The best testimonials start with skepticism.

It's easy to think that start-to-finish positive testimonials drive the most conversions.

But "reverse testimonials" can be more effective. They start with skepticism: fears, doubts, or obstacles.

Everyone has objections. Testimonials that address them first build connections with others who are on the fence because of their own reservations. Plus, they add a storytelling arc, from problem/concern to success.

You can get better, transformational testimonials by asking your reviewer a few key questions:

1. What was the problem you were having before you discovered our product?
2. What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve the problem?
3. What obstacle would have prevented you from purchasing?
4. What was different about our product?
5. Take us to the moment when you realized our product was actually working to solve your problem.
6. Tell us what life looks like now that your problem is solved or being solved.

Asking questions also gives helpful guidelines to testimonial givers, so they aren’t staring at a blank screen trying to think of what to say.

Bonus for higher-converting testimonials: If possible, align a testimonial's messaging with its placement. If your customer talks about a specific feature, spotlight their comments in your marketing surrounding that feature, like a dedicated landing page or re-engagement email. If they came across your brand through a YouTube ad, how much more effective would it be if the testimonial giver also discovered you through YouTube, clicked, and is now thriving?

Ecommerce cart abandonment has skyrocketed. Retargeting helps, and it's even more effective if you time it right.

Pre-pandemic, ecommerce shoppers abandoned their carts about 70-80% of the time. For some industries, that number rose to nearly 95% with the onset of Covid.

One theory: Our online shopping style now more closely resembles our pre-pandemic window-shopping habits. We look, we make a mental note, we move on.

You won’t recover all those lost sales, but you can get many of them back through retargeting messages (email, SMS, app notifications) or ads that remind shoppers about the products waiting for them.

Don’t retarget right away, though. Test waiting one to three days.

Sooner than that, and you might be marketing to shoppers who simply haven't proceeded to purchase yet but intend to. Longer than that, and there’s a good chance they’ll forget about their interest in your product.

When you do retarget, consider using scarcity or urgency to drive the purchase.

Example: Say you normally run a simple retargeting ad for a product a shopper added to their cart. Try adding messaging to your ad indicating how many other people bought the product today. Or, if true, indicate that you're running out of stock, and they should act quickly to get one.

A shorthand tactic for quickly assessing the performance of your Facebook/Instagram video ads: measure "thumb stop rate." This is a measure of how often people stop scrolling through their feed to pay attention to your ad.

• A high thumb stop rate indicates that your video’s intro grabs users' attention.
• A low one (less than 10%) means you need a better hook.

The thumb stop rate isn’t a default metric in Facebook’s Ads Manager. You’ll need to create a custom metric and add it to your ad dashboard.

Here’s how:

1. Go to your Ads Reporting page.
2. Click Customize to open the Customize Pivot Table sidebar.
3. Select the Metrics tab.
4. Click the Create button.
5. Fill out the custom metric creation form using the formula: 3-Second Video Plays / Impressions.

Add this metric to the Ads Manager view you look at each day. Consider creating new hooks (or entirely new videos) for any ads with weak openings. This is the first touch point to folks watching the rest of the ad.

Time-to-value measures how long it takes for new users to experience value from your product.

You want this to be as short as possible.

• Airbnb's time-to-value is one click: search a location for rentals.
• SimilarWeb's time-to-value is one click: analyze any website or app.

Both companies' time-to-value is immediate, free, and doesn't require setting up an account.

More examples:

• Loom: The user you send a video to gets immediate value. They can watch the video without needing to sign up.
• Miro: The user you send the board to gets immediate value. They can instantly start collaborating with you without needing to sign up.
• Calendly: The user you send your calendar link to gets immediate value. They can see available times and book time with you without needing to sign up.

So, if your model allows, see if you can shorten your users' time-to-value through your product.

You can also take this a step further. Unlock value incrementally by creating two different product experiences:

• First time-to-value: New users get instant value by accomplishing the first step in their customer journey (this is the experience described in the examples above—finding a rental, analyzing their website). Give users access to a useful portion of the full product, but not the whole thing. Prompt them to create an account to get access to the rest.
• True time-to-value: Once they sign-up, present users with a second wave of value by presenting features that previously were locked. Help them continue their customer journey by picking up from where they previously left off in the first experience. For Airbnb, that means seeing the availability of rentals they discovered. For SimilarWeb, that means viewing the full report and comparing to competition.

By including two separate, valuable experiences, you'll likely turn more browsers into paying users.

If you've tried traditional influencer marketing and didn't get the ROAS you would have liked, consider this.

Here are three ways to increase influencer ROI:

1. Try whitelisting: Whitelisting involves running ads through influencer accounts. Here's the best part: Influencers are often willing to create better content for you. Why? Because you’re putting ad dollars behind influencers’ accounts—and they’re getting new followers as a result. You’re helping them promote themselves. So they're more likely to create the content for free if you agree to put a certain amount of ad dollars behind their account.
2. Repurpose content: Influencers will create content for you. It's likely you've worked out an agreement to have them post it on their account. But you can stretch it much further. With permission, use the content across your other marketing assets: website, blog posts, ads on other channels, sponsorships, etc. Influencers are usually happy for the extra exposure. And you can save thousands by avoiding product photo shoots.
3. Retarget: Influencer marketing should bring potential customers to your website, but few will convert if they only see your message once. Test a retargeting campaign: Serve ads to those in your influencers' audience who clicked through to your site. Since these people already know who you are, you can use targeted language. It's likely retargeting will drastically improve your customer acquisition cost from influencer marketing.

We wrote a playbook on influencer marketing. It walks you through exactly how we test influencer marketing as a performance channel.

For every second a page takes to load, bounce rate goes up.

Test your site on Google PageSpeed Insights. If you get a mediocre score for site speed, try this:

1. Use a heatmap like Hotjar to see which sections of a product page aren't generating as much interest. Cut them. Loading fewer items is more impactful than simply reducing element sizing.
2. A reminder to remove all plugins and custom code you don't need.
3. If you keep it, optimize it: Resize images and use the WebP image format, Google's preferred format. Kraken.io offers image compression and optimization.
4. Lazy load—only load elements as a user scrolls over them. How you lazy load depends on your CMS, but whichever tool you use, make sure you follow Google's recs so the Googlebot still sees all your content.

Simple and fast way to tighten up conversion on your homepage.

Most ecommerce companies offer deep discounts on popular items for Black Friday.

This strategy might result in a lot of sales, but it often decreases your average order value (AOV) and doesn't guarantee meaningful profit.

Instead of single-item discounts, try bundling popular products with other items and offering a smaller discount. Consider this process:

• Group products that are frequently bought together in bundles.
• Test selling these bundles months before your sale. Now would be a good time.
• Promote them to your existing audience through unpaid channels (email, social media, website banners, checkout upsells). This will keep costs down as you find your most profitable bundle.
• You'll know you've found a strong bundle when it consistently converts without a discount and holds a low return rate.
• When Black Friday arrives, offer a discount on the best-performing bundle.

Choose a discount that results in a final price that's higher than your current AOV.

Offering bundles could help you realize the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer quicker, and develop better customers than you'd get offering standard promos.

There's a powerful feature in most email service providers that very few take full advantage of: dynamic content blocks.

You can use dynamic content to show slightly different messages to your audience based on their behavior and preferences. You can dramatically improve click-through and conversion—without having to create multiple versions of the same email.

A few use cases:

• Promos: Give only first-time buyers a gift when they complete the purchase of the abandoned item in their cart.
• Net-promoter score survey: Ask your customers to fill out a survey to receive a 20% off coupon code. For those who have already submitted a survey, remind them that they have an unused coupon.
• Referral programs: Ask people who haven't referred yet to refer to unlock a reward. But ask people who've already referred to refer more people for an even better reward.
• Newsletters: It's likely some of your subscribers have read your blog posts. Pitch your product's most relevant feature based on the posts they've read.

When you find a high-converting block, you can add it to all your email flows (new subscribers, first-time purchases, and post-purchase). At every stage in the lifecycle, show people the offer most relevant to them.

Sometimes the best marketing messages come straight from the customer.

When you uncover your customers' motivations and expectations—and the language they use to express those feelings—you can take what they say and mirror it back to them in your copy.

Mining reviews is a great way to source copywriting gold. Here’s how to do it:

Go where your prospects are leaving reviews online (Amazon, Google, even Reddit).

Parse through reviews for products or services that address the same core problems that yours does.

Pay attention to descriptive language. Look for patterns. Flag anything that resonates and add the best reviews and copy snippets to a spreadsheet with these three columns:

1. Memorable phrases
2. What people want
3. What people are emotionally reacting to

Fill it up, then read through them again and you’ll notice the recurring frustrations, questions, statements, and experiences—what’s most important to your prospects.

Use these new insights to update and test:

• Headline copy on your homepage
• Product messaging
• Value propositions

Review mining lets you build a valuable swipe file to help spruce up your copy and messaging. You can take it a step further and use the insights to build better products.

Autocomplete in Google Search can help you uncover real search queries from other users that are related to your target keyword.

Most SEO focuses on ending autocomplete options—the text that populates after you enter a keyword in Google.

But there are also middle and pre autocomplete options. You can check them with a simple "+" sign.

Let's use the keyword gold chain for example. To see more autocompleted queries, type this into the search bar: "+ gold + chain +"

• When you click on the far left "+" sign, autocomplete will show you queries that include keywords before "gold chain." For example, "how to clean gold chain."
• Clicking on the middle "+" will reveal keywords between "gold chain." For example, "gold rope chain."
• Clicking on the far right "+" will uncover queries such as "gold chain with pendant."

Try this:

• Make a list of newly discovered keywords after using this process.
• Pop your keywords into a keyword research tool like Surfer or Keywords Everywhere to see the monthly search volumes of each autocompleted query. Note any queries that have over 1000 monthly searches—that kind of keyword volume might be worth trying to capture.
• Use the top keywords as the focus of future SEO-optimized blog posts.

Apple is rolling out a privacy-focused iOS14. Google Chrome is weening off cookies.

The way startups use marketing data is changing—rapidly. Startups should consider building systems to collect "zero-party data."

• Zero-party data: Explicitly consented user data (e.g. survey responses)
• First-party data: Assumed consent (e.g. on-site analytics)
• Second-party data: From a partner (e.g. Facebook audiences)
• Third-party data: Traded or bought (e.g. conference attendee list)

New privacy policies will continue to tighten. It's predicted that third-party data will no longer be very usable and second-party data will become significantly less granular.

Here's one way you can collect the data you need:

First, set up a post-purchase survey a week after your customers buy. Ask 3 questions:

1. How they found out about your product (attribution)
2. How they'd feel if they could no longer use your product (net-promoter score)
3. How likely they are to recommend on a scale of 0-10 (best customers)

This is data you can use to identify top-performing channels and ideal customers.

In exchange for their time, you could send them 3 x 20% discount vouchers (1 for them, 2 for sharing). Or swag. Or special access to future products.

Separately, identify your top 10% of existing customers by filtering them by recency, frequency (how many purchases), and lifetime value. Email this group to introduce yourself and to ask for a 15-minute phone call to provide feedback and learn:

• Where they spend their time online (websites, newsletters, communities, YouTube channels)
• What they'd Google to find your product

If you run a referral program, you inevitably have customers who are willing to give a referral but don't actually do it. That's called the referral gap.

It can be a chasm: one study found that 83% of customers were willing to give a referral, and only 29% did.

Here's how you can close the gap and turn more of your customers into an autonomous sales team:

• Use the channel that drives the most last-click revenue for your referral requests. If most of your last-click revenue comes from email, then send your referral request via email (don't try to get customers to share on Twitter). Last-click attribution signals the channel where your customers take decisive action—closing the referral gap requires turning inaction into action.
• Reduce friction by pre-writing any outreach messaging your customers will need. And avoid the sales copy. Write it as if you're prompting your best friend to check out a new product.
• Shorten the process to the bare minimum. In Gusto's program, customers share a referral link through social media or email within two clicks.
• Use heatmaps (like Hotjar) to see how customers engage with your referral program's landing page. Tweak messaging where they're getting stuck, focusing on clarity and program benefits. Give this page as much respect as your other pages.

Roughly 70% of ecommerce shoppers abandon cart. These are higher-intent shoppers who were one step away from becoming customers.

Nearly half of cart-abandoners cite additional or unexpected costs as the reason.

Try these tactics to convert more shoppers:

• Offer free shipping starting at a minimum dollar amount—or better yet, on all products. Customers expect free shipping now on most orders. A fast way to kill conversion is to add shipping fees to your checkout page.
• Shopify brands can set default free shipping (or free shipping by value, weight, products, or customers) in their admin settings.
• Bake extra fees (like shipping costs) into your product pricing. If you have to charge fees, include them on your product page, not your checkout page.
• Don't make account creation mandatory. Provide an option for guest checkout. Every step you take to reduce friction will likely increase conversion.
• Keep your checkout process simple and flexible. Offer one-click checkout (with a tool like Fast) and multiple payment options.

Let's face it. Instagram simply doesn't have the organic reach it had a few years back. The platform is generally saturated with content.

But you can increase your organic reach by focusing on building community.

To increase reach, aim to spend at least 30 minutes a day on community building:

• Follow 10 to 20 key hashtags for your industry. Regularly interact with the top posts for those hashtags. These posts are often surfaced on the Explore feed, so you have a chance to engage with new users and encourage them to follow your account.
• Reply to DMs and comments on your posts, and share user-generated content you're tagged or mentioned in (with permission).
• Glossier has a "Top 5" Story Highlight featuring five of the "best things" they were tagged in. This 1) gives those creators more exposure, 2) reinforces the popularity of the Glossier brand, and 3) tells the IG algo they're immersed in their community.
• Bonus: Stories are a viral feature. When you tag your customers in stories, some will share on their own stories—showcasing your brand to all of their followers.
• Turn on notifications for popular accounts in your space, such as creators with high engagement:follower ratios. Whenever they share new content, you'll know to jump into the conversation. You'll get in front of thousands of relevant users—for free.

Instagram builds features specifically for ecommerce brands. Lean into their core values (like community) to get more organic reach.

Deliverability is the percentage of emails that make it to inboxes (as opposed to spam folders or firewalls).

Think: You’ve done all the hard work of finding the right targets, getting their email addresses, and crafting emails to them. It’s inefficient if many of your emails don’t even make it to inboxes.

Here’s the 80/20 on improving your deliverability:

• Create a separate subdomain for sending cold emails. For example, if your usual email is jsmith@company.com, set up a separate subdomain and use jsmith@e.company.com to actually send emails from. This way, if anything goes wrong (rare), you haven’t impacted your main domain.
• You can also use a tool like Mailwarm to get positive engagements on your emails before you start sending at scale. What you’re looking for is "regular email traffic" and a responsible slope to higher volumes that won’t negatively impact your sender reputation.
• Avoid including too many images or too much HTML in your emails. One of the spam flags that you can avoid is the ratio of text to other content.
• Limit your links—especially to social networking sites. And try to avoid bit.ly and other link shorteners as they’ll get picked up by spam flags.
• This might not be news to you, but it's arguably the most important factor when it comes to deliverability: Get your targeting right. You improve deliverability by getting a high rate of replies, and low rate of unsubscribes and spam reports. So only send emails to people you truly think will benefit from your product.

Bonus: Here are some tools we've used to send cold email:

• PersistIQ—free to start.
• Streak—also free to start.
• Mixmax—integrates directly into Gmail.
• Mailshake—best for just starting out in cold outreach.
• Reply IO—has an AI email assistant to help craft messaging.
• Lemlist—similar to Mailshake, with multi-channel sequencing.

A low open rate doesn’t necessarily mean people are ignoring your emails.

It’s possible your emails are left unopened because a visitor:

• Misspells their email address
• Uses a fake email
• Used an old corporate email
• Doesn’t align with your target audience
• Is a bot

These broken emails can be a net drag on your email deliverability.

This is one of the many reasons it's a wise idea to use a double opt-in confirmation for subscribers: Ask users to confirm their interest when subscribing.

The result: fewer emails going to spam and greater engagement from your recipients.

We want you to delete contacts from your email list.

Two reasons to remove inactive contacts from your list:

1. Since email platforms charge per contact, inactive contacts on your email list cost you upwards of 50% of your email bill.
2. The higher your open rate, the more Google delivers your emails to inboxes as opposed to the Spam folder. You can increase your open rate by removing contacts who don't open your email. Pretty simple. That's the second benefit of removing inactive contacts: Those who remain see your emails even more.

So here's what you do:

• Once per quarter, duplicate your email list and search for contacts who've been inactive for over three months.
• Before you remove them, try a win-back email campaign that explains they'll be removed if they do not resume opening and engaging with emails.
• Once you have a cleaned list, test a new campaign for higher open rate and CTR.
  

Open rates for SMS marketing are misleading—it's best to avoid using them as your defining metric.

Some reports suggest that SMS has a 99% open rate. But the majority of those opens might be users:

• Opening to delete your message
• Opening by accident
• Or opening because they have no idea who the message is from

Instead, consider measuring success of your SMS campaigns based on:

1. Click-through rate (CTR). People who click the link are likely interested in your message. A high CTR signals an effective campaign.
2. Use of SMS-specific discount code. Create a discount code for your SMS campaigns and measure how many people use it. The higher the percentage of SMS recipients who use your code, the more successful your campaign.

Triggered emails typically convert better than broadcast emails. (It's reported that they drive 624% more conversions than broadcasts.)

Triggered emails are pre-written campaigns that trigger based on someone's engagement with your site or app.

4 trigger-based campaigns are more profitable than the rest. Here's how to get them right:

1. Welcome nurture: Welcome emails often get 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than your other promo emails.

• Include your brand's name in the From field (ex. Julian at Demand Curve)
• Remind them what benefits they can expect

2. Abandoned cart: This will likely be the most profitable email you'll ever send. Adding to cart shows massive buying intent.

• Over 70% of ecommerce carts are abandoned
• Create copy that answers: "Why buy now?"

3. New customer post-purchase: You've got your customer's undivided attention—get them excited.

• Tell them next steps and set expectations
• Validate they made the right decision
• Cross-sell accessories or complimentary products

4. Customer re-engagement: Each subsequent purchase increases your customer's lifetime value. And it's cheaper to re-engage existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.

• Share useful and relevant lifestyle content
• Mix-in special offers and seasonal sales

The subject line of your email is one of the most important elements.

If it's weak, your email won't get opened and the rest of the email is irrelevant to your subscriber.

There are three reasons people decide to open an email:

1. Self-interest: Offer them something that's going to help them.

• Example from Spotify: "Playlists made just for you"—save them time and effort.

2. Emotional interest: Spark positive emotion.

• Example from Typeform: "You're invited to the premiere"—make them feel special.

3. Relational interest: Get them to like you, trust you, and want to hear what you have to say.

• Example from Allbirds: "Leave a lighter footprint"—they like the brand and mission.

Consider leaning into one of these elements for each of your subject lines. As a result, you'll likely increase your email marketing performance.