy-to-pronounce ticker symbols outperform those with hard-to-pronounce ones. BABY is going to perform better in the stock market than, say, JWXEV based on the name alone.

In the face of such evidence, why would you not make your website simpler?

Scientists can throw around terms like “cognitive fluency” and they can run complicated tests with electromyography. But me? I like to measure the stuff that matters to my business — dwell time, conversions, revenue.

Guess what. I’ve come to the same conclusions, with a sharper point. Simple websites convert better, too.

Let me say it as simply as possible: A simple website will make you more money. Period.

Here’s the Rule: KISS

KISS stands for “keep it simple, stupid.”

A less abrasive version is “keep it simple and straightforward.”

The idea has many iterations among engineers, developers, designers, architects, and programmers:

• Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
• It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
• Don’t repeat yourself (DRY).
• You aren’t gonna need it (YAGNI).
• Do the simplest thing that could possibly work (DTSTTCPW).

I prefer KISS.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Here’s How to Apply the KISS Principle

None of this matters unless you actually implement it.

Redundant acronyms aside, here’s how to do simple.

1. No ads. None. Period.

Ads on your homepage are a major no-no. Unless you’re running a site whose primary purpose is ad revenue, then ditch the ads completely.

Ads inject tons of complexity into a website. Only use ads if your business is ads.

2. Reconsider the Sidebar

Do you really need a sidebar?

Brian Dean, conversion guru, used Crazy Egg to discover that a paltry 1.9% of his visitors clicked on his sidebar.

This was a problem. Why? Because that sidebar was his conversion goal — a social squeeze page.

I’ve wondered if the sidebar — a fixture of most blogs (even one of my blogs) — is actually a distraction.

3. Make Your Homepage a Place of Absolute Simplicity

The page that matters most is your homepage. Your homepage should set the tone for the rest of the website — simple, clear, and free of distraction.

Look at the website of designer Jonas Lindvall. It takes minimalism to the nth degree, and showcases an extremely subtle design (look for it).

The beauty of the website is its simplicity. The user knows what they should do next.

4. Use Your Above-the-Fold Real Estate For One Thing

An easy way to apply the principle of simplicity is to think of it like this: What is the one thing I want the user to do when they are on this page?

If you were to ask people in your website what they want users to do on the website, you’d get tons of different responses:

• We want them to start a free trial.
• We want them to read the blog.
• We want them to enter their contact information so we can add them to the mailing list.
• We want them to find out about our team.
• We want them to click the “products” menu.

Clear the table and start fresh: What is the one thing that you want the user to do?

Find out, and then design the website around that one thing. You can still provide a menu, giving the user flexibility and option, but don’t force them to think hard. Give them simplicity, and they will be more likely to do what you want them to do:

I’ve tried to make my website, Neilpatel.com, very simple. There is a menu, but you have to scroll below the fold to see it.

5. Limit Your Menu to Seven Items

The short term memory can hold only seven items. To make your website as simple as possible, limit your menu to seven items or fewer.

Many websites try to give their users as many options as possible, but this only confuses them.

IBM, for example, has 11 menu items, plus a couple of other things I could click. That’s way too many.

Keep it simple, like this.

Four menu items. Much better.

6. Use Lots of White Space

White space, or negative space, is the area of your website that doesn’t have stuff — no menus, no text, no images, etc.

The space doesn’t need to be literally white. In fact, it can have subtle design, like in the image above. The clouds and horizon are red tinted, and they have texture. But it’s safe to call it negative space, because it’s not an area of the page that is competing for the user’s attention and action.

In the website image below, the white space would be the background image of the coffee beans. There is an image, but it’s not distracting. The website uses white space in order to create a sense of simplicity.

A site like the one below uses lots of negative space to focus attention on the central point of information.

White space is not wasted space. It’s valuable ingredient in creating a simple and elegant website.

7. Make The Structure Intuitive and Shallow

Site structure has a lot to do with simplicity, too. Make the navigation easy to understand for a user who knows nothing about your business.

Don’t require that a user click menu after menu. Give them all the information that they need in one or two clicks.

8. Avoid Drop Down Menus

Drop down menus seem like a good idea. They save on space. They allow you to add more information.

But many times, drop down menus can produce added complexity to a website. I would avoid them if possible.

The ecommerce website below has created massive dropdown menus that cover the entire page, a clear violation of the KISS rule.

If you must use dropdown menus, use them carefully and sparingly.

9. Reduce Choices

Hick’s Law states that the more choices a person has, the longer it takes them to make a decision.

Image Source

In other words, too many choices is a bad thing. Reduce the number of choices on your website, and you’ll improve your simplicity and conversions.

10. Use Minimal Color

Color is a good thing, but not too much of it. Some of the best websites designs keep it simple by using a single color or very limited colors.

11. Kill Stuff That’s Not Clicked On

If people aren’t clicking on certain parts of your site, get rid of those features. An easy way to tell what people are clicking on is by analyzing your site using a heatmap tool like Crazy Egg.

12. Use Lots of Images

Images are easy on the brain. Your brain can process images faster and easier.

The more images you add to a website design, the more enjoyable it is for people to look at.

Plus, it makes your website feel so much simpler and intuitive.

13. User Testing

Finally, test your website. Every target audience is going to respond differently to color, design, imagery, layout, and functionality. Test your website early and often, and make sure that you’re adapting to what users need and want.

Conclusion

We all want a website that “looks good.” But what makes a “good looking website?” It’s simplicity.

Simple websites work better, look better, feel better, act better, function better, respond better, appear better, and are better.

Follow the KISS rule, and you’ll make your website the kind of place that users want to spend time on.

How have you applied the KISS principle to your website?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Source: KISS

As a content marketer, you’re always pushing out content you hope visitors will find and love. And you’re always trying to get visitors to convert into customers.

Those are your two jobs – producing content and converting visitors.

But are your efforts paying off? And, if they are, how do you know what’s working and what’s not? How do you optimize your content marketing?

Thankfully, Kissmetrics is here to help. I’ve detailed five reports every content marketer can use to refine and optimize their content marketing. The measuring and reporting tools outlined below will help you get focused on the work that will produce the best results.

Let’s get started.

1. Track and Improve Conversions with the Funnel Report

You’re a marketer and you have numbers you need to meet every day, week, month, quarter, etc. Maybe the goal is to increase email signups by 2x, drive more people to a “Send Me Info” form, sign up people for your product, deliver orders (for ecommerce companies), get people to leave comments on a blog post, or drive people to a landing page. Whatever it is, you need to start by seeing how many people are already moving toward that goal.

Enter the Kissmetrics Funnel Report. This report shows you how people move through a website flow. This can be a signup flow, product usage flow, checkout flow, etc. You can place it anywhere on your site, and you’ll see where you’re losing customers. Here’s a sample funnel:

Now ask yourself:

Where am I trying to drive my users? What would make my boss happy? Would it be acquiring customers, increasing email signup rates, or bringing more leads to our sales team?

Figure out what this is (or “these are,” as you can certainly work toward increasing more than one number). Who knows, maybe you want to see how many people are commenting on your blog posts. If you want to move that needle (or are just curious), that’s cool. I won’t judge.

Then you can use the Kissmetrics Funnel Report to see your baseline, and use A/B tests to move the needle (more on that later).

Being able to see where you’re losing customers is pretty great, right? In addition to that, you can also segment your traffic. Segment is a fancy analytics word for “group.” You can group your traffic by things like marketing channel and see which channel is sending you the most customers. You’ll be able to see how each group moves along your funnel. Here’s an example (it’s the columns and rows underneath each step in the funnel):

You can break out each group and see how well it moves through your funnel. The best groups should get more of your attention and money, while the worst groups should be toned down.

Actionable Tips for Content Marketers

You aren’t limited to grouping people only by channel. Here are a few other groups I’d recommend:

• Blog Category – If you run a blog, you can use blog category to track which category drives the most signups. We do this for our own blog and know which blog categories are the most effective at driving signups for the Kissmetrics product. This helps drive our content strategy because we know which content attracts the right audience. Note that “blog category” is not automatically tracked in Kissmetrics. You’ll need a little help from a developer. Once you implement it, you’ll find the information is helpful.
• Type of Content – Content marketing is more than just text-based content. Maybe you have videos, audio files, infographics, etc. You can track each of these content types and see how people who view them move through your funnel. This will help you answer questions like “We’re spending all this time and money on infographics, but are we actually getting customers from them?” or “We have tons of videos, but do people who view the videos go on to sign up for our product?” Again, “type of content” is not automatically tracked in Kissmetrics. Just get a little bit of time from a developer, and they’ll set you up.
• Referrer – Here’s one that is automatically tracked in Kissmetrics. I use referrer all the time to see which URLs are sending us customers. All I do is create a funnel for the steps “Visited Blog” to “Signed Up.” Signed Up triggers when someone…signs up. Then I do this:

This tells Kissmetrics to show me who the referrer was when someone visited the blog and to show me the full URL, not just the domain name. I click Apply and get my data:

The blurred column on the left is a list of the exact URLs that sent traffic and signups.

This is especially useful with guest blogging. If you guest blog and link back to your marketing site in the byline, you will be able to see how many people visit and how many of them sign up.

If you have an affiliate program, you can track traffic from each affiliate and see how it moves down your funnel.

Okay, so you get the idea about the Funnel Report. You can see where you’re losing customers through website flow, you can segment group traffic by whatever will get you the best insights, and you can optimize your marketing. On top of all that, you can put a smile on both your face and your boss’s face when that needle moves in the right direction.

Click here to watch a demo video of the Funnel Report.

Now, how do we move the needle? Through tests and iteration, of course. Let’s get into that now.

2. Test the Entire Funnel with the A/B Test Report

You want to get more people to sign up (or reach whatever goal you have). The best way to do this is to A/B test.

Since you’re a marketer, you’re probably running tests galore. You also probably use Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce, or some other testing tool.

The good news is that you can track the results and import the data (automatically) with Kissmetrics. There’s nothing additional to buy – it all comes with our Analyze product. We call it the A/B Test Report, and it’s pretty awesome. Here’s why:

• You can test any part of your funnel. This is especially useful if you have a long onboarding process. Let’s say you run a SaaS company and your blog gets a lot of traffic. You can run a test on your blog to see how it impacts product use, not just to see how many signed up for your product. After all, what good is a signup if they don’t use your product? We’ve run plenty of internal tests at Kissmetrics on variants that appeared to be winners at the top of the funnel, but as we went further on down the funnel, they were losers. If we weren’t using the A/B Test Report, we would have launched a losing variant!
• The A/B Test Report will display the statistical significance of your test. This is really important, as too many marketers (hopefully you’re not one of them) cut their test way too short. They’ll bring it live on Monday and close the test the following Wednesday, well before enough data has come in. (You can think about statistical significance this way [if you’re not a sports fan, skip this part]: Baseball, hockey, and football player stats in the first few games don’t really matter. Stay with me here: When the 2016-2017 baseball season starts, no one is going to put too much stock in a player’s first few games. Why? Well, if they go 3 for 4 in their first game, their batting percentage is going to be 750%. Obviously, it’s going to come back down to earth shortly. And no one looks at what a player did in the first game – watch the TV broadcast and notice they show the stats on how the player batted the previous year. There’s more data there. The same is true for your test.) You need to allow enough data to come in before you can reach conclusions. And since you’re using the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report, you’ll quickly know the statistical significance. If you don’t pay attention to this, you may launch a losing variant before enough data has come in.
• The A/B Test Report will give you a recommendation. Was the original page the winner with statistical significance? If so, it will tell you to keep that. Or was it the variant? Or was it a toss-up? You’ll know with the A/B Test Report. No more guessing.
• You will see every person who was in the test. And you won’t see just the number of people, but who the people actually were. You can dig deeper and see where they came from, if they converted to a paying customer, etc.

Here’s an example of how the report looks:

At the very top, you select a baseline. Below that, in bright blue, is the recommendation. On the next line, those 5 numbers in bold are the metrics for the test: how long it ran, how many people were in it, how many conversions there were, the improvement, and the certainty of improvement (aka statistical significance). You’ll want to go for at least 95% certainty.

The middle of the report is the data visualization. You can see the variant was the big winner here and that it was during the entire time the test was running.

The bottom section contains the metrics for each variant. You see the number of people in each variant (click the number to see a list of every person), the number of conversions for each (click the number to see each person who converted in the specified variant), the conversion rate, the improvement, and the certainty.

Actionable Tips for Content Marketers

This depends on which needle you want to drive. Since you’re a marketer, I’m assuming you’re in charge of increasing signup rates. Your boss tells you “If you double signups by the end of the year, you get a bonus.” You accept the challenge (why wouldn’t you?).

Awesome, now start testing. You’ll run the test on your blog. It’ll include a small CTA that shows up at the end of blog posts.

Talk to a designer, get something sketched up, bring in a developer to get the variant page running, and create your test in Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce, etc. (we integrate with them all), and track the results in the A/B Test Report.

Again (and this is important), you can test any part of your funnel with the A/B Test Report.

So more people click on the CTA in your variant page. Great? But did they actually start using your product? You’ll know with the A/B Test Report.

Here are a few more tips on where to A/B test:

• Landing Pages – If you have landing pages for webinars or eBooks, you can test various elements on these pages. Try removing fields or adding/removing steps, and see how it affects your conversion rate.
• CTAs, Button Copy – What content site doesn’t have a few CTAs and signup forms on every page (besides Zen Habits)? As a marketer, you know you need to test and optimize everything you can get your hands on. Test your headlines and your button copy. See that orange “Try Kissmetrics” at the top of this page? We’ve gone through dozens of copy for that button. “Try Kissmetrics” is what has performed best. If the button copy isn’t “Try Kissmetrics,” that means we’ve found another winner that beat it. We’re always testing.
• Optimization Tools – Tools like BounceX, Hello Bar, and SumoMe are getting more popular for content marketers as a way to get something out of visitors who show intent to leave. In most cases, this is a chance for the marketer to grab an email address. Other times, it’s used for making an offer. Quick Sprout uses Hello Bar to increase its Facebook fans. Just visit the blog, hover near the top (as if you are going to close the tab), and this appears:

It’s a good idea to A/B test these tools on your website to see if they actually move the needle.

The general rule of thumb is this: anything the visitor can see should be tested.

The visitor can see a lot of things (CTA, headlines, optimization tools, elements on landing pages, etc.), and you should test them all.

Click here to watch a demo of the A/B Test Report.

3. Track and Grow Reader Retention with the Cohort Report

Building loyalty is difficult. This rule goes for almost anything, but especially for building a loyal audience on the web. There is an unlimited number of websites, but visitors are able to keep only a small number of sites in their rotation. For most people, that might include Facebook, their favorite news site, YouTube, and a few others. So it’s very difficult to get into that daily rotation. The best you can hope for is to have people sign up for your email newsletter and/or subscribe to your RSS feed.

Now, how do you track reader loyalty?

If you’re not familiar with the term, “cohort” can be quite intimidating. It may sound like something you’d see in studies or medical journals. “A cohort of people were put on x” or “There was the y chromosome cohort” (also known as males). Don’t let the 6-letter word put you off so that you never learn what it is. A cohort is pretty simple:

A cohort is a group of people who share a common experience or characteristic within a defined period of time.

For marketers, this could be a group of people who signed up for your product in May. It could be called the “May Signup Cohort.” People who visited your blog and commented may be a cohort you pay attention to.

If you want to see the cohort of people who visited your blog from a specific marketing channel, here’s how that would look (actual data will vary):

On the left-hand side, we see the list of marketing channels. People who first visited the blog during our date range (May 1, 2013 – May 31, 2014) are put in one of these buckets, depending on the channel. In the next column, we see the total number of people in each channel who visited the blog during those months.

On the right, the blue shaded cells with percentages in them show us when the people visited the blog. So if a person came to the blog from a Google search in May 2013, they would be put in the organic bucket (20%). If they visited the blog again in July, they would be put in column 3 across from organic. The higher the percentages (darker shades of blue), the more retention there is. Since you’re a content marketer and you want to drive retention, you’ll want to get more traffic from the marketing channels that have proven to deliver strong reader retention.

This example shows us that email brings strong reader retention. The main takeaway for us is that we need to continue to drive people to our email newsletter. Once we do that, we will have a strong possibility of keeping them as readers. So our new goal is to build up our email list.

Actionable Tips for Content Marketers

Here are a few other ways you can use the Cohort Report:

• Track which types of content bring in loyal readers. Are certain pieces of content keeping people from returning?
• Track signup rates across marketing channels or types of content. Perhaps one type of content leads more people to sign up.
• If you guest blog on other platforms, you can track referrers and see which bring loyal readers, or even signups.

You’re probably thinking “Why track signups on a Cohort Report? I can use the Funnel Report.”

Yes, you can. But the Cohort Report allows you to track signups over time. So if someone comes to your site in March but doesn’t sign up until November, the Funnel Report may not report that if you don’t extend your date range long enough.

Another benefit of using the Cohort Report to track signups is that you can see how long it takes people to sign up after they visit your site. Did you have a marketing campaign in April that didn’t get many signups? Perhaps people who visited in April weren’t ready but came back 8 months later and signed up. You’ll see this with the Cohort Report. You’ll be able to tie marketing campaigns to signups.

We’ve written a lot about this before. Check it out if you would like more information. You can also watch a video demo of the Kissmetrics Cohort Report.

4. Use People Search to See Which Content Moves the Needle

A big benefit of using an advanced analytics platform like Kissmetrics is that it tracks people. Every action on your site gets tied to a person – THE person who performed the action. This opens a world of possibilities, one of them being the ability to tie content to business growth. Let’s break it down.

You create content because you want to build awareness and convert traffic into customers. But can you see exactly which pieces of content convert readers into customers? With Kissmetrics, you can. There are two ways:

• If you want to see whether a specific piece of content brought in signups/leads/customers/whatever you track, use the People Search feature.
• If you want to see pieces of content lined up next to each other and see which leads to signups, use the Funnel Report.

In the first option, you have a piece of content on your website, be it a blog post, video, audio page, etc. You want to know if people who viewed that page eventually went on to sign up, submit a lead form, etc. Here’s how you do it.

Step 1) Open the Kissmetrics People Search

Here is the starting page in People Search. In simple terms, you can find people based on things they have done on your site.

Step 2) Set Your Criteria

We’ll click on “Add a condition” and set our criteria. We’ll look for people who have viewed a particular blog post:

We’ll use the “Viewed Url” property:

We’ll use a blog post url and select “Sign up” as the event. This means that people will have to have viewed the url and signed up. If they viewed the url but didn’t sign up, they will not be in this list. The same goes for if they signed up but did not view the url. They have to have done both to be in this list.

A quick note: This is not in chronological order. A person does not need to view the url and then sign up. They can sign up and then view the url. They just have to have done both within the selected date range.

We’ll select the date range as the last 30 days. This means that people must have viewed the url and signed up within the last 30 days. We’ll also find out when each person signed up.

The final step is to click Search.

Step 3) Get Your Data

Within a few seconds of clicking Search, we get our list of people:

The blurred out column on the left is a list of email addresses. This is how we choose to identify people. You can use anything you like, but email address is usually best.

So we see that over the last 30 days, 4 signups have viewed that specific url.

You can do this with any url on your site. Just set your criteria, and you’ll get your data.

Actionable Tips for Content Marketers

Here’s what you can do with this data:

• You’ll learn which content turns visitors into readers. Maybe a post got a lot of traffic but actually zero signups, while a less-visited post actually converted a lot of people.
• Take what you learn from this data and tailor your content accordingly. If you have a gardening site and see that content about perennials doesn’t convert people to purchase but content about apple trees does, then you can tailor more of your content toward apple trees.

This can totally change your content strategy game. The question shifts from:

“How much traffic did that post get?”

to…

“How many signups did that post bring?”

Again, you don’t have to use signups. Just use whatever goals you have or what needle you want to move.

A quick note about this data:
This is great data, but don’t draw conclusions too quickly. Keep in mind that a person may view a dozen pages before signing up. Just because they viewed a page and signed up doesn’t mean it was that page or piece of content that led them to sign up. You’ll have to get a little more granular if you want to see the exact path they took. Fortunately, you don’t have to leave Kissmetrics to get the data. It’s all within the Kissmetrics Person Details report.

Click here to watch a People Search demo.

If you want to get a more broad view of the relationship between content and revenue, you can use the Kissmetrics Revenue Report.

5. Let the Revenue Report Show You Which Content Brings Customers

Sometimes you just want a bird’s-eye view of what type of content is bringing you the most revenue. You may have questions like:

Which blog post categories acquire the most customers?

Which content brings the most valuable customers?

If you’re asking these questions, then the Kissmetrics Revenue Report is your new favorite tool.

This report gives you an overview of your revenue. You’ll get a graphical representation of your revenue. Also, you’ll be able to break up your revenue into segments (groups) to see which group is performing the best.

Why is this useful?

Because, taken as a whole, your revenue is just a number. It’s great by itself, but it really doesn’t give you the information you need to bring more revenue to your company.

You can break up sources of revenue into groups. For instance, you can look at the customers who came from each marketing campaign and see which campaign brought the most valuable customers. When you do this, you’ll have a much better understanding of what you need to do. This is exactly why it’s called actionable data. And it’s exactly the type of data you get in Kissmetrics.

Enough talk, time to see the Revenue Report in action. I’m not going to bore you with every step of setting up a report. We’ve already been through that.

Let’s say we have an ecommerce store selling auto parts. Throughout our site, we have content on car repair and maintenance – everything from changing oil to replacing transmission gaskets. We love producing the content, but we also need to make sales. We want to know which type of content brings us the best customers, so we use the Kissmetrics Revenue Report.

Here’s how our data looks:

We’re sorting by total revenue. We can see that the most revenue comes from customers who viewed articles about transmission repair.

There are a few other important metrics. I particularly like lifetime value. This tells us the total amount of revenue we can expect from each customer. As we can see, customers with the highest lifetime value viewed articles on transmission repair. Our largest number of paying customers also came from this post category.

What about our old friend, churn? For our ecommerce company, we need return customers. Businesses aren’t built with one-off customers. We need to keep churn as low as possible.

With the Revenue Report, you can trigger churn as an event or if a customer doesn’t pay you within x number of days. In this case, churn is pretty high, and there isn’t much variation among post categories. This looks like a larger company-wide issue.

Also, we may need to expand our churn time frame. Some car parts and materials are consumable – people will always need to buy quarts of oil, filters, wiper blades, etc. Other products are bought only once. This makes churn a little more difficult to nail down. Customers will repurchase some items, but not others.

So here’s the plan:

1. Investigate high churn numbers.
2. Keep producing content on transmission repair. These articles bring us a lot of customers with a high lifetime value.
3. Maintenance and body repair are also strong post categories. After that, there is a drop-off. So we’ll focus on writing and expanding our library of transmission repair, maintenance, and body repair content.

Actionable Tips for Content Marketers

• See how types of content correlate with revenue. You can also do this with different subjects.
• Look to see if customers came from a PDF, a webinar, a blog post, etc. This will help you narrow down what’s working so you can put more energy into those things.
• If you’re doing a lot of guest blogging, you can check out referrer or channel to see if your efforts are actually bringing enough valuable customers.

Click here to watch a quick demo video of the Revenue Report.

Become a Content Marketing Hero with Kissmetrics

Marketing is all about measuring and optimizing, and these five Kissmetrics reports will help take your content marketing to the next level.

And you aren’t limited to just these five reports. Every business is different, and you have goals you need to meet and exceed. Kissmetrics is a versatile product. You can track any action a person takes on your site. It could be clicking a button, submitting an order, downloading a file, etc. Track everything or only a few things. It’s up to you. Kissmetrics is here to give you the data you need to optimize your growth.

Now, finally, I’ve got one more tool up my sleeve. This tool will help you boost conversions towards whatever needle you’re looking to move. Let me tell you a little bit about it.

Bonus! Use Engage to Nudge Visitors toward Conversion

Kissmetrics has this great tool called Engage. It allows marketers to create nudges that move visitors toward action. This video explains it all:

Here are a few things content marketers can use Engage for:

• Increase blog newsletter list – Do you have an email list of subscribers who receive updates and new content you produce? Create an engagement on your site that points visitors to the email signup landing page.
• Move visitors toward content – You know what type of content converts. Now you just need to move people to that content. Use Engage to point people in the right direction.
• Drive traffic to landing pages – Gated content is one of the best ways to drive leads. The more people you can get to your landing page, the more leads you’ll have.
• Introduce people to your service – Content marketing isn’t really marketing if you’re not bringing in any customers. Show people what you really do (besides blogging). Create an engagement that sends them back to your main website. The more visitors you can turn into prospects, the better.

With Engage, you’ll have a great tool that can optimize conversions and turn visitors into customers. Use it wisely.

Got All That?

We’ve gone through a lot. Here’s a recap:

• The Funnel Report allows you to see where visitors are dropping off in a conversion funnel. Track whatever needle you need to move, whether it’s signups, downloading a white paper, submitting a landing page, etc. Find out which types of content and which referrers are delivering the most customers. See if guest blogging is working for you by observing whether people who viewed a guest post of yours visited your site and signed up for your service.
• The A/B Test Report allows you to test any part of your funnel. Create your test in Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce, etc., and track the results with the A/B Test Report. Test your landing pages and CTAs to see if any optimization tools actually do you any good.
• Track reader retention with the Cohort Report. See which types of content bring people back and even which marketing channels bring loyal readers.
• See which content converts with the People Search. Pick a piece of content and see if it has brought you signups. No longer do you have to guess – you can see which content converts.
• Get a bird’s-eye view with the Revenue Report. See which types of content bring you the most valuable customers. Track total revenue, average revenue per customer, lifetime value, total number of paying customers, and churn rate.
• Nudge visitors toward conversion with our Engage tool. Create lightboxes that move people to sign up for blog updates and gated content or that send people back to your main website.

Optimize Your Marketing with Kissmetrics

These are just a few examples of what content marketers can do with Kissmetrics. Our reports are more than vanity metrics – they provide insights into how users are behaving on your site. Once you see this data, you’ll know what needs to be improved.

Ready to get straight into the action? Just click the button below to request a personal demo of Kissmetrics. You’ll learn more about Kissmetrics and how it will help you optimize your marketing.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

Source: KISS

More than 80% of the visitors to your website will not convert. But what if you could get these visitors to return to your website so you could present your offer again? That’s where retargeting comes in.

And besides getting visitors back to your site, retargeting can also be used to reach people who didn’t open your email and people who showed a special interest in your product.
Even if you already use retargeting, you probably aren’t making the most of it.

In this article, I’ll teach you a few techniques that have enabled me to achieve the best results I’ve ever seen with paid advertising. Read on to discover 10 techniques that will help you target your consumers better and deliver more results from your retargeting campaigns.

The techniques below will work on either Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. Just consider the two as one medium for retargeting.

1. Engagement Factors

Custom Segment in Google Analytics allows you to segment your traffic with incredible precision. By linking Google Analytics and Google AdWords, you’ll be able to retarget specific segments of your audience. And you can use a wide range of factors to base your retargeting on. Some of my favorites include:

• Page depth
• Number of visits
• Landing Pages
• Session duration
• Certain goal completion

You’ll need to crunch your data in order to understand what works for you. As an example, you may find that people who visited your website 3 times and spent more than 5 minutes are more likely to buy. You can then create a custom segment and target these people on the Google Display Network.

2. Vertical Website(s)

If you know your industry lacks knowledge regarding a specific topic but you don’t think it’s relevant on your main website, you can create a separate website.

Here are some examples:

• You are developing accounting software, and you realize that people are looking for reviews. You can create a website reviewing all the software.
• You notice that people are searching for “How to install [competitor’s product].” Create a website that shows how to install your competitor’s product.

Once you’ve created the new website, you can easily retarget warm prospects to your website.

To give you an example, Prezly developed PRStack.co, which features PR resources and enables them to channel traffic back to their product.

Look at what your industry is missing and what you can offer to fulfill that need. If you don’t create that website, someone else will.

This technique can work wonders if you rank on competitive keywords with your new website. If Google can bring you 100k visitors on a handful of keywords, do it. You won’t regret it.

Keep in mind that exact match domain names tend to rank pretty well. As an example, GrowthHackers.com will easily rank well for the keyword “growth hackers.”

3. Form Completion Status

You can track the people who started filling out a form but didn’t complete it. They may have had something else on their mind, or they may have been interrupted.

You can create a segment of warm leads who will be ready to fill in that form the next time it hits them.

4. Free Trials

How many people signed up for your product, used it for 5 minutes, and then never came back? Maybe they got distracted, or maybe the timing wasn’t right for them. After a few days of inactivity, you can send them some interesting content to remind them of your product.

You could send the emails directly, but I’d suggest you try different approaches, such as:

• Email + retargeting
• Retargeting alone
• Email alone

See what works best for you.

5. Past Users

How many leads have you had in your entire history? This is probably a huge number. You can get these people back on your website through targeted ads. Since you already know their emails, you can get started in a few hours. Here are a few examples of what to promote:

• Features / Benefits
• Announcements
• Use Cases

The main idea is to stay in touch with your past contacts and engage them with new content.

6. Active Users and Promoters

Customers are not created equal. Some are more likely to engage and share your content. What if you could target them directly?

You can measure engagement of users through an analytics tool like Kissmetrics (using the Cohort Report) or by using a NPS survey. You can then retarget these users based on how engaged they are.

Highly engaged users won’t hesitate for a second to share your content with their peers.

As an example, let’s say you use Kissmetrics every day and are delighted with their software. You’d be more likely to share something on your medium of choice (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) than to forward their weekly newsletter.

In this example, retargeting can allow you to meet your users on their own terms, where they are the most likely to engage with your brand. If you target the right people, you’ll drive more awareness.

7. Past Promotions

As a marketer, you run plenty of promotions to acquire customers. But the people who visit your website aren’t always ready to buy your products right away. The important thing is to make sure they remember you when they’re in need of a solution like yours.

This is where most businesses retarget. Once a person visits their site, the business will show ads to the person when he or she visits on other sites.

You can easily present your offer (even if it was six months ago) at several different times and places.

8. Email Marketing Combo

What if you could target people who never open your emails and people who open your emails but never click on them?

As a savvy marketer, you’re probably building an email list in order to keep engaging your audience. Think about all the people who never opened or clicked on your emails. You could easily target these people depending on how warm they are. You can then show them different content depending on where they stand within your funnel.

As an example, you might want to show very informative (top of the funnel) content to people who never engaged. You could show use cases and whitepapers to people who click on all your emails.

Implementing this tactic might require a bit of development on your end. It is however fairly easy to make a script to synchronize MailChimp and Facebook.

Doing this can have a great impact on the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. People who never opened your emails will finally reach your website.

9. Content Series

Sometimes cold prospects don’t want to give you their emails right away no matter what you show them.

In that case, you can create a series of content and retarget them from one piece of content to the next. The best part? You don’t need their email, retargeting will do the trick…

You’ll don’t ask for their email until the last step. Here is a quick example:

1. Visitor lands on your blog
2. You retarget them to another article
3. You retarget them to a landing page
4. You retarget them to a whitepaper with email capture

This way, you can funnel your visitor toward interesting content. The warm prospects will convert whenever they want by inserting their emails, while the others will wait until they’re ready.

10. Page Based

One of the most common methods of retargeting is to base the content you show people on the pages they’ve seen on your website.

The content you would show people who’ve seen your pricing page would be different from the content you would show people who’ve seen only your blog.

You could also use this technique to show people content that is similar to what they’ve seen before.

Pro Tips

Avoid Being Creepy

You could retarget people whose payment failed with an ad saying “Your Payment Failed,” but I’m not sure they would like it.

These days, you can collect a massive amount of data about your users. Being able to target people with incredible precision based on that data is a great opportunity for marketers. However, make sure you’re not being too intrusive or annoying.

Retargeting can sometimes appear creepy. Use your good judgment to avoid these situations.

Consider Your Audience Size

If you have only a few hundred visitors on your website, you won’t be able to apply most of the techniques above.

Make sure you have a decent audience size when you begin retargeting. With a small audience, pay attention to your Budget and Frequency to avoid spamming people.

Clean Your Lists

If you can’t get people to buy from you, just let it go. Not everyone is interested in what you’re selling. If you keep showing them ads, they’ll get tired of you and they might even talk badly about you.

I sometimes notice that people who look at specific pages rarely convert (e.g., Career page). Knowing that, I exclude these people to improve a campaign’s ROI.

Also, pay close attention to the membership duration of your audiences. If you haven’t seen someone for the last 540 days, chances are, they won’t be interested.

Watch for Concurrent Ads

Ensure that your ads aren’t concurrent or that their concurrence doesn’t look weird. Let’s imagine the following context:

• You retarget people who visited your blog with ToFu content
• You retarget people who visited your pricing page with BoFu content

Therefore, people who saw both your blog and your pricing page will see both ToFu and BoFu content. Make sure the experience isn’t weird for them, or exclude the concurrent audience (target people who visited your blog but didn’t visit the pricing page).

Set Up Automation

I’ve seen people waste hours manually adding and removing customers from retargeting lists… Don’t do that! You’ll waste time and become overworked. The next thing you know you’ll be showing the wrong ads to the wrong people.

Linking your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to your retargeting audiences is also possible. Integrate and automate as much as you can. Do as little work as possible. Automate to the maximum.

Make sure the whole process is automated and that you don’t need to do anything to update your audiences.

Keep Experimenting

You need to experiment with different techniques in order to discover what works best for you.

Techniques highlighted in this article are only some of the ones I’ve tried in the past. Don’t listen to me blindly; test them yourself and brainstorm around new ideas.

As an example, in previous campaigns, we realized that pushing content to new audiences and retargeting people who engaged was an incredible source of revenue.

When getting started, most people will think about conversions as the ultimate goal of their PPC strategy. This vision is clearly short-sighted. It’s primary to get your goals straight (e.g., generating revenue), but don’t forget other types of advertising that could lead to the same results.

Retarget Unopened Email

We are all building incredible email lists. It’s terrific because sending email doesn’t cost anything and can drive great results.

Unfortunately, more and more people aren’t even opening their emails. Gmail and their “Promotion” tab isn’t helping.

Something I like to do is send an email and then retarget people who didn’t convert (including those who didn’t open/click the email).

If you notice that your emails have a low open rate or a low CTR, retargeting may be one way to talk to these people and win back their attention.

Remove Poor Performing Geographical Locations

Not all leads are created equal. Some are ready to buy and are a great fit for your product, while others aren’t worth your time. Is there a certain geographic locations where poor quality leads are coming from? If so, you may want to eliminate that area from retargeting.

For example, if you find that you consistently find yourself getting low quality leads from Mexico, you’ll want to remove people in Mexico from being retargeted. This will make for a more cost-effective retargeting program.

Did you know? Using Kissmetrics, marketers can track the effectiveness of their online campaigns. You’ll see how many conversions and customers each campaign has delivered, allowing you to comfortably eliminate what’s not working so you can focus on what is. Become a better marketer today with Kissmetrics! Request a personal demo to learn more.

Retargeting Madness

Retargeting is very powerful and can show great results. It allows you to target the right people and show them timed and customized offers.

By doing so, you can expect to transform cold leads into warm leads and warm leads into customers. That’s everything a marketer could ask for, right?

Retargeting can be an incredible source of exposure. Get creative, find new ways to target people, and share them in the comments below.

Did you try any of these tactics? What kinds of results did you get? Did you have any trouble implementing them?

About the Author: Pierre Lechelle helps startups grow through digital marketing and growth hacking. Follow him on his blog or Twitter.

Source: KISS

We’ve made 2 big hires we’d love to tell you about.

Paul O’Leary, Chief Technology Officer

Paul joined Kissmetrics in August as our Chief Technology Officer. He brings a ton of knowledge about big data and analytics. He has more than 20 years of technology development experience with more than 10 at the executive leadership level, most recently as VP of Engineering at Concurrent. There he helped build the industry’s first application performance management solution for big data.

Prior to that he was the co-founder (along with Kissmetrics CEO, Brian Kelly) of Quantivo, an analytics company that was acquired by Aggregate. Quantivo achieved many industry-first innovations in building and scaling a powerful cloud-based analytics infrastructure specifically focused on advanced analytics for marketing and retail.

Now he’ll focus on bringing even more performance, scale and analytic capability to Kissmetrics’s cloud-based infrastructure and solutions.

I asked Paul what his proudest technological achievement is. Here’s his answer:

“[My] proudest achievements are always the awesome teams [I’ve] helped to build and lead. Great technology is built by great teams.”

Paul is a team guy. We’re thrilled to have him join our rock-star engineering team.

Maura Ginty, VP of Marketing

Maura joined us in May as our VP of Marketing. She has more than 15 years of online marketing experience. She’s advised on integrated marketing at Fortune 500 companies as well as small businesses, primarily for travel and software companies. She’s also written 2 books on digital marketing (one on B2B marketing and the other on landing page optimization) and is an alumni of the Google Technology Advisory Council. She’s had a number of marketing jobs in her career, most recently serving as Head of Marketing at GeoEx.

She got into marketing from the editorial and digital marketing side, back when digital was new and the underdog of marketing budgets. As we see more about how analytics, conversion optimization, and behavioral data serves both customers and marketers — marketing still proves to be the best combination of art and science.

I asked her why she’s excited for the challenges of working at Kissmetrics. Here’s her answer:

“Kissmetrics is at the heart of all of these favorites. We share the excitement of marketing and all the best techniques to make it the most fascinating and ever-evolving field.”

In her spare time, Maura travels to farflung corners of the planet as a cover for her obsessions with maps, local cheese, and obscure languages.

How This Helps Kissmetrics & Marketers

With this new leadership, Maura is going to help us introduce Kissmetrics to the right people; Paul will help us build an analytics infrastructure that is ahead of its time.

Since 2008, Kissmetrics has been building a product that helps marketers measure and optimize their marketing. We’ve built a solid product thus far, and we’re taking it even farther just this summer:

• we launched Engage, a conversion optimization tool that nudges visitors and users towards action. We’re already iterating on the product. This past week we launched custom colors, allowing our customers to design their engagements with whatever colors they choose.
• we’ve updated the navigation, allowing a more horizontal view of data and reduces the amount of steps to view a saved report.
• customers can now use date range within filters. This can help answer questions like: How is my sign-up conversion rate affected if people don’t view the pricing page in the past 30 days?
• Marketing isn’t just about first and last touch attribution. That’s why we’ve added multi-touch attribution. Using this feature you’ll be able to see the source of every conversion.
• We’ve added LiveChat, Segment, Woocommerce and Shopify as integrations. You can see how chat customer segments behave or easily add Kissmetrics to different stores via plugins.

And we’ve got some big plans for what’s ahead. You’ll hear about them shortly. Our team is working hard everyday to help build a product customers love.

Interested in Joining Us?

We’ve got a fun road ahead. Check out our careers page to learn more about our culture and the open positions. We’re currently hiring engineers and customer success superstars.

Source: KISS

When considering email marketing, most of us are thinking: Not this; not again! And we shouldn’t be surprised either, because checking our inbox takes up 28 percent of our time and the word email reminds us of the tons of spam awaiting.

There are 196.3 billion emails sent everyday, and 64 percent of those are spam!

Maybe it’s a cliché, but there are only two approaches to email marketing: you either love it or hate it. The fact is that:

• According to Salesforce, 95 percent of consumers use email.
• 61 percent of emails are opened on smart devices.
• For every dollar spent, there is average return of $44.25.

These few statistics are a friendly reminder that the risk is worth the gamble. Why? Because email is about to change. Let me explain.

As I stated before, a lot of companies underestimate emails, mostly because their marketing is ineffective – they keep trying, but get poor results. Take a moment to think of three emails you like – three newsletters you are waiting for. That isn’t an easy task, is it? But hey, truth to be told, it’s good news for you.

As full stack marketers, startup founders, growth hackers, and sales guys (and gals), we should benefit from the ignorance of average marketers. It sounds harsh, I know, but believe me, it’s the only way to restore faith in emails and achieve the results we all need and/or want.

Here’s the theory: email isn’t stagnating, but the way we use it is. If we approach email marketing as one of our many responsibilities, we simply won’t find a golden mean. We should keep evolving. Let’s take a look at Sparrow.

Sparrow was an iPhone email client designed to provide an efficient and pleasant mailing experience. This startup from France changed the email inbox forever. Sparrow’s panel navigation, threading system and many features led to its 2012 acquisition by Google. I encourage you to read the whole Sparrow story, as it’s a very interesting and valuable one.

Another example of handling email with pleasure is Mailbox. Mailbox allowed different ways of accessing email, including retrieving a message after a few days or hours, and organization of color-coding. In case you missed it, watch this video:

Such experience is valuable – 37 days after launch, Dropbox acquired Mailbox for a reported $100 million.

The last example of a growing trend in email marketing is Paperfold. Paperfold has designed a fast and functional iPad app that lets you “see” the visual story of your email.

I read the transcript of an interview with Paperfold’s team. Co-Founder Eva Liparova said:

“Good design can change behaviors… I’m interested in how brands can engage customers. When I saw Paperfold, I thought, this feels really good. It doesn’t look like email. It creates emotion. There are emails out there that have changed our lives”.

If There is a Demand For Beautiful Email Apps, Email Marketing Has to Keep Up

The evolution of email apps and the inevitable trend of beautiful usability aren’t mentioned here to inspire you to change the face of email marketing (but of course – dream big!). I have a strong background in running startups, and what I always love to repeat is this: automation is the key.

Let’s be realistic. Even if we are capable doers, we won’t reinvent emails. Building a company email marketing strategy is a long and tiring process – it’s one of the major pains in your sales & marketing plan. I am not the first, and I won’t be the last, to state that you have to test and optimize until your results are satisfactory. But this process gives you more than failures, disappointments and a feeling of resignation – it gives you experience. And that’s something that’s hard to ignore. Once you hit the spot with flow and content, you should take one step more. Emails can be easily automated without losing quality.

It’s almost the same as content marketing on your blog. All you want to do is give quality stuff to people who want it. But emails have one tiny advantage: you can deliver them to specific people. What’s more, you can collect more information about this person than you can extract from Google Analytics.

This is lead “pre-warming”, and it’s not complicated. Let’s start with 3 pretty popular places.

I would like to show you one easy example of finding and winning a lead. I assume you have a blog with solid content that solves one of the many problems of your customers.

Quora

Check out Quora – it’s the most incredible source of content inspiration. There are lots of questions waiting for an answer. I picked one question on Quora which, in my opinion, may get very interesting answers.

126 potential leads on Quora (notice the amount of people that want an answer)

It’s a good question, and you can write an amazing post on your blog about it if it’s your niche (Sprout Social did). But take a closer look. I just found 126 people potentially interested in your product/service, 126 people with names and social media accounts hooked up. For me, that’s a lot of leads.

I bet Quora isn’t a big surprise to you. To be honest, there are a lot of places like that where you can find a batch of quality leads. For sure, there’s input needed to get them, but I would like to remark that this way is somehow scalable. So, if it turns out fine for you, then you probably just hit the jackpot.

Yelp

Another example of a place full of leads is Yelp. It might be a great source of contact information such as addresses, post codes, emails, websites, etc. Finding a target on Yelp and building your database there can be useful for your email marketing and lead generation. Thinking about and researching this case I found two interesting things: first, a Yelp scraper tool. As you can see, the creativity and business instinct of some people is alive and well.

Udemy Course

Second, and more serious, a Udemy course about Web scraping. Matt Ellsworth, owner of the course, claims you can get the data you need from Twitter, Yelp, Reddit, Hacker News and many more.

The idea in itself is quite interesting, and with such tricks you can find people with specific demands you can probably fulfill. It seems to be the direct way to grow your business.

GitHub

As a last example of such place, something a little bit different – GitHub. It may be a place unfamiliar to marketers, but GitHub offers plans for repositories and free accounts that are usually used to host open-source software projects. As of 2015, GitHub claims to have 10.9 million users, which makes it the largest code host in the world. As you are probably already figuring out, it’s a great place for lead generation. Just take a look at the user accounts – there’s a lot of data available with clearly specified requirements.

As a bonus, I present to you Scrapy, an open-source framework for extracting the data you need from websites.

These three examples are perfect for preparing a lead-generation process and email campaign because of two things:

1. By knowing the environment and ecosystem of every targeted group, you are making your goal measurable and achievable.
2. By combining knowledge and cleverness, you are getting tools to achieve your goals.

Since we have a base full of leads, let’s warm them up with 3 killer outbound tactics!

I like to rely on Twitter and LinkedIn, especially when we’re talking about outbound. Here are three step-by-step ways to pre-warm your target using social media channels:

#1: We got 10% conversion rate from a tweet to inbound leads. How?

• We made a list of 100 potential customers active on Twitter and put them on the list – they have to be a really great fit.
• We checked the list everyday and tried to start a conversation/share their blog post, etc. (Focus on commenting on articles they share – it gives the best response rate).
• When they discovered our engagement, they checked our site and asked about the product themselves (keep communication consistent).

From a tweet to inbound lead:

And even to a homepage testimonial:

#2: We generated a 75% response rate after the first email (using Twitter + email). How?

• We used the sequence described in way number one, but we added email as one of the steps but…
• This can’t feel like a crappy generic email. Here’s an example of our template:

“I’m Greg (@pietruszynski) from Growbots. We were tweeting about the article you shared: ‘[title]’. I did some research and saw that you may be responsible for outbound sales at [company_name], so I decided to get in touch.

With our tool you can generate a new list of prospects, send automatic email campaign – leads are automatically uploaded to CRM. I’d really love to show you our tool and get your feedback – would you like to have a look?”

Can you see the pattern? Point of touch, openness to discussion on shared interest, and awesome pitch.

#3: We created an outreach campaign which aimed for 100% response rate (using Twitter + email + LinkedIn + call). How?

We used the second strategy but added LinkedIn, Twitter Ads and a call. We made a cadence out of it, which looks like this:

a. Twitter Ad (lead prewarming)
b. Tweet
c. Email
d. Call
e. LinkedIn invitation
f. Second email
g. Second call
h. Second Tweet
i. LinkedIn message
j. Third email
k. Third call

It’s a long road, but believe me – it’s worth it!

Since we know what to do and what our goal is, let’s take a look at things that can help us. But here’s a disclaimer: these are just tools. They will make your job easier and save you time, but never mistake tools for know-how. Your abilities, skills and ideas are the most important things here.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a powerful tool for creating personalized, automated and effective newsletters and targeted emails. It has a built-in analytics section that allows segmentation, conversion analytics and tracking your email campaigns.

Klaviyo cites nice examples on their blog. In How Tortuga Backpacks Increased Email Subscriptions 7x With Content Marketing they describe how Packsmith used the Klaviyo Shopify app to drive subscribers with their content. The trick is simple: after leaving your email on their landing page, you receive a packing list so you won’t forget anything for your trip. They claim that since adding the list guide to their blog’s homepage, they have increased monthly email subscriptions by seven times. That’s a lot, isn’t it?

PersistIQ

I read an article on TechCrunch in which the founder of PersistIQ said that sales statistics show that it often takes up to seven interactions with a potential client before you get a response, and most sales people don’t have that kind of patience. That was the reason he created a tool for smart drip campaigns for outbound sales. PersistIQ works in three simple steps: it imports your leads, you create a campaign, and finally all you have to do is wait for a response. The level of automation saves you a lot of time.

QuickMail

QuickMail.io provides a process through which cold email prospects transform into warm leads. It allows you to set up automatic follow-ups and run a drip campaign from your inbox.

On QuickMail’s blog you can find a few interesting case studies. I particularly like this one:

“Over four months, Fabi Mersan, CEO of ClinicBuzz, was constantly trying difference sequences to see which one had the most success in her market.

Initial email response rate: 5.0%
First reminder response rate: 15.0%
Second reminder response rate: 12.5%
Third reminder response rate: 5.0%
Fourth reminder response rate: 1.67%”

First of all, it’s a good idea to think it all through. Take a look at how many reminder responses Fabi set. Second of all, focus on the results – they are pretty amazing. It would be a waste of leads if we had stopped at the first reminder response. As Fabi states in the interview, and I agree with her, smart follow-up is crucial for success.

We wanted make this process scalable. I believe that data and outreach should go along, so we decided to create our own lead generation tool. First, we generate highly qualified prospects lists:

Then we focus on our copy and shoot automatic email campaigns at selected leads (as you can see from Quickmail.io case studies you have to be persistent):

After those steps email campaigns are automated, we only need to use other channels, which we mentioned before.

Recap

To wrap this up in simple steps:

• Analyze your existing base of active customers.
• Find cool online places where your target hangs out.
• Profiles on social media are crucial to the pre-warming process.
• Get involved in creating a valuable, persistent and painless email campaign.

Because I’m a sales guy and I use email every single day, I believe that in five years cold emailing won’t exist. No one will open such email. It may sound horrible, but it’s a call to action. Realize it now and start preparing. “Native” email is the future – reaching people with things they want while saving time spent on their inbox is the future.

About the Author: Greg Pietruszynski is a serial entrepreneur and growth hacker. He reached and engaged millions of users for companies such as MTV and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Pietruszynski is responsible for over 200 marketing campaigns. You can follow him on Twitter (@pietruszynski) or his Growth Hacking Blog.

Source: KISS

Here is the common situation of many startups. They have no money, but they have to do marketing.

What’s to be done? Instead of focusing on costly marketing methods, such startups must focus on low-budget marketing hacks.

The beauty of growth hacking is that it engages alternate methods of growth, methods which are sometimes lower cost.

Where marketing and engineering meet, growth hacking happens.

Obviously, growth hacking isn’t free. Strictly speaking none of the techniques in this article are “free.” Anytime you involve people, employees of the company, there will be payroll and associated costs.

But here’s why these methods are so powerful. They don’t require a huge marketing budget. All you need is some time, some savvy, and the kind of focused and driven perspective that smart marketing requires.

1. Get Links From Your Service Providers

To rank well, a website needs high-quality backlinks. Where do you get these backlinks? Obviously, buying links is not advised. What should you do?

If you’ve built partnerships with service providers or business partners, you have an instant source of untapped link potential. Reach out to these service providers and ask them to link to your website.

You gain a few nice links,and all it cost you was a few minutes of emailing.

2. Search For Unlinked Mentions

Another great way to get links and boost your site authority is to look for unlinked mentions of your brand or company name.

If you find such mentions in online publications or websites, email the site editor and ask them to provide a link. You might discover plenty of brand mentions all over the web.

A quick search and a few emails later — presto. Free backlinks. The good kind.

3. Host a Webinar

Free webinars introduce your brand and product to a wider audience. The more appealing the topic, the better you’ll attract interest.

Kissmetrics has been hosting webinars on a regular basis for a long time, with surprisingly powerful results.

Webinars take time. You’ve got to brainstorm topics, plan the webinar, and spread the word. The benefits, however, are top-notch.

4. Cross-promote

One explosive method of marketing that some companies use is cross-promotion. Cross promotion allows you to partner with related businesses who can market your services, in exchange for your marketing their services.

For example, if you are providing consulting services for online business owners, you may recommend that they use a certain web designer to create their website. The web designer is your cross promoting partner. This web designer works with business clients, and she points these clients your way for consulting services.

It’s a win-win, and apart from a signed document and an easy conversation, doesn’t require much work at all.

5. Be a Blog Commenter

The idea of marketing is to make your brand presence as well known as possible. One way of doing so is by commenting on blogs. Here’s how this works:

• Identify the top 5 blogs in your niche.
• Read and comment on the blogs on a regular basis.
• As people see your name and associated brand, they become familiar with it and perhaps even curious about it.

With every comment, you’re establishing a persistent brand presence. Just make sure you’re not making dumb comments. Customers’ perception of your brand is shaped by the quality of your comments.

6. Help a Reporter Out

Occasionally, you’re going to come across some newsworthy information in your niche or business. Sign up for Help a Reporter Out (HARO). It’s a free service that reporters often use to find stories. If you have a story you can help a reporter out, and gain publicity.

7. Create a Robust Google+ Presence

Google+ is one of the web’s foremost places for building brand exposure. Google uses your business information to form a web presence in Knowledge Graph boxes and wider indexation.

The better your Google+ profile, the better your brand will be featured and published organically across the web.

8. Network in Person

Don’t neglect the opportunity to market in person. You’ll meet great people in person whom you may never come across online.

Every person you meet is another marketing possibility. Obviously, you don’t want to go around shoving your business into people’s faces, but as the issue of work comes up in conversation, tell them about it.

The whole idea of networking is basically marketing. You get to introduce other people to your business live and in person.

9. Go Ahead and Run a Contest

As much as they’ve been sullied and scammed, online contests are still a great way to get low-cost marketing publicity. Giving away the cliche iPad, cash prizes, or other merchandise is an easy way to gain some viral potential and improve your brand’s image.

10. Build a Referral Program

The best forms of marketing are those that you can set up, turn on, and they grow — organically, automatically, and without too much effort. A referral program or affiliate program may not work for every business, but it’s worth a try.

Creating an affiliate program essentially turns your customers into a de facto marketing department. You don’t spend marketing money unless they first make a sale on your behalf.

11. Tweet Up a Storm In Your Niche

Twitter is a killer marketing platform. With its instant reach and massive output, Twitter can produce high levels of referral traffic, plenty of brand exposure, and nonstop social buzz.

What I suggest is following at least ten influencers in your niche, following their followers, retweeting their tweets, and mentioning them in comments. As you associate with their platform, you’ll begin to build your own platform.

12. Upsell Your Existing Customers

Too often, we view “marketing” solely as a method of gaining new customers. In reality, some of the best marketing happens with existing customers. Econsultancy and PredictiveIntent report that upselling is “20 times better than cross-selling.”

Source

Marketing back at your own customers is relatively easy and low-cost. The benefits are extraordinary.

13. Get Cozy With Niche Influencers

Within every industry are a group of power players. They control the conversation, shape the contours of the market, and reach a huge audience.

Make these people your friends. You don’t need to be schmoozy about it. You can be direct. Providing them with a product or partnering with them on a project are simple and mutually helpful ways to grow your brand and ride their wave of influence.

14. Claim a Hashtag

Hashtags are the billboards of the Internet. Since hashtags are now available on every major social platform, you can create a hashtag for your business and use it everywhere you post.

A hashtag is a searchable and interactive extension of your brand, and has the potential to spread virally.

15. Get More Email Addresses

Growing your email list is one of the most enduring and effective methods of marketing. I suggest using Hello Bar as a simple and cost-effective way of harvesting more addresses.

16. Get More User-Generated Content

Everyone knows that content marketing is effective for inbound marketing. If you’re not careful, however, content marketing can be expensive. How can you gain more content without blowing your entire marketing budget?

The answer is user-generated content. Motivate your existing fans and customers to tell their own story and write content, and you’ll instantly open the floodgates to tons of fresh and engaging content that your audience will love. Your fans will be creating and sharing content for you.

17. Talk to Your Fans

Customers and fans love to be loved. The way you show that love is by retweeting, favoriting tweets, liking the comments, and sharing their status. Don’t simply expect that your social media presence is going to work for you. You have to work for it, by talking to your fans.

They will return the favor, and engage at a deeper level.

18. Produce High-Quality Press Releases

Press releases have past their heyday as an SEO tool, but they still hold sway in marketing. If you use a source like PRWeb, you’ll be out a few hundred bucks anytime you pop out a press release.

A source like PRLog.org, however, is free of charge. The amount of syndication you get may not be as high quality, but it’s something. And, hey, it’s something for nothing.

Just be sure to write very high-quality releases, and nofollow any links back to your website.

19. Hack Craigslist

Craigslist is the 59th most popular website in the world. Airbnb, valued at 24 billion, used Craigslist to skyrocket its growth. You can use Craigslist, too. Try using Craigslist’s geographic focus to target specific areas and markets.

Make sure that you’re complying with the site’s terms of service. Use Craigslist in the way that it was intended. Violators will be banned from the site.

20. Blog

I can’t create list of marketing techniques without mentioning blogging. A business blog is an indispensable strategy for online marketing. Use it, work at it, and make it work for you.

If you’re frustrated with the current condition of your business blog, read these 35 tips that will make it better. If you’re struggling with traffic, read this post.

21. Guest blog

If blogging is awesome, then guest blogging is doubly awesome. When you post an article on another blog, you are instantly gaining that blog’s audience. The cost of guest blogging is free, less the time you spend. Create a killer article, appeal to the blog’s audience, and you may be invited back to contribute more.

I’ve used guest blogging with incredible success. My 300-and-counting guest blogs are still paying me back in terms of referral traffic, leads, and customers.

22. Create a LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn is free, and yet it gives you incredible marketing opportunities. Many professionals use LinkedIn as static social media tool — a place to put up their resume, and not much else.

LinkedIn is so much more than an online resume. I’ve used LinkedIn to publish content, connect with powerful people, and build a marketing group with thousands of members.

All of this cost me zero dollars and zero cents, but the marketing upside has been incredible.

23. Give Free Help to Others

If you make marketing all about you and your business, you’re going to be frustrated and unfulfilled. Try giving to others, free of charge.

Obviously, you’re not a charity; you’re a business. But why not give away a product, an hour of your time, or a membership for a customer who can’t afford your services?

Some of the best business opportunities I’ve had were consulting gigs with customers who couldn’t pay. These opportunities have been beneficial in ways that I couldn’t have predicted.

Even today, I give away virtually all of my content without charge. Doing so is fulfilling for me personally, and it provides an opportunity for improved marketing.

Conclusion

Marketing doesn’t have to break your bank, blow your budget, or cost you thousands of dollars. Like I mentioned in the beginning of this article, marketing can require nothing more than the investment of time.

Chances are, you can increase your marketing presence today by implementing one of these methods. Pick one and run with it.

What is your favorite no-cost marketing technique?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Source: KISS

Killer copy is the backbone of marketing.

Creating it is a powerful art and sweet science.

And it’s not about being clever or cute.

It’s about getting the person who’s reading your words to do one thing, and one thing only…

To take the desired action you want.

That’s it.

However to get your prospect to act, you need to grab his attention and keep it…all the way down to the last word. You need to push his emotional hot buttons and bring him to boiling point. And you need to lift risk off his shoulders, overcome objections, ask for the sale and justify your price.

Doing the above–without sounding like a robotic product description with a buy it now button–sounds like a handful doesn’t it?

Don’t worry, I got you covered. After reading this guide you’ll be equipped to:

• Create straight-for-the-jugular headlines that grab attention
• Nail your openings and introductions
• Craft a smooth sales message that propels your reader forward
• Create copy that keeps readers straightjacketed to the page
• Comfort your reader’s gnawing objections
• Learn how to hook your prospect with (proven) psychological hacks

So get comfortable, it’s time to harness the power of the written word to beef up your business with higher conversions.

Let’s go.

Get Into Bed With Your Customer

You can have beautifully written copy. You can have a gorgeous website design. You can even have a kick-ass product.

But if you don’t have a firm, white-knuckle grasp on the nightmare inducing pains and heart warming dreams of your customers; you’ll get as far as a solar powered snail…in an eclipse.

Think about it…if you aren’t aware of what fears make your customer’s throat dry and his heart heavy, and what goals he continually “replays” in his head when nobody is watching. How on earth are you going to convince him that your product/service can help him?

You can’t.

Velocity partners boasts a good understanding of their customers:

They could have spoke about anything related to content marketing, but they know their audience values the concept of branding.

This understanding allows them to create hot topic that emotionally resonates with their audience.

Here’s another great example from the Myfitnesspal mobile app:

They know their audience is serious about losing weight; serious enough to track every calorie they consume.

They also know that people think counting calories is time consuming and difficult. So they stress how effortless it is to log recipes, and how easy the app is to use.

This snags the attention of anyone who’s committed to tracking calories without ripping their hair out or being robbed of their time.

To unearth the desires and pains that’ll sway your prospect towards action, start by resting your marketing hat for a minute and donning your “sales detective” one.

Becoming A Sales Detective

This is where you roll your sleeves up and start sleuthing behind the scenes.

Infamous copywriter John Carlton calls this becoming a sales detective and getting into a “ bogart-like gumshoe frame of mind.” You’re going to:

• Dig through previous copy or sales literature
• Interview customers
• Interview employees
• Scout out your competition, James Bond style
• Pump Google Alerts for info
• Analyse your web analytics

Becoming a sales detective is all about using research to step inside your customer’s world.

It will inject empathy into your copy and answers the all-important question…“who are you dealing with here?”

With the “preliminaries” out the way, let’s dive into the “nitty gritty” details of creating powerful copy.

Crafting Headlines That Jar Prospects Into Attention

Famed copywriter David Ogilvy said:

“On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.”

Or in other words: A weak headline can make your business bleed money.

A case study by contentverve.com shows the huge power behind headlines. They switched the landing page headline for a local scandinavian gym from, “You Work Out Smarter at Fitness World” to “Group Training and Fitness at Your Local Gym”.

The results?

A 38.46% increase in memberships sold.

All from changing a headline.

When it comes to your copy, your headline has two main jobs:

• To snag the attention of your audience
• And seduce them into your pitch or ad

Different headlines work for different pages and user goals. But most high performing headlines usually do the following:

• Offer a mouthwatering benefit to the reader
• Tickle the reader’s curiosity
• Promise specific results within a certain time frame

One simple but effective headline formula you can follow is:

Benefit to customer + Time Period Where He’ll Get The Benefit + Overcome His Objections

“Double Your Website Traffic + In 2 months + Or Your Money Back”.

Another way to strengthen your headline is to attack it from a different angle. To do this, run it through a filter.

The Benefit Driven Filter

This attacks from a benefit driven angle, and simply focuses on telling the reader what’s in it for him.

Here’s an example from Box:

“Securely send & share large files without email or FTP client.”

It’s quick, clean, and does what any great headline should do; tell the reader what’s in it for him.

The Inspirational Filter

Applying this filter forces you to focus on how your product/service will help your reader achieve an “inspirational” goal or result.

Here’s an example from Tom Ewers Paid to Blog subscription service:

“It is possible to make $100+ Per Hour From Freelance Blogging. I want to show you how.”

Some freelancers are skeptical about making a comfortable living with blogging.

This headline confronts that doubt by claiming that it’s possible, and that the product will show you how.

The Aggressive/Competitive Filter

Who doesn’t like sound of of being the best or beating the competition?

That’s what aggressive filters focus on: Leaving the competition coughing in your dust bubbles.

Here’s an example from webprofits.com:

“Get a free backlink analysis and find out how to beat your competition on google”.

It conveys a solid benefit to the reader, and promises information on how they can overthrow their competition on Google.

Looking for more ways to come up with attention grabbing headlines? Here’s 9 more proven formulas.

The AIDA Formula

You have a white knuckle grasp on who your prospect is. You know his pains and desires. And you have a headline that’ll drag him in like demonic tornado.

Now it’s time to lay down some copy.

Productivity usually plummets at this stage. People find themselves drowning in writer’s block… wondering “what now?”

Well fear not, the famous AIDA formula (popularized by the legendary Gary Halbert) will pluck you from the crushing coils of writer’s block. Just like a superhero swinging down to pluck you from a speeding car.

The AIDA formula acts as a skeleton for most sales letters. It is structured around the wavering interest levels of your reader. Which helps you anticipate his thoughts, questions and objections.

This magnetizes your copy and gets your prospect to act.

So what exactly does AIDA stand for?

A – Attention
The opening, where you snag your prospect’s attention and quickly convey that what you have to say will benefit him. Usually the headline and the opening sentence.

I – Interest
This is where you pique the interest of your reader by either “rubbing salt in his open wounds” (agitating his pain), or by weaving a story that highlights how he’ll fulfill his desires.

D – Desire
Your reader is interested in your offer. Now it’s time to “stomp on his greed glands” and arouse his emotions by describing how your product/service will enhance his life.

A – Action
After your product sweeps the reader of his feet, this is where you invite him to take action. Usually to buy, download, click or subscribe.

Here’s an example of the AIDA formula from Get Response.com:

The headline “world’s easiest email marketing” grabs your attention.

And the bulleted list of benefits, sows the seeds of interest by telling you how their software will power up your email marketing.

The page then mentions who the product is for, and describes how its features and perks can help you, regardless of your skill level. This piques your interest, works up your desire and begins to chip away at your objections.

The page then intensifies your desire and tackles objections further. This is done by showing testimonials from industry leaders who you probably look up to.

The page then calls the reader to action by inviting them to a 30 day trial.

If you spend too much time gazing at a blank screen with a blinking cursor…use the AIDA formula. It’ll inject your copy with a smooth flow and structure that holds your readers attention and doesn’t let go.

Apply the Boxer Mindset To Copy

Writing copy is like boxing.

Especially when it comes to your openings.

In the ring, if you don’t want to be eating the canvas, you have to think 3-4 punches ahead.

You have to predict your opponent’s counters, slips and movement patterns before he even thinks of doing them. Will you throw feints to keep him on his toes? Or mix up your style to land more shots? Or close the distance for more impact?

Similarly, if you want to keep readers hooked to your copy, you have to anticipate their thoughts and be mindful of each word, sentence and paragraph you deliver.

To hit hard and get results–like a boxer’s punches–your words have to flow. Non-stop.

Are you going to mix up long and short sentences to keep your copy exciting? Ask questions that flow into the next paragraph? Or deploy an analogy to bring home the point you’re trying to make?

Whatever you do, remember that your reader should smoothly slip into each new tightly woven sentence and paragraph.

You’re essentially guiding his thoughts, just as you would aim to guide your opponents movements and strikes in the ring.

Crafting Openings That Suck People In

If you don’t have a killer opening that goes straight for the jugular, you don’t stand a chance at converting your prospect.

Because if your opening doesn’t motivate him to, he isn’t going to travel down your sales letter and click your buy it now button.

So how do you create openings that nudge your reader along? Here are 3 ways:

Open With a Question

Opening with a question is a great way to start your sales letter.

It almost forces your reader to mentally respond, creates a little conversation, and keeps your copy fresh. This helps streamline your reader’s thoughts on to the next sentence.

Keep It Short

Short sentences and paragraphs are like grease on a slide, they keep you moving forward, fast.

They also make for great openings.

Think about it, you’re more inclined to read a series of sweet, short 2-3 sentence paragraphs over a huge mammoth-like chunk of text, right?

Why? Because short sentences and paragraphs feel easy, and people take the path of least resistance. They also build momentum, which makes it easier for the reader to continue reading.

Joe Sugarman (renowned copywriter) describes this as being like a locomotive:

“When the locomotive starts to chug from a standing start, it really works hard. The amount of commitment the train must exert is monumental. But once this train starts to move, the next few feet become easier and the next few even easier. So it is with copy.”

Wistia does a great job of combining the two techniques above:

Notice how their copy feels engaging and conversational? That’s the questions at work. The questions also do a great job of setting the reader up for the next sentence and keeping him speeding through the copy.

Also, notice how you float from one sentence to another? That’s those short sentences at work.

State Your Claim

No fancy stuff.

Just be blunt and let readers know what you’re about.

Here’s an example from the Kissmetrics homepage:

There’s no cuteness. They lay it out in the open by telling you exactly what they can do for you.

And because it is blunt and upfront…you will either instantly prickle with recognition, or pay no attention at all.

Lighting Up Your Prospects Greed Glands

Gary Halbert said:

“When it comes to writing copy, far too much attention is paid to the actual writing and far too little is paid to ferreting out facts about that which the copywriter is trying to sell.”

You’ve opened your copy with a bang. Got your reader’s attention and have captured his interest with a killer opening.

Next comes the meat of your sales letter.

Where you switch to full-auto, releasing a barrage of benefits that make your reader’s heart swell with desire, and create a burning itch that has to be scratched.

Benefits transform an ember of interest into a raging fire of desire that motivates people to act.

Michael Aagaard blasted conversions up 80% by adding three benefit driven bullet points to his opt-in form. That’s the kind of power benefits have.That’s why they are a must if you want to sell anything.

Here’s a lovely example of benefit driven copy from Wrangler:

Wrangler could have listed their features and said:

• These regular rise jeans have slimming side seams and a subtle boot cut
• They also have a reverse yoke
• The jeans also have vertical back pockets and a contour waistband

Instead, they harnessed the power of benefit driven copy by showing how the features of their products benefit the user.

• Slimming side seams and subtle boot cut to flatter your shape
• A reverse yoke lifts the seat
• Vertical back pockets are proportion to make the most of your assets
• Contour waistbands means these jeans won’t gap in the back

Each feature constantly relates back to how it will make the reader look sexier, slimmer and more desirable. Which doesn’t just describe what they’re selling. It seductively drip feeds the product benefits into her brain.

A Note on Bullet Points

Bullet points are easy to read, make your copy more scannable, and allow you to pile on the mouthwatering benefits of your product.

But two lesser-known ways of maximizing your results with bullets are to mix them up with…

Blind Bullets

Blind bullets can be described as teaser bullets.

They provide a clear image of the benefit you receive, but not the specifics or the“how” behind the benefit. This deliberate vagueness arouses the reader’s curiosity and keeps him interested.

Take a look at these examples from the sales page for Doberman Dan’s newsletter:

See what’s going on here?

There’s a juicy benefit being offered, and its value is made higher with specific numbers. But the benefit still shadow-dances around the edges of the “how”.

It’s blind.

This prompts the reader to think “what secret food will give me a 5% edge?”, and “what is the master key to making serious money?” Adding to his curiosity and desire.

Open Bullets

Open bullets are the opposite of blind bullets.

They wow the reader by giving away detailed specifics behind the benefit.

Just like this opt in page:

Each point has a “blind” style headline. Followed by detailed information on each case study and the benefit it offers. This soars the value of each point, and helps establish the idea that the seller “knows their stuff”.

Be sure to mix in blind and open bullets to keep your copy more engaging.

Take The Weight off His Shoulders

Your reader has breezed through your copy.

He’s ready.

He knows your offer will greatly benefit him. And his credit card is peeking out his wallet. But if only he could squash those doubts pecking at his brain…

“What if you don’t deliver?” “What if he doesn’t make extra money with your product? “What if he doesn’t save time?”

We’ve all felt this to some degree, right?

You’re at a checkout page and you love the product. But you’re just not sure.

I’ve experienced this many times. I’ve thought, would I get results from this? What if it tanks? And guess what?

After knowing that I didn’t risk a penny and there is no risk on me. I could just return the product or ask for my money back, I whipped my card out and completed the check-out.

Because I felt safe in buying the product.

That’s why guarantees are such an important part of your copy. They help you eliminate the risk of your prospect being “taken”.

Now, you don’t need a groundbreaking guarantee.

A guarantee that shows that your prospect isn’t at risk and stands to lose nothing will suffice.

If you’re selling software, you can offer trials and let your prospect try before they buy. I recently made a purchase from GetResponse, but only because they offered me a risk free trial beforehand.

A free trial also does your marketing for you. And it allows you to put your money where your mouth is.

Your prospect gets first hand experience of the benefits of your product. He could potentially boost sales/conversions without spending a dime. And nothing sells someone like fresh cash, or concrete results.

Create a Greased Slide

How your copy is written will impact your results greatly.

That’s why it’s important to make sure that your copy is easy and fun to read.

As Joseph Sugarman said, your copy should read like a greased slide.

There are 101 ways to power up your writing, but some basic techniques that you should stick to are:

Keep Sentences Short, But Vary Your Pace

Gary Provost sums this up perfectly…

Deploy Powerful Action Verbs, Kill Fluff

“Adjectives are just fluff and air. Like tossing flowers out of your ad to get your prospects attention.” — John Carlton

Here’s a written scene that relies on adjectives instead of verbs:

“He quickly raised his combat knife to see where his attackers were. He composedly stepped out of his life-saving cover. The black gun menacingly fired two loud shot that quickly found their targets.”

The same scene after powering it up with action verbs:

“He used the reflection in his combat knife to gather a rough idea of their location and stepped out of cover. The gun rattled to life. Each shot whizzed to its destination with lightening fast speed.”

See the difference here?

One description is heavy and hard. It requires the reader to wade through bloated words and mundane text.

The other packs-a-punch, and delivers powerful imagery straight into the reader’s brain. Because it uses action verbs to describe and removes the fluff.

Make it Easy To Swing From Paragraph to Paragraph

Ever heard of transitions?

They’re words and phrases that can be viewed as “literary tubes”, because they connect ideas and sentences together.

For example, the sentence below uses “so” as a transition:

“You want to boost your conversions without spending tons of money, so you tweak your copy.”

Unless you want to sound like an illiterate robot, transitions are a must in all forms of writing. But they are even more effective when they become delayed transitions.

Delayed transitions place the joining phrase, or word, at the beginning of the next sentence or paragraph.

Here’s an example from Apple’s watchOS 2 preview page:

Delayed transitions are used at the beginning of each sentence to connect and flow right into the next.

Using delayed transition makes your copy better because:

• They make it easier to start reading a new line.
• They help create shorter sentences. This keeps readers engaged and builds momentum.
• They switch up your flow, which as we know, prevents your copy from becoming stale.

Psychologically Advanced Copywriting Tricks

The basics have been covered.

Now it’s time for some advanced copywriting tips to magnetize your copy.

Boost your Perceived Value With Re-framing

According to Wikipedia, “reframing is a psychological technique that consists of identifying and then disputing irrational or maladaptive thoughts. Reframing is a way of viewing and experiencing events, ideas, concepts and emotions to find more positive alternatives.”

With regards to marketing, reframing is when you increase the perceived value of a product by tweaking the buying lens from which your reader views it.

And it’s been proven to work.

Here’s an example of reframing from Volkswagen:

The price of a brand new car is reframed with the price of two lattes a day. This instantly makes the offer more appealing because it softens the blow of the price.

Here’s another more detailed example:

What price can you place on learning how to get more copywriting clients than you can manage? $2,000? $3000? $5000? (You can easily earn all these numbers back within a month of learning how to secure clients.)

This takes the reader’s view of the product from being just a “$260 video course” to a wise educational investment in which they save $4460.

Keep Readers Hooked With Open Loops

Open loops are everywhere.

And they’re powerful, because our brains have a natural craving for completion.

As discovered by scientist Bluma Zeigarnik, our brains undergo a state of tension when they view something as incomplete.

A tension that won’t be relieved until you feel the task at hand, or whatever you’re involved in, is complete.

It’s the feeling you get when you’re immersed in a book that you just can’t seem to put down.

The feeling you get when your favorite TV episode ends, and you’re itching to find out what happens next.

It’s the gnawing feeling in the back of your brain when leave your keys at home and step out the house.

When it comes to writing copy, an open loop is a portion of your sales letter that doesn’t immediately tie up.

Here’s an example from Jon Morrow’s Serious Bloggers Only sales letter:

Jon opens an itching open loop in the reader’s brain at the start of the sales letter. He does this by mentioning the “biggest secret to taking your blog to six or seven figures per year”.

After opening this loop, he doesn’t tie it up immediately.

Instead, he teases the reader by asking if they’d like to know. And mentions how people pay him up to $5000 for his expertise and advice…

A deeper mental itch is then created because this causes the reader to question “why is his knowledge so valuable?” and “what makes him so special, whats this secret?”

This motivates the reader to travel further down the copy. Where he ties up the open loop, and pitches to the reader.

The easiest way to implement open loops in your copy is to ask more questions.

Or…ask questions and delay the answer to keep your reader invested.

One Final Thing

“You must not come lightly to the blank page.”

–Stephen King, On Writing

Ever seen an athlete or world-class performer come to his task lightly?

You don’t.

Because to give a riveting performance, or win, they have to be focused, charged, and ready to spring.

The same mentality applies to writing copy…or anything that moves people to action.

Jon Morrow put this perfectly when he said:

“Your readers are the dead batteries. You are the live one. The written word is your pair of jumper cables.”

Charge yourself with emotion, close your eyes and imagine yourself as your customer, feeling the pain that your product/service solves.

You’ll instantly add a flaming intensity to your copy that snaps readers out of their slumber, and connect to the living, breathing human who will benefit from your offer.

Conclusion

What design converts better with your copy?

What words or phrases seem to click with your readers?

Where do reader’s lose/gain interest?

You can only know if you test.

Be sure to experiment with different calls to actions, headlines and benefits for maximum conversions.

What do you find most frustrating about writing copy? Let me know in the comments below.

About the Author: Hassan Ud-deen is a content marketing consultant who is addicted to words. He’s a specialist in article and case study writing for traffic generation. Hit him up on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Source: KISS

Back in January of this year, we launched a free Chrome extension (Datanyze Insider) targeted for sales and marketing pros.

In the first 6 months following the launch, marketing resources were extremely scarce. When I say bootstrapped, this is what I mean:

• 2 marketers (myself and our marketing manager, Michael)
• A $5k budget
• Limited design and technical resources
• A marketing automation platform
• Analytics

Over the course of this post, I do my best to outline and explain the tactics that got us to 10,000 installs in 6 months.

If you’re thinking: “Great, but I don’t have a Chrome extension” — don’t sweat it. These tactics are highly translatable and can be used to launch and grow any new product or offering.

Alright, let’s get going.

The Proof

For the skeptics, here’s a snapshot of our month-by-month progress. We launched Insider on January 21st and hit 10,000 users by early July. By July 21st, we were almost to 11,000 free users.

In this case, the goal completion can only be triggered when users submit our sign-up form. (We’ll talk more about the install spike in June later on.)

The Plan

Before the launch, we devised a plan that focused on 3 main deliverables:

1. Attracting new users (for free)
2. Optimizing for conversion and user success
3. Creating advocates and getting referrals

Each of these deliverables has been absolutely crucial to the success of the campaign. While driving traffic and acquiring new users may seem like the most crucial element, I cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure your first users love the product and are willing to spread it around. Let’s dig in.

Step 1: Attracting New Users (For Free)

Starting out, we had little budget and little design or technical resources. We did have time though (lots of it), and we chose to spend it familiarizing ourselves with the key players in our space. Our main questions were:

Where do our potential users live?
How do they look for new tools?
Whose opinion do they trust?
What makes them tick?

Having these questions top of mind made it easier for us to focus on the right acquisition channels and get the most out of our efforts. Here are the tactics we employed to get the ball rolling:

Tactic 1: Guest Blogging

If you only have the ability to execute on one tactic, make it this one. Guest blogging gave us a highly effective, free way to get in front of new audiences, provided that we could bring an interesting topic to the table. (Yep, I’m guest blogging now. ☺)

Starting out, we did a bit of research to decide which blogs to approach. We used a combination of BuzzSumo and Moz for this.

With BuzzSumo, you can enter in any keyword phrase, author or URL, and it will send back the most shared articles for that search term. You can filter results to identify which topics are trending this month and you can even view who’s sharing each article on Twitter.

The free Moz Chrome extension allows you to employ a similar technique with Google search, but puts an emphasis on SEO rather than social. (Granted, these two spheres are becoming more and more intertwined, but I thought it would be nice to show both.)

In the search results, Moz will provide the domain authority for each page and the number of websites that link to it. We focused on the results with a high domain authority and lots of inbound links.

Once we had a nice sized list of blogs we wanted to post on, it was time to start reaching out. Kissmetrics contributor, Kristi Hines, wrote an awesome post on how to do this, so I won’t try to reinvent the wheel. However, I will offer up one piece of advice: BE AUTHENTIC.

When you’re reaching out to someone for the first time, you need to find a way to quickly humanize yourself to your recipient. This means doing a bit of research on the blog if you’re reaching out through a Contact Us page or the author if you’re reaching out directly. Remember, if you want to get value, you’ve got to provide it first.

Tactic 2: Influencers

Put simply, influencers are industry experts that your buyers trust. When they tweet, buyers retweet. When they blog, buyers share. When they speak, buyers listen. Identifying and engaging with influencers correctly was a key piece of our acquisition strategy.

First off, we set out to identify the main influencers in our space. A great free tool for doing this is Topsy. It helps find out who’s driving your preferred topic of conversation on Twitter by keyword or hashtag.

You can sort results by timeframe or use the “Influencers” tab to check out which handles get retweeted the most on a given topic.

Another great way to find influencers is on Quora. A quick search for the topic “sales development” brings up a number of frequently asked questions and a preview of which responses received the most upvotes.

Once we had compiled a nice list of influencers, we wanted to get them interested enough in our extension to share it on social or (hopefully) write a nice blog post. This is the hard part. Here’s a little step-by-step process that worked pretty well for us:

1. Interact with each influencer on social. Retweet their posts on Twitter, follow their answers on Quora, comment on a blog post they wrote and, if possible, mention them in your own blog post.
2. Connect on LinkedIn. Before reaching out, connect with each influencer on LinkedIn. This helps humanize your outreach by putting a face to your name when the time comes.
3. Ask for advice. When it comes time to reach out, don’t ask them to share or write about your product right off the bat. Instead, ask for advice. Influencers love digging into new tools and sharing their expertise.
4. Take their advice. If you’re able to get some feedback on your product, make sure you take the necessary steps on your end to incorporate their advice into a V2 of the product.
5. Show them V2 and ask for help. Once you’ve got something new to show them, write your influencer back and note the changes you made. This will show them that you’ve invested in their feedback, making them more likely to become invested in your product. Then (and only then) should you ask for their help with promotion.

Remember that install spike in June? It came from an influencer blog post.

We even got some influencers to tweet out our posts:

If you don't use @datanyze, you're prospecting blind. http://t.co/77NA8nVoBr #sales #marketing

— Kyle York (@kyork20) June 26, 2015

Datanyze: Give us your Salesforce, we’ll fill your funnel http://t.co/0ODhXyzhL4 via @VentureBeat @Datanyze #saas #insidesales <love it!>

— Trish Bertuzzi (@bridgegroupinc) May 4, 2015

Tactic 3: Quora

Quora is an absolute treasure trove when it comes to new users. Thousands of new questions get asked, answered, and upvoted everyday, and top answers often hit the top result on Google (and stay there).

To keep up with questions on Quora, we used a free tool called Feedly. With Feedly, you can copy any topic URL from Quora and create an RSS feed that will alert when new questions are asked. Here’s an example of a feed we used that covers Chrome extensions. Check this out if need help setting it up.

Once we had our feed setup, we needed to answer questions TACTFULLY. This meant:

1. Addressing our prospect’s question in full.
2. Providing more than just a link to our product.
3. Organizing our answers with helpful pictures and bullets.
4. Furthering the discussion by commenting on or citing other helpful answers in the thread.

Once we answered each question thoroughly without being too product pitchy, we chose to ask some co-workers for a little upvote love. This helped get our answers higher in the thread and generate more views.

Step 2: Converting users and making them successful

Once we started driving a great deal of users to our sign-up page, we needed to accomplish two things:

1. Make them confident enough in our extension to fill out a form and install something on their computer.
2. Help them find success quickly so they are comfortable recommending the extension to their network.

Tactic 1: Reviews

At first, we spent a lot of time brainstorming creative ways to ask our customers for reviews. Here are a few of the (semi) interesting ideas we came up with:

1. Pick out several power users and ask for a review in exchange for more credits.
2. Send hand-written letters to influencers. (oof)
3. Sheepishly ask our friends and family to write something nice…

After a good amount of back and forth, we decided to take a risk. Our plan was to add an email to our existing nurture track that simply asked for a review.

The email would be sent out to everyone 5 business days after they installed the extension – whether they used it, liked it, loved it, or not. Here’s what we sent:

This email has been responsible for 90% of the 78 reviews we’ve collected to date. Though it’s automated, I believe it works for a few reasons:

• It comes from the engineer who created the extension.
• It puts a face to the name.
• It asks for both positive AND negative reviews.

Putting ourselves up for both positive and negative reviews was, admittedly, a huge risk. But it was one we were willing to take, because we were confident enough in our product and onboarding flow that users would be successful enough to react favorably.

Tactic 2: Onboarding

“How can we make our first users successful without being too hands-on?” was a question we started to ask ourselves as the installs rolled in.

First things first, we decided to spend a little money. We needed a how-to video that could quickly explain the value of using the extension without digging too deep into the features. We did a bit of research and wound up using SmartShoot, an Elance of sorts for outsourced video production. The video doesn’t exactly bring you to the edge of your seat (we’re no Slack or HubSpot) but it does get the point across.

Next, we created a help center focused on providing answers to questions new users might have. We covered all the basics from install to account creation, and also provided video tutorials on how to use the most prominent features. We then rolled these two assets up into a welcome email, keeping things simple and brief.

You’ll notice that there are quite a few links in there, which may lead to sensory overload for some users. However, we tested a variety of different email styles and found that users who received all resources in the first email, performed nearly 25% more actions in the first week. For us, this was a HUGE piece of knowledge.

After the initial onboarding email, we continued with a 6-email nurture track that focuses on tips and best practices. We figured that if users were successful with the extension, then they would be more likely to refer their friends – a topic I’ll discuss in the following section.

Step 3: Creating advocates and getting referrals

Tactic 1: Growth analytics

Many readers may be familiar with HubSpot’s Chrome extension, Sidekick, which was launched back at the end of 2014. One of the most fascinating articles I’ve read (and one that should be on every data-driven marketer’s short list), is a post that outlines their growth approach for this product.

The HubSpot team stuck to a pretty simple plan:

1. Choose a goal
2. Build a model
3. Analyze the inputs
4. Identify opportunities

HubSpot’s main objective was to find gaps in their existing acquisition and onboarding flows that could be closed up to increase weekly active users. Here are the reasons their users dropped off, which feels pretty typical for most online products:

We are currently taking a similar approach, but aren’t getting quite as in the weeds as HubSpot did (…bootstrapped, remember?).

Currently, we’re focused on increasing the number of credit-based actions a user takes. This means identifying the demographics of the users that drop off, figuring out when they drop off, and why.

I should mention that we’re still very much in the middle of this process, but if you’re interested in our preliminary findings, feel free to shoot me an email!

Tactic 2: Referral program

Nothing spreads faster than a free tool people enjoy using. In our quest to drive more installs, we decided that it was worth using what little design and engineering resources we had to get something off the ground.

Building a successful referral program is no easy task, but luckily there are plenty of awesome examples out there to help get the creative juices flowing. In particular, we decided to emulate Dropbox’s referral campaign, which was a key ingredient in their whopping 3900% growth. Here’s a look at our referral page.

…I’m not a big fan of the confetti either.

A few things to note:

• We highlighted a target goal of “500 credits” to give users something to work towards.
• We chose to make Invite Gmail Contacts the focal point. This is the holy grail of referrals, but not always the first one on a user’s mind.
• We provided a shortened URL for users who prefer not to share on social. Some of our most viral sign-up chains came from links copied to an internal chat tool like Slack or HipChat.
• We gave users the ability to track their referrals and even resend the referral email to prompt friends to sign up.
• We gave both the referrer AND the referee 10 additional credits as a reward for signing up.

Since implementing the program back in March, referrals have accounted for nearly 25% of all new installs. It has also helped our sales team identify which accounts are most likely to convert based on the number of active users on the same domain.

Bootstrapping Can Work If You Have a Solid Plan

So there you have it — a little over 10,000 installs in 6 months! Perhaps not all of this advice is uniquely relevant, but hopefully there are a few nuggets in there that you can take away. Would also love to hear about any bootstrapped marketing tactics you’ve used to supercharge a marketing campaign and get results.

About the Author: Sam Laber is the director of marketing at Datanyze, the all-in-one sales intelligence platform. For more content, check out the Datanyze blog or follow Sam on Twitter @SLaber89.

Source: KISS

In the early days of social media marketing, the number one goal for businesses was to amass huge followings, and for good reason. It was a time when there was no limit to organic post reach, and the companies with the largest social audiences benefited the most with totally free advertising.

Unfortunately for those early adopters, the networks have matured, the business models have grown and nowadays brands are lucky if even a fraction of their social following see their posts. That’s why marketers need to completely rethink the way they approach social as an organic channel.

Where before social marketing was all about building a giant audience, today social marketing is about providing quality, relevant content to your audience so that you can engage with them as individuals and attract them as a customer. But in order to really provide your social audience with engaging content, you need to figure out who they are. This can be done with some of the reports available online.

This post will cover how to use data to find your perfect social audience, and how to look at reports on past performance to find out which content resonates with your audience.

1. Demographics Reports

Who are the people that are interacting with you on social media? There’s a chance that you or your community managers can name some of the top influencers within your social following, but who is your average reader? One way to get a tremendous increase in social engagement is to answer this question, and create content that resonates with those individuals. Here are some of the reports available to you that can be used to figure out just who your average social engager is.

Facebook Page Insights

Let’s start with Facebook. Facebook has a plethora of information on your fans and followers. One way to access that information is through the Facebook Insights tab found on your brand’s homepage.

If this is your first time using this tool, take a look around at some of the great data at hand. Otherwise, navigate over to the People tab to start pulling data on your fans and followers.

The above screenshot is looking more specifically at the People Engaged section. It’s better to look at People Engaged since this shows the demographics of the people who are more inclined to actually engage with your social posts.

The first data you’ll see breaks down the various ages and genders of the people who are engaging with your Facebook posts. For example, the graph below shows that of all the people interacting with Sprout Social, 21% are women ages 25-34.

Various age groups and genders are likely to interact with content differently. That’s why it’s a key advantage to figure out your main audience and create posts catered to their interests.

Twitter’s Analytics Tool

Similar to Facebook, Twitter offers audience insights within its analytics dashboard. After you access your analytics page, navigate to the tab addressing your Followers.

Assuming you have enough followers, this tab has information on their gender, income, education and more, which will help you create content on Twitter that this audience is more likely to interact with. However, the tab doesn’t include age data. One option is to use Sprout’s Twitter Analytics.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter tool created by the software company Moz. If you have access to the tool, choose the Analyze tab from your dashboard.

From here you can enter any Twitter handle and scan their followers. The data provided is similar to Twitter’s, but the one we’re most interested in for creating demographic-driven content is the gender section.

Google Analytics

Most of the networks don’t provide as robust data as Facebook and Twitter, but never fear: Google always has your back. Access your account and navigate to Audience > Demographics > Overview.

After that, you need to +Add Segment, that looks at the Traffic Sources you’re interested in finding demographics for, like Pinterest.

2. Location and Language Reports

Location-based geo–targeting is a very powerful tool for social media marketers. It’s possible for you to pull reports to find some of your most engaged cities, states or countries, and then write and distribute topical content to those locations for better response. For instance, creating a post for a specific city could call out the hometown sports team.

Facebook Page Insights

Back on the Facebook Page Insights report, just a little below the age and gender information, you’ll find data on where the people engaged with your page are located.

So the company in the example above could see some increased engagement if they targeted a post to their Chicago audience that called out The Cubs (or the White Sox if that’s what you’re into…).

Twitter’s Analytics Tool

You’ll find location information when you access your Twitter Analytics the same way as in the previous report, but this time you’ll need to navigate over to the second tab.

In the right column you’ll find information provided by Twitter on both the country and region your followers are in.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk preserves your reports for 60 days, so you should be able to find the same presentation you used when looking at the Demographics report. Followerwonk actually puts your followers’ location data in an interactive map.

Google Analytics

Similar to the Demographics Reports, if you can’t find location data for the other networks look to Google Analytics. Access your account and navigate through Audience > Geo > Location.

After you create the custom segment looking at the social source, Google provides data on users by country, city, continent and subcontinent.

3. Sent Message Reports

Now that we know who our audience is, it’s a good idea to think about the content that they like. One way to do that is to look at your past social media performance to see which of your posts received good engagement, then use that information to dictate your strategy moving forward. A few of the platforms that we’ve mentioned so far have the ability to analyze old posts for performance, but I want to focus on two that do a great job.

Followerwonk

Just like with the other reports, you’ll need to navigate to the Analyze tab of your dashboard. The difference this time is that instead of choosing to “analyze their followers’ you want to choose ‘analyze their tweets’.

Followerwonk uses Retweets as the main metric for deciding what makes the most important Tweet. In the example above I chose to look at Social Media Examiner. Followerwonk shows that this is their most important Tweet over the time period.

A day In the life of a #SocialMedia Manager? pic.twitter.com/PqhFDl3pgt

— SocialMedia Examiner (@SMExaminer) June 1, 2015

Social Media Examiner can look at this and decide that if they create more fun content that resonates with social media managers, they’ll see more engagement.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management platform that also gives you analytics on your past social media performance.

Sprout has a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can look at to find out which of your pieces of content perform well. You can then study those posts so that they can inform your content strategy moving forward.

4. Day and Hour Reports

Once you’ve figured out who to target and what to post, the next question on your mind should be “when to post.” And you wouldn’t be the only one, either. This Google Trends graph shows just how fascinated people are with finding the perfect time for posting.

However, the best time to post for one brand may not be the best time for another. That’s why you should look at these reports to find your unique perfect post time.

Facebook Page Insights

Access your Facebook Page Insights again, and go to the Posts tab. This is where you’ll find additional information on your fans, such as when they’re online.

Although this doesn’t say when you get the most engagement, it does have information on the days of the week and hours of the day when your fans are most likely to be online. Posting content at these peak days and hours should lead to an increase in your engagement.

Manual Reporting

Unfortunately, Facebook is one of the only networks out there that provides data on when your users are accessing the site. However, you can always pull data manually to look at which days are performing best. Or try talking to your community manager; most of them have a good idea of which days and times get great response. If all else fails, try a tool like Sprout Social that automatically post your social messages at the time that will yield the most audience engagement.

Every Audience is Unique

No two brands have an identical social media following, so it really doesn’t make much sense to use a one-size-fits-all content strategy. Taking the time to analyze your unique social media audience allows you to develop a content strategy that caters to them, which will set you leagues above the competition.

About the Author: Michael Patterson is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Sprout Social, a social media platform that helps brands manage their social media efforts. You can find him on Twitter @MPatterson22.

Source: KISS

In this era of extreme digital marketing, leading an organization isn’t too different from competitive mountain biking. Here are a few key tips to keep in mind to help you make it over the finish line successfully without getting bashed up on the way down.

Photo Credit: Maridav www.fotosearch.com

Start Out With the Right Equipment

You wouldn’t set out on a hardcore cross-country trail without a capable bike, strong helmet, tuned suspension, and of course, nice disc brakes – so why would you even attempt to run a web-based organization without being armed with the data and insights you need to achieve top performance? 

Set up the systems you need to clearly monitor and measure your business. You don’t need to just buy either the top or bottom shelf to put off your uncertainties. Think about what complexities you’re facing in your business. What problems do you really need to solve? How is your website set up to serve your customers? We’ve seen several clients over purchase or opt for “free” and not have the best solution in place to see and fix their business challenges.

Be Prepared to Go Fast and Win

With speed on your side, all you really need to do is steer with confidence and you’ll come through clean. But if your organization isn’t prepared to go fast with confidence, the bumps and roots are going to hit harder, slow you down and even take you off track.

In fact, you’ll probably find yourself in granny-gear trying to haul yourself uphill while others pass you by. Plus, you won’t have the momentum required to hit the banks and ramps, and you’re likely not enjoy the ride to its fullest potential. Make sure that you have the information you need to quickly and easily monitor your business performance, presented in a format that won’t require you to take your entire organization offline in order to figure out how to make the raw data actionable. Business is faster than ever and you need to be ready to make quick decisions, and adjustments, so you can enjoy the ride.

See Where You Want to Go

When you’re burning down the trail you need to see your path clearly, focus on where you want to go and be ready to react. You can’t possibly navigate successfully if you’re looking off trail or questioning your decisions. You’ll go down, hard.

The beauty of the web is that our customers leave digital data trails that help us understand their behavior and show us the right path. In order to lead effectively, C-suite executives need to start taking a more active role in aligning the entire business with the journey of their customers. 

This data can illuminate the path to better performance across the entire company by providing an understanding of the customer journey from beginning to end by showing the actual flow of the audience and identifying potential bottlenecks along the way.

It’s All About Confidence

In this fast paced business climate, decisions need to be made sooner, rather than later, because the meter is running. You simply can’t afford to base decisions solely on instinct or “art”. Data is the key to everything that is happening within your prospect and customer base.

If you have the right data and the correct insight into the customer experience, you can make decisions with speed, precision and confidence. Executives who take an active role in building a data business have a more in-tune view of their businesses and are able to compete more effectively. Those who aren’t taking an active role in mapping and understanding the customer journey are at huge disadvantage, and will soon be left in the dust.

To run a competitive organization, implementing the right systems and delivering the right data will enable you to meet the expectations of your customers and pull away from the competition. And Kissmetrics would love to help – request a personal demo, if you’d like to learn more.

About the Author: Brian Kelly is the CEO of Kissmetrics.

Source: KISS