When analyzing email marketing performance, avoid judging the quality of an email by its open rate.

Open rate is a measure of PAST performance, plus time of day, plus email subject. Here’s what we mean by past performance: If your emails have been consistently good, people will be more likely to open future ones.

But on an email-by-email basis, consider this:

• It’s often more helpful to measure click-through rate (CTR): How many people who open your email click through and take an action you suggest?
• Along with CTR, look at click-to-open rate (CTOR), which measures the percentage of people who click after opening.

CTOR excludes people for whom the subject wasn’t appealing, which is a better indicator of how appealing your copy, design, and CTAs were.

In ecom, when a new customer purchases your product, there's a time gap between them clicking "buy now" and the product arriving at their door.

Instead of going radio silent, you can use that time to get customers excited about the product they purchased.

Create a post-purchase email flow that educates your new customer about your brand, what they can expect when it arrives, and what kind of transformation they'll experience from using it.

You can include:

• Examples of how to use your product.
• User-generated content showing off real customers.
• An invite to join your community.

By building anticipation towards unboxing, your customers will likely put more value on the item they purchased—and you're more likely to turn first-time buyers into lifelong customers who will buy from you again and again.

Many marketers believe that emails that land in the Gmail Promotions Tab won’t get read.

In reality, your messages aren’t getting buried:

• The Promotions Tab was designed for desktop, so mobile users won’t have email separated into tabs. They’ll likely see your email in their main inbox.
• Even if your email lands in Promotions, the numbers aren't bad:

• 50% of readers check their Promotions Tab daily.
• These readers tend to click through more often because they’re in the mindset for promotional emails.

Instead of trying to artificially avoid promotions, focus on getting people to engage with your emails:

• Prompt replies: Propose questions to get people to reply. Two-way communication sends positive signals to Google, fast-tracking you to readers’ primary inboxes.
• Personalize and segment your campaigns: They’ll get more engagement, which shows Gmail that your content belongs in their inbox.

Blasting out sale announcements feels straightforward and promotional. As a test, try teasing sales in advance so customers can’t wait to check their inbox:

• Blur out sale items. Chubbies does this for their Black Friday items, using playful copy and a CTA of ‘setting an alarm for tomorrow’ to see what surprise items are on sale.
• For physical products, try using a daily deal sequence leading up to a big sale.

          • Most companies can’t run daily deals forever. But before a launch or big sale, it fosters intrigue and gets subscribers into the habit of clicking.

          • Example: Poo-Pourri offers six different deals over 12 days before Christmas and promotes them in their emails.

In doing so, they create a curiosity gap, where the subscriber feels compelled to check back each day to see the next deal.

Note: This works well before big events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday. But better yet, you can create your own holiday like BarkBox does for “National Dog Day.”

When used sparingly, a little mystery and intrigue go a long way to drive clicks and sales.

While they're often thought of as intrusive, popups convert 3% of site visitors, on average.

And strategic, high-performing popups can reach ~10% conversion.

To make higher-converting, less intrusive popups, try the 60% Rule:

• Open your website's analytics and see what the average time spent is on a specific page you'd like to use a popup on.
• Set your popup to appear after 60% of the average time spent on your specific page. So if the average time spent on a page is 50 seconds, set your popup to appear 30 seconds after visitors land on that page.

At that point, readers have shown interest in your content but are nearing the end of their session. Prompting them with a relevant and valuable incentive in exchange for their email will feel like a fair exchange.

Bonus: When designing your popups, ensure the copy, call-to-action, and incentive are directly relevant to the page the visitor is currently on. You can rephrase the headers that appear on the page as a hook in the popup.

Negative reviews can actually improve checkout conversion.

For context, reviews are a big deal:

• 93% of consumers claim product reviews impact purchase decisions
• The social proof of having 50+ product reviews increases conversion. Shoppers trust peers more than they trust brands.

Negative yet constructive reviews can outperform your best positive review for generating sales. When a partially negative review weighs your cons versus your pros, and concludes that the product was worth purchasing anyway, that sounds authentic and honest.

Here's what you can do:

• Make sure your post-purchase email flow contains a request for reviews. The more reviews you have, the better.
• Don't bury slightly negative reviews. If someone leaves a 4-star review and offers a fair (and insignificant) critique, showcase it towards the top of your product page. Be human.

Most ecommerce stores use one main navigation item, like ‘Products’ or ‘Shop’, as a dropdown for all of their product categories.

This can damage conversion. 

When a customer arrives on your site, they’re immediately scanning for products. If it's not easy for them to find what they’re looking for, they’ll bounce.

Try this: Feature your product categories in your header menu. If you have dozens of categories, group them together to reduce friction. Once a customer feels that they are headed in the right direction (they’ve clicked a relevant category), they’ll feel better about continuing their search.

Worth testing: If you have one, clear, best-selling product, consider linking it directly in your header menu. It's likely that people visiting your site are coming specifically for your best-seller. They might have seen it in an ad or heard about it through word of mouth. Seeing it in your header menu is confirmation that it's worth clicking on.

Marketers generally create standalone landing pages for product FAQs.

Instead, try weaving FAQs into your product pages.

This prevents visitors from having to leave your product pages to answer their questions, increasing your odds of converting them. 

Try these four tactics:

1. Make answers collapsible to avoid cluttering your pages.
2. Order and categorize questions logically. Step into your customer's perspective and ask yourself, "What questions would pop into my head right now?" Then answer them in order.
3. Feature real customer questions and answers. They're relatable.
4. Include links to relevant blog posts, videos, and other resources in answers. If customer's need more convincing before purchase, they'll click through.

A friendly PSA. Great product pages do two things:

1. Reassure and convert customers who were learning towards buying
2. Win over and convert those who were on the fence

Most product pages look the same for a reason. There’s a formula. Here’s how some of the top brands structure them (for desktop and mobile): 

Product images:

• Desktop: Left side of the page. People scan from left to right.
• Mobile: Front and center. People scan and then scroll down.
• Reasoning: You want them to see your product before your price.

Product name, details, add to cart:

• Desktop: Right side of the page.
• Mobile: Just under the image.
• Reasoning: Remove lengthy product descriptions above the fold. Keep it minimal—the goal here is conversion.

Full product description and reviews:

• Desktop and mobile: Just below the fold.
• Reasoning: If people are interested in your product, they will scroll. When they do, you want to hit them with copy that will convert. Reviews and testimonials are critical in this section—they add weight to the claims you’re making on the product page.

Love 'em or hate 'em, popups can dramatically increase conversion—when used correctly.

If you show people the exact same popup each time they visit your site, you're missing out on opportunities to either 1) push leads closer to a purchase or 2) increase LTV.

Try this: use dynamic popups to meet visitors at their current stage in the buyer's journey.

Most marketing messaging tools offer the ability to target individuals with different popups. So split your audience into three segments and show a popup that resonates with each:

1. First time traffic - people who haven't subscribed yet.

Provide a discount, giveaway, or exclusive piece of content gated by an email capture.

2. Returning subscribers - people who have subscribed but not yet purchased.

Include a subscriber-only discount to encourage purchase. Tip: include a countdown timer on the popup to create urgency.

3. Customers - anyone who has already made a purchase.

Feature new products and greet people with a "welcome back" message.

CRO is about optimizing high-leverage touchpoints with customers. Popups are no exception.

You don’t need to wait for a customer to leave your site to initiate a cart abandonment campaign.

Instead, use a chatbot to preemptively engage customers on the verge of leaving your site. It’s often faster and more effective than a traditional cart abandonment email campaign.

Try this:

When a customer’s cursor leaves a window, automate your bot to reengage them with a targeted message. Examples:

• “How about an exclusive offer on your cart?”
• “One of the products in your cart is low in stock. Would you like to check out now?”
• “Did you want free shipping with those items?”

If users still show exit intent after engaging with your chatbot, trigger a high priority message to your customer support team and talk with them.

Finding anything you want through Google search is a superpower that not many marketers take full advantage of.

Here’s a quick tip: Use Google search operators.

The syntax of your Google search can help run market analysis, prospect people on LinkedIn, find investors, retrieve fundraising news, etc.

Examples:

Search: “site:docs.google.com/spreadsheets intitle:startups 2020”

Use case: Find open Google spreadsheets that include “startups” and “2020” in the title. For example, if you offer services for startups that are hiring remotely, you can find a list with thousands of potential leads and email addresses.

Search: “site:airtable.com inurl:VC”

Use case: Find Airtable bases that contain “VC” in the URL. You can find lists of investors that may be relevant to your fundraising needs. These lists often provide you with the names (and occasionally emails) of investors, and also share relevant information about each one of them.

Buying ads in newsletters is an opaque form of performance marketing: There's no algorithm to optimize, and there are rarely options for A/B testing.

But newsletter ads are a highly effective way to reach quality leads.

Know what to look for before you spend any advertising dollars on newsletter ads.

Here’s a framework for buying ads in newsletters:

• Read the newsletter for two weeks before inquiring about a sponsorship. Understand the style, audience, and interests before you throw cash at it.
• Ask newsletter owners for unique open rate and click-through rate. Tip: Have them take a screenshot of the numbers from their email service provider (like MailChimp or Customer.io). It's rare, but some newsletters overstate their metrics.
• Focus on lead gen—not only purchase. Only a small percentage of subscribers will buy straight from your ad. So optimize for email capture and track clicks so you can retarget these new leads and convert them down funnel.

LinkedIn has insightful firmographic data, yet most marketers rarely consider running LinkedIn conversion ads—they're often far too expensive.

But you can combine LinkedIn's B2B targeting with Facebook's conversion-focused ad platform to create a highly-targeted B2B funnel.

Here's how:

1. Create a LinkedIn ads campaign promoting an article or landing page using the “website visits” objective. Make sure your article or landing page has a quality lead gen offer and that your pixel tracks the conversion.
2. On Facebook, create a custom audience targeting the visitors who visited your article or landing page from your LinkedIn ads campaign but didn’t convert.
3. Run a FB "conversions" campaign to this audience promoting your lead gen offer.

Taking this approach, your CPC and ROAS could be much lower than you’d get if you ran the entire lead gen campaign through LinkedIn’s ad network.

Lookalikes are one of the most reliable ways to scale paid social ads.

But lookalikes haven’t changed much over the last couple of years. Many startups run basic lookalike campaigns and settle for a suboptimal ROAS.

Try these tactics to get more out of your lookalikes:

1. Setup exclusions: You’re probably driving traffic to a lookalike of your best users or customers. But have you tried creating a lookalike of your worst ones, and using that as an exclusion audience? In our experience, this won’t help with your CPA, but it could have a significant impact on your retention and LTV.

2. Use UTM’s to seed cross-channel: Search traffic is often more qualified than social—after all, if people are searching for your product, they’re actively in the market for it. Instead of seeding a lookalike with everyone who has visited your site, try testing a seed with visitors where “URL Contains ‘utm_source=google’”. You’ll be targeting people most similar to those who came to your site with high purchase intent.

3. Try partners' websites: A couple of months back, we wrote about how you can retarget someone else’s website traffic using pixel tracking marketplaces (like Repixel’s). But consider this: once you have access to another site's pixel, create a lookalike off of it. Expand your reach with your partner’s audiences—and not just your own.

Most marketers see TikTok's shockingly high CPAs and give up on ads too soon.

One reason for poor ad performance on TikTok comes down to poor ad creative.

Before ruling out TikTok as an acquisition channel, test these changes to see if your CPAs improve:

1. Sound: Most advertisers don’t put much effort into their ad sound. But TikTok requires videos to have sound. Try using audio to highlight customer testimonials and feature walkthroughs of your product’s benefits.
2. Quantity: Creative fatigue happens more rapidly on TikTok than on other platforms—users consume massive amounts of content and are quick to ignore anything that feels repetitive. So build a queue of fresh videos and change your ads, at a minimum, bi-weekly.
3. Authenticity: If your content feels like an ad, you’re going to get a swift swipe up. So make sure you're creating ads that match the organic content that users come to TikTok for. Shoot on an iPhone and make grittier content that is authentic to how your actual customers will engage with your product.

It’s getting more expensive to run Facebook ads.

One way to try reducing costs is by using a different ad objective—and getting creative.

Say you own a DTC cookware brand. Consider this:

• Create a piece of content that your audience will love, like a seasonal cooking guide. Feature your relevant products within the guide.
• Then run a retargeting campaign to drive traffic to your guide. Make the ad objective “Engagement.”
• Set engagement goals of:

          • Time on page: 20 seconds.

          • Vertical scroll: 50%.

If your content is great, you might experience lower acquisition costs and a higher ROAS.

Why? When you optimize for different objectives, Facebook can distribute your impressions differently to the same audience. And maybe that re-distribution achieves a better cost structure given you’re no longer indexing on the higher cost folks who have a history of purchasing via Facebook ads.

Users who send direct messages (DMs) to your brand on Instagram are likely to be interested in your product—yet many brands don’t do enough to convert them.

Consider running ads directly to people who DM your brand:

1. In FB Business Manager, go to Accounts and click on “Instagram Accounts.” Select your Instagram business account.
2. Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience. Select “Instagram Account” and “People who sent a message to your professional account” in the past 365 days. Call it “Instagram DMs” and click on “Create Audience.”
3. Create a campaign to target this audience.

Important: For best ad performance, study the questions that continuously pop up in your DMs. What do these users want from you? Design your ads with the value props that directly solve their problems.

Most subscriber growth on YouTube comes from the algorithm promoting your videos to new audiences.

YouTube's algorithm promotes videos that get people to stay on the platform longer.

To increase the likelihood of your video being promoted to new audiences, optimize these three areas:

1. Thumbnails. Try testing your YouTube thumbnails with your audience on Instagram or Twitter. Make a poll and ask them to vote for their favorite before using it on YouTube. The more engaging they are, the higher your click-through rate (CTR). And a high CTR keeps users on-platform longer.
2. Retention rate of your videos. Videos that are more frequently watched till the end produce greater on-platform time. In the first 15 seconds of your video, explicitly say what the viewer is going to see and tease why they should stick around until the end.
3. Average view duration. You want users to watch another one of your videos in the same session. Test creating a multi-part video series that spans a specific topic.

Your LinkedIn posts can get significantly more reach with this small tweak.

The LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes "dwell time”—a measurement of the amount of time a user spends viewing a post—when assessing virality.

More dwell time leads to more impressions.

You can lean into the algorithm by creating posts that people stop and spend time on.

Here’s how:

• Avoid single images in your post. Instead, upload a multi-page PDF with key insights or brief case studies on each page. Each page should flow into or introduce the next.
• In the body of your post, tease any surprising conclusions or data. Give your audience a reason to stick around to view the entire PDF.

Remember to only include outbound links in the comments section—the algorithm might demote content with outbound links in the body. You can mention the link in the body of your post so that your audience seeks it out.