5 Blog Topics to Stop Rehashing Immediately

You work hard to create blog content that people actually want to read. You know it’s an important part of your content marketing efforts that will bring in new customers over time.

But there are a few topics that online readers have seen time and time again—and at this point, they’re just becoming noise.

An Algoso survey found that 88% of people read blogs because they want analysis and opinions, while 74% wanted information on trends within a sector or to learn from others’ experiences.

algoso-survey-results
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In order to satisfy those readers’ driving desires, you need to write blog content that says something new, interesting, and insightful—not regurgitates what everyone else has already said.

Here are 5 topics that have been overdone (and that you should steer clear from.)

1. The 10 Best X

With more than 4.9 billion search results for this phrase, it’s safe to say that we’ve all seen our fair share of top 10 lists.

For example: The 10 Best Ways to Get More Followers on Twitter or The 10 Best Ways to Grow Your Email List

The trouble with these posts is that they strive for quantity—not quality—by providing only surface level information rather than taking a deep dive into one particular point.

When we look at a top 10 blog post, we don’t learn much beyond what they are. There’s often no how that explains what makes them qualified to be on this top 10 list or that walks you through how you could emulate what made it so successful.

Plus, research shows that the average content length for a top-ranking site in Google has at least 2,000 words. Therefore, it’s clear that Google defines higher quality content as posts that go into greater detail.

Unfortunately, the average top 10 post falls far short of that minimum. Bottom line: There’s not a lot you can teach in that few words.

Try this instead: Rather than throwing together a quick top 10 post, pick the best example on the list and pick apart what makes it work so well. Create a piece of content like ‘The One Best X to do X’ that teaches the reader something valuable using this singular example—and leave the rest of the top 10 list behind.

2. How X is Like X

Another overdone blog topic is the comparison post that finds some creative similarity between two concepts and trys to spin it into something interesting. There are 1 billion search results for this blog topic—so comparison posts have had a good run.

For example: How Your Business is Like a Computer Processor or How Your Marketing Funnel is Like Baking a Cake

It sounds like a good idea, but is there real substance for the reader that can come from such a far-fetched comparison? Is it going to teach them something they didn’t already know?

Posts that try to use comparisons to teach a concept often miss the mark because the writer is so focused on staying on track with the theme. The content becomes idea-centric rather than based in research, and while it might make for a clever headline, the content itself comes out weak.

The other obstacle that arises from posts that pivot on similarities between concepts or products is that they lack those essential personal opinions and experiences that offer unique insight—which the Algoso survey showed was a top motivator for blog readers.

Try this instead: Comparisons can be powerful when used to demonstrate a finding that others can implement, too. Try something like ‘What We Can Learn from Testing A Against B’ that shows how a test proved that one method was more effective than another.

ContentVerve uses this to effectively showcase results of A/B testing and compares two versions side by side to illustrate the positive impact.

contentverve-test
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3. News Round-Ups

There are more than 350M search results for news round-ups, but how many of them offer something new to the conversation?

When it comes to these news round-up posts, they often just repeat information that’s already been shared elsewhere and leave out personal insight.

For example: Healthcare News Round-Up for August 2015 or Marketing News Round-Up: The Things You Missed

For the reader, there’s simply not much value. Number one: They may have already read the news elsewhere, so when they encounter it on your blog with no accompanying input, it feels disappointing. When someone visits your blog, they want to hear from you—not from someone else.

Number two: News round-ups also frequently include quote-heavy content that really tells the reader, “Hey, I didn’t have the story, but someone else did.” Is that a message you want to send to your readers?

Try this instead: Rather than just repackaging existing information, try a topic like ‘Highlights of X and What You Can Learn From It.’ This way, you’re still sharing the important information, but you’re doing the legwork for the reader and telling them what they need to read between the lines. Or, share what you know from your past experiences—and weigh in with some fresh perspective.

4. Why X is Cliché/Wrong/Bad

Lots of bloggers and content marketers like to take to the pulpit and express their opinions on business issues, launching lofty statements like, “X is wrong and here’s why.”

For example: Why Blogging is Bad for Your Business or Why Client Thank You Notes are Cliché

Don’t believe me? Check the 1B search results that come up for that title.

Opinion and persuasion are definitely key elements to a great blog post. However, when writers make these bold claims, they often forget to back them up with research, case studies, or experience. They’re purely opinion-based—and there’s where things get tricky.

Commentary that’s not backed in tangible proof can read as trivial for the audience, and can put you in a position to play defense with people who disagree. What might sound like an emotionally charged blog post that you’re really passionate about could actually do harm for your personal brand if you don’t have the ethos and logos to accompany your claims.

Additionally, these posts often lack a strong CTA for the reader. If blogging is part of your content marketing strategy and you throw in an opinion piece that’s missing a strong, relevant CTA, you can cause serious damage to your sales funnel.

Try this instead: Make bold claims by showcasing interesting case studies you conducted that include screenshots, testing methods, and real numbers that prove your point. Think more along the lines of ‘How We Tested (strategy) to Discover You Should Use A Over B’.

5. The Year in Review

999M ‘year in review’ posts exist already.

For example: The Year in Review: Looking Back at My Business in 2015 or Recap: The Year in Review and What I Accomplished

[Insert: GoogleResults.png]

Do we need another? Probably not. Here’s why:

Reflection posts that simply recap the past 365 days don’t typically offer the reader any new insight and instead just recycle ideas, lessons, and events you’ve already talked about.

More importantly, though, think about what motivates your audience to visit your blog in the first place. They might like your writing style and online persona, but really, they want to learn something they can use for themselves.

If you’re just looking back on what you accomplished this year and not showcasing an in-depth lesson you took away from it—you’re probably just rambling.

Try this instead: It’s okay to share what you learned over the past year, but remember to focus in on one key theme. A topic like ‘The Most Important X I Learned in (year) That Helped My Business’ gives the reader serious value—you’re squeezing the best lesson you learned over a the course of a whole year and handing it to them with a pretty bow.

google-results-year-in-review

Conclusion

With millions of pieces of content that already exist on the Internet, the blog posts you write need to stand out, provide value, and be backed in research—not pure opinion.

Gary Vaynerchuk said that when it comes to what you’re producing on the Internet, “Someone is always watching.” Readers can see when you’re not giving a solid effort to your blogs and each time you deliver less-than insightful blog posts, you chip away at the trust and authority you’ve earned with your audience.

Stop rehashing these overdone blog topics and start being a unique voice in the noisy world of content.

About the Author: Kaleigh Moore is a social media consultant and copywriter who helps SaaS companies craft intelligent content with a charming human element. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Source: KISS

 

Search Engine Ranking is Not The Point – Check These Progress Signals Instead

We all want to show up higher in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). That’s the name of the game. Most clients will see a rise in ranking and love you for it. However, have you really completed your job as a web marketer by improving your client’s key terms positions?

More often than most people think, a rise in ranking does not improve the bottom line. In fact, some clients will report that despite a rise in ranking, an improvement in calls/sales have yet to come.

The truth is that improving ranking does not necessarily improve sales.

Of course we want to improve our ranking, and in order to do this, we take a look at keywords, and their ranking data. However, while there is no question about the value of checking a set of keywords against the SERP and finding out their positioning, this information is simply over rated… and I’ll explain why.

Knowing the rankings for a set of keywords doesn’t really give you an idea of performance, it’s just a number. Not once, but many times I have witnessed keywords with high commerciality and decent search volume entering the performance zone (position 1-5), with little to no improvement. For the experienced readers, this is probably starting to sound familiar.

Improvement can be defined as: ranking increase, additional traffic, more conversions, better CTR, impressions, etc. However, some improvements are only stepping stones to end goals.

We should treat some improvements as signals indicating that we are on the right track, and others as actual success metrics – working towards reaching our goals. With this in mind, I am going to discuss discovering a website’s high ranking keywords and their signals, and more importantly, understanding how to utilize them for perusing success metrics (conversions goals).

Differentiating Signals vs. Success Metrics

Let’s pause for a second…. I know some of you might think that conversions on a website are affected from a range of metrics that sometimes SEO experts have no control of (no budget to improve code/design, bad sales copy, wrong call to action, bad offer all together, etc). So how can goal completions be an indication? To start, you are right! However, even though you still might not be able to reach the full potential of a website due to barriers, you should be able to see some incline with your success metrics, and that’s enough to prove that what you are doing is working. Getting more or less results is probably out of your hands if you don’t have access/resources to improve on-page conversion metrics as part of what you do.

Okay, now going back to signal/success metrics. Here are the metrics I review when promoting a business. I use Ignitur to automate the process, but you can do this on excel as well. Signals are just direction pointers, and the success metrics are what I’m really aiming for:

  • Signal – Impressions
  • Signal – CTR
  • Signal – Traffic
  • Signal – Ranking
  • Success metric – Goal completion

You should know that you might not find all of this data unless you have a PPC campaign in place, which if that isn’t the case, you will need to mine this information somewhere else. My method has helped me rely less on scraped keyword ranking data and more on what’s important to improve my client’s bottom line using Google Webmaster Tools (WMT).

Instead of checking the positioning of a set of keywords I/the client came up with, I compare them to the search terms list in Google Webmaster Tools to see what I’m already ranking for.

Example

Keyword: [Target Keyword]

I’m already ranking for:

  • Best [Target Keyword] in Phoenix AZ
  • Where to find [Target Keyword] in Phoenix
  • Buy [Target Keyword] near 85028
  • [Target Keyword] that sell also Ocean Breeze Orchids
  • Pictures of [Target Keyword]
  • [Target Keyword] (exact match)

You get the idea, right? I compare the core key terms I want to rank for as Phrase Match with what Google indicates I’m already ranking for. Aha moment! You now have a list of terms that your website is showing up for in the SERP that you most likely didn’t know about. You can do the same thing for each core keyword on your list, until you have a long list of keyword versions (and some exact match) of your core ones.

How To Do This Screening in Webmaster Tools?

Download the list of queries from Google Webmaster Tools.

Select ‘Search Traffic’ -> ‘Search Analytics’ -> click ‘Download’ on the bottom. Don’t forget to check all metric options available:

queries-search-analytics-webmaster-tools

Note: this table provides 1000 records. Unless you are an eCommerce store with many products, that should be more than enough. However, and for probably a limited time (until Google takes this option out), Google gives the option to see up to 10,000 search queries if you just click the link ‘Go back to the old search queries report’.

10000-search-queries-webmaster-tools

Next…

Open the excel file and click CTRL F. Input your core keyword, click ‘replace’ -> click ‘options’ -> click ‘format’ -> click ‘fill’ -> choose the color green -> Click ‘ok’ and click ‘Replace All’. Now, all key terms containing your core keyword will be highlighted. Repeat for all keywords. (This works with excel on a PC, not a Mac)

What Do You Do With These Keywords?

The information you just downloaded and sorted has all the signals we talked about above:

  • Signal – Impressions
  • Signal – CTR
  • Signal – Traffic
  • Signal – Ranking

I will talk about the success metric in a little bit…

Actions You Should Take:

  • High ranking + Low CTR/Clicks – Improve meta description
  • High ranking + Low Impressions – Improve page relevancy
  • High CTR + Low Clicks/ Impressions – Make sure your keyword is in the title
  • High Impressions + Low Clicks – Improve page engagement and all relevancy metrics

Any combination of Low + Low means that the work needed is beyond a few tweaks.

When you are done with all content updates, wait for the next few crawls, review and adjust. You now probably see why just checking ranking for a list of keywords might feel like a half-way job. There was no direction on which actions to take and why. Right now you have your signal metrics to give you a clear direction.

Another immediate action you can take to improve your organic presence is using the metrics and actions above. Use the option in WMT to see ‘Pages’ in search metrics:

pages-webmaster-tools

The results will display a table of URLs. Simply try to improve anything ranking on pages 2 to 5 (will show in the table positions 10.1 to 50 in the SERP. These pages have more chances of improving with a few minor tweaks, as opposed to pages 5 and down which indicate that relevancy level need more than a few content changes to bring them up in ranking.

urls-in-webmaster-tools

Why Do I Need to Wait For a Few Crawls?

If you are working on inner pages, you want to make sure you give Google enough time to update its index. Alternatively, you can use the option in WMT ‘Fetch as Google’ in order to expedite this process.

Let’s Go Even Further and Separate Between Brand and Non-Brand Keywords

Simply continue working on the same excel file, but do your searches and sort by company name/ business owner name and color the cells in a different color. In the example below, the non-brand keywords are highlighted in green, and the brand keywords are highlighted in red.

spreadsheet-urls-webmaster-tools

Do I Still Need To Do Keyword Research?

Of course you do! Remember in the movie Stargate when the lab guy explains that for space travel you need six points to define the destination and another one to define the point of origin? (By the way, this is Hollywood misinterpretation – you only need three to define the destination and one for the origin…just like GPS).

Following this example, the core keywords you come up with after your keyword research are your coordinates to the destination. Your origin is the current status of those keywords – the signals I talked about earlier. Without one or the other, there really can’t prove any progress. Sadly, it is common to only check ranking on core keywords without really knowing the other important metrics needed to start moving the spaceship to its destination.

Do I Still Need to Check Ranking?

Not really, however, I found it very difficult to let others see it through this perspective, so in some cases, I still provide this data alongside all the goodies above. It simply keeps everybody happy.

What About the Success Metric?

Success metrics are merely Conversion Goals. This is a whole different topic, but I will still cover some of the essentials. You can bring the horse to the river, but you cannot force it to drink! As an SEO specialist, I feel responsible to bring relevant traffic to my client’s website, as well as conversions, but I cannot force a purchase.

Example #1:
I define a user conversion when a subscriber signed up for his 30-day software trial. It is not my responsibility to convert them from free subscribers to paying clients.

Example #2:
I define a user conversion on a hotel’s website when someone clicked ‘Book Now’. It is not my responsibility to convert them from prospects to vacationers (maybe the offer is bad…).

Example #3:
I define a user conversion when a user fills out a form or calls the company. It is not my responsibility to actually sell their services over the phone.

You are probably asking ‘what about eCommerce websites where conversions are actual sales?’ Excellent point! Well, it really is not different from the examples above. If the client decides to sell car parts 25% above suggested drop-shipping retail value instead of 15%, he will probably have less sales, but if you bring him relevant traffic, you will still be able to show him some improvement. However, it would be smart to define conversion goals from the start that are not actual website sales, where you have less control of. Here are a few ideas:

  • Increase email subscribers
  • Download discount coupon
  • Product searches on the website
  • Create an account
  • Calls (you can use a call tracking number)

To Sum It Up

Use Google WMT search metrics data to improve your SEO results. WMT provides 90 days of data. You can align your testing and tweaking strategy, and make adjustments every quarter according to the trends.

About the Author: Asher Elran is a practical software engineer and a marketing specialist. He is the CEO at Dynamic Search and founder of Web Ethics.

Source: KISS

 

5 Ways to Take Advantage of the Google/Twitter Partnership

Here is what we know: Google and Twitter are partners.
Here is what we don’t know: The impact this will have upon search/social marketing.

In February, Google and Twitter agreed to a partnership that gives Google access to Twitter’s firehose, which is the term for Twitter’s stream of Tweets.

What is Google going to do with this information? The answer seems obvious. They will provide tweets in the SERPs for real time search results, right? After all, Google is a search engine.

Most likely, yes. But the fact is, we simply don’t know. Google is a search engine, but they’ve also made a pretty darn big social media platform, smartphone platform, and operating system among other things. They’re even involved in space travel.

Whatever they plan to do with it, we will probably find out in the next few months. Right now, however, we can prepare.

And what should we do to prepare? Since we don’t know how Google will be applying firehose information to their search algorithm, we must focus on the broader issues of search and social.

This article does not promise the end-all solution, but it is an attempt to help marketers get ready for whatever is coming.

1. Understand the extent of social search

We might as well begin with the basics.

Social and search are merging. This is no longer pie-in-the-sky conjecture. It is the reality of the here-and-now.

Already, social platforms have robust search algorithms built in to them.

Facebook’s innocuous search bar can turn into a powerful social search. An advanced search can produce surprisingly focused results. I can even find friends who aren’t my friends.

facebook-advanced-friend-search

Twitter’s own advanced search provides even more flexibility. Twitter search can produce results with positive emotion, negative emotion, or questions.

twitter-advanced-search

For Google users who are logged in, Google already returns Google+ results, which includes detailed contact information on users.

When I search for the name of someone in my Google+ circles, I get proprietary results drawn directly from my personal network.

google-circles-search

With Google and Twitter’s tighter relationship, we can now expect the existing search power of Google applied to Twitter in new and surprising ways.

Social media professionals should understand how search works, both from a social perspective and from a search engine perspective. Having an understanding of search will enable social media strategists to further advance the findability of their brands and specific social media campaigns.

Digital marketing professionals have long struggled with identity crisis, trying to determine how broad or deep they should be. Those who prefer specialized roles tend to clash with those who are digital marketing jack-of-all-trades. SEOs are told that they aren’t actually SEOs, and marketers and agencies alike are trying to shape up into a T.

Whether you’re a search professional or a social professional, you should realize that the boundaries between the two are blurred. Search professionals should understand how social affects their role. Social professionals should realize the impact of search upon their role.

Both must acknowledge that the lines of the playing field are being redrawn in new and startling ways.

2. Employ an ongoing social strategy

Admittedly, this is a broad application, but it’s one that I must insist on.

Twitter and Google’s partnership sends a clarion call to the digital marketing world: Social matters. Big time.

Brands — from enormous companies to individual personalities — must have a social presence. But social presence isn’t enough.

It’s now necessary to have an ongoing methodology for advancing a social media agenda.

In the early days of the web, a business thought that it was doing a good job simply by having a website. Websites were digital placeholders.

Then around 2009 we realized that brands needed to produce content on a regular basis! The blog boom was born.

benefits-of-blogging-for-companies-traffic
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Greater indexation, more pages, more visitors, more leads, more revenue — good things came to those who blogged.

We’re in a similar situation with social. A company that lacks a consistent output of social content isn’t going to last in the world of social.

As Google and Twitter merge their vast user bases and algorithmic technology, we’re going to see the importance of real time social search results.

Let me be very clear: Tweet regularly. Tweet often. Tweet a lot.

Keep your social output consistent and regular. Presumably, the better your posting velocity, the more likely you are to gain the right kind of attention and traffic.

3. Learn hashtag strategy, and use hashtags regularly

Hashtags will become more important than ever.

It’s likely that hashtags will help to drive search queries and Google’s search results. This is, admittedly, conjecture, but it seems likely that if tweets are part of the search results, then hashtagged terms within those tweets will also be searchable and visible.

It’s not a leap of logic to assume that any hashtagged queries will also produce additional Google results.

How can we be so sure? For one, Google already does this. Hashtagged queries get social results:

semrush-hashtag-google-search-results

The top result for #semrushchat is a Twitter page with that hashtag. SEMRush hosts Twitter chats, so the hashtag #semrushchat has plenty of action, images, and updates.

semrush-hashtag-twitter-results

Hashtags are the new keywords — not just for social activity, but search activity, too.

Since all the major social platforms use hashtags, Google search has been forced to adapt.

Now, your brand must adapt, too. Creating unique hashtags and capitalizing on the use of those hashtags will put you in a strong position to gain additional visibility and exposure s Google rolls out the application of their Twitter partnership.

For a quick visual summary of hashtags, check out this hashtag infographic.

4. Participate in trending topics

Twitter loves its Trends.

Users love it, too. Twitter trends are a way to discover what’s hot on Twitter. Trends can easily explode into worldwide sensations.

the-dress-twitter-trending

As Google jumps into the game, Trends will become even more significant in their real time search application.

Google can ascertain what topics are trending, but not with the same instantaneous algorithmically-powered accuracy that Twitter has.

A Googled trending hashtag can’t compete with Twitter’s live stream.

twitter-san-francisco-trends

A Google query for #birdbands will give you this…

hastag-bird-bands-google-results

You get the idea that #birdbands is trending, but you don’t know why — not at a glance anyway.

Twitter’s live stream, however, shows you this…

birdbands-twitter-hashtag-live-stream

Searching on Google means that you won’t get the joke at first. Searching on Twitter gives you complete understanding.

As Twitter and Google cozy up, Trends will be bigger and better than before. Twitter’s recent mobile changes mean that trends are more apparent and easier to find. As Google brings these trends into search visibility, we can expect it to improve even more.

5. Measure, track, and adapt

It will be interesting to see how the Google and Twitter partnership will affect the impact and ROI of social media.

In light of the coming change, keep close tabs on your social media record keeping. Be sure to align your social media efforts with your company goals. To this end, it will be helpful to inform your company’s search marketing team of the efforts.

Conclusion

My final recommendation is perhaps the most significant, but also the most obvious.

Keep using Twitter. If Twitter is partnering with the king of search, there is no way that the 14-character social media platform is on the decline.

This is the perfect opportunity to beef up your Twitter profiles, ramp up your tweet velocity, and strengthen your strategy.

Search and social are finally getting together, and it can only mean good things for social media marketing.

What do you think will be the biggest impact of the Google/Twitter partnership?

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

Source: KISS

 

How to Succeed at The Most Critical Point in SaaS Sales

If you’re like any other SaaS marketing maven, you want to drive more sales in the best way possible.

And if you’ve given it any thought, you realize the epochal importance of the free trial.

Everything about the free trial is important. I would argue that the free trial is the most critical phase in SaaS sales. Most SaaS sales models place an enormous amount of emphasis on the trial, because, taken broadly, it’s the only marketing method that makes sense.

But that’s where a certain amount of distraction sets in. We obsess over all things free trial, completely missing the whole point of the trial — to get users to use the product!

My goal in this article is to clear the table on the free trial period, and get our heads screwed on right so we can understand how to capitalize on the most important point in SaaS sales.

Let’s Describe What’s Going on Here

Most SaaS sales processes go like this, generally:

  1. Customer is aware of a need.
  2. Customer considers alternatives.
  3. Customer zeroes in on your product.
  4. Customer starts a free trial.
  5. Customer converts into a customer.

At point four in the list above, the customer is already deep in the funnel. The funnel diagram included below expands it a bit. You can see that the customer is there — starting the trial. They have just a couple microsteps to go until they are a full customer.

marketing-funnel-6-phases
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Let’s look at another diagram of this point. This time, I want you to see just how critical it is based on what comes after the purchase point.

customer-engagement-funnel

At the nexus of those two triangles is the transition from free trial to paying customer. You can’t experience the benefits without moving them on from the active use/free trial phase.

And that’s where we need to focus on — getting the customer over the hump of free trial and into the utopia of a closed deal.

Understand What Motivated the Customer to Begin With

One of the best ways to figure out how to get the customer to buy for good is to figure out why they started the trial to begin with.

Let me explain.

Why is a customer going to buy your product? Think through the answer, because this is kind of the whole point of your SaaS, right? What does the customer want to achieve, do, or experience?

That’s the reason why your customer started a free trial. The motivation should be no different.

If you are able to satisfy the customer’s need during the temporary trial, then you can compel them to remain a customer by continuing to satisfy them in the future. SaaS isn’t a one-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing process of serving the customer.

The cause for conversion into free trial and the motivation for conversion into a full customer are one and the same. Problem: solved.

Use the customer’s free trial motivation as the tool to drive engagement beyond the trial.

Map Your Customer Journey

To drive further into the reasons and motivations for attracting and retaining customers, do yourself the service of mapping the customer journey.

customer-journey-model
Source

Why? Because you’re going to experience an epiphany of sorts. Every customer is going to follow a path that takes them from awareness to completion.

One of the most valuable insights from a customer journey map is that you will find out what customers do and see when they sign up for a free trial. You’ll discover whether it’s encouraging or demotivating. You’ll learn what obstacles they may experience when they move through the process.

Look at it From a Long-Term Perspective

Pictures or diagrams are so much better at explaining things than I am. So, here’s what I want you to do. Look at this diagram for at least ten seconds.

revenue-comes-from-upsells-and-renewals
Source

What do you see? I see that you’re going to gain 5-30% of a customer’s revenue at the initial sale point. I see that a whopping 70-95% of the revenue is going to come a week, a month, or a year down the road.

What does this tell you?

  • To me that says that I need to take a long term view. Customers don’t prove their maximum value until some time has passed.
  • It also tells me that customer retention is killer.
  • Finally, it tells me that none of that revenue will materialize unless I close the sale. Forget 95%. I just need 5% right now!

Even a longview of sales informs me that this is a critical point. So let’s get into some of the tactics.

Get a Perspective On Your Goal: Engagement

If you’re honest for a second, you’ll realize that you can’t make the customer do anything. You can, however, coax them to do something.

That most important “thing” is called engagement.

Engagement can be a slippery term, so let me explain what I mean by it. I agree with Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures who explained that “Engagement is when your customer is realizing value from your SaaS.”

You see, the customer will only want to buy the SaaS when she actually experiences the value that it can provide. Engagement happens many times in multiple scenarios, but it all boils down to the same experience — value for the customer.

In the critical pre-purchase stage, you must drive engagement. The entire free trial period should be designed around engagement — getting the customer to smell, taste, and feel the value of the product.

Without engagement, there will be no purchase.

Know What You Want the Customer To Do

Engagement is meaningless unless you actually understand what action causes engagement.

A customer can’t realize value from the SaaS unless he is doing something with the SaaS.

Doing what? What do you want the customer to do? That depends on your product and your customer.

For Mention.com, as an example, that could be compelling their customer to create an online alert. So, what does Mention.com do with their free trial? They force customers to engage.

The word force sounds all cruel and violent, but it’s actually quite kind and compassionate. Why? Because they want their customer to actually experience the value of the product right from the get-go. There’s no better way to do so than to engage and launch the trial simultaneously.

Here’s how they do it:

mention-trial-engagement

Now, let’s talk about that little engagement action.

Make Your Customer Do the Engagement Action

Once you’ve decided what you want the customer to do, it’s time to make them do it. I used the word force in the preceding point. To divest the term of its negative connotations, let me provide a more cohesive set of suggestions around this concept.

Emphasize This Action in Your Email Marketing

Email message play a critical role in this critical point in sales. How you say it matters. So how should you say it? Beg, wheedle, whine?

No. Command them. Get them to do the action you’ve selected. Here’s an example of such an email. This email sample comes from Autosend.io, which provides an upsell schedule dashboard for SaaS. They want their trial lead to first log in. Makes sense.

emphasize-action-email-example
Source

Put Dependencies on That Action

What do I mean by this? Show the customer that they will only experience the usefulness of the software if they do the specific action.

Mint.com compels users to add a bill or an account. These two actions are presumably Mint’s engagement action, which will draw the user in to experience the value of the software.

get-started-two-options
It’s kind of like a game. The user has to unlock the next level, so she needs to do a certain action.

Reward the Action

When the user does that action, give them a pat on the back. They’ve earned it. By applauding their action, you can drive them deeper into the experience and engagement of the SaaS.

Remember, it’s all about action. The user needs to do.

Trial users who stay active are more likely to convert. Notice how Totango sketches out the condition. Trial users are 4x more likely to convert when they are using the SaaS for three days. The opposite holds true, too. A user who cancels is a user who’s not using the SaaS.

totango-customer-analysis
Source

By encouraging activity through a variety of methods, you will improve your success at engagement and sales.

Be Sure to Send a Welcome Email Right Away

According to MIT and InsideSales, the odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the first hour. You need to be calling them within an hour of them becoming a lead. If you don’t, the chances that you’ll connect with them drastically decrease.

And you should automatically email the free trial user immediately.

The customer doesn’t know what to do after they start the trial. You have to tell them. The way you do that is by sending them an email.

What you say in that email is just as important. There’s a misconception that you need to send them an elaborate letter, complete with details, metrics, motivations, instructions, and all the other things that make for a warm-and-fuzzy welcome experience.

Not quite. The shorter your email, the better.

Here’s an example of a free trial expiration email that I received.

free-trial-expiration-email

Am I going to read that? No. It’s way too long.

Will I read a short message like this?

great-trial-expiration-email-uberflip
Yes.

Short messages are important. You have several days and multiple emails to communicate with the customer – introduction, action, motivation, etc. The free trial is a process and a sequence, but you don’t need to give them every bit of information all at once.

Shorten that email. No, shorter. Shorter…There.

Send Them More Emails

Email is the communication method of choice for the vast majority of SaaS providers. Use email frequently in order to give the user all the information that they need to…

  • Start using the SaaS.
  • Complete the engagement action.
  • Sign up for the product.
  • Your emails should follow a logical series of actions and activities that push the customer to full conversion.

Conclusion

The better you get at converting customers past the free trial, the better you’ll get at SaaS marketing as a whole.

Once you bring customers past the free trial, you can enjoy the massive revenue opportunities, upsells, retention, and awesomeness that follows.

But first, concentrate on getting past that initial hump.

What have you discovered as the best method for converting trial users into full customers?

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

Source: KISS

 

The Top 3 Ways to Get Your SaaS Customers to Open Your Emails

Quick poll question: How many of you have signed up for a free software trial and then cancelled it after getting the welcome email?

Most people have at least once. Mainly because the welcome email was just so awful that there’s no way the software could have been good, right? For SaaS companies, this can be a big problem. Emails are the lifeblood of many SaaS providers, so losing subscribers (and by extension leads and customers) can be the difference between hitting a sales target and not.

Let’s take a look at the top 3 ways you can craft better welcome emails for your SaaS customers.

1. Clear & Tidy Headlines

Recipients know what they’re getting, so don’t worry about cluttering up the headline of the email. It sets up the expectation with customers that you’ll give them what you say you’re giving them. The welcome email is truly a welcome email, no more, no less.

What to try: A simple “Welcome to [company name]”.

Example: Vero

Vero, an email marketing software company, does exactly that in their first email after signing up to their blog. The subject line is “Welcome to the Vero blog!” Recipients are reminded about what they signed up for (updates from the blog), who it’s from (Vero), and that it’s the first email from Vero (the “welcome” is a pretty big sign.)

vero-welcome-email
Source

2. Clear CTAs Throughout the Email

Many welcome emails just repeat information or contain so many links that readers stop reading after the first couple of lines.

What to try: A single CTA in your welcome email.

Next time, try adding a link for readers to log in to their new account, or a reminder about a feature that solves a pain point for the reader, just keep it simple.

For example, if it’s a free trial of collaboration SaaS software, a CTA to “add coworkers to your account” may suffice.

Example: Vero

You may have noticed that Vero’s welcome email goes against this idea and has a few CTAs in it. But they’re all very simple ones that readers can choose to see or ignore.

  1. The first CTA is a link to Vero’s About Us page. It’s hyperlinked so readers can check out the page, or continue reading.
  2. The second CTA is a list of some of the blog’s more practical posts. Again, they’re linked very simply, and the reader can choose to read them now or save them for later.
  3. The third and final CTA is a set of email addresses readers can send messages to if they have immediate feedback.

Sure, there are three CTAs in the single email, but they’re all pretty simple ones, which is the key thing to keep in mind in your welcome emails.

vero-email-ctas
Source

Example: Tictail

Here’s a better example of the one CTA per welcome email – It’s from Tictail, another ecommerce software solution. After signing up , readers are invited to visit their dashboard right away. Simple and clean, with good visuals to invite readers to click it.

tictail-welcome-emails
Source

3. Consistent Look and Feel

To avoid the spam filter of today’s email accounts, it’s important to craft a welcome email that doesn’t look like spam. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore your current branding to the point that the recipient doesn’t know who you are and why you’re in their inbox.

What to do: Colors, logos, fonts, company name, etc. all should reflect what’s on your website right now. Ensure that someone’s always looking at your emails whenever you change your branding.

Example: Buffer

Buffer does a great job in their welcome email, using their logo, font, and colors really well.
Here’s their main website:

buffer-homepage

And here’s their welcome email:

buffer-welcome-email
Source

Example: Shopify

Shopify’s welcome email does the same as Buffer, but also includes their quirky, casual tone they use with their audience, who are mainly entrepreneurs.

Here’s their main website:

shopify-homepage-2015

And here’s their welcome email:

shopify-welcome-email

Bonus Tip: Delay Sending That First Email

You’ve probably got your email signup form hooked into software that sends out responses as soon as someone signs up, right? You want to make sure that the lead doesn’t go cold. Yet doing so gives off a negative impression of your SaaS company.

Why? Because it just screams “automated email”. Especially if you’re located in a different time zone. There’s just no way that you’d be sending a personalized email at 3am your time.

What to try/do: Send out a quick email right away that acknowledges the signup and that’s it. Just a short “Thanks for subscribing. Look for our welcome email in your inbox shortly” kind of message. Then, send your welcome message during YOUR business hours [Author’s note: link this to the other article I submitted on personalizing emails], regardless of where the customer is located.

You’ll give the appearance of having someone manually composing and/or sending the email to the customer, even though it’s another automated email. Your SaaS customer’s perception of you goes up, increasing their chances of converting into a long-term paying customer. (Even if they really know that the welcome email is coming from an automated system, it gives the appearance that it’s not, which they like – actually, we all like it. That’s why personalized emails do better than generic ones.)

Conclusion

Welcome emails are a tricky thing to do well. Some SaaS companies cram them so full of information that customers run away immediately. The successful companies welcome them simply and directly, and keep them as customers by sending out a well -written and –timed email that provides useful information to them.

Use these four tips to set up better welcome emails for your SaaS customers. You’ll look more professional, appear more successful, and earn a spot on their vendor shortlist more often.

About the Author: Julia Borgini helps Geeks sell their stuff. A self-proclaimed Geek & writer, she works with B2B technology & sports companies, creating helpful content & copy for their lead generation and content marketing programs. Follow her on Twitter @spacebarpress to see what she’s writing about now.

Source: KISS

 

Tackle Marketing Automation to Drive Conversions

According to Aberdeen Group’s research study, “companies using marketing automation receive 53 percent higher conversion rates than non-users and an annualized revenue growth rate 3.1 percent higher than non-users.” Businesses notice the value of this technology and are taking advantage of its benefits to deploy successful campaigns.

Marketing automation helps companies increase workplace productivity by effectively eliminating repetitive manual processes with an automated solution-oriented substitution. Then, human error becomes less of an issue with these routine tasks.

Moreover, Gartner Research “predicts by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationships directly with companies without human interaction.” Thus, requiring efficiency in how we interact with our prospective clients online.

Marketing automation strengthens customer relationships, scales marketing campaigns, and gives businesses a competitive advantage. It makes it easy to integrate lead generation efforts to create a manageable sales cycle.

Save your company time and resources by automating lead nurturing programs and creating convenient drip marketing campaigns. Marketing automation does the habitual tasks, while your marketing and sales team can focus on more complicated projects.

Let’s explore the benefits of marketing automation, the strategies you can implement, and the results achieved from forward-thinking companies.

The Benefits

Based on the study “Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success,” 91% of successful users believe that marketing automation is “very important” to the general success of their marketing.

Companies perceive more relevant communication to be one of the main benefits of marketing automation, followed by increased customer engagement and more timely communication.

econsultancy-marketing-automation-benefits
Source

Marketing automation is similar to a nerve center, “combining the management of marketing efforts and sales across all channels from lead to close.”

Back in the day, a customer representative’s job duties included following up with all leads that entered the sales system. Now, marketing automation software can identify leads that are qualified and ready to be approached by the sales team.

This technology eliminates the time spent on unqualified leads. It brings valuable insight to help your team members understand the needs and wants of the customer. How did they learn about your services? How did they land on your website? Which email newsletters have they subscribed to?

Here are the results of a March 2014 study by Regalix, reporting a staggering percentage of B2B marketers experiencing improved lead management and nurturing from marketing automation:

Benefits-of-MA-emarketer
Source

Ever desired to align your sales and marketing goals? Well, here’s your opportunity. Marketing automation makes it easier for your teams to collaborate and focus on the customer life cycle.

As a result, you can create targeted buyer personas, content, and programs, leading to a more effective process for closing sales. If your desire is to maximize conversions through cross-selling and upselling opportunities, marketing automation reports offer analysis of customer data.

When customers are more informed–receiving the right information at the right times–they are more likely to spend more. Businesses mastering this process “generate 50% more sales-ready leads…[and] at a 33% lower cost per lead.” Therefore, companies receive higher revenues, while cutting marketing overhead costs.

Just because customers don’t purchase today, doesn’t mean they won’t ever buy your product or service tomorrow. Let marketing automation revitalize previous leads that have gone inactive. Through retargeting email campaigns, automation can periodically send informative content to leads that previously went cold.

The Strategy

Marketing automation streamlines your marketing activities, in order to turn visitors into loyal buyers. From lead generation to sales-ready leads, marketing automation equips you to grow your business. Here’s an infographic that cleverly explains the process:

marketing-automation-infographic-explained
Source

LinkedIn highlighted a list of the hottest skills in 2014, where statistical analysis led the pack and business intelligence held the sixth spot. Marketing campaigns rely on these talents to gain insight on user persona. Without market research and real-time prospect tracking, we wouldn’t gain accurate information to customize the customer’s buying journey.

Learn what your customers are clicking on. Improve your engagement rates by building upon what’s already working in your marketing strategy. Custom redirects let your employees see which links are receiving the most love and which ones are being ignored. Use this data to develop content and campaigns that will resonate with your prospective buyers.

One of the most effective marketing strategies is to create and deliver personalized experiences to customers. Personalization involves really getting to know your customer behaviors to execute content that is relevant and meets your client’s preferred timing and mode of communication.

To create effective, personalized follow-up sequences, understand the specific interests of your customer and the customer’s stage in the buying process.

sequences-active-campaign
Source

Drip campaigns let you set up a series of timely emails to your audience. Case studies reveal a 98% conversion rate from these types of campaigns. These targeted communications educate your clients about product benefits and features, welcome incoming customers, and warm up new leads.

Plus, drip campaigns can assist with long sales lead-times. You can stay in regular contact with prospective clients. Here’s an example email I received in my personal inbox from a SaaS business:

Shayla-Email-drip-campaign

When setting up your drip campaign, remember to measure engagement and know the best time to engage directly. Lead scoring can help you automate the perfect time to do so.

Investing in analytics is the best marketing automation strategy to execute. When you implement marketing plans, “knowledge and information ensure your adoption of the right approach, right channel, and better results.”

Marketing automation software serves specific business purposes. Research companies to see how they can meet your company’s needs. Here are a few suggestions:

  • Hubspot
  • Marketo
  • Pardot
  • Act-On

The Results

When executing your marketing automation strategy, remember that success takes time. Don’t expect a huge jump in productivity in one week. Technology doesn’t automatically mean success. How your team effectively uses the software will produce the results.

Cincom Systems

Cincom Systems is an enterprise software solutions company. It’s challenge was identifying newsletter subscribers in the sales process.

With the help of Eloqua, Cincom launched a five-phase, behavior-based content campaign.

Phase 1: When a newsletter subscriber clicked through to an article, Eloqua would grab their information and begin to track them.

Phase 2: Tag each article by subject matter. Then, use these tags as signals that subscribers may – or may not be – interested in Cincom.

Phase 3: Conduct content audits that analyzed Cincom’s newsletters, website, blogs, ebooks and podcasts to look at what content worked best for their readers.

Phase 4: Gain a better picture of their readers through progressive profiling.

Phase 5: Pursue those leads based on the information that had been gathered.

Look at the results:

  • 256% improvement in the campaign open rate.
  • 1941% increase in the click-to-open rate.
  • 1513 potential opportunities identified.
  • An average of 18 new sales leads every week.

Paper Style

Paper Style offers personalized invitations and announcements for special occasions. The company’s open and click-through rates suffered because they were sending the same message to visitors, despite their demographic or specific interests.

SilverPop helped walk Paper Style through segmentation of the wedding planning process. First, they created a typical timeline of a bride’s buying behavior. For example, assuming brides would more likely buy wedding invitations before thank you cards.

Once a bride entered their sales funnel, a series of messages were sent to identify whether the person was a bride or a friend of the bride. This simple question determined which sequence of emails the individual would receive.

wedding-flow-chart-funnel
Source

Changing from a generic newsletter to personalized marketing automation produced amazing results for Paper Style. Their open rates increased by 244%, email click rates by 161%, and their revenue per mailing increased by 330%.

Strengthen Your Customer Relationships

Marketing automation works to automate your communication programs. It integrates key elements of marketing into one system. Making it easier to create timely, structured campaigns with all of your prospects.

Now, your marketing and sales teams can automate and optimize your programs from initial contact through the entire sales process.

Prioritize your outreach. Streamline the process. Boost conversions with marketing automation.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, the law and social responsibility. She inspires a new breed of innovative attorneys at Hearsay Marketing. Connect with her on Twitter: @shaylaprice

Source: KISS

 

5 Ways to Become a Better Headline Writer

Article headlines make the Internet go round.

Ask any marketer, any writer, any reader, anyone. They’ll tell you: Article headlines are super important.

How important, really, are headlines? Experience, data, and history all point to the fact that headlines are the single most important component of an article, bar none. You’ve heard the statistics repeated ad nauseum — 80% read the headline, 20% read the article, ten seconds to gain someone’s attention, and all the other scary and data-driven statistics.

how-quickly-people-leave-webpages
Source

Recognize this? I thought so.

You know all this. More relevant to you is your own experience with headlines. Why are you even reading this paragraph right now, at this point in the space/time continuum of your mortal existence?

You were beckoned by the headline, formula-driven and hackneyed as it was, right?

Even though we’re Buzzfed up, Upworthyized, Viralnovaed, and Clickholed out of our minds, we can’t shake off this all-important reality: Headlines are freaking important.

In fact, the word “important” isn’t strong enough.

I’ve summed up the X ways that are guaranteed to turn you into a better headline writer. No matter who you are, what language you speak, or your final grade in composition class, you can develop white-hot skills in headline creation. Starting now.

Once you reach this level of awesome, you’ll reap the rewards in traffic, audience, readership, engagement, conversions, and, hey, even feeling really good about yourself.

1. Know Your Audience

I hate to lead off with a boring one, but it’s critical. You have to know your audience.

Let me give you an example to explain what I mean.

Look at this headline: “Neuropeptide Y—a novel brain peptide with structural similarities to peptide YY and pancreatic polypeptide.”

nature-neuropeptide-headline

Is that not magnetic? Did it not capture your attention in two seconds? Will you not read the entirety of the article with rapt attention and owl-like eyes?

You might find this headline uncontrollably entrancing if you are a peptide researcher, are a neurobiologist, are K. Tatemoto, or have a side hustle researching pancreatic peptides.

This headline might just be the most electrifying headline in the whole world. Why? Because it could be exactly what some people are interested in. A good headline is relevant to the audience.

Get it? Okay, now, here’s another example: “He Thought He Just Found A Regular Fish, But When He Looked Closer, He Couldn’t Believe It.”

regular-fish-shock-and-awe-headline

Is that appealing? Absolutely. It has a wider appeal than polypeptides, which is cool, because ViralNova isn’t concerned about targeting a narrow slice of the human population. They are concerned with getting as many eyeballs on their content as possible. Who wouldn’t want to find out about a guy who couldn’t believe it when he thought he just found a regular fish?

What is the difference between the peptide headline and the mind-blowing fish headline?

Audience.

It all comes down to audience. The Nature Science Journal has identified the audience that they want to attract (scientists), and ViralNova has identified the audience that they want to attract (warm bodies with a proclivity for clicking).

The right headline is only the right headline for the right audience. (Yes, I used the word “right” three times in that sentence, and I’m not apologizing.)

So, what’s the takeaway for you who desire to be a better headline writer?

Know your audience.

Once you figure it out who your audience is, really and deeply, and discover what they want, you can create the best headline for them. A good headline is only as good as it is relevant to your audience.

2. Practice

You only get better at something by doing it. A lot.

Improvement gurus call it deliberate practice or DP. Why is Kobe Bryant so good at basketball? How did Misty Copeland become a star ballerina?

Talent is overrated. Practice is everything. It’s no different with writing headlines. You’ve got to do it again, and again, and again, and again to the power of 100.

Sims Wyeth, an Inc. contributor explains, “to get better at almost anything” you have to practice. That practice, deliberate practice to be precise, “consists of endless repetition and excruciating boredom.”

Did you get that? Endless repetition. Excruciating boredom. Getting better at headline writing is an attractive destination, but the path to get there is agonizing. You’re not going to love it. You’re going to loathe it.

Coschedule recommends writing at least 25 headlines per topic/article in order to come up with the best one. After you come up with 25, you eliminate over half, narrow it down to the best five, and poll your friends on the best of the survivors.

25 headlines is a lot of headlines. But it’s not just the number that is important. It’s the practice that goes into writing headline after headline after headline.

Practicing writing headlines produces perfect headlines.

3. Follow Patterns

I’m skeptical of formula-driven headlines. How many “things you didn’t know,” and “7 ways” (oops), and “you’re doing it wrong” articles can a single human being take in during a single lifetime?

But here’s the thing. Headline formulas and patterns become formulas and patterns because of their proven past success. Even though you’ve already read eighteen “how-to” articles and nine list posts today, you’ll probably give in and read another six or so before 5pm.

For example, Brian Clark of Copyblogger wrote an article a while back called “10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work.” His headline? It worked.

And his formulas? Heck, they work, too!

One of the reasons why they work is because they are psychologically appealing (more on that later) and audience specific.

Let me show you one of Clark’s formulas as an example.

Formula: Here is a Method That is Helping [blank] to [blank]

The title here is ready to be tailored to a specific audience. Here are Clark’s three examples with my description of the intended audience.

Here is a Method That is Helping Homeowners Save Hundreds on Insurance
Audience: Homeowners who want to save money

Here is a Method That is Helping Children Learn to Read Sooner
Audience: Parents and child educators

Here is a Method That is Helping Bloggers Write Better Post Titles
Audience: You

The formula-driven technique is only as effective as the titles are relevant to the audience. Go back to point number one and read it again if you’re not entirely clear on this concept.

If all else fails and you simply cannot come up with a good headline, use a formula. They’re like training wheels. The more you write, the better you’ll get. And then you can branch out on your own.

4. Split Test

Split testing is the key to unlocking the potential of your website. I test everything. Images, kerning, headlines, post length, social media frequency, load time, navigation changes — everything.

Why? Because split testing produces improvements.

If you aren’t split testing your headlines, you’re missing out on a major source of knowledge. The better you know how your headlines perform, the greater ability you possess to produce killer headlines.

Let’s say you produce a headline for an article, publish the article, and it gets shared and liked. Good. But what if you had written a different headline? Would it have gotten more shares and more likes? You won’t know unless you test.

In a study released by Unbounce, one website tested three headlines, leading them to discover the winning headline with a 41% boost in conversions.

headline-ab-test-winners-losers

Another single headline change produced a 68% higher CTR.

headline-test-68-percent-higher-ctrSources for both images

Testing is a scientifically sound and rigorous method of determining the actual best headlines. By running these tests and uncovering the comparative success of your headlines, you can’t help but get better.

A less scientific way to test your headlines is with simple polls. When you come up with a series of headlines, send them to your colleagues and let them vote on which one they think is best. Although it’s not quite as sophisticated as running a split test, you’ll still be able to learn what best resonates with people.

By polling and testing, you overcome one of the greatest roadblocks to writing effective headlines: Your own flawed assumptions. Assumptions are like a rut. You get stuck in it, don’t know you’re in it, and your conversions and clickthroughs are dying as a result.

Kick yourself out of the rut with a little good old-fashioned testing, and you’ll race lightyears ahead in your headline creation skill.

5. Study Human Psychology

This final point sounds a bit weird, but it’s incredibly effective.

Human psychology is the study of the mind — how it works, how it is motivated, how it processes information, etc. By unlocking a few common thinking methods, cognitive biases, and tendencies, you will be able to learn powerful ways of writing headlines that people deeply crave on an elemental level.

For example, are you aware of the self-reference effect? According to the self-reference effect, the human mind interprets events and experiences in a different way if the information is related somehow to themselves. Memory works better when the information being remembered is related to the self.

When this mental effect is applied to headline creation, it lets us know that we need to relate the headlines to the audience. More specifically, the self-reference effect informs us that using the word “you” or equivalents in a headline may improve the memorability and attractiveness of a particular headline.

There’s no reason why issues like the self-reference effect should be locked away in volumes of peer-reviewed cognitive neuroscience medical journals. You should be using such knowledge to enhance your own article titles.

Conclusion

Becoming a better headline writer is the good life. When you can unleash great headlines with skill and ease, everything in online marketing gets better. Conversions. Engagement. Clickthroughs. Shares. Traffic.

It’s all there.

“Getting better,” however, isn’t an accident. It requires intentional and sometimes mind-numbing effort. Remember the whole “endless repetition and excruciating boredom” bit? Yeah, it’s going to feel like that sometimes.

Don’t stop. Success is in the offing. Let’s go make headlines that turn heads.

How have you improved your ability to write great headlines?

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

Source: KISS

 

Is Your Winning Variation Actually Leading to More Cancellations? How to Use Data to Find Out

Imagine this: you just found a huge win on an A/B test. Your variation doubled signups over the original. So you launch your variant to 100% of visitors. Pop the cork! Here come the signups.

Fast forward six months, and you have a surge in cancellations. Your customer support team can’t figure it out, and there have been no major changes in your product. You are left puzzled and frustrated.

Then you realize something. For the past six months, people have been signing up through the variant. Could this be the cause of the cancellations? If you use Kissmetrics, you can get the answer.

Identifying Whether a Variant Led to More Cancellations

Using Kissmetrics, you can find out if an A/B test that initially delivered more signups ultimately led to more cancellations. It doesn’t matter if the test was six months ago. You can still go back retroactively and see how the test performed and whether the variation brought more cancellations. Here’s how we do it.

The Funnel Report

A funnel report is used to track how many people move from one step of your website to the next. Marketers traditionally use a funnel report to see where visitors are dropping off in their path to purchase.

But we can use the Kissmetrics Funnel Report for other purposes, too. One of them is to see which test variation led to more cancellations. To do this, we’ll create a funnel for just two steps – signed up and cancellation. When you use Kissmetrics, you may name your events a little differently, but if you’re a SaaS company, you’ll need to know when people sign up and when they cancel.

Here’s how our funnel looks:

kissmetrics-funnel-report-cancellations

During our selected time range, we had 11,794 signups. Of those 11,794, nearly 9,300 canceled. To see how each variant performed, we’ll have to segment our traffic. “Segment” is a fancy, analytical way of saying “group.” So if you came to our site and saw the variant, you’d be put in the variant group/segment.

Here’s the funnel, segmented by the A/B test:

ab-test-segmented-cancellations-kissmetrics

We can ignore “None.” These are people who were not in the A/B Test. They didn’t see the variant or the original.

Underneath “None” are our A/B test pages. We have our variant and the original. The variant page generated 125 signups, while the original delivered 111 signups. Also, the variant delivered a much smaller percentage of cancellations.

Before we can say the variant is a winner, we’ll need to make sure this data is statistically significant. We can use the A/B test significance calculator to get this data. Here’s how it looks:

ab-test-significance-calculator

On the right, we see that this data is statistically significant. We can move forward with full confidence knowing that the variant page is the real winner. Customers who saw this page will be less likely to cancel later on down the road.

A Word of Caution

While this data is valuable, it’s important to be careful with the conclusions you reach.

While the original/variant page did lead to more cancellations and it is statistically significant, can we be 100% no-doubt-about-it absolutely sure that this is the reason more people canceled? No, we cannot. Correlation is not causation. It could just be happenstance that those shown the original/variant page canceled at a higher rate than those shown the variant/original – and the original/variant page should not be blamed.

This also doesn’t mean the data is worthless. Perhaps the original/variant page made a promise that the product couldn’t live up to. Or maybe the original/variant page attracted the wrong audience. To find this out, we can collect data from our canceled customers and see if we find trends. If not, it may just be coincidence.

We can find the canceled customers in Kissmetrics. Here’s how:

view-people-in-step-kissmetrics-funnel-report

We’ll click to view the people in the “Subscription canceled” step and view the people in the variant segment. From there, we’ll get our list of people, and we can contact them to learn why they canceled.

Track Tests with the A/B Test Report

Kissmetrics has a report that tracks your A/B tests. It’s called the A/B Test Report, and it has some unique features.

This report does not create tests for you. You can still use Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce, etc. for that. It does track the test, report the results, and import the data into your Kissmetrics account. There are a few additional benefits of using this report:

  • The statistical significance calculator is built in. You’ll see the amount of data that came in, and the Report will draw a conclusion for you (e.g., variant beat original). Its calculator will ensure the results are statistically significant, which can reduce the odds of false positives.
  • You can see how an A/B Test impacts any part of your funnel. Want to see how a homepage headline test impacts signups? No problem, just set “signups” as your conversion event. You aren’t limited to testing only to the next conversion step.

Here’s how the report looks:

view-people-in-step-kissmetrics-funnel-report

You’ll get multiple metrics for each variant, and even be able to see every person in each variant.

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

Get the Whole Picture with Kissmetrics

It would be impossible to get this kind of data if you weren’t using a tool like Kissmetrics.

A benefit to using a people-tracking platform like Kissmetrics is that each visitor to your site is recorded as what they are – a person, not a session. This makes your data accurate.

If you’re running an A/B test, each person gets tagged with the pages they saw, and you’ll be able to go back and see which pages/steps they went through, as we just did. With Kissmetrics, you can see the entire customer journey, from when the prospect first visited (and which variant they saw) to the customer’s most recent action. As long as you have the tracking in place, you can get the important data you need.

To see how Kissmetrics can benefit your marketing, signup for a personal demo today. To get right into it, you can signup for a 14-day Kissmetrics trial.

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

Source: KISS

 

Stories are Told, Not Programmed: 3 Keys to Marketing Your SaaS Product to Human Beings

SaaS companies are quite literally changing the face of business. Seemingly every day new tech-driven solutions are challenging the status quo of the ways business communicate and share information.

While new developments in technology are obviously crucial to progress in any industry, what some SaaS companies fail to do is remember the single most crucial shared characteristic of their audience: they’re human.

Not capitalizing on the imagination of your audience is like trying to fix your printer by having a conversation with it. It simply isn’t what works. If we don’t try to talk to computers with human language, why do we try and do the opposite?

No matter what the industry, the way to create messages that resonate with people is through stories. Here’s three simple ways you can take your SaaS marketing strategies and bring your story to life:

1. Simplify

Keeping things simple may sound simple, but too often SaaS companies get in their own way and try to throw too much at their audience when marketing their product. If nothing else, simplicity is everything. As humans, we crave it. And perhaps the only thing smaller than our tolerance for complexity is our fleeting attention spans. The most effective language around SaaS products are the ones that waste no time in explaining exactly how it benefits a user.

Take 1Password for example: it’s a computer software that protects a variety of important log-ins and passwords from hackers or thieves. While 1Password is composed of an intricate security vault system, they simply speak to what the consumer truly cares about: safety.

1Password is advertised as simple, convenient security, which loosely translated, means peace of mind.

Dropbox’s branding similarly embodies this tactic – their leading message on their homepage reads: Good things happen when your stuff lives here. Much like 1Password, they focus on a simplified benefit of the product.

dropbox-homepage-good-stuff-happens

It’s conversational. The incredible complexity and technology behind Dropbox has been boiled down to the most basic and straightforward conclusions that could possibly be drawn, thus appealing on an emotional level to the humans who use it.

2. Metaphors + Parallels

This would be a technique perhaps best used during investor presentation or initial product demo to simply explain what it is your product or service is all about. Even when speaking to a tech-savvy audience (which isn’t always the case), we encourage our clients to draw parallels and metaphors to help explain their product’s problem, solution, technology etc. By bringing complex information back into ideas and concepts that anyone can understand, you can eliminate gaping question marks very quickly.

For example, say you’re pitching your SaaS platform that helps unify and monetize data sets and algorithms in the climate research space. Rather than diving head first into the back end framework and development strategy, consider stepping back and explaining the fundamental problem using a concept anyone can understand.

Lead with a story about farmland. It may sound farfetched, but it works. Say things like:

Imagine you wake up tomorrow and decide to become a farmer. You buy 200 acres of land to grow a combination of corn, beans. wheat, etc. You plant thousands and thousands of seeds in fertile ground and wait for mother nature to play it’s part. Only it never does. Your seeds have been planted by they lay dormant without a little help from mother nature.

Now imagine the farmer on the plot of next to you has the exact opposite problem. His land has been flooded with rain and the sun is shining, only there’s just one problem. He has no seeds. Both farms have incredible potential to grow useful crops, yet they both don’t have access to the things they need on their own.

Well that’s exactly the problem that exists in the world of climate science analytics today. Vital data and the analytical models they depend on have been and it’s why we created ForeCastle (fictional – not a bad name though, right??)

Paint a picture in your audience’s mind and not only will you win their attention immediately, but you’ll dispel any confusion about exactly what it is your product is all about.

3. Tell People What You Believe

Everything we do as people – from the toothpaste we buy to the car we drive – everything is governed by what we believe. Beliefs polarize, galvanize and inspire us into action. The best marketers are the ones who take advantage of this reality and build bold communication strategies that tell the world what they stand for.

Take one of the hottest communication platform SaaS companies in Slack for example: Their tag simply reads “Be less busy”. With three simple words, Slack is telling you that they understand the crazy workload you have to endure and that they believe something can be done about it. They tell you that they believe a fundamental flaw exists in the way businesses are run. While claiming that businesses should address their communication issues is certainly nothing new, claiming that they have a platform that could “end email” separates Slack from both competitors and potential customers who believe that email has become a sacred cow of the business world.

For Saas companies that similarly serve as networks, such as LinkedIn, this step is exceptionally important because those beliefs are what attract users. As a business oriented social networking site, LinkedIn believes that individuals should be in control of their professional identity and should have the opportunity to engage with likeminded, professional individuals. Therefore, those users who believe that a professional networking site is beneficial will use it, thus perpetuating the belief and creating a community of humans who feel the same way.

By using this belief as the foundation for the way they talk about their services, they’ve allowed us to connect with them in a way that’s as aspirational as it is human.

It’s easy to get caught up in the tech-first approach to marketing SaaS companies when that technology lives so close to the core of what your company is. But humans don’t respond to bone dry data like we do to stories and ideas. It may seem counterintuitive but the reality is – storytelling is one of the simplest and scientifically proven methods for connecting with people. With just a few strategies – you can capitalize on the most fundamental characteristic of your audience no matter who they are – they’re good old fashioned blood pumping human beings

About the Author: Maxx Parcell is the lead Content Writer and Developer at SquarePlanet in Chicago, IL. His job is to help our clients tell their story more effectively. Including anything from sales pitches to full brand message strategy, we work to help people improve the way they communicate and connect with people. We do things a bit differently. We believe in being pirates. For more information about exactly what that means and to read our own blog, please visit SquarePlanet.com.

Source: KISS

 

How to Optimize Your Site for Every Stage of the Buying Cycle

If you’ve been in marketing for a while, you’ll eventually discover a harsh reality.

You can’t force people to buy from you.

No matter how sexy your site or how awesome your conversion methods, you can’t automatically turn an unwilling customer into an eager spender.

Why not? It’s explained by something called the customer buying cycle. To understand the buying cycle to its fullest, you must also understand your customers. You can find out why they didn’t buy, what might make them buy, and why they might come back to buy in the future.

My goal in this article is to show you how you can optimize your site for every stage of the customer buying cycle. Even though you can’t make a customer buy, you can at least know how your site can meet the specific need that the customer has at any given point in the buying cycle.

What is the Buying Cycle?

The buying cycle is the process that every customer goes through when they purchase an item.

It looks like this:

the-buying-cycle

It’s described as a cycle, because it tends to be repetitive. You can also look at it as a linear process.

There are hundreds of versions of the cycle. The specific cycle depends in large part on the specific product that you are selling.

The broad truths to keep in mind regarding the buying cycle are as follows:

  • Every customer goes through some process of consideration, realization, and conversion.
  • The customer can only be in one spot of the cycle at a time, for any one need.
  • The success level that you achieve when marketing to that customer depends on where he or she is in the buying cycle.

And that’s where we come back to the harsh truth: About only 3% of the people who visit your site are going to buy your product. In fact, you’re generally doing well if you can get more than 3%.

What’s happening with the other 97%?

They’re leaving, choosing not to buy, going away.

Anyone who didn’t convert is at some other phase in the buying cycle. They might not ever convert. They might convert someday.

You need a marketing strategy that is actively targeting the vast percentage of your website visitors. I’m not talking about individual conversion methods here. I’m talking about broad content tactics that move any visitor closer to a conversion — to the next best phase in the buying cycle.

Your goal is, of course, more conversions. But to think of it more broadly, your goal is simply to move the customer to the next phase in the buying cycle.

Let’s talk about how to do that.

Phase 1: Conception: The Customer Realizes a Need

Customer Question: What is my need?

In this phase, the customer is trying to figure out what exactly they need. They have no focused questions yet, only a vague awareness that they have a need.

Your Marketing Move: Describe the problem

Before opening up your marketing methods, make sure you understand all you can about your customers’ needs. Some businesses may perform a “customer needs analysis” to try to hone in on the problem.

Your content marketing is one of the best places to focus your strategy. At this phase in the buying cycle, customers want information (i.e., “informational query”).

To gain traffic from these informational queries, construct a content marketing approach that focuses on problems and solutions. Some of the best blogs in the business are all about problems and solutions that the target audience needs.

Buffer, for example, publishes outstanding long form content focused on the types of solutions that their prospective customers need.

For example, Buffer recently published an article on Pinterest marketing mistakes. They know that their target audience is trying to figure out how to optimize their Pinterest social strategy. Since Buffer’s product is all about social sharing, they’ve got the kind of content that is going to attract the problem-centric queries that their audience is using.

buffer-pinterest-marketing-mistakes

The article starts with a problem, focuses on a solution, and leaves the customer with actionable steps to improve their Pinterest strategy.

Plus, as always, they include a CTA at the end of their blog post:

buffer-ending-cta

Most content marketers are challenged by trying to figure out what kind of content will engage their prospects.

buffer-ending-cta

If you filter your content marketing approach through the matrix of “needs and problems,” then you’ll have plenty of fodder for content.

Prospective customers will find you, engage with your content, and move on to phase 2.

Phase 2: Comparison: The Customer Explores Options for Meeting this Need

Customer Question: What is the best way to meet this need?

At this point, you’re not the only player in the game. The customer is scoping out alternative prospects. Other businesses know about content marketing, and how best to attract the solution-seeking customer.

The queries are still informational and solution-focused. Now that they know their problem, they are moving towards a solution.

Your Marketing Move: Options for Meeting the Need

Content is still going to play the lead role in your marketing approach for this phase of the buying cycle.

The same content that attract the prospects’ information queries in the first phase is going to be the same content that drives them to the consideration phase. Not only should your articles be problem-centric, but they should be solution-focused.

Make sure you’re trying to solve the issue beneath the issue. For example, your customer may be buying a bed, but what they want is a good night’s sleep.

buffer-ending-cta

Market to the core need of the customer, not just the specific widget they’re in the market for.

Phase 3: Consideration: The customer narrows down options, and makes a judgment about the best one

Customer Question: Which solution is the best for me?

Each of the three phases of the customer buying cycle so far have been fluid. A customer may move rapidly through each one, and your marketing move is pretty much the same — create solution-focused content.

Here is where the consideration process gets deeper. You’re dealing now with an informed customer. She knows the marketing, understands price points, is aware of the brands who can solve the problem, and realizes what she needs to do next.

You can finally forget about solutions. The customer is way beyond that phase.

Now, your customer wants to hear about features.

Your Marketing Move: Explain the features and benefits of your product

This is, by far, the biggest phase in the buying cycle. At this point, the customer is actively engaged on your site, interacting with your content, downloading your PDFs, and viewing your pricing. At this point, you can pull out all the optimization stops, unleash all the methods, and do everything in your power to get the customer to convert.

The questions that the customer is asking at this point have deepened and become more specific. She has answered the big what question, now she needs to answer other questions:

  • How does this feature integrate with…?
  • What are the terms on the guarantee?
  • How easy is it for me to get in touch with support?
  • Can I return the item?
  • Is the team friendly, professional, competent?
  • What are the shipping costs?
  • What are the delivery times?
  • How much storage space do I get?
  • What if I don’t like it?
  • Is there a warranty?

Your website’s evergreen and product pages are now the focus content. You’ve managed to earn organic traffic from the customer’s queries. Now, you need to earn their respect through comprehensive, detailed, powerful, and compelling descriptions, content, and information that is specific to your product.

I’m not merely referring to the way in which you create compelling and SEO-friendly ecommerce pages. I’m referring broadly to the way that you shape content on your site to explain everything possible about your content.

  • Create content about each feature.
  • Create content about your support.
  • Create content about your warranty.
  • Create content about your technical specifications.
  • Create content about all the details of the product.

The more content, the better. The customer is actively seeking more information, more distinguishing features, more characteristics, and more aspects of the product.

If you have more information than the competition, then you possess a remarkable advantage. You will be able to nudge the customer out of phase 3, and into phase 4 — conversion.

Phase 4: Conversion: The customer buys the chosen option

Customer Question: How do I buy this product?

The customer is ready. Your problem-centric, solution-focused, feature-driven content has pushed them to this culminating point.

They are ready to buy.

Your Marketing Move: Engage in conversion optimization

This is the spear tip of conversion optimization — getting customers to convert on a purchase. Before, you may have optimized your blog’s CTAs, adjusted headlines, and performed the kind of tweaking necessary to boost conversion rates.

Now, you move it up to the final phase — optimizing buy CTAs, optimizing the pricing page, and streamlining the shopping cart. You don’t want anything to get in the way of a killer close

This is that point in the article in which I talk about the staggering cost of shopping cart abandonment. Just because a customer drops your widget into his cart doesn’t mean he’s going to buy it. In fact, nearly 7 out of every 10 customers who puts a product in their shopping cart are going to abandon said shopping cart. You’re going to feel frustrated.

As with any problem, there are solutions. Focus on regaining abandoned customers, but remember that they may still be flitting in and out of various stages in the buying cycle, so don’t completely lose your mind if you have high abandonment rates.

Phase 5: Continuation: The customer returns to this option when the need arises again

Customer Question: Should I buy this product again?

Marketing isn’t over when the customer buys. In fact, a new and heightened phase of marketing has just begun.

You have a customer, but you need to keep it that way.

Your Marketing Move: Kickass service and ongoing support

Conversion optimization is important. Killer content is important. Great products are important.

And it all stays that way for your existing customers, too. Notice, however, that the shift turns from content and conversion techniques to the customer service. If there is any aspect of your business that involves customer service, make improving it a priority.

Check out this chart that shows what the most important factors were in creating a satisfying customer experience.

Conclusion

The reality of marketing is that you can’t control every aspect of a customer’s experience. You’re limited.

The more that you’re aware of the customer buying cycle and how it affects your marketing approach, the better you’ll become at dominating every phase of the purchase.

Smart marketers know what they can do, and they do it to the max. Admit what you’re helpless to control, but take mastery over the things that you can.

How has your understanding of the customer buying cycle affected your marketing?

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

Source: KISS