Top Growth Tactics

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Free trials are often touted as one of the best ways to get more SaaS leads. But if your trial users aren’t turning into paying customers, your acquisition model is broken.

To convert more users, try one (or more) of these strategies:

• Personalize onboarding. Send a welcome email when users sign up. Ask what they need help with. Or offer a one-on-one demo to show the full potential of your software—Funnel CRM shared that doing so increased conversions from 5% to 9%.
• Trigger support emails based on user activity. Adobe offers a 7-day trial for all its Creative Cloud apps. If users spend more time on a particular app, they’re automatically enrolled in a sequence focused on that app’s features.
• Offer a short feedback session halfway through the free trial. Resolve issues that users encounter. Communication platform Nextiva uses a 15-minute feedback session to uncover issues and offer support. The short time frame makes the ask feel like a small commitment—and gives Nextiva the chance to schedule another call at the end of the trial.
• Limit the features available during a free trial. Your product’s best feature should be easy to find and use during the trial. But to add intrigue, make secondary features visible but not accessible. This will entice users to upgrade to a paid account.
• Offer a discount at the end of the trial. Some users may not be fully convinced to sign up once their trial ends. In this case, you could try offering a generous discount off the first few months of your paid tier. Payment platform Dunnly offers as much as 60% off for 3-6 months after its free trial ends. It’s seen more fully paid conversions this way than by simply extending free trials—the discount weeds out leads who are reluctant to pay anything. And if users are continuously experiencing value in the discount months, they’re less likely to churn once they start paying full price.

Founders dream of product-market fit (PMF).

But most of the advice you’ll find online reads something like, “You’ll know it when it happens”—a lagging indicator. This doesn’t help you understand what PMF really is or how to get there.

Sean Ellis, who ran growth in the early days of Dropbox and coined the term “growth hacking,” found that a simple survey can help you quantify PMF. Use it as an actionable, leading indicator.

Ellis’s survey technique has been used by companies like Slack and Superhuman to reach—and accelerate—PMF.

Here’s how:

1. Survey users (ideally 100+) who have experienced the core product benefit.

Ask: “How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?”

Group responses into three buckets:

• Very disappointed
• Somewhat disappointed
• Not disappointed

2. Measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”

If your “very disappointed” segment is at least 40% of the total sample size, that’s a strong sign that you’ve found PMF. That percentage is based on Ellis’s research benchmarking nearly 100 startups.

If your “very disappointed” bucket is under 40%, there are a few additional questions you can ask to iterate toward PMF. Check out Superhuman's in-depth post for the full framework.

Here’s a quick change that could increase Facebook retargeting conversions:

Shorten your ad copy.

Sounds ridiculously simple, and it is. But many marketers retarget with long-form ad copy—and it might be bringing down conversion.

‍Brainlabs ran a series of ad copy split tests for a fashion retailer. Short ad copy—copy that fit on one line on Facebook—consistently drove more clicks for retargeted users than long-form copy (64% vs. 36%).

Compare that to prospecting campaigns, where clicks from short-form and long-form copy were equally split.

The theory behind this difference:

• Retargeted users are often already aware of your brand and product. They’re higher intent and don’t need as much education, so they react better to shorter messages.
• New prospects need more education—so longer ad copy might be necessary.

Consider testing short- vs. long-form copy in a retargeting campaign to see if you get a similar conversion improvement.

Creating compelling social ads is only half the battle.

Impressions and clicks are great. But you need folks to add your product to their carts and convert.

That’s where your ad landing page (often a product page) comes into play. Here’s how to optimize it for more adds to cart.

• Show real people using your product. Skip Photoshop and take a quick snapshot with your phone. Even better, show a hand touching your product—this can make your product appear more appealing.
• A/B test your CTAs. Try different messaging like “Shop Now,” “Check Out,” “Add to Cart,” etc. Also test the button’s actual placement, e.g., next to your product image, above or below your product info, or even as a fixed button on mobile.
• Address objections in your copy. For example, make it clear how long shipping will take and what your return policy is. Anticipate the reasons shoppers might give for not buying—and then handle those objections preemptively.
• Include user-generated content at the top of your page. Most companies default to including UGC at the bottom of a page, after product info. But UGC often converts better than staged product images. Try adding it to your product carousel (think: product selfies) or interspersing it among product info.
• Find out what’s holding shoppers back. Consider using an exit-intent popup to ask users about their hesitation. Here’s a simple template from Hotjar. The multiple-choice format makes it easy for shoppers to provide feedback in seconds.

Your optimization efforts can get more adds to cart, but users will still inevitably drop off during the checkout process. So make sure you have cart-abandonment email flows set up to convert a percentage of that group.

How most companies do keyword research: Build a giant list of top-of-funnel keywords. Then move down the funnel toward conversion.

How most B2B companies should do keyword research: Target prospects who are already close to converting.

This is “pain-point SEO”: Identify your prospects' main questions and pain points, then find relevant keyword opportunities that address those topics.

If you focus on high-intent keywords around customer pain points, your content will have a much better chance of converting people immediately, even if the search volume is low.

How to uncover pain points:

• Study forums and communities where people discuss topics related to your product, like Reddit and Quora. Then enter their URLs into your keyword tool to find out what keywords they rank highly for. Example: A Reddit post at r/Entrepreneur ranks #4 on Google for the keyword phrase “starting a business with 50k.”
• Interact with your customers via interviews, phone calls, and surveys. Ask them what problem they were looking to solve before stumbling across your business. And how they would describe your product/service to a friend who knows nothing about it.
• Talk to your sales/CX team. You’ll get great insights into the problems customers are trying to solve, and any objections they might have.

Take notes and look for patterns. Turn the most common use cases, questions, and problems into content ideas. Then use Ahrefs to size up the opportunity of keywords that tie into those pain points and intents.

Once you have a handful of keywords, pop them into Clearscope. Run a report on each to gain AI-backed insights into how to rank for it.*

* Clearscope is our sponsor, but our content team was using their reports for SEO well before we partnered with them. Demand Curve readers can get up to three complimentary Clearscope reports. Head over here to get your free reports.

When it comes to email, some marketers invest loads of time in writing, designing, and building flows. But they under-invest in making sure those emails actually land in inboxes.

This is called email deliverability.

To reach your subscribers, you need to indicate to internet service providers (ISPs) like Gmail that you’re a legitimate sender.

One way to improve your sender reputation and email deliverability: IP warming. Instead of blasting all your contacts at once, “warm up” your list by gradually scaling up the volume of sent emails. Do this over a period of at least ~4-6 weeks.

At first, send emails just to the people who are most likely to open, click, reply, and forward. Don’t get too creative at this stage. Send emails that you think have a high probability of generating interest, like a promotion similar to past successful ones.

This will send positive signals to ISPs and help you reach more inboxes as you scale up.

IP warming is also important for brands that are switching email platforms. If that’s the case:

• Export your most valuable leads—new subscribers and people who have clicked on your emails in recent months—to your new email service provider.
• Run your next campaign to just this audience.
• Increasingly add more contacts for each new campaign.

More than a third of SaaS websites don’t show enough of their product’s user interface (UI), according to research from Baymard.

Why this matters: Without a visual representation of your UI, people don’t feel like they know enough about your product. So even if your site has text describing how your software works, they won’t necessarily feel confident about moving forward.

That’s because, according to research, users most value UI representations in the form of images, GIFs, videos, and demos. Take note—we listed those in descending order of importance. Images come first.

Why not videos?

Videos take longer to load and require more user effort. (Users first need to decide to watch a video, then click “play” and adjust their audio volume.) In other words, a video is a lot more demanding than a screenshot. The same goes for demos, which feel like extra commitment compared to images and GIFs.

This is actually good news for optimizing your SaaS site, since creating images requires less effort. Here are five tips for better representing your product:

1. Prioritize showing images of your product’s UI. Take screenshots of key screens, like your main dashboard and most important product features. Example: Clearscope displays a screenshot of its text optimizer on its homepage.
2. Show more concrete images of your product than abstract ones. Abstract graphics show only an interpretation of your product. The online counseling platform BetterHelp could do better here. Instead of using abstract illustrations, it could show its app’s scheduling and messaging functions, plus other features.
3. If you do use videos, make them short and loop them. The idea is to make your videos mimic GIFs, which often sacrifice image quality. Take a look at the looping six-second video on HelpDesk’s homepage for some inspiration.
4. Make sure non-looped videos load quickly and have scrubbing previews. This is best for longer video walkthroughs with audio. Scrubbing previews show what’ll happen in a video when you move your cursor across a video’s timeline—they give users an idea of what to expect.
5. If your demos are self-guided, make that clear. A CTA button that says “Try a demo” feels much more inviting and low-effort than one that says “Book a demo.”

Marketers know PDF content upgrades are a potential game changer for the conversion rate of a blog. PDF keywords, on the other hand, are a surprisingly overlooked content opportunity.

No matter what niche you’re in, there's a good chance people are looking for PDFs related to the product or service you sell. Consider the following keyword examples:

Search volumes may be low, but so is the competition. What's more, search intent is crystal clear. Searchers have problems and they're looking for solutions—PDF resources about their specific dilemma.

To find relevant PDF keyword opportunities in your space:

1. Search for the keyword "PDF" in Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer.
2. Exclude modifiers suggesting the searcher is looking for a software solution, not information (e.g., convert, merge, compress, save, turn, combine).
3. Include keyword modifiers related to your niche (e.g., keto, trading, social media marketing).
4. Scan the results for relevant PDF keywords you can create content for.

Once you have your keyword(s), create a landing page or blog post on the topic and offer a PDF bonus in exchange for an email address. The bonus can be a unique asset (e.g., checklist, cheat sheet, guide) or a nice-looking PDF version of the original content. Experiment and see what works.

Content upgrades have the potential to lift conversions as much as 500%—possibly more.

And if you can rank for those assets, you’ll have yourself a self-perpetuating traffic and conversion machine.

As you create a product, service, or piece of content that you want to go viral, carefully consider why someone would share it.

Jonah Berger, a professor at Wharton, conducted rigorous research to figure out why people share. Here are the six reasons he found (with examples of each):

1. Social currency: “We share things that make us look good.”

• We all seek social approval. It’s human nature. So we share things that we think will boost others’ perception of us.
• Example: When the founder of SmartBargains.com launched a new site, Rue La La, he made it invitation-only. It sold the same products as Smart Bargains. But because consumers now felt like insiders—a badge of social currency—they bought a lot more.‍

2. Triggers: “Top of mind, tip of tongue.”

• We share and talk about things we come across. Which is why people discuss things they see regularly (like Cheerios) more than things that are less visible in their everyday lives (like Disney World).
• Example: The most inescapable song of 2011, Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” peaked in daily searches every Friday after it came out.

3. Emotion: “When we care, we share.”

• We share things that make us emotional. Things that elicit high-arousal positive emotions (awe, excitement, and amusement) and negative emotions (anger and anxiety).
• Examples: Basically, everything on Upworthy.

4. Public visibility: “Built to show, built to grow.”

• We imitate things we see. We’ll go to the food truck with the long line and sign up for the email service we see others using (AOL, then Hotmail, then Gmail).
• Example: The Apple logo is upside down on a closed MacBook. But it’s right side up when the MacBook is open—say, at a coffee shop where others are working nearby. That’s solid public branding.‍

5. Practical value: “News you can use.”

• We share useful information. Passing along helpful tips, tutorials, guidance, etc., strengthens social bonds.
• Examples: #lifehacks viral videos on TikTok, Brené Brown TED Talks‍

6. Stories: “Information travels under the guise of idle chatter.”

• Berger explains that “people don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives.” Which is why Aesop didn’t just say the words, “Don’t give up.” Instead, he told a story about a slow-yet-persevering tortoise who ended up winning a race.
• Example: Unboxing videos are a type of story. As psychologist Pamela Rutledge puts it, each is “a mini-three act play with an exposition (presenting the box), rising action and conflict (what is it? can I get the box open? will I like it?) and resolution or denouement (showing what’s in the box).”

For more on virality, check out our complete guide to organic viral marketing.

Good video testimonials work wonders in landing more sales. In fact, for 89% of enterprise companies, they can drive anywhere from 25% to 50% lifts in conversions.

But many companies struggle to produce video testimonials quickly and cost-effectively. They spend as long as six months on video production, often recording customers at live events or sending videographers to film their subjects directly. They don’t realize that you can get informercial-level video testimonials without traveling anywhere or investing in expensive equipment.

Here’s how:

• Identify your top customers. Depending on your product or service, these might be your repeat buyers, customers with high engagement, or those who’ve consistently referred your business to others or given high NPS scores.
• Create an enticing offer in exchange for a short video interview about your product. A few examples: an exclusive discount, credit toward customers’ next purchase, or a free month of service.
• Sign up for a free Calendly account if you don’t already have one. This will make coordinating interviews with your customers easier.
• Email your top customers with your special offer and Calendly link.
• Keep your interviews short, no more than 20-30 minutes, and record them on Zoom. Ask questions to guide customers toward a cohesive narrative. Try these ones:
• Why did you want [product]?
• What problem were you trying to solve?
• What do you like about [product] vs. [competitor]?
• What surprised you about [product]?
• Would you recommend [product] to others? If so, who and why?
• Use a video editing software like iMovie to cut out any pauses, umms, or other unwanted sounds. Add music from AudioJungle to give each testimonial more life—we recommend using tracks from the Cinematic category.
• Publish the testimonials on YouTube. Then add them to your sales pages and use them in your ads, emails, and other marketing collateral.

Once you’ve nailed down the process, consider automating your offer as an email sequence so you can collect testimonials on the regular. The more footage you collect, the more assets you have to leverage as social proof for your product.

DTC and ecommerce shops, here’s a creative way to delight and retain customers after a purchase:

1. Buy raffle tickets. These are cheap—a roll of 500 costs less than $9 on Amazon.
2. For each order you ship out, include some raffle tickets. Instead of broadcasting your raffle on your site, keep it on the down-low. Only tell customers in their confirmation email or a note in their order what these tickets are for and why they should hold on to them—this makes the whole experience feel special.
3. Announce the winner via email or SMS. Then ship the prize to them. For raffle prizes, think small goodies that relate to your product.

Why this strategy works:

A raffle is old-fashioned fun, and in this case, it’s unexpected. By delivering unexpected value, it creates delight—and studies show that delight improves customer loyalty.

This strategy might work especially well for subscriptions like FabFitFun and Birchbox since they have recurring orders. You can easily include raffle tickets with each scheduled shipment.

Community-led growth and product-led growth (PLG) are often talked about separately.

But an effective go-to-market strategy can be to blur the lines between them.

Embedding community in your PLG strategy could mean built-in virality.

Examples:

• Strava: Use it to work out. Stay because your friends and colleagues are on the app too, giving you kudos.
• SparkToro: Use it for audience research. Love it because of the SparkToro team’s community participation, like bi-monthly office hours.
• Hacker News: Use it for news and commentary. Go to Y Combinator, which runs Hacker News, when you want to apply for a startup accelerator (example courtesy of Nir Eyal).

“Build community as a competitive advantage” is one of OpenView’s 11 principles for PLG. Compared to the old (and even fairly recent) days of establishing brand reputation through ads and trade shows, now “users are the brands. People respond to people, and look to folks they trust for advice. … Community isn’t just about creating another Slack channel. It’s about convening and connecting your target audience to help members achieve their own goals.”

Five ways to foster community as part of PLG, from OpenView:

1. Highlight power users’ creations to amplify community creators. Example: Figma’s community plug-ins
2. Build relationships by connecting users with their peers. Example: Optimizely’s Developer Community
3. Participate in existing communities where your users are active.
4. Build a content community. Create informative content that will help your users out. Any good content marketing program does this.
5. Acquire an established community, like how Zapier acquired Makerpad (probably a later-stage method).

Don’t have a product yet? It’s not too early to start building a community to get people invested in your concept—and get invaluable early insights into what your users will want.

The bar for engaging content on YouTube is rising. And YouTube’s algo continues to improve to surface the best, most relevant videos for its users.

If you’re creating content for YouTube, here’s a list of counter-intuitive insights (and how you can use each) adapted from VidCon 2022:

Insight: YouTube is beginning to value quality viewer experience over straight watch time. YouTube is running more surveys, and increasingly weighting responses to those surveys, to figure out how happy/inspired your videos make people feel.

What to do: Map out the emotional experience you want your viewer to have. The goal should be to help your viewers through a transformation, not just burn their time.

Insight: YouTube's discovery algorithm is driven by two major factors, performance and personalization. Performance can be summed up by the question, “did people enjoy this video?” and personalization by, “who is the right person for this video at this exact time that they open up their device for a YT session?” Most people forget about personalization, which is driven by video watch history, channel watch history, and factors like time of day and device type.

What to do: Clearly define your audience and value propositions. Simple, but most brands and creators miss the mark here. If YouTube can’t interpret who your video should be for, it's because your script and delivery aren't clear, and YT will not find the best viewers for you.

Insight: Most people know how important intros are, but the last 30 seconds of your video are critical as well. Recency bias (as well as the peak-end rule) point to the fact that viewers will put a lot of weight on the conclusion of your video—so much that they often judge the quality of the entire video based on their feeling at the very end.

What to do: End your videos with a laugh, some kind of joke, or a valuable takeaway.

Insight: The optimal rhythm for retention is not “the fastest paced video possible”—it’s more like a rollercoaster with a dynamic pace.

What to do: Find opportunities to slow down the pace after a high speed segment and inject an emotional story if possible.

When you're down to the last 48 hours of an email campaign, chances are good that all you have left are the "tire kickers." And if they still don't buy, it's usually for one of two reasons:

• They aren't interested, or
• They don't feel confident in their decision to buy your product

For the second type of prospect, marketers often resort to scarcity/urgency tactics to drive a final burst of sales. This can work. But if buying your product feels like a giant leap to on-the-fence prospects, "pushing" them with countdown timers and FOMO may not instill the confidence they need to take action.

To make your product feel like a natural step forward, try "coaching" prospects through their objections with a minimum viable commitment (MVC).

Here’s how Copy Hackers used this tactic in their closing course launch email:

Notice how instead of provoking anxiety with ultimatums, the copy relieves it with a stress-free offer—the MVC. When you empathize with your prospects’ current emotional struggle, you set the bar just high enough so they feel good about their ability to clear it.

Consider testing this formula in the CTA of your closing promotional email:

1. Maybe you’re [time or value objection]
2. Maybe you’re [unsure of being a fit objection]
3. Either way, you totally appreciate having [guarantee length] to put [Product] to the test to see if you can [achieve most desired outcome or overcome most crippling pain]

One of the biggest paradoxes in marketing?

Popups.

People hate them, yet many companies still use them since they often lead to more conversions.

So marketers who want to capture the conversion benefits of popups need to figure out a way to do so without irritating potential customers.

One tactic to try: trigger popups only for warm users.

According to one study, 92% of first-time visitors to a website don’t make a purchase. But 75% plan to return and buy something on their next visit.

So instead of enabling popups for all users by default, consider showing them only to returning visitors with a demonstrated interest in your business.

For example, trigger a free shipping exit popup only for returning visitors with a minimum basket value (say, $50). The key here is minimum basket value. If you show a popup for free shipping for orders over $75 but a visitor only has $10 in their cart, your popup probably won’t be very effective.

And by only triggering the popup for returning visitors, you don’t bombard first-time, low-intent visitors with intrusive popups.

Prioritization is a critical step in the experimentation process.

You can’t test everything. Testing takes time and resources, which are always in short supply.

One piece of criteria we always recommend factoring into prioritization: impact. How much could test findings move the needle on your north star metric—the metric you care most about?

When making that call, it’ll help to think about a test’s funnel stage.

Bottom of funnel

Bottom-of-funnel events—those nearer to the point of purchase, like the checkout process—are almost certainly closer to your north star, so they have a high likelihood of driving impact.

An extreme example: A test that removes the “buy” button from your checkout page will have a drastic effect on revenue (just not the kind you want!).

Prospects at that stage have high buying intent. They’re ready, or nearly ready, to buy.

However, some changes to bottom-of-funnel events might not be as effective because prospects have already made their decisions.

Top of funnel

Top-of-funnel events, like those in the awareness and consideration stages (e.g., landing pages and ads), can sway decision making. And prospects’ emotional investment may be higher at earlier funnel stages, when they’re discovering how your product will help them.

Plus, top-of-funnel experiments are often easier to test and alter, both because sample sizes are bigger (top of funnel gets more traffic) and because the changes themselves are frequently lower effort.

But they’re farther from conversion, they have lower intent, and they run a greater risk of being vanity tests: tests that move the needle on some metrics but not your north star.

Our recommendation: When your experimentation program is new and you’re gaining an understanding of which tests will have the most impact, all else being equal, go lower in your funnel to remove the distance from your north star.

An effective way to improve B2C ad performance?

Show people using your product.

When we see others using a product, we can’t help but experience it vicariously. This effect improves how we value the product.

A recent marketing study found that you can enhance that effect by showing a hand touching a product. Here’s an example from Yeti:

Based on the research, this increases how much people:

• Like the product
• Are likely to buy it
• Are willing to pay for it

For example, the study found that people who saw a gif of a hand touching a sweater:

• Liked it 9.4% more
• Were 16% more likely to buy it
• And were willing to pay 14% more for it

Brands like Starbucks and Samsung reported more likes on social posts when a hand was touching their products.

In order for the effect to work, the hand:

• Must be seen from a first-person point of view, as if it’s the person’s own hand
• Must touch the product in a relevant way (e.g., feeling a shirt’s fabric, mixing or pouring a drink)
• Doesn’t need to match the viewer’s hand—it can be any skin tone or gender, or even a digital recreation (like an alien’s “hand” in a game)

Steps to implement:

• Include a first-person-POV hand in your image and video creatives. Make sure it’s touching your product in a meaningful way (such as using or feeling it).
• Use those creatives in your ads, on product pages, and in social media posts—in any of your marketing assets.
• Implement this tactic if you’re in the VR or metaverse space.

Content marketing used to be pretty simple.

Finding an article that answered your specific question in a Google search was rare. Articles that got it right earned most of the traffic.

Then SEO shifted to aggregation: articles that consolidated information into one place ranked higher than fragments. This led to the “skyscraper model”—massive, exhaustive guides on subjects.

Now, search results pages are dominated by established brands with loads of authority and backlinks. Most search results contain the same information: copycat content. The problem is, once a reader has read one article, they’ve effectively read them all.

To address this problem, in April 2020, Google filed a patent that, in short, should reward articles that bring new information to the table.

They call this idea information gain. It’s a measurement of the new information provided by a given article, above and beyond the info provided in other articles on the same topic.

So instead of studying search engine results pages to outline articles, content marketers should be asking themselves, “What new information can I bring to the discussion?”

Three ways to factor this question into your content:

1. Create content that builds on other results

Instead of trying to outrank a top-ranking, comprehensive article, assume that the reader has already read it. How can you add value beyond what they’ve already read?

• Share a practical “next step”—a continuation of a competing article.
• Elaborate on a key idea contained within the competing article.
• Write the 102 version of their 101, going into more depth, detail, and nuance.

2. Experiment with risky framings and angles

You’ll likely be rewarded for bringing new and unique information to the table. Consider:

• Addressing unserved intent (“My specific use case isn’t represented here.”)
• Filling in missing information (“It’s weird that no one has mentioned X here.”)
• Challenging a differing or erroneous opinion (“That’s an outdated belief.”)
• Correcting mistakes in Google’s comprehension (“That’s not what I meant by this keyword.”)

3. Build an information moat with original research

Create content that can’t be found elsewhere.

• Include personal perspectives and company experiences.
• Survey your customers, users, or network for interesting data.
• Add quotes from subject matter experts.

Your content still needs to be better. But with the direction Google seems to be heading in, it’s smart to make it different as well.

Most content on ecommerce email marketing focuses on DTC: retention, maximizing lifetime value, and bringing customers back to purchase again and again.

But what should you do if you’re a store selling $1,000+ products that are typically once-in-a-lifetime purchases for customers?

These businesses tend to get fewer repeat purchases, so they can’t afford to give away a huge discount upfront in hopes of profiting off future orders.

Instead of the standard percentage off first purchase promo that most DTC companies use to acquire emails, here are a few alternatives for high-priced items:

• Dollar amount off: If you sell a $2,000 product, try “$200 off” instead of “10% off.” Dollar amounts feel more substantial (and tangible) than percentages and look more attractive when you’re selling a pricey item.
• Free gift with purchase: Free gifts are a popular option with luxury brands. Skip discounting altogether but still offer something that gets customers excited. For example, if you're selling an expensive couch, throw in a low-cost item like an end table as a free gift.
• A chance to win a discount: Everybody who signs up is entered and you announce a winner periodically.
• Custom content with educational value, rather than dollar value: A product recommendation or downloadable PDF. This is a great option if discounting doesn’t fit your brand, but your product is more difficult to understand.

Consider testing two of these at a time until you find a winner that works best for your long-term acquisition strategy.

Frameworks are so acronym-riddled—think BAB, PAS, and AIDA—that they can be more confusing than helpful. Plus, they’re often discussed without any context, adding to the sense that they’re just a bunch of letters.

But here are three of the most powerful copywriting frameworks in context, using classic Porsche ads to explain how they work.

BAB framework:

First up, BAB: before-after-bridge.

• Before: The pain point your audience is facing. Like driving behind a Porsche in a car that’s not a Porsche.
• After: What life is like when that pain is resolved. Hands grip a sport steering wheel. The road ahead is all yours.
• Bridge: The solution—your product. The bridge that takes you from before to after.

The reason we like BAB and the other two frameworks we’ll discuss: They spotlight experience. They zero in on, and accentuate, what it’s like to have or not have your product. Think of it as another form of highlighting benefits, not features.

Another great BAB example, no copywriting even needed:

PAS framework

“In the beginning I looked around and could not find quite the car I dreamed of. So I decided to build it myself.” –Ferry Porsche

That simple statement encapsulates the next framework, PAS: problem-agitate-solve.

• Problem: The pain point. Ferry couldn’t find his dream car.
• Agitate: Agitate the problem. Heighten the negative emotions it provokes—frustration, anger, fear—or the pain it causes. Add some drama.
• Solve: Your product is the solution. Ferry built his dream car: a Porsche.

This example isn’t an ad; it’s a quote. But you can see how PAS can pack a full story into just a few words.

Admittedly, the quote doesn’t have much agitation. We’re including it anyway because we admire its concision and full arc. If this were an ad, it might linger longer on what life is like without Ferry’s dream car. It takes longer to get places, you’re on a first-name basis with your mechanic, you’re embarrassed to drive around in your old ride. Then it would get to that dream-realizing Porsche 911.

AIDA framework

(The example below is an old ad and the copy is a bit blurry. We call out the lines that matter below.)

The third framework is AIDA: attention-interest-desire-action.

• Attention. Grab attention with an eye-catching headline, image, or both.
• Interest. Nurture interest and intrigue. This ad does that by describing the experience of driving a Turbo: “400 horses. Zero to sixty in just over four heartbeats.”
• Desire. Stimulate desire. Want “some very serious amusement”? To get it…
• Action. Take action. Call 1-800-Porsche.

AIDA is a copywriting classic—it goes all the way back to 1898. The fact that it’s still one of the most widely used and recommended frameworks among copywriters is a testament to how dependably it works.

For more on copywriting, check out our favorite examples here.

Personalization works.

We see it every year with Spotify Wrapped, when personalized content goes massively viral. 80% of consumers are more likely to buy when brands offer personalized experiences. Personalized recs account for 75% of Netflix’s watched content and 70% of YouTube’s.

But when personalizing your marketing or product, avoid the creepiness ditch. That’s the no-man’s-land where personalization starts to feel creepy, resulting in fewer conversions, not more.

Examples of creepy personalization: You feel singled out, your privacy seems invaded, or a mistake annoys you and reminds you that you’re being targeted, like when Pinterest congratulated single women on their weddings.

Ways to avoid the creepiness ditch:

• Don’t retarget too fast or too much. Consider waiting at least 24 hours before retargeting, and keep frequency conservative. Over 30% of people actually get angry at an advertiser if they see the same ad 10 times.
• Make sure messaging is relevant. In a study from Gartner, nearly half of participants said they would unsubscribe if content seemed personalized but irrelevant to them. But don’t get so relevant that people feel ill at ease—e.g., by targeting based on sensitive search history.
• Pay attention to bias and stereotypes. Another study found that people who received an ad for weight loss based on their size felt judged. Also be careful about stereotyping if your product uses personalized avatars.

Books don’t work.

Think back to your favorite book from ~2015. How much of it do you remember?

And that was your favorite.

Humans just aren’t wired to retain information well after a single read. That’s not how we learn. We need activities, feedback loops, and metacognition (thinking about thinking about what we’re reading). We need to spread out learning over time.

Of course, retention isn’t just a memory problem. It’s a startup problem too. User retention is what drives sustainable, scalable growth. During onboarding, here are a few ways to boost business retention through cognitive retention:

• Do > show > explain. The more action-driven your user's education is, the more effective it will be. For instance, instead of starting users off with a bunch of tool tips and videos, Grammarly guides them to fix a dummy page’s grammar.
• Don’t show your user every feature. Over-educating a new user will overwhelm them. Spread out learnings—and new feature introductions—to avoid info overload.
• Connect through personalization. In general, personalization reduces friction and time to activation. Some ways to increase learning during onboarding, and make it more personalized in the process: 1) For B2B, offer a one-on-one webinar or demo. 2) Try a “choose your own adventure” approach to onboarding, with users picking their path.

Image: IBM

Following these steps increases the chance that users will reach their "aha moment"—the moment they realize real value from your product. And they need to do that to stick around.

Some companies purposely make it hard for users to disengage from their products.

For instance, with autoplay turned on, YouTube and Netflix automatically show more content after the user’s video has finished. And publishers like BuzzFeed and Bustle use infinite scroll so that more content automatically populates as users move down their sites.

Companies do this to engage users for longer. But this kind of product experience may actually do more harm than good.

Why? Users feel trapped. Although they voluntarily continue to use your product, they may feel negative about it once they break away. They might even be more likely to perceive it as a mindless or addictive waste of time.

To avoid trapping users, consider building natural exit points into your product. That is, give users clear signals that a product experience has ended. Make it easy for them to leave.

A few examples:

• Instagram shows users a “You’re All Caught Up” message once they’ve seen all the posts in their feed from the last two days.
• The dating app Coffee Meets Bagel closes chatrooms after seven days—an exit point that encourages users to swap contact info with their matches or chat with new ones.
• Many mobile games show a post-game screen with options to return to the home screen or play again.

Exit points create a sense of completion and make it easier for users to leave with satisfaction. Users are less likely to feel bad about using your product for a prolonged amount of time.

Here are a few ideas for how to create exit points:

• Instead of enabling autoplay or infinite scroll, use “Next” or “Load More” buttons.
• Celebrate the end of a product experience by framing it as a big win. For instance, after completing a workout, a fitness app could show a message like “You crushed it—now it’s time to relax!”
• For a more transparent approach, show users how long they’ve been using your product and invite them to take a break. Example: ”You’ve watched 97 videos in the last hour. Want to rest your eyes for a bit?”

Unlike attention-trapping features that take advantage of users, exit points treat your customers more kindly and ethically. And since they help deliver a more satisfying experience, users may stick around for longer over time.

About pages are one of the most-visited, yet under-utilized pages on websites.

People who visit this page are often primed to take action because they're already interested in your business—they’re actively seeking to learn more.

To capitalize on this qualified traffic, consider adding an email signup form on your about page. Make sure the CTA and value you’re offering are consistent with the themes you talk about on the page.

For example:

• James Clear offers a free habit-building email course that nurtures new subscribers to buy his book, Atomic Habits.
• Perfect Keto invites visitors to join their keto newsletter and access subscriber-only discounts and resources.
• Exploding Topics asks their about page readers to subscribe to their newsletter where they share emerging trends every Tuesday.

This tactic might sound obvious, but look around. Most companies don’t take advantage of it.

There are a few “rules” to running experiments. Scientists should follow them, but marketers can break them sometimes.

Rule 1: Your hypothesis should test one discrete variable.

It should have one cause and one effect.

• Example of a one-variable hypothesis: If we build tailored landing pages for our audience segments, our unsubscribe rate will decrease.
• Example of a multi-variable hypothesis: If we build tailored landing pages for our audience segments and add personalization tags to our emails, our unsubscribe rate will decrease.

When to break it: Testing one variable, then another, then another isn’t always feasible in a fast-paced startup environment. You might need to break this rule to have fast impact instead of exact insights.

Do you want precise learnings? Follow the rule. Is it more important for you to move quickly and gauge cumulative impact? Break it.

Rule 2: Don’t peek at A/B test results early.

Early in an experiment, the likelihood of a false positive is high. If you peek early and see the result you want, you might be tempted to call the experiment too soon.

When to break it: Looking at your test results early gives you a chance to catch anything that’s critically broken. If you don’t, you could end up running a test for weeks, only to discover a bug that not only invalidated the test but even hurt company performance.

Plus, it’s extremely difficult to guess what your goal for a test’s outcome should be. For example, if your goal is a 5% conversion change but your test ends up producing a 15% effect, you’ll waste time if you let it run without looking at it.

So, although it’s not good science, we recommend breaking this rule.

First, do a spot-check one or two days after launching a test. Look for any critical issues, bugs, etc.

Then, if you’re running a longer test, look at it again at the halfway mark. But with one important rule in mind: If you’ve set a confidence level of 90%, then when you do your midway peek, only call the test if there’s a statistically significant result with a 98% confidence level or higher.

There’s still a chance that the effect you’ll see at the halfway peek is a false positive. But we’ve found that this method is more practical than the “don’t look at a test at all until it’s reached its target sample size” method that no one actually follows, and it provides some added protection against false positives.

When you’re deciding which TikTok creators to work with, we suggest narrowing your search to those who make quality content in a similar industry to yours—instead of basing your decision on the size of their following.

Why focus on lesser-known influencers? They give brands the most bang for their buck.

Influencers with large followings generally charge more—and engagement rates are often lower than those of smaller creators. But more crucially, TikTok users see nano- and micro-influencers as “people like me,” making viewers more likely to trust them and take action based on their recommendations.

With smaller influencers, you aren't riding on anyone's celebrity, only the quality of their performance.

Another benefit of lesser-known influencers: You can commission a higher volume of creatives to test in your campaigns. Since many of them are either early in their careers or striving to work as creators full time, they’ll work harder to deliver a result you’re happy with.

While other brands try to land deals with TikTok celebrities, focus on finding expert craftspeople who know how to engage an audience.

For more on TikTok, we’ve got a fresh, definitive playbook for you: How to Acquire Customers with TikTok Ads. In it, we cover how to make A+ ad creatives, source content creators, structure your ad account, and launch your first campaign.

We spent months interviewing top TikTok ads experts to make sure it’s the most credible, in-depth resource on TikTok acquisition. Dive in here.

“Buy X, get Y free” promotions reliably increase sales conversions.

However, you’ll drive even more conversions by framing a customer’s target product as the free gift, instead of the other way around.

For example, if a customer searches for “fitness tracker” on your website, show them the offer “Buy a weighing scale and get a fitness tracker free,” rather than “Buy a fitness tracker and get a weighing scale free.”

Why it works:

• People don’t expect to see a product they actually want as the free gift.
• This makes them feel lucky—the promotion seems more attractive.
• And the novelty of the offer makes them more likely to buy.

Steps to implement:

1. Choose a target product (the free gift). This can be something your customers commonly search for or a known best-seller.
2. Choose a secondary item (the main product) of equal or similar value. If one product is significantly more expensive than the other (e.g., buy a printer, get a free laptop), people will either question the quality or think it’s a scam and refuse the offer.
3. Enhance the effect with messaging that makes customers feel lucky (e.g., “It’s your lucky day!”)

Should you offer a freemium plan or free trial?

It’s a tough call for many SaaS businesses. Here are the pros and cons.

Pros of freemium/free trials:

• They’re product-led growth tactics for customer acquisition. They can reduce signup friction and get users to experience your product’s job-to-be-done faster.
• They provide an opportunity to hook prospects by delivering value before any money changes hands. When done right, by the time the user starts paying, they 1) understand how the product solves their problem, and 2) have developed a habit around product use.
• By analyzing data from thousands of SaaS and subscription companies, the ProfitWell team found that freemium cuts customer acquisition cost (CAC) by nearly half, and free trials had 15% lower CAC.
• The ProfitWell team also found an almost 20% improvement in net retention and a twice-as-good Net Promoter Score (NPS) for freemium vs. non-free.

Cons:

• Freemium and free trials are tough to get right. Unless you understand exactly what to charge for and how customers value your product, you run the risk of giving away either too much or not enough value in your product’s free version. It takes a lot of data to know how to strike the right balance.
• Those promising stats from ProfitWell notwithstanding, there is the potential for freemium/free trials to result in an increase in CAC and a drop in retention. If you decide to offer freemium or a free trial, make sure it works with your CAC and average revenue per user (ARPU) and provides a clear conversion path.

There are a few indicators that freemium/free trial could be a fit for your business. As you implement or refine your pricing strategy, consider:

• Low product friction: Your product is easy to get started in and experience value from.
• Product stickiness: The value of your product increases the longer someone uses it, making them less likely to leave for a competitor—and giving you more time to convert them to paid.
• Network effects: Your product’s value increases as more people use it. Both stickiness and network effects help maximize user retention. And the longer someone is retained, the more likely they are to upgrade eventually.
• Product virality: Your product has pull virality and word-of-mouth potential.
• Self-service: You don’t need to put many resources toward supporting self-service users. They can experience product value without extensive training or support.
• Market competition: You’re offering an alternative to a well-entrenched competitor or introducing a totally new concept. Both might benefit from a freebie nudge.
• Market size: Your product would be able to convert enough people to make the economics work. Which means either a bigger market or a higher conversion rate.

91% of B2B buyers rank webinars as their favorite content format.

But webinars have grown stale over the last several years. The problem isn't the format—it's that marketers have allowed the medium to become boring.

Try these tactics before, during, and after your webinar to get more out of the event:

Before: If partnering with guest speakers, create a joint promotion plan that leverages their network to increase attendance.

• Don't make it a one-off event. For greater impact and longevity, cover the topic from different angles over the course of a series. People who show up to multiple events become prime SQLs.
• Ask your audience to help define the agenda. Instead of assuming you know what your audience wants, survey them to find out what topics they're most interested in. Curate your webinar sessions accordingly.

During: Choose a personable moderator. Someone who can comfortably manage the ebb and flow of the conversation and get the audience involved.

• Turn your speech into a discussion. Use live giveaways, Q&A, and breakout groups to turn passive listening into active participation.
• Take advantage of the chat feature. Webinar chats panels either feel like ghost towns or they’re filled with sales pitches. Task a colleague with acting as the host—have them engage in discussions, ask and answer questions, and get feedback in real-time.

After: Follow up. Include a link to the webinar recording, thank them for their attendance, and encourage sharing (a one-click tweet works well).

• Repurpose and distribute: Repurpose the webinar into assets for your marketing channels to drive traffic back to the original (i.e., blog post, Twitter thread, podcast, YouTube clips, LinkedIn post, etc.).
• Consider avoiding the word "webinar" in your promotion. It's boring. Masterclass, Seminar, or Expert Talk are better alternatives.

Webinars should feel more like live courses than product demos. Keep tabs on how top internet creators are building live courses. They usually nail “edutainment”—the sweet spot between entertainment and education that leads to high engagement and high perceived value.

Shoppers don’t perceive prices or buy rationally.

Because of this, seemingly minor pricing tactics can have an outsized impact on conversion.

Take a look at this example:

The product on the right should convert better than the one on the left.

Why? Simple pricing tactics proven through behavioral psychology studies:

1. Use a smaller font for the reduced price. It makes the item feel less expensive compared to the original price.
2. Place the prices horizontally, not one on top of the other. And show the higher price on the left and the lower price on the right. Since we read left to right, this helps shoppers understand the price reduction.
3. Choose prices so that the sales price's right-most digit is lower than regular price's right-most digit. For example, £295 should be reduced to £250, not £249. Because shoppers read numbers to themselves, the lower right-most number makes the whole reduced price seem lower.
4. Separate the two prices physically by a distance—don’t include them right next to each other. This separation helps shoppers internalize the difference between the two prices.

While creating pricing pages and ads, consider testing these tactics to see if they increase conversion.

Keyword optimization helps people discover your app in the App Store. Screenshot optimization entices them to download it.

Last December, Apple launched a new A/B testing feature for mobile apps. If you sell an app that’s already getting decent traffic from search, consider A/B testing your screenshots' messaging, sequence, and design to increase download conversion rate.

1. First, log in to your App Store Connect account. Navigate to My Apps > Product Page Optimizations and click the "+" in the header.
2. Give your test a name and choose the number of variants to test (Apple calls them "treatments").
3. Select how much traffic each treatment will get. For a true A/B test, we recommend splitting traffic 50/50.
4. Click Create Test and upload your screenshots. Click Start Test to launch.

Let your test run for one to four weeks; until it reaches 90% Confidence (statistical significance).

• Once you have data back, compare conversion rates from impression to download.
• When you can determine a clear winner, end the test and choose the top-performing treatment.

Some successful Amazon advertisers get about 60-70% of their sales from organic traffic, with the rest coming from pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Even if you have a great Amazon ad profile, it pays to spend time improving your products’ organic rankings in Amazon’s search results.

Amazon SEO ranking uses the same two factors as Amazon PPC ad ranking: performance and relevance.

Performance:

• Amazon wants to know that your product is buyable. If your conversion rate is solid, your organic rankings will prosper. Besides an optimized PPC program, other elements that improve conversion include strong product imagery and good reviews.
• Pricing and inventory factor into performance too. You’ll lose out to competitors if your product is priced too high or your stock runs out.

Relevance:

• You’ll rank more highly for a search term if your product page proves you’re relevant to it. If you’re running PPC ads, use the keyword insights you get out of them to optimize your product pages.
• Tactically place high-converting keywords from your campaigns on your product page. Add them to your product title (including your brand name), product description, and image metadata. Another element that will help with relevance is the search term field (Seller Central > Inventory > Edit Product > Keywords). Use up all 250 characters with a string of keywords that differ from those in your title.

Most brands source their influencer content like this:

1. Reach out to a bunch of different types of influencers.
2. Send them some products.
3. See what comes back.

But that quantity-over-quality approach rarely works out—the resulting videos don't capture what the brand needs.

The best TikTok creators know how to make engaging video content, but they need direction to promote your products well. That's where a creative brief comes in.

A creative brief is a set of instructions that helps you maintain quality control and minimize costly reshoots. Here’s what we recommend including in a TikTok brief:

1. Specify deliverables: Define your advertising goal, and specify the number of videos you want. We suggest asking for 5-10 different openers per video so you’ll have plenty of hooks to test.

2. List talking points (value props): Tell creators how to talk about your product. The best way to do this is by listing your value props.

3. Storyboard: A storyboard is a graphic representation of how you want your ad to go, shot-by-shot. Answer these questions to map out a linear, product-focused storyboard:

• Situation: When and where is your product used? Who is it supposed to help?
• Problem: What problem(s) does your product solve?
• Process: How does your product work? What does it do?
• Solution: What results can the customer expect? How does the product improve their life?

4. Set content guidelines: List any do's and don'ts you have around language, phrasing, competitor mentions, or buzzwords related to your brand.

• Make sure the creator knows how to use your product correctly so they look comfortable with it on camera.
• If the creator is responsible for editing, provide direction on text overlays, video effects, and other post-production details.

5. Share examples: Browse TikTok's Ad Library (open link in new tab) and include links to a few of your favorite ad examples. Note specific shots, visual effects, or content types you want to recreate (e.g., unboxing, TikTok made me buy it, X reasons why).

You’re hiring quality creators because they’re great at engaging their audiences. Your brief sets the guardrails so that creators understand and pitch your product in the best way possible.

Most business experiments—around 90%—result in so-called failure.

Example: an A/B test in which the status quo ends up being the winner.

But those results are just as important as “successes.” They support startup growth by providing insights into:

• Why the experiment variant “failed”
• What you can learn for your next experiments
• How risky your experiments are. Too many small wins may mean you're not focusing on the most high-leverage opportunities.

Instead of defining “failure” and “success” based on test results, here are the definitions we recommend.

Failure: the act of creating 1. an undisciplined test, like one with an untestable hypothesis 2. a test with low impact on your business, or 3. a test your team won't learn from

Success: the act of developing, launching, and learning from a rigorous test with the potential for high business impact

Basically, a sloppy test is a fail. An inconsequential test is a fail. A well-designed test is a win. And any test that gives you useful new information is a win.

So go ahead and “fail.” Encourage your team to do the same. Disproven hypotheses are part of a healthy growth culture.

Here's an underrated SEO technique that can improve click-through rate: schema markup.

Schema markups (also known as structured data) are snippets of code that, when added to your pages, help Google represent your content in search results.

Image: Hubspot

For certain search types, adding schema can get you more clicks. By giving visitors more insight into your content, it can encourage them to click on your site vs. other search results.

For example, someone shopping for a specific product might click on the result that’s labeled “in stock” based on product schema.

Besides product schema, here are three other types worth adding to your pages:

• FAQ: Consider adding this markup to your actual FAQ page, plus your product and service pages. You’ll be able to address objections right on the results page.
• Ratings and reviews: Use this schema as social proof. A search result with strong ratings and reviews is more enticing than one without.
• Video: Since this schema enables a video thumbnail in SERPs, your content gets a visual element that text-only search results lack.

You can find more details about each type of schema on schema.org.

To create your schema markup, use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or another free online generator like TechnicalSEO.com. These tools walk you through the markup process and then provide a code to be added to a specific page’s HTML code.

People tend to value items more when they own them.

That’s the endowment effect—the psychological phenomenon behind why someone is more likely to buy a car after taking it for a test drive. When we feel like something is already ours, we place a higher value on it.

Here are a few ways you can use the endowment effect to convert warm prospects into paying customers.

Reframe promos. Instead of standard promos (and free giveaways), frame them as if they already belong to users.

• Example: “Get a 20% discount on camping gear” → “Claim your 20% off new camping gear”
• Livongo, a health management company, replaced the generic copy “Join the program” in its email marketing with “Claim your welcome kit” and drove a 120% increase in registration.

Adjust cart abandonment copy. Consider using the endowment effect in cart abandonment emails. Use language like “your [product] can’t wait to come home” to help shoppers feel as though they already own the items in their carts.

Create interactive content. Help users visualize products as theirs by adding an interactive component to your site, app, or socials.

• For example, IKEA’s Place app lets people see how furniture fits in their home, endowing them as owners.
• You can do something similar by creating custom Snapchat or Instagram filters with your products, like filters for trying on sunglasses or makeup.

Try this copywriting framework to create more compelling product descriptions:

1. List all of the product’s features.
2. For each feature, explain its benefit(s).
3. For each benefit, explain its value. In other words, translate each benefit into its real-life implications—state why customers should care about it. For extra punch, inject emotionally appealing language at this step.

Here’s an example of this framework applied to a reusable water bottle.

Feature → Benefit → Value

• Wide bottle mouth → Faster refills → You can spend less time standing at a water dispenser—and more time running, hiking, etc.
• Straw lid → Easy sipping → Since you don’t have to twist off a bottle lid, you can drink with just one hand—perfect when you’re on the road.
• Double-wall vacuum insulation → Protects liquid's temperature for hours → You can be refreshed for any adventure with your drink either as cold or hot as you’d like.

Some companies make customers jump through hoops to cancel their subscriptions.

Instead of offering easy, online cancellation, they force customers to cancel by phone during business hours. Or if they do offer an online cancellation option, they make it difficult to find.

But these tactics are unethical and, in some cases, can even lead to legal action from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

You should make it easy and straightforward for customers to cancel your service. Remove the friction.

Customers aren’t necessarily lost forever when they cancel. Some might return at a later time. Others might reconsider and decide to stay. Whatever the case, a smooth offboarding flow should accomplish two things:

• Allow customers to leave, easily, on a positive note.
• Without adding friction to the cancellation process, entice users to stick around.

Here are five tips for creating a smoother offboarding experience:

• Make cancellation as easy as the method used to buy or sign up. If customers can sign up easily online, they should also be able to cancel easily online. Simple as that.
• Remind users of your product’s key benefits. Consider how Canva (left) reiterates the features users will miss out on by canceling—it even shows an example image comparing its free and pro plans. This is more likely to persuade users to stay than Otter.ai’s approach (right).

• Give users an option to pause their subscription or skip a month. Sometimes the reason customers want to leave is a matter of timing, or something else outside of your control. By offering the ability to pause or temporarily deactivate their accounts, you can stop customers from leaving altogether. And if you note that you’ll save their data, there’s a better chance they’ll return later on.

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• Include a “salvage” offer to retain customers. If you sell a subscription, offer a discount to renew customers’ contracts. Or, depending on your product, offer users an extension of their trial (e.g., for another 60 days) or the ability to swap out a product for another one. Just be sure to present your salvage offer alongside your cancellation option—you don’t want customers to feel cornered.
• Make it easy to identify the cause of cancellation. Set up a quick, one-question survey with options like “Too expensive,” “Technical issues,” or “Switching to another product.” Include an optional field where users can add any comments. Don’t ask for a phone call to collect feedback—it can feel like a burden and further sour unhappy customer experiences.

Referrals are like adding fuel to your existing word of mouth (WOM) fire. They encourage WOM by offering an incentive for recommending your business to others.

While you’re investing in building a referral program, do some research to see if people who are already referring you organically want to do so formally.

Two ways to find organic referrals: 1) Check your site analytics, and 2) dig into your social media.

1. Site analytics

Check which sites are referring significant traffic to yours. In Google Analytics, navigate to the Acquisition tab > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

If a source in your list is reputable and speaks fondly of your product, reach out to them. See if you can form a relationship and test a formal referral program.

Set up goal tracking in Google Analytics to measure the number of new users who visit your site from a referral source. Use that as a source of truth when negotiating compensation or other forms of incentives with partner websites.

2. Social media

To find out how customers are talking about your business organically, do some social listening.

• On Twitter: In the advanced search window, type your product and business’s name in brackets in the “any of these words” section. This will show you all the public tweets that mention your business or product name. You can also use Tweetdeck to track mentions. Engage with high-quality posters. See if they’re willing to join your formal referral program.
• On LinkedIn: In the search bar, type the name of your business. Then click Posts > Date Posted. Set the time frame to “past month.” Click Show Results > Sort By > Latest > Show Results. You now have a filtered list of all the posts from the last month that mentioned your business. Search the results for any that speak highly of your brand. Reach out to see if they’d be willing to join your program.

For more on referrals, check out our process for launching a program here.

When users start struggling with a service or an app, they often get discouraged and stop using it entirely.

People don’t tend to continue using things they feel bad at.

For example, a user might stop playing a game if they’re stuck on a single level for many days.

But this struggle is a great opportunity to use personalization to retain users.

By providing personalized support—helpful tips, links to resources, or, in some cases, discounts on helpful upgrades—you can retain users who otherwise churn out of frustration.

You can automate this tactic based on event triggers specific to your service or app. A few examples:

• Mobile games: number of games / levels failed
• Dating apps: number of matches per user
• Educational apps / services: number of failed quizzes

Here’s how this personalization might play out:

The dating app Tinder could calculate the number of matches each user receives and then compare it against the average number of matches across all users. Then it could identify users receiving a relatively low number of matches and deliver personalized content like tips on how to improve their profile. Alternatively, it could offer a discount on an upgrade or special feature that could solve the frustration.

Providing support to struggling users ultimately motivates them to stay.

Most list posts (listicles) are utilitarian, boring, and easily copied by rivals.

They have titles like:

• The Top 10 DSLR Cameras
• The 5 Best CRM Products
• The Complete List of SEO Tools
• And so on

These types of posts may generate a ton of pageviews—but they rarely generate revenue (a common goal of listicles).

You can transform your listicles from generic, copycat content into unique, defensible, revenue-generating assets in five steps. Here's how.

1. Choose novel selection criteria. Most listicles are “Google research papers.” The writer searches a target keyword, skims the search engine results page (SERP), and grabs an assortment of popular things to include in their article. This isn’t effective since you’re recycling the same information as everyone else.

To differentiate your listicle and pique the reader's interest, you need a strong hook.

• Ditch the "best" qualifier and try something less common (e.g., Overlooked / Foundational / Overrated…)
• Target a specific reader or use case (e.g., X for Content Marketers / CMOs / Ad Specialists…)
• Pick a specific product trait (e.g., X Overlooked Browser-Based / Freemium / No Code…)

2. Surface your thought process. Even though you’re curating objective information, your writing still needs to persuade. You are the expert and your job is to persuade the reader that your list is worth trusting. To do that, share your thought process and selection criteria (why you chose what you chose).

• Why did you include it? "It's the most recommended…" or "It's the lowest-priced…"
• Why not other options? "We excluded apps that don't offer a free trial…"
• Is there something novel or unexpected about it? "Though not a conventional SEO tool, this AI content app offers the same keyword research data at a lower price."

3. Share personal experience to demonstrate credibility. Readers can tell when a writer doesn’t have firsthand experience. So even if your articles rank for their target keywords, readers won't trust your advice. If you want your listicles to convert readers, you need to prove to them that you have firsthand experience with the things you're writing about. Here are a few ways to do that.

• Take screenshots of software you're reviewing (any part that can't be accessed without logging in).
• Take your own product photos—even better if you include yourself in the photos.
• Share personal anecdotes about your experience that only a real user could have.

4. Lean on the experiences of others. If you can't experience the product or service firsthand, base your listicle on the experience of people who have. That means surveying and quoting audiences and synthesizing firsthand experiences from users.

• If you have access to a large audience (i.e., email list or social media following), survey them and share your research in the listicle.
• If you don't, interview a subject matter expert and share their insights to lend credibility to your list.

5. Make a single, opinionated recommendation. Listicles are meant to help readers make a decision. Most listicles are good at collecting things but usually go overboard with too many choices. This only makes it harder for the reader. Great listicles go out on a limb and make a strong recommendation. And readers trust it because it was written based on firsthand experience and clear selection criteria.

• For example, the product review site, Wirecutter, reviewed over 250 wine glasses and still managed to come up with a single final recommendation for its readership.

Can you guess which of these two headlines did better than the other?

• 2 reasons why the price of silver will rise steeply
• 2 reasons why the price of silver may rise steeply

You might expect the first to perform better because it’s bolder. It makes a definitive claim: the price of silver will rise.

But according to copywriter Gary Bencivenga, the headline that used “may” outperformed its counterpart by 200%.

Why?

The one-word difference qualifies the rest of the statement—it’s a condition telling readers that the claim being made isn’t 100% certain. So it feels more realistic. Even credible.

Here are some examples of how companies use conditional claims to build more trust:

• "A/B testing can transform your business—if you do it right” (headline on VentureBeat)
• “Zoom is probably the most well-received collaboration tool that we’ve seen...in 20 years.” (the first testimonial shown on Zoom’s homepage)
• “When it’s time to get granular regarding competitor traffic stats, the Top Pages report in Traffic Analytics is hard to beat.” (an announcement from Semrush)

Note the italicized phrases that create a condition—they ground the claims and make them feel more believable—they’re not absolute statements.

To build more trust with readers, try using* conditional claims in your own copywriting.

One easy way to do it: use an “if... then” statement. Define a clear requirement (if), and then write your promise (then).

*See what we did there? In most of our tactics and recommendations, we use conditional language—we can’t say with 100% certainty that growth will follow.

Repeat customers spend ~67% more than first-time buyers. And it costs 6-7x more to turn a new visitor into a customer than it does to retain an existing customer.

Improving retention can fix a leaky-bucket business, yet only 18% of companies focus on it.

To increase profitability and lower marketing costs, consider implementing the following four retention strategies.

1. Start a loyalty program. Loyalty programs incentivize customers to return to your site to buy, reengage with your product, and promote your product on your behalf.

Tools like Loyalty Lion or Smile.io can get you started.

Here are a few loyalty models to explore:

• Free newsletters: Encourage sharing in exchange for premium content or shoutouts.
• Paid newsletters: Reward your top advocates with comped subscriptions.
• B2B: Offer training, tools, and invitations to members-only events.
• Ecommerce: Create a tiered membership program that rewards customers with points, perks, or discounts. For example, Sephora's Beauty Insider has over 25 million members, and those members account for ~80% of Sephora's annual sales.

2. Collect feedback throughout the sales process. When implemented, customer feedback can help lower CAC, improve your marketing's effectiveness, and improve retention.

How to implement:

• Collect feedback from on-site forms, social media, email and post-purchase surveys, and heatmaps.
• Look for repeat questions and complaints about your product or website, as well as requests for new features and products. Apply the most common feedback.

3. Follow an omnichannel engagement strategy. Compared to single-channel marketing, an omnichannel approach can improve retention rates and engagement by 90%.

Quality engagement always starts with quality content. Here are a few ways to encourage omnichannel engagement via content and community:

• Reply to social media and blog comments.
• Host special events (webinars, workshops, AMAs, interviews).
• Start and maintain a well-organized Slack or Discord channel.
• Personalize email as much as possible.
• Involve your audience in content creation (crowdsourcing).

4. Provide exceptional customer support. Anticipate all the different ways someone might need support (see point #2), and implement as many as make sense for your business.

• Add a prominent live chat to your website that shows when your team is available and ready for questions.
• Create a well-organized knowledge database that lets customers search for answers themselves.
• Create and moderate a community forum that allows users to help each other.
• Write comprehensive blog posts addressing common issues and questions.
• Create video tutorials or educational courses about your product or service.

Keep track of what you learn, and make gradual changes that address your target audience's goals, pain points, and interests. Accomplish that, and you'll have no problem boosting your retention rate.

Check out this Patagonia ad:

(Image source: @dailyadcoffee)

Copywriter Jon Morrow defines power words as “persuasive, descriptive words that trigger a positive or negative emotional response. They can make us feel scared, encouraged, aroused, angry, greedy, safe, or curious.”

If you “sprinkle in a few, … you can transform dull, lifeless words into persuasive words that compel readers to take action.”

What’s remarkable about this ad from Patagonia isn’t that it uses power words. All great copywriting does.

The remarkable thing about it is that those power words tap into different emotions depending on the order you read them in.

Reading from top down, they cause anger and fear: screwed, it’s too late, we don’t trust anyone, we don’t have a choice.

From the bottom up, the emphasis changes entirely, to hope and encouragement: choice, livable, imagine, healthy future.

Brilliant.

The poem is followed by that kicker of a tagline: “Buy Less, Demand More.” That’s shocking from a retailer—and extremely affecting.

The takeaway? Appeal to your readers’ emotions. We tend to think of decision making as being connected to the rational part of our brain, but the opposite is true. Decision making is emotional.

Feelings dictate decisions. Emotional responses are why we share things that go viral, why we donate to causes, and why we buy what we buy (or don’t buy what we don’t need, in the case of Patagonia).

Refer back to Morrow’s list as you write your copy. Consider how your writing instills fear, encouragement, arousal, anger, greed, safety, or curiosity. If, instead of triggering a high-arousal emotion, it makes you feel merely content, a little bit sad, or just kind of bored, it’s time for a rewrite.

That Patagonia ad is one in a collection of the strongest copywriting examples we’ve come across. You can check out the full article here.

Referral programs have three phases of maturity. Understanding yours will help you maximize your referrals ROI.

• Phase 1: Test—when your referral program is starting out
• Phase 2: Prove—when you’re optimizing it
• Phase 3: Scale—when you’re growing and streamlining it

Phase 1: Test. The point of this phase is to test your referral program incentive as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iteration is the action, profitability is the goal.

Here’s what this phase might look like:

• Find your top 10-20% most engaged customers. Run a pilot with them by sending them individualized emails describing your referral program.
• Fulfill the incentives manually. Engage with new prospects 1:1 and learn from them.
• Refine your messaging, incentive, and process over time.

Spend time on this phase. Early-stage referral programs are not yet “set it and forget it.” Just like any other marketing channel, they must be actively monitored and improved before you start scaling up.

Test, then invest.

Phase 2: Prove. Once you find an incentive that converts and messaging that resonates, start removing friction from the process.

• Optimize the experience to make it as few clicks as possible (for the customer first, then the prospect, then your internal team). Start using low-cost automations for repetitive tasks.
• Continue to refine your messaging and learn from your new customers.

Phase 3: Scale. When your referral program is predictably generating prospects—and the economics still make sense—it’s time to invest in referral program software, like Rewardful, GrowSurf, or Referral Rock.

Create feedback loops so your referrers know their efforts are paying off. Even if their sharing doesn't yield a referral, seeing that their friend clicked and viewed is still encouraging (and might spur another referral).

Keep an eye on your economics to make sure customer acquisition cost (CAC) is comparable to your other acquisition channels. Monitor the quality of your prospects to keep out any fraudulent gaming of the program.

How much should you charge, and how should you charge (e.g., subscription, usage-based, flat rate)?

When establishing your business model and answering those questions, be sure to factor in friction.

Your product’s friction should align with your model’s friction. A low-friction product should have a low-friction business model. A high-friction product should typically have a higher-friction business model.

• A low-friction product is easy to use to accomplish a product’s job-to-be-done. It’s easy to get started in and stick with. Examples: TikTok, Gmail. Those have low model friction, too—they’re free. Free trials, freemium, or just plain free often align with simple products.
• A high-friction product has a more complex onboarding and use process. Experiencing full product value and forming a product habit take longer. Examples: Salesforce, Palantir. They have high model friction, too, such as higher pricing, add-ons, and variable pricing.

When product and model friction don’t align, there’s a risk that your product’s value won’t get realized, your unit economics (CAC and ARPU) won’t work, and growth potential will be stymied.

• Low product friction and high model friction: Not competitive. You’ll lose out to competitors who make it easier to pay or offer a more affordable solution. Because of the pricing barriers to entry, you’ll limit the number of users who experience your product’s job-to-be-done—and limit growth. Hypothetical example: if Instagram were to start charging a monthly fee.
• High product friction and low model friction: If you have a highly complex product, it probably can’t be learned during a free trial or freemium use. Users wouldn’t get the maximum value from your product. If you were to offer onboarding services to help free trialers get the most out of your product, your CAC would go up and could become unsustainable.

Because of the importance of aligning product and model friction, successful low-ARPU products tend to be low-friction (like social media apps), and successful high-ARPU products tend to be high-friction (like enterprise B2B SaaS).

Good creative is the biggest driver of ad success in a post-iOS 14 world.

Your ads need to resonate with your audience. No amount of sophisticated targeting or optimization tweaks will save your campaigns—that's what makes creative testing so crucial.

Here’s a look at Thesis’ creative testing methodology. Consider using it to find learnings faster and protect your core campaigns from creative flops.

Step 1. Use a simplified account structure. Three campaigns, 3-4 ad sets per campaign, with 3-6 live ads in each. The campaigns:

• Campaign 1: Creative testing. Isolate creative testing into a separate campaign to ensure live tests won't impact your core campaign performance. This also allows you to force spend to drive faster learnings and curb creative fatigue.
• Campaign 2: Prospecting. Move winners from your creative testing campaign into a separate prospecting campaign. This campaign contains only your best-performing ads.
• Campaign 3: Retargeting. Again, move winners from your testing campaign into a separate retargeting campaign. You can test the prospecting creative as is, only changing the specific offer or discount for your retargeting promotions.

Step 1a. Allocate ~20% of your budget to creative testing. Use your CPA target and this formula to calculate (approximate) starting daily spend:

• First, calculate your weekly budget by multiplying your target CPA by 50 (minimum weekly conversion threshold needed to exit the learning phase).
• Then, divide your calculated weekly budget by 7 to arrive at your daily budget.
• Here's a hypothetical example using a $35 CPA:
• $35 x 50 = $1750
• $1750 / 7 day = $250 daily budget

Step 2. Set up a creative test. Use broad targeting—it's the most scalable (and often the cheapest). Each creative concept gets its own separate ad set containing up to six variants.

Only test elements of the ad unit itself (e.g., ad formats, new images or videos, thumbnails, copy, or CTAs). Here's an example of a net-new video test:

• Create a new ad set for your video test.
• Choose one element to test. If the video is untested, start by testing different hooks or altering the first three seconds of footage.
• Launch test.

Step 3. Run creative tests for at least three days, then make a call. After about three days of running a new test, you'll typically run into one of the following scenarios:

• Results are excellent: CPA is lower than average. At least 1-2 variants show signs of traction. Start scaling spend by ~20% every three days directly in the creative testing campaign. If you have the budget, you can increase spend by 50%-100% to drive learnings even faster.
• Duplicate the winning ad into your core prospecting and retargeting campaigns.
• Results are average: Only a few purchases are generated, falling within 10%-20% of your CPA targets. Start optimizing at the ad level and turn off worst performers to give other ads more spend.
• If an ad reaches 2X your average CPA without a purchase, turn it off.
• If no winners are found in the test after 5-7 days, turn off the ad set.
• Results are bad: CPAs are high (2X normal or greater) across the board, engagement rate is poor, and there are little to no purchases generated from the new creative test.
• Follow the same optimization process from the previous bullet point.

Don’t turn off any ad set that's performing well during your creative tests. Keep it running in your testing campaign as long as results remain strong.

If you have an ecommerce site, best practice is to keep your menu (navbar) as simple as possible.

That’s not to say that every ecommerce brand should remove its informational pages—e.g., blog, About Us, FAQ—from their menu. For some, those links will help conversion, not hinder it.

A general rule of thumb for you to consider:

• If your brand has a relatively low average order value and you’re not selling a complex, ultra-specialized, or mission-driven product, move your informational pages and blog out of your menu and into your footer.
• For higher-priced, sophisticated, or story-oriented products, content marketing and info pages could increase conversion. These can factor into the consideration, intent, and evaluation stages of a buyer’s journey. Your navbar might be a good place for them.

Examples: Allbirds has a page about sustainability in its navbar. That's a core value that many shoppers will connect with and support. Judy puts FAQs in its navbar, since the decision to buy a disaster prep kit brings a lot of questions with it. On the other hand, the navbars for Nomatic and Clevertify focus on their relatively straightforward products (backpacks and baby clothes).

This boils down to a simple question to ask about any page: Will it help prospects convert or distract them from converting?

When it’s done right, cold email is one of the highest ROI activities for growing your business. In fact, good cold emails get response rates between 2% and 10%—and even better ones get rates above 40%.

Here's the framework we use to write emails of the latter caliber:

• Opening line: Your first sentence must grab attention. Since it also appears as your email’s preview text in the inbox, your goal is to intrigue readers enough to open your email. We recommend personalizing this line so it doesn’t read like the other poorly written cold emails people get in their inboxes.
  
• Context: Why you’re reaching out. For instance, because you noticed that the recipient is using a particular tool and might have a certain pain point. The more specific, the better. This is also a good place for a quick intro.
  
• Value proposition: How you offer value. Don’t be salesy. Focus on describing your product’s benefits rather than its specific features. If true, highlight the fact that your product genuinely solves a problem for your recipient better than an alternative they’re already using.
  
• Wrap-up: One clear call to action. If this is your first email, ask for someone’s interest instead of their time. “Think we might be a good fit?" works better than “Let’s book a call” since replying “yes” is lower friction than immediately booking a call with a stranger.

Note that it’s not enough to just write one email in hopes of reaching your target audience. Write multiple—test different opening lines, value props, etc. Create different versions to experiment with.

For inspiration, take a look at this cold email that uses this exact formula:

Read more about sending better cold emails here.

In a survey of ~600 SaaS companies, nearly half (45%) had usage-based pricing in 2021— that’s up from 27% in 2018.

What is usage-based pricing? It’s charging for customers’ use of or transactions with your product. The more they use it, the more they pay.

Examples:

• SendGrid users pay for emails/month.
• HubSpot users pay for marketing contacts.
• Wistia users pay for videos or podcast episodes.

Usage-based pricing is generally considered the SaaS gold standard. When you align your pricing with product value, users stick around. They came to your product because of the value it offers, and they’ll stay if they’re paying for what they’re getting out of it.

If usage-based pricing is right for your business, the first step is to figure out what you’d charge for—what your value metric should be (like “marketing contacts” for HubSpot). Here’s an abbreviated version of a framework for that process:

1. Define your job-to-be-done: what it is your customers “hire” your product/service to do. Example for a language-learning app: “self-paced language learning.”
2. Convert your JTBD into proxies. Examples for the language-learning app: courses taken, live classes scheduled, test score improvement.
3. Answer these questions for each proxy: Does it align with customers’ needs? Is it scalable? Is it clear? Does it make sense as a way to acquire and retain customers? Do price and value scale proportionately?
4. If any of your proxies have all “yes” responses to the above questions, include them in a customer survey. Use max-differential sets to find the right feature for your value metric. These force respondents to pick the most and least important item from a list, helping to identify what your audience truly values (and they’re available in survey platforms like SurveyKing).

We get much more in-depth with this framework in our Growth Program’s pricing module, where we also help you determine whether usage-based pricing is right for your startup. But these four steps provide an overview of the customer-first approach you should take with usage-based pricing.

Product seeding is the act of sending your product to influencers so they'll promote it to their audiences—organically. Some call it gifting.

Most brands approach seeding by immediately pushing contracts or content obligations on influencers.

We advise taking a more hands-off approach instead. That is, identify relevant influencers that align with your brand. Send out your product and make it clear there are no strings attached. Then see which influencers create content about your product without being asked. Use a tool like Archive or MightyScout to track influencer stories and posts that mention your brand.

Product seeding has three major benefits:

1. It has a higher potential ROI than traditional influencer marketing, which often requires a large upfront investment. Though product seeding means giving away your product for free, organic exposure from just one influencer can quickly offset this cost.
   
2. It identifies influencers who genuinely love your product—creating the perfect foundation for an effective, long-term, and mutually beneficial relationship. Example: After the Rowing Blazers team got word that Pete Davidson was wearing their apparel, they reached out for a collab—and got a very enthusiastic response.
   
3. You can easily repurpose this user-generated content for other channels, like ads. This is where serious growth comes in. You can get loads of high-quality, influencer-generated content, for free, from genuine product adopters. Taylor Lagace scaled Animal House Fitness from 0 to $1M in 4 months by using this seeding and ad approach.

We’d recommend seeding micro-influencers (those with under 50k followers). Big-time influencers who create for a living expect to get paid for their work upfront, whereas smaller influencers might appreciate the free product. For more insights on influencers, check out our creator marketing playbook.

There are two main signals Google’s algorithm looks at to rank your pages:

• The types of sites linking to you: What are they? And how big, relevant, and authoritative are they? These are backlinks.
• Your internal link structure: How are you linking pages together? Does your link structure enable productive link flow?

Most marketers over-fixate on backlinks, when they should be paying more attention to internal link structure.

Think of your website as an electrical circuit:

• Backlinks supply energy to the circuit in the form of electrical current (link flow).
• Each page functions as a component of the circuit board.
• Unless each component is calibrated and strung together just right, electrical current won't flow, and the circuit won't function.

To get the most benefit from backlinks, link up your pages in a way that distributes link flow productively throughout your website.

Here are two ways to do it:

• Distribute link flow to high–search value pages. Every internal link you create sends a signal to Google that you think that page is important.
• Your “About us” page may be valuable to you and your site visitors, but if that page has no search value, you’re sending Google the wrong message by linking to it internally.
• As a rule of thumb, remove these links where possible, especially if they’re repeated often. Then prioritize creating links to key pages that are better optimized for search. Think: valuable blog posts and pages that are designed to convert.
• Avoid linking to weak or duplicate content.
• Duplicate content tells search engines that your site has poor content quality. Linking to these pages only adds insult to injury. Apart from your header and footer, make sure your pages share less than ~50% of the same words.
• Pages that are considered “weak” in Google’s eyes typically have low word counts and little information. Think: all the short, half-hearted blog posts of the internet—abundant in quantity, but never quality. To make your link flow more productive, avoid linking to these pages (better yet, avoid having them altogether).

After The Hustle published an article about Hint Water, the flavored water company saw their CPC drop from ~$5 to < 10¢. Their cost to acquire customers dropped from $80 to $25.

(Source: Nik Sharma during our Growth Summit. That’s an unlisted video, just for DC readers.)

We view PR as an “unscalable channel.” It can help you get traction, but growth won’t compound as you put more resources behind it.

But that doesn’t mean a single media hit can’t cause growth to skyrocket. Think of it as performance PR: using media to earn revenue.

Here are three ways to increase your chances of getting viral PR:

1. Run social media ads to your target demographic within a specific location: where editors who cover your industry are. Then reach out to those editors. People view the things they’re familiar with as better. Editors are more likely to respond since they’ll already be familiar with your company because of your ads.
2. Pretty much all major media companies are on affiliate platforms. To increase your chances of media traction, join one of those platforms (like Impact, Skimlinks, or ShareASale)—especially if you’re DTC. A higher affiliate percentage usually ups the likelihood of a mention.
3. As Bell Curve’s growth strategist Stephanie Jiang puts it, “Media drives media.” Put ad spend behind existing media mentions. They have third-party validation, which carries more weight than a company talking about itself.

Loyalty programs can feel like a nice-to-have, so plenty of brands brush them off.

But building an email-based loyalty program for your best customers could have an incredibly high ROI—trade a few hours of work for a steady stream of revenue.

Here’s an example.

Rejoiner, an email marketing platform for ecommerce brands, built a quick loyalty program for their client Peak Design.

The results are incredible. The program has generated $46.8k in added revenue over the last 90 days—with an 11.6% click-through rate. And it took just six total work hours to build.

Here’s how they pulled it off (and our take so you can replicate the strategy).

Step 1: Rejoiner created two loyalty offers based on Peak’s purchase history:

• Customers who’ve spent over $500 get $20 off their next purchase of $100+.
• Those who’ve spent $1,000 get $40 off their next purchase of $200+.

Our take: Don’t overthink your loyalty segments and offer. Consider targeting the top ~10% of your customers by spend—no need to get too methodical here. Provide an offer that’s materially valuable and test it. You can optimize the offer and segments later.

Step 2: Rejoiner created an email that combines personalized copy with CRO best practices (like the big red button). It feels personal but gets straight to the point.

Clean, simple, effective. The result: 8% of recipients make a purchase.

Our take: Customers know that the emails they receive from brands are automated. When you’re writing your email, show there’s a human behind the copy. The Peak Design email feels like it’s coming from a friend. And use “I” instead of “we”—“I” feels more emotionally involved, and studies show that it leads to more purchases.

Step 3: Rejoiner used a unique discount code. A generic discount code like “VIP_10_OFF” would quickly kill the magic the personalization created.

Plenty of apps make it easy to generate randomized discount codes (here’s one for Shopify brands). And most of these apps integrate with email marketing platforms, so you can send each subscriber a unique code.

Bottom line: A simple, thoughtful email loyalty program can be an engine for incremental revenue.

Most companies that pursue SEO default to using keyword difficulty and search traffic to determine which keywords to target. They simply prioritize keywords that aren’t too competitive to rank for and regularly receive moderate to high search traffic.

But Ahrefs adds another layer to their research. Besides search traffic and difficulty, the Ahrefs team also uses an internal metric they call “Business Score.”

Business Score is a subjective rating measured on a scale from 0 to 3 and based on each keyword or potential topic’s relation to Ahrefs’ product.

• 0: The keyword can’t be tied to Ahrefs’ product.
• 1: Ahrefs provides only a partial solution.
• 2: Ahrefs provides a solution, but other tools solve the problem just as well.
• 3: Ahrefs’ product is an irreplaceable solution for the keyword.

For instance, a topic like “backlink analysis” ranks 3 while “email outreach" ranks 1—Ahrefs can help with finding companies to reach out to but it isn’t an all-encompassing solution for email outreach.

Ahrefs prioritizes keywords with a higher Business Score, using this metric to understand each keyword’s business value. Since they don’t make a compelling case for users to invest in Ahrefs, topics with a low Business Score are low-priority.

If you’re pursuing SEO, consider including Business Score in your keyword research. This metric will save you from creating content about topics that are relatively easy to rank for but don’t drive people into your product.

Every piece of copy is unique.

Yet no matter the situation, the same mistakes seem to show up over and over again.

At least that's what Neville Medhora, founder of Copywriting Course, observed after answering over 20k questions from his students.

Here are 8 of the most common copy mistakes, with solutions to quickly solve them:

Mistake #1: Putting too many CTAs on a page or email

• Why it's bad: Including too many CTAs causes each of them to compete against one another (e.g., Join, Click, Buy, Read More). This dilutes your message and leads to decision fatigue—both of which hurt conversion. And especially in email, once a reader clicks a link, they're unlikely to come back and click anything else.
• Quick fix and result: Pick one CTA and write your copy for that specific action. Your messaging and conversion should be stronger.

Mistake #2: Using too many buzzwords or jargon

• Why it's bad: Buzzwords are vague and confusing. Jargon is usually too specific for most audiences, which is also confusing. Neither one clearly tells the reader about your product or how it benefits them. This makes it a chore to read and hurts conversion.
• Quick fix and result: Replace buzzwords and jargon with direct, simple language that a 5th grader could understand. You'll help readers value your offer.

Mistake #3: Busy pages with bad layouts

• Why it's bad: Crowded pages are bad UX. They're tough to read and distract from the copy—the most important part.
• Quick fix and result: Make the simplest possible page layout and use negative space to your advantage. That means simple words, distraction-free layouts that emphasize those words, and short, concise explanations to get the message across. People will be more likely to read your copy and take action.

Mistake #4: New writers trying to copy content from major blogs

• Why it's bad: Major blogs tend to write about the same broad and stale topics over and over again. Articles like, "how to start a business" or "complete guide to losing weight." This usually makes for mediocre content that isn't very useful.
• Quick fix and result: Instead of writing for the masses about the same broad topics that have been covered ad nauseam, write about the specific problems your product aims to solve. Your content will resonate more if you include personal stories from experience, anecdotes, and interviews. This gives your content personality, a memorable human element.

Mistake #5: Subheadings that don't guide the reader through an article

• Why it's bad: Most people skim through content to get the gist from subheadings. Bland subheadings make your content hard to scan, and many readers will just bounce.
• Quick fix and result: Tell the story of your content using descriptive subheadings. Your content will be more engaging, and more readers will stick around to read the full article. And readers who just want to skim will still get value from the subheadings alone.

Mistake #6: Writing "How To" content without giving practical actions

• Why it's bad: When your content fails to give readers practical actions to take, it doesn't actually help the reader. It's also forgettable—if there's no action to take, the reader probably won't remember your advice.
• Quick fix and result: Include at least one actionable takeaway in every section of your article. This makes for better content, happier readers, and actionable content is much more likely to get shared.

Mistake #7: Awkward cold emails with bad intros

• Why it's bad: Gimmicky, insincere email intros are guaranteed to turn the reader off immediately. They probably won't read past the intro, and they definitely won't convert. They may even dislike you and delete your email.
• Quick fix and result: Write the email as if you're speaking to a friend. Be direct and concise, don't pitch them upfront, and state a simple, obvious reason for why you're emailing them in the first place (e.g., "I saw that we're in the same Slack group and wanted to reach out"). Have a legitimate reason for reaching out. You'll build better relationships and more conversions that way.
• Note: We cover how to write a cold email in detail here.

Mistake #8: Overthinking email style and format

• Why it's bad: When you only write one draft, you don’t have anything to test, you get stuck on design instead of conversions, and you put yourself under a lot of pressure to get it right on the first try.
• Quick fix and result: When testing different formats, write three versions: one short, one medium, and one long. That way, you'll move quicker because there’s less pressure and more creative freedom, and you’ll have extra versions to test. In the long run, this will help you land on a style and format that resonates most with your audience.

Check out Neville's full post which has helpful visual examples.

All eyes are on TikTok as the next big opportunity in paid social.

TikTok is unsaturated—competition is low and traffic is affordable. And its userbase is snowballing across audiences worldwide.

But is now the right time for you to test TikTok ads as a new ad channel? Before you launch into testing, consider these questions:

1. Can you commit the budget to test TikTok ads properly? Every new channel has a cost of entry, and you have to spend to learn. We recommend setting aside 10% - 30% of your ad budget to test this channel properly. It’ll likely take 6-10 weeks to test and validate TikTok as a paid acquisition channel.
2. Does TikTok align with your product? TikTok ads perform well for DTC ecom brands and mobile apps. DTC ecom brands selling visual products with broad appeal, short sales cycles, and AOVs between $25 - $100 tend to get the most out of TikTok. Similarly, mobile apps and games work well since free app installs are low-friction. TikTok ads can work for many other types of products, but consider how your product aligns with the channel before testing.
3. Do you have the capacity to focus on TikTok as a separate channel in your ad mix? TikTok is an entirely different beast than Facebook. To give TikTok ads a fair shot, you'll need to invest resources into producing a high volume of channel-specific creatives that you can test diligently. Whether you make them yourself or partner with content creators, having a high volume of creatives ready to go is essential.
4. Have you seen success with Snapchat ads, IG Reels, or IG Stories? If you've had success with any of these channels and want to diversify, TikTok is a logical next step. TikTok can have cheaper CPAs, cheaper CPMs, and higher quality traffic than Snapchat or Instagram. You can try repurposing Snapchat/IG assets because these types of ads are typically vertical UGC videos, precisely the kind of content that performs best on TikTok. And if you have the original video content, even better. You can cut new ads, making full use of TikTok's audiovisual publishing tools to achieve the right aesthetic.

If you answered 'yes' to all four questions, TikTok ads might be worth testing now.

If not, and you're still interested in experimenting with TikTok, consider experimenting with an organic TikTok strategy before you dive into ads.

Hiring for SEO positions is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming process.

Unless you're an SEO expert yourself, you likely lack the domain knowledge needed to properly vet candidates and entrust them to deliver results. And SEO is an investment—results often take 6-12 months. That requires massive trust in who you hire.

So, if you're thinking about hiring an SEO operator and don't have the time to brush up on technicals or source a trusted referral, use these sample interview questions to help expedite the interview process and find a qualified candidate:

• How do you check whether a URL is indexed by Google? Every operator should know the site: command. This displays all indexed pages in the SERPs.
• How do you block a URL from being indexed? This question is meant to see if they actually know the purpose of a no-index tag and don't confuse it with blocking a page in robots.txt. The former tells Google not to index a page while keeping it in the sitemap. The latter keeps pages out of Google's index completely.
• What are the most important SEO ranking factors, in your opinion? No definitive answer here. Listen to their perspective and see if they can explain how multiple ranking factors contribute to overall rankings. A good candidate will:
• Back up their answers with data and relevant experiences.
• Have on-the-job examples to share.
• Avoid absolute statements and not be afraid to say "it depends" (SEO is nuanced and case-specific).
• What SEO myths have you had enough of? Only an experienced SEO should be able to answer this question. Ask them to elaborate on their favorite SEO myths and how they navigate them in their work. Their answer should provide insight into their learnings and strategy—the development of their process.
• What are some quick technical SEO wins? No right answer here, but you want to see if they can differentiate between and prioritize low-impact, high-impact, low-effort, and high-effort optimizations.
• For example, compressing images and deleting thin content are low-effort, high-impact actions. Optimizing meta descriptions on blog posts is a high-effort, low-impact one.
• A site that's been online for 9 months is getting zero traffic. Why? There are a million reasons why an established site might not be getting traffic. They should be able to offer several possible scenarios—with solutions—that illustrate why that is. This question is meant to explore their ability to problem-solve, think critically, and be creative—all requisite SEO skills.
• How do you perform a technical SEO audit? Like the last question, there are many ways to skin a cat. The point of this one is to check if they have a process in place for auditing a website. Some follow-up questions:
• What tools do they use and how do they use them?
• What are the first things they look for in an audit, and why?
• How have they resolved particular issues and what were the results?

Bonus: Ask the candidate to explain their SEO strategy in a way a child could easily understand. This is harder than it sounds, but if they can get the point across without all the jargon and technical mumbo jumbo, that's a good sign they know their stuff.

Check out the article for the full list of questions.

Consumers now have a sixth sense for inauthenticity. We can tell when a brand is jumping on a bandwagon just because it’s the trendy thing to do, or when they’re saying all the right things but not following through with all the right actions.

How can you overcome consumer distrust? Two possibilities are to talk about your competitors and share bad reviews.

It sounds illogical. But by talking about competitors and bad reviews, you'll:

• Create a warmer brand perception. Transparency and authenticity increase brand trust.
• Surprise seen-it-all-before consumers. Most brands talk about themselves (and only in a positive light). Acknowledging competitors and addressing bad reviews is novel.
• Overcome key objections, like they’re not as good as x competitor or any concerns that often come up in negative reviews. Praising competitors might increase perceptions of competence, and addressing bad reviews is a direct way to dispel whatever objections are discussed in them.

Talk about your competitors. In a series of Facebook ads for a fictional car wash company, an ad that praised a competitor got a 5.4% click-through rate (“Precision Car Wash congratulates LikeNew Car Wash. Our fiercest competitor and the Industry Best 2020 Award recipient!”).

Compare that to a 3.3% CTR for a self-promotional ad (“Precision Car Wash is proud to receive the Industry Best 2020 Award”) and 1.8% for an ad with a third-party endorsement (“The Industry Best 2020 Award committee is proud to announce Precision Car Wash as this year’s Best 2020 Award recipient”).

Praising a competitor seems risky and unlikely. When a brand does it successfully, they come across as genuine. And sincerity is skepticism’s biggest foe.

Share bad reviews. Peloton did this earlier this year with ads featuring negative comments like “overpriced coat rack”—followed by praise from those same people a few years later.

If you share bad reviews, balance them with positives like Peloton did. Prove that either 1) the criticism is no longer valid or 2) it was never justified to begin with.

Don’t overdo either of these tactics, or it could start to backfire. Always keep copy fresh and authentic.

Many subscription companies default to offering monthly and annual plans without thinking about the in-between.

But mid-term options like quarterly or semi-annual plans offer serious benefits:

• Compared to monthly plans, there are fewer billing problems and frustrations like canceled credit cards.
• They reduce monthly churn since customers are locked in for a longer period. And customers don’t mind because the commitment isn’t as daunting as an annual plan.
• Your company can get paid sooner, meaning fewer concerns with planning and budgeting for the long term (a common challenge with annual plans).

Offering a mid-length subscription option can be a win-win for both you and your customer. It’s worth testing if your product:

• Has seasonal appeal. For some products, demand regularly fluctuates based on customers’ needs and schedules.
• Example: CareGuide, a platform that helps people connect with caregivers, offers a monthly, quarterly, and annual plan. The quarterly plan might make sense for parents who need to hire childcare over the summer, when school isn’t in session.
• Doesn’t need to be replenished quickly. Customers may not exhaust all of your product in a short period, e.g., clothing and skincare products.
• Example: FabFitFun, which delivers a seasonal box with a variety of lifestyle products, offers quarterly and annual plans. Since many of its curated boxes have accessories, cosmetics, and grooming products, it would feel excessive to receive new ones on a monthly basis.

Roughly 50% of Twitter engagement happens within the first hour of posting.

This means apart from creating interesting social content, timing is crucial for getting your tweet seen.

And according to an analysis of more than 7.6 million Twitter likes and 139,000 follows, you should decide when to post your content based on the type of content you post.

In short:

• Post in the morning if your content is educational in nature.
• This includes how-to guides and business/science news.
• Example: Much of the New York Times’ tweets
• Post in the evening or late afternoon if your content provides immediate gratification.
• This includes memes, celebrity gossip, food pics, and promotional offers, like a flash sale.
• Examples: Entertainment Weekly, McDonald’s

Your Twitter posts are more likely to get higher engagement if you follow this pattern. In fact, this trend even applies on weekends, and to subjects that aren’t relevant to work.

Researchers suspect that this is because our self-control declines over the course of the day—making us prefer more immediately gratifying content in the evening.

To plan your Twitter posts accordingly:

• Categorize your content into two types: educational and entertaining.
• Schedule educational posts to go live before 4 pm and entertaining posts for after this point.
• If you primarily focus on one category of content, adjust your publishing time accordingly.
• Consider experimenting with the timing of your content on other channels, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, even email.

Marketing on TikTok remains an untamed beast for most businesses. The creative requirements are incredibly steep and specific compared to those of other social ad channels.

To get started on the right track, follow these helpful starter strategies:

1. < 1-second thumbstop. TikTok and Instagram Reels have drastically shortened attention spans. You might have a 3-second window to grab someone's attention on Facebook. On TikTok, you only have one second. Design your ads assuming people will only see the first thumbnail. And use catchy headlines and audio to reel them in.
2. Showcase the end-state first. Arrange your creative in reverse chronological order; open your video with the benefit to the customer and showcase the end result. Then show how they got to that end result thanks to your product.
3. Mimic organic product discovery content. Ecommerce products get discovered on TikTok via "digital" word-of-mouth marketing (i.e., everyday people gushing over remarkable product finds, completely organic). To tap into this existing user behavior, design your ecommerce ads to mimic hashtag trends like "TikTok made me buy it" or "things I found on the internet."
4. Authenticity is key. Well-produced, airbrushed content doesn't fly on TikTok. Users value authenticity. Two ways to make your ads more authentic: a) entertain viewers with an earnest performance, like a comedy skit, and integrate your product, seamlessly or b) educate via product demonstration and a believable, emotional reaction of someone experiencing the benefits.
5. Install the TikTok pixel. TikTok needs a lot of data to optimize your ads. Even if you aren't ready to experiment with ads yet, consider installing the pixel now so it'll be ready when you are. This will give you better targeting and ad optimization from day one.
6. Set up an MVP brand profile. Establish an organic brand profile before launching ads to test content types and find your audience. Virality potential is high and feedback, immediate, so if you create quality content, TikTok's algo will find an audience. Once you iterate towards a formula that works, use engagement and video view data for targeting and lookalikes in your ads.
7. Always-on creative testing. Ads fatigue faster on TikTok than any other ads platform. To stay ahead of the curve, set up an always-on creative testing campaign in your ad account. Inject new creatives tests on a weekly basis, and move winners into a dedicated prospecting campaign with your top-performers. Rinse and repeat.
8. Leverage trending audio and video syles. Don't make ads. Make TikToks. Utilize trending audio or video effects in every video you produce. The more organic, the better. Also, use captioning and voice-over to reinforce your core message and help keep viewers engaged.

TikTok got more traffic than Google last year (source: Cloudflare).

That sentence has a ton of implications for marketers. Here’s one: Search might start getting much more visual.

Imagine a truly multimedia search engine, with visual queries, data, and results. It would align more with our TikTok-Instagram world than hyperlinks and text. We’re not there yet, but Google’s making progress with initiatives like its Multitask Unified Model system, which could one day respond to a photo of hiking boots with feedback on whether they’re suitable for a hike up Mt. Fuji.

In the meantime, we already have visual recognition technology like Google Lens and Bing Visual Search. And they’re already advanced. Just snap a pic and get relevant search results.

To optimize for a visual-search world:

• Make sure your pages pass Google’s mobile-friendly test. Pretty much all Google Lens searches are done on mobile.
• Add descriptive image file names and alt text wherever they’re missing from your content.
• Visual search is yet another reason to optimize your site content as a whole. High-authority pages and sites are more likely to appear in Google Lens results.
• Keep creating high-quality written content. Brian Dean found that the pages Google Lens pulls image results from have an average 1,631 words of text. That text provides context, helping Google Lens do its job.
• Visual search could increase brand exposure. E.g., someone takes a picture of a competing product → your logo’ed product appears in results. Consider adding branding to items that don’t have it.

Most growth marketers are familiar with the following:

• Say-do gap: when customers say one thing during interviews/surveys, then do another
• Referral gap: when customers say they’d be comfortable giving a referral, but don’t
• Creepiness ditch: the void where personalization starts to feel creepy, resulting in fewer conversions, not more

Here’s another one: the gap between site browsing and adding products to cart. Aka the browse-cart gap.

It’s a pretty big deal. Salecycle found that 43.8% of retailer site sessions include product page views, but only 14.5% result in add-to-carts.

One way to reduce the gap? Browse-abandonment emails. They’re a form of retargeting that aren’t as common as cart-abandonment emails—even though compared to traditional emails, they have a 50.5% higher click-through rate and 80.9% higher open rate.

• Use browse-abandonment emails to remind site visitors of what they were looking at. Feature product images, and make it easy to get back to browsing with high-contrast CTAs. This is a good space for overcoming objections—you could highlight free shipping or your easy return policy—and sharing social proof, like customer reviews.
• Consider that visitors might have decided against the products they were viewing, so open up the playing field. Showcase other products that might draw them back in. These could include best-sellers or products that are relevant to viewed product pages or past purchase history.

As with all email, you should segment and personalize. You’ll only be able to retarget people who are already on your email list, and while that’s limiting, it does mean stronger brand interest and possibly higher intent. Take advantage of that to close the gap and the sale.

Rule of thumb: Early-stage startups should avoid offering discounts.

They can easily become a crutch or a Band-aid that’s covering up—and failing to solve—a bigger problem.

That said, discounts can be effective, depending on your market. As with everything pricing-related, what matters is who’s doing the buying.

Example: Apple Store shoppers don’t typically buy based on discounts, but J.C. Penney shoppers do. The department store chain found that out the hard way when they brought an Apple exec in. He got rid of J.C. Penney’s discounts—and sales tanked.

If you’re considering experimenting with discounts, here are some guidelines to help you get started:

• Don’t offer more than 20-25% off. Steep discounts dilute brand value.
• Make discounts random—in terms of both when the offer is made and what it is. That way, your audience won’t come to expect a discount or hold off on buying until your predictable “annual sale.”
• Don’t start off by offering discounts across your entire audience. Focus on user segments that truly need a bit of a nudge. That way you test discounts without cannibalizing leads who'll likely buy at full price.
• The best kinds of discounts are the ones that are deeply aligned with your product. They incentivize activation, habit building, and long-term use. Some examples:
• “Get 30% off if you buy 10 or more” is a more effective discount than “get 30% off your first order.” The “buy 10 or more” offer means more product use, increasing the chance that your product’s value will be realized—which often leads to a higher LTV.
• Free trials fit the bill too. By offering a 30-day free trial, you decrease initial friction and give prospects time to experience your product’s value.
• A discount on an annual vs. monthly subscription increases the chance that a user will get activated and build a product habit.

In-cart cross-sells can boost AOV.

But only if the products you’re featuring are relevant to the items already in your customers’ carts.

A Baymard study found that 52% of sites recommend products that are either completely irrelevant or based only on what other customers bought.

In 2022, most people expect a personalized online shopping experience, which is why irrelevant cross-sells rarely work. And worse, they erode users’ confidence in your site and business—dragging down your AOV.

If cross-selling is part of your ecom strategy, consider these 6 tactics to help improve take rate and AOV:

1. Avoid listing a fixed number of products: One highly relevant suggestion that stands alone will get more attention than if it’s buried amongst four irrelevant suggestions. For example, If someone is buying a computer mouse, only show them the batteries they'll need, not batteries plus a random selection of office supplies just to fill up space.
2. Be cautious about listing alternative products: Introducing alternative products during checkout can cause the customer to second-guess their decision, consider other options, and abandon the checkout process—the last thing you want. Products that complement the item in the cart should be shown over alternative products. For example, if someone is ready to buy a pair of AirPods, don't recommend a headset from Bose or Beats by Dre.
3. Use labels to define the context: If you want to present a cross-sell but don't have a high relevance product, consider using labels like "Inspired by Your Browsing History," "Frequently Bought Together," or "Other Products in This Collection." Users will be less dismissive of questionable product recommendations if you simply give them a reason.
4. Prioritize products of the same use case or theme: Giving priority to products of the same use case or theme can prevent seemingly unrelated items from being displayed. For example, cross-sell sections with labels like "Winter Essentials", or "Back to School" allow sites to make reasonable suggestions as long as they're thematically related.
5. Feature products that customers need to get started: Some examples: A toy that requires batteries to operate, a mobile phone with specific dimensions for a protective case, or a camera needing a particular memory card type.

If you’re building a brand, you need quality assets. Think, photo and video for your site, social channels, ads you might run, and the content you create.

Here’s an effective workaround for brands looking for a fast, inexpensive way to source the top three types of quality creative assets you need using vendors.

• Product shots. Use Soona for a quality virtual shoot. Simply choose what types of shots you’re looking for, provide details, and ship your products. You’ll live chat with your photographer so you can make sure you get the shots you need. And you should have finished assets in about 2 weeks.
• High-quality stock video. Use Social Motion Packs for beautiful video content. You can buy individual content packs or a subscription to their library.
• UGC. Use Billo to source talent. Spec out exactly what type of UGC you want. Creators will apply for your project and you choose those who best fit your brand. Send them products. Approve their content as they submit.

Pencil used this process and sourced loads of quality content for their brand ... at a cost of $343.

Most content marketers know how to use Ahrefs for keyword research, backlink research, and site analysis.

But there are other powerful ways you can use Ahrefs that many marketers don’t know about. If you’re working in content marketing, consider trying these three tactics:

• Size your market. Using Keyword Explorer, look up your target keyword. Then click on the three dots in the corner of the Volume box and click “Export as CSV.” The CSV file shows how the volume of your target keyword has fluctuated over the last 5+ years. This will help you figure out whether your market is shrinking or expanding—which is nice to know before you invest in creating content for that keyword.
• Define your content clusters. When your keyword research turns up a group of similar or related keywords, it’s hard to decide how exactly to structure your pillar page. For guidance, enter these keywords into Keyword Explorer. Then in the sidebar, click “Traffic Share By Pages.” Look at the page that ranks for the most keywords you entered and earns the largest share of traffic—you can take notes on page structure, depth, and topics to use for your pillar page.
• Build links from pages with greater traffic potential. Avoid simply judging link-building targets based on their domain rating (or another authority score)—most of these scores matter less than they did years ago. Instead, prioritize building links from sites that drive more traffic. To do this, look up the URL of a competitor page that ranks for your target keyword in Site Explorer. Go to Backlinks and sort by page traffic. The top referring pages that drive the most traffic are the sites you should prioritize getting a link from, regardless of their domain rating.

Many B2B and consumer SaaS startups create free resource templates for their target audience to use with the goal of nurturing them into paying customers.

They tend to offer these templates as part of a blog post. For example, an email service provider might provide cold email templates as part of a guide to cold outreach.

This SEO strategy is a great way to attract visitors—but you can get even more from it by creating standalone landing pages for each of your resources. Hypercontext, an employee engagement app, did exactly this by creating separate landing pages for each of its 60+ meeting templates. The result was a 51% organic traffic boost in just three months.

To be clear, Hypercontext still includes its templates in some of its blog posts. For example, it’s published:

• 4 things to include in your daily scrum meeting agenda [Template]: A blog post giving best practices about planning scrum meetings
• Scrum Team Meeting Template: A landing page where users can immediately access Hypercontext’s free template

To avoid keyword cannibalization, Hypercontext focuses its blog posts on other relevant info not provided in its templates. Meanwhile, it keeps its template pages very short and to the point.

Why does this strategy work? The standalone pages grab more long-tail template-related keywords than a blog post might. And since users searching specifically for templates usually have more of a transactional intent (and likely less interest in reading a long blog post), your standalone template pages actually better satisfy user intent.

Common marketing wisdom tells us that on-site user reviews are a great form of social proof for converting prospects.

This is generally true. But for DTC ecom brands, you might be collecting and displaying your reviews in the wrong place.

Research shows that users spend little time looking at DTC site-provided reviews—they believe these reviews have a higher likelihood of being manipulated.

Users would rather look at external reviews on Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or another third-party source.

So if you’re a DTC ecom brand, rather than focus on gathering on-site reviews, consider these tactics:

• Encourage customers to review your product on third-party sites. Since shoppers perceive reviews on third-party review sites as being less biased, you’ll get more ROI from these reviews than ones on your own site.
• Feature user-generated social media content instead. People trust reviews from your users on social media more than the reviews on your site. The logic: If people are willing to speak positively about a product on social media for their followers to see, then the brand can be trusted. So you can embed social media posts from real users directly on your site, as opposed to reviews, and come off as more authentic.
• Prioritize influencer marketing. This is a more involved approach to reviews—you can give micro-influencers your product for free in exchange for honest reviews. People turn to influencers for recommendations. Lean into a source they already trust. To go deep on influencer strategy, check out our influencer marketing playbook.

If you’ve already invested in getting reviews on your site:

• Make it easy to sort and filter them. Otherwise, users will further perceive your site as being manipulative in the kinds of reviews it features.
• Allow users to upload images with their reviews. Reviews with photos convey more authenticity than those without.

Nearly one out of every five users abandon their online purchase because the checkout process is “too long or complicated.”

But research shows that it’s not the number of checkout steps that takes the greatest toll on users—it’s the number of form fields. Why? Users increasingly shop on phones where they struggle to navigate between mobile forms and inefficient keyboards.

Below are a few simple but effective tactics for minimizing the number of fields in the checkout process:

• Use a single “Full Name” field rather than separate “First” and “Last” names. Users tend to type their full name into the first name field anyway.
• Hide Address Line 2, Company, and Coupon fields behind a link. These fields generally apply only to a minority of customers.
• Use city and state auto-detection based on zip code. Besides reducing the number of necessary form fields, this auto-detection feature eliminates potential typos in city names and helps users avoid scrolling through long state drop-downs.
• Hide separate fields for billing address. By default, assume that customers’ shipping address is the same as their billing address. Provide a pre-checked checkbox (“My billing and delivery information are the same”) that users must uncheck to reveal separate billing address fields.
• Encourage users to create an account at the confirmation step—not at the beginning of the checkout process. Since they’ll have already filled out necessary user information in the earlier steps, creating a unique password won’t be so fatiguing. (Whereas if you nudge users to create an account at the beginning of the checkout flow, it feels like a tedious extra step.)

There's often a significant time delay between posting a new blog post and when it actually starts generating traffic.

But you can reduce this time by signaling to the search algorithm that a new page is high quality and should be indexed quickly.

A simple way to kickstart this process: Link to the new article from existing high traffic pages.

Here's how to quickly find high-quality opportunities for internal links:

1. Use Google to run a site search for the topic of your new article. In the search bar, type: site:yoursite.com "topic" For example: site:mparticle.com "data governance"
2. This query will return all pages on your site that have that keyword in them, ranked by relevance.
3. Open the first one in your CMS, quick-find the keyword using "control/command + F". Highlight the first time the keyword appears and hyperlink it to the new blog article.
4. Repeat this process for the top 10 internal pages that have this keyword.
5. Once all 10 internal backlinks are complete, go to Google Search Console and enter the URL of the new blog article. Under URL Inspection, click Request Indexing to ensure the page and associated links are crawled as soon as possible.

You can use this same process for content pillar pages that link to internal blog articles relevant to the keywords mentioned. Backlink hygiene helps search engines understand what your website is about and increases the likelihood that readers click through to multiple pages of your site.

Common belief: Pricing pages should be as simple as possible. No bells, no whistles, no anything that can draw attention away from the “buy” CTA.

But instead of thinking strictly about how much is on your page, think about how much value and friction each element adds.

• Value: Reaffirm that your product is worth buying. Overcome last-minute objections.
• Friction: Minimize confusion and distraction.

What that means in practice is that you can have more elements on your pricing page—as long as each one adds value and reduces friction.

Here are four that might fit the bill, depending on your product and audience:

• Live chat: Some companies only include live chat on their homepage or landing pages. But for high-priced items where customers might have questions before converting, we suggest testing live chat on product pages. You can instantly connect with prospects, resolve their final objections, and optimize your pricing based on the common questions you get asked.
• FAQs: Semrush’s pricing page helps prospects overcome common objections like levels of commitment (“can I cancel my subscription anytime?”) and investment (“what is Semrush’s refund policy?”) Google Workspace has a “Top Questions about Google Workspace Pricing” section on its product page, with questions about plans and users. If you’re aware that users are often struck with questions when they reach your product pages, don’t make them load another page to get those questions answered.
• Social proof: Testimonials, media mentions, or customer logos confirm that your brand is trustworthy and your product is popular. They often prove to be the tipping point for on-the-fence prospects.
• Word counts: Most companies keep their pricing page word count to 200-600 words. You should highlight your unique benefits and most valued features, but if your feature list is huge, consider linking to it instead of putting everything on your pricing page.

Dark mode is becoming more available across all apps, browsers, devices, and email inboxes.

Some surveys suggest that 90%+ of users prefer dark mode wherever it’s available. Even if the 90% is overestimated, it’s safe to say that a large percentage of users experience the internet through dark mode.

So if you’re designing ad creatives solely with light mode in mind, your ads’ CTRs might be taking a beating.

Why? Colors appear differently. With dark mode turned on, contrasting ads originally created for light mode may blend in.

To earn more users’ attention, consider designing and optimizing ad creatives for dark mode:

• Use a patterned or textured background to keep your ad from blending into the surrounding site.
• Choose a color other than black or white for your creative’s background; this will make it stand out in both light and dark mode.
• If you’re showing a product screenshot that blends into the surrounding site, consider adding a frame along the edges of the creative to make it stand out.
• Avoid using thin font weights, which are less readable against a dark background. (Visibility worsens when viewed in dark mode.)
• Create different versions of your existing ads to test colors opposite to those currently used.

Ambiguous delivery dates are a conversion killer for ecom companies.

Shoppers want to know exactly when they'll receive their order before purchasing.

So consider this simple tactic to increase conversion: Add estimated delivery dates to your product pages.

Estimated delivery dates satisfy shoppers' urge to know when they'll receive their orders, yet they're less often used by marketers.

If you have a Shopify site with a 2.0 theme, you can easily add estimated delivery dates to your product pages.

Go to Online Store > Themes > in your theme, click Customize. Open Product > Default Product (or a product template if you’re using one). Add a Custom Liquid section to your product page. Then copy this code and paste it into the Custom Liquid box.

Your delivery dates will update automatically.

Consumers shop differently around the holidays than they do during other times of the year.

Purchasing intent may be more focused on gifting—completely different than how they shop for themselves.

Given the difference in intent, consider tailoring your product copy during the holidays. Doing so can make your pitch more persuasive and increase conversions.

There are a few ways to go about this:

• Help customers envision how your product will bring joy as a gift. For example, you might include copy like “Show your partner how much you care with this deep-kneading shiatsu massager to soothe her back and neck tension.” The copy connects the dots for users by framing products they might not have even previously considered as potential gifts.
• Address concerns from other audience segments. This is especially effective for products that are more commonly given as gifts during the holiday season, like video games. Since parents and relatives may be more likely to purchase a video game than the actual game player, tackle the product from their perspective. Consider adding answers to questions like: what rating does it have? Why does it have that rating? What do other parents think of the game? The point is to reposition your products from the viewpoint of new consumers (gift givers).

Viral cycle time (VCT) is how long it takes a user to invite other users to a product.

It's a vital element of growth, even though it's not discussed nearly as often as viral coefficients (how many new users an average user brings in). To experience product-led growth, your VCT needs to compensate for churn.

TikTok has a short VCT. A daily user sees a great video > shares it > recipients become new users. Lower-frequency products tend to have longer VCTs. B2B enterprise products, for instance, typically take more time to get into, learn, and recommend.

Ignoring VCT is like ignoring your payback period when calculating annual revenue per user (ARPU). If it takes years for your product to make money, you’ll have slower growth than products with quicker earnings. (That’s why you should always factor your payback period into your ARPU:CAC ratio.)

VCT has an inverse relationship with engagement: The higher your engagement, the shorter your VCT. Two ways to factor this relationship into your product build:

1. Design your product so its content is meant to be shared on the spot—not bookmarked and saved for later. Examples: Spotify, social media platforms
2. Design your product so users can easily and immediately collaborate or transact with others, and that interaction makes their user experience better. Examples: Slack, Zoom

Note: Nir Eyal discussed VCT at our Growth Summit in November. You can watch his talk here and join the waitlist for the next one.

Most SEO marketers have been in this situation before:

You've tried just about everything to get a page to rank, yet nothing is working.

The problem might be your "semantic relevance" score. Google uses multiple algorithms to decide who to rank and who to tank. TF-IDF is the “relevance-scoring” algorithm used to measure language patterns and discern whose content does the best job of servicing the target keyword.

All things equal, pages with higher semantic relevance scores are rewarded with higher rankings.

If you've got pages that aren't ranking, consider these steps:

1. Download WebSite Auditor, which analyzes the semantic relevance of your competitors’ pages and compares them against your own
2. Install, and navigate to Content Analysis > TF-IDF
3. Copy and paste the laggard’s url and accompanying keyword(s)
4. Click “Run Audit”

When complete, you’ll see a full list of every relevant word and phrase missing from your content, along with recommendations for how to include them on the page.

Add all missing terms (there will likely be many), re-publish, and you're done.

We've seen sites climb to top positions using this simple method.

There are two drop-off points in every webinar funnel: registration and attendance.

When you promote a webinar through a partner's email list, you can increase the number of signups by around 40% using a clever one-click registration link: embed all the signup details into the link. You can do this with a third-party tool and by collaborating with your partner.

Here's how:

1. Sign up for One Click from Growth Tools (free)
2. Add your webinar details, partner email service, and success page URL
3. Click Create Link
4. Share the link with your webinar partner to use in promo emails

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Half a billion people visit the Apple app store each week. These are highly motivated customers looking for one thing: apps. That means unlike general query search engines like Google, the Apple app store caters to high-intent customers ready to download an app.

But because of the way Apple’s targeting options are structured, many marketers fail to get results. Apps need to get the ad group structure and targeting right to truly capitalize on the potential that Apple Search Ads offers.

Here’s one way to get results from Apple Search Ads.

Make three versions of all ad groups (each containing a specific set of keywords) targeting:

1. New users
2. Returning users
3. All users

You might wonder why you should target all users in a separate ad group since you’re already targeting new and returning users.

That’s due to a little-understood nuance of Apple Search Ads:

If you target ‘new’ users or ‘returning’ users (or if you layer on any targeting parameters like age, gender, or demographics), Apple excludes certain sensitive categories of users, like users under 18, those with accounts from educational institutions, and folks who’ve turned off ads personalization, among others. If you fail to target all users, you’d be missing a considerable audience.

Targeting these users obviously widens your reach. But more importantly, it results in stronger economics—since few advertisers target these users, the competition tends to be lower and the economics much stronger.

By targeting all users in addition to new and returning users, you’ll cast a wider net and likely see much stronger performance and lower costs.

Startups that run promotions for big, national holidays are often disappointed by results.

Most brands are running promotions at the same time, and they're crowded out.

Instead of launching promos on major holidays, consider creating a promo around an obscure holiday.

The less popular the holiday, the less competition for customers' attention. So your promotions actually stand out and drive action. Research shows that this approach can lift your promo conversion by as much as 25%.

The key: Identify a holiday that’s relevant to your product and build a story around it.

BarkBox turned an otherwise unknown holiday, National Squirrel Appreciation Day on January 21, into a viral social media campaign.

Instead of searching for affiliate partners from scratch, find out what's working for your competitors and start there.

Here's how:

Affiliate platforms often use standardized link structures to track conversions. If you know the specific URL naming convention, you can use a tool like Ahrefs to find out which affiliates are promoting your competitors.

For example, affiliate links for Acuity Scheduling always start with "?kw="

In Ahrefs:

1. Enter a competitor's URL into Site Explorer
2. Filter backlinks that include "?kw="
3. Sort by Traffic and see which affiliates drive the most volume

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And links from the popular podcast hosting platform, Transistor.fm, begin with "?via="

Using this tactic, you can quickly create a list of relevant affiliate partners and backlink opportunities.

Microsites can meaningfully increase web conversion. A microsite is a separate web entity from your main website that's created for marketing purposes. It usually has its own domain name and URL. Marketers generally use microsites to promote events and new products, often with more creative freedom than their main brand allows.\

And here's the benefit. If you create something remarkable (fun, useful, or novel), it could get shared more than your main site otherwise would.

A few examples:

• The meditation app Calm created Do Nothing for 2 Minutes, a site that challenged visitors to not touch their mouse or keyboard for two minutes.
• Adobe set up Creative Types, a personality test that identifies how different people perceive the world and create things.
• The virtual music lesson platform Rock Out Loud Live bought the domain IKilledZoom.com to showcase how its audio quality is better than Zoom's.

For better results, consider these best practices:

• Focus on a relevant topic. Your microsite should relate to the industry or problem your brand solves.
• Link to your main site. Your brand's logo doesn't need to be the focal point of your microsite but it should be easy enough to notice to connection.
• Make it interactive. Interactive microsites like Adobe’s quiz or Calm’s game engage users and make it more likely they'll share it with others.
• Avoid overcomplicating it. A single landing page is fine; so are minimalist designs. Case in point: Digiday's WhatTheFuckIsMyTwitterBio.com, which attracted 100,000 users organically, was set up in two hours.

One reason why some ecommerce stores convert poorly:

Their products are too available—they're always for sale on site. And shoppers are always within a few clicks of buying from competitors.

Put another way, there's no urgency driving people to purchase now.

Urgency motivates action. Entrepreneur Marcus Taylor tested two versions of a landing page. One showed just the price of an offer, and another had a “time left to download” countdown just above the price. The conversion rate was almost three times higher for the version with the countdown.

Two ways you can increase urgency on your ecommerce site:

1. Show limited stock levels to highlight scarcity, using an app like Stock Level Inventory Quality (for Shopify stores). Shoppers who feel FOMO buy faster.
2. Set a deadline. Add a countdown to indicate how little time is left on a deal, or show customers how soon they should order to get a product by a certain date. You can take this a step further by inviting shoppers to set a calendar reminder so they don't forget to buy before the deadline.

Don’t go overboard by using countdowns, stock limits, and “act fast” language. Nobody likes a pushy salesperson, even when that “person” is a piece of code on your website.

Bonus: If you run an ecom store on Shopify, check out our brand new playbook on Shopify conversion.

A single TikTok collaboration video can go viral and generate millions of views and tens of thousands of new users for your app.

But that's unlikely to happen for you unless you understand how to work with content creators.

A few tips to maximize your top of funnel acquisition through TikTok creators:

• Search for creators in your niche with 50k - 250k followers via relevant hashtags. Next, cross-check their 20-30 videos to get a rolling average of engagement—weed out some of the larger accounts that have poor recent engagement. Look for a minimum of 3 videos above 100,000 views, since this de-risks your opportunity to reach many new users.
• Personalize your creator outreach by mentioning the creator's specific audience, and how your partnership will benefit their audience. Also, email them at their listed email instead of sending a DM. Response rate is generally much higher that way.
• Work with your creators to make persona-centric videos. They tend to outperform generic problem-oriented creatives. Top-performing creatives often follow a standard formula:
• Open with a hook identifying the persona
• Highlight the problem
• Solve the problem through your product
• High performing examples: Student, UX designer
• Make sure creators clearly mention how and where to get your product—seems obvious, but many advertisers drop the ball on this and lose out on conversion.

Following these tips, Tactiq.io—a video meeting transcription tool—was able to generate 150,000+ new users on $1820 USD in spend.

This strategy works for some types of products better than others:

• Freemium SaaS products, since there's a low hurdle to get TikTok users to try for free.
• Broadly appealing products that solve a real problem. With TikTok's algorithm, it's harder to reach a very specific audience—your creator's content will be surfaced to very different users. Broad appeal ensures many types of viewers have a reason to get your product.

Fluff muddies messaging.

It's also kind of inconsiderate: It makes readers put in more effort than they need to understand your point.

Here are some free resources for keeping your copywriting fluff-free:

• The Handy List of Human Words—A good list for converting robotic language into human language (e.g., "deactivate" —> "turn off")‍
• Use Simple Words and Phrases—Another good list, this one from a group of federal workers who believe government writing should be plain and clear.‍
• Hemingway Editor—Copy your writing into the editor to see what its reading level is. (6th grade is good; 10th is too hard.) Check for too many adverbs, complex phrases, instances of passive voice, and hard-to-read sentences.‍
• Readability Test Tool—Copy text or a URL into the tool to check its readability according to the Flesch-Kincaid formula, and get helpful stats like average words per sentence.

Most companies don't measure leads generated from content.

If you don't measure, you can't calculate customer acquisition cost (CAC)—there's no way for you to tell whether your content marketing is profitable.

Here's an easy way to measure acquisitions from content marketing using a simple ‘thank you' page and Google Analytics.

Two steps:

1. Configure your opt-in forms so they point to a unique 'thank you' page after a user enters their email. Example: https://growandconvert.com/thank-you/ Anyone who lands on this page must have opted in through your lead capture form(s). Nobody else will see this page.
2. Set up a new goal in Google Analytics: Once your lead capture forms are set up to send opt-ins to that thank you page you made, you’ll need to configure the page as a new goal in GA. Here's a 2-minute setup video that shows you how.

GA will track how many users reach your thank you page (a “Goal Completion”). Measure that number against the cost it takes you to create your content, and you'll be able to calculate your CAC.

A common misconception about experimentation is that it’s all data, all the time.

Data is a critical part of it, yes. But there’s a human element to testing too. After all, you are trying to understand your users. On both ends, people are involved. While researching, hypothesizing, designing tests, and analyzing results, judgment is key.

One area where judgment comes in: when to make the call to override A/B test results.

Imagine you run a copywriting test:

1. One version of the copy is true and honest. You accurately portray your value props.
2. Another version slightly overstates the benefits of your product.

And the second version wins the A/B test.

You'll earn more short-term profit by going with the data and implementing the second version of the copy. But doing so could actually harm your customer lifetime value—those who purchased might feel deceived and likely won't purchase again.

You're better off overriding A/B test results when your winning test variant is harmful to your long-term sustainability and growth.

Another example:

When Netflix was testing Grace and Frankie (show) promos, they found that users clicked more on an image with just one co-star, instead of the two co-stars together. Netflix went with the image of the duo anyway.

Learning: You should also consider overriding your findings if they present ethical or legal concerns, don’t align with your company values, or run the risk of demoralizing your team.

Even if your Facebook video ads have strong hook, that doesn’t mean users will stick around to watch the whole thing.

And if your ad can’t sustain their interest, people probably won’t convert.

To find out if your video ads are generating interest, look at their average play time. Then look at their performance data in Ads Manager. There's a chart that shows the percentage of video plays for different seconds of your video ads. Use it to find out at exactly what times users drop off—then map these points in your video.

Consider why users might not be motivated to keep watching at these points:

• Is it after the first cut?
• Does text appear?
• If so, how long is it?

You're not looking to compare it to a play time benchmark—video ad lengths vary drastically between companies.

But you can look for the most intense drop-offs and consider editing your video ads to hold attention at those critical time periods.

Reddit is rich with content ideas and audience insights, but it can be difficult to navigate. Try these three free tools for more efficient Reddit research.

• Subreddit Stats: Find out which subreddits have seen the most growth in the last day, week, month, and year. Use it to find out what new trends or interests are gaining traction. For example, the recent growth in r/ArivaCoin might explain why a new cryptocurrency is gaining momentum. You can also look specifically at the growing subreddits relevant to your industry to see what kinds of content are being posted. Then see if you can relate this topic back to your product.
• Map of Reddit: Find out what other subreddits members of a particular subreddit are drawn to—in other words, where other segments of your audience may hang out online. For example, searching for the subreddit upcycling shows an overlap with subreddits like ZeroWaste, sewing, and declutter.
• Reddit Saved: Although you can save posts and comments on Reddit, you can’t easily search through this saved content. This app offers a solution, so you can continue saving content for inspiration and then quickly search for a specific post later.

Customers discover errors in SaaS products all the time. Or any product for that matter. When they do, Google is the first place they look for solutions.

If you’re a software company, you can target specific error message keywords your ideal customers might search for, and write about the solution for easy, high-intent ranking opportunities.

For example, SEO tool Ahrefs could look up a competitor’s keyword rankings and filter for error terms like “problem” or “fix” or “broken.”

Ahrefs can help fix the error, then try to persuade users to switch from their competitor.

Another example: If you’re a cryptocurrency SaaS, you might review Coindesk’s rankings for relevant errors or problems people are searching for and you know the answers to.

Some search volumes may be low, but the intent is generally high.

Anyone looking for solutions to such specific problems is feeling the pain and needs an immediate fix—if you can give it to them in an article, video, or FAQ page, you become the hero, the solution they’ve been searching for.

Amazon advertisers can consistently get around a 10% conversion rate. That's wildly high compared to most paid channels.

Amazon’s users are high-intent and ready to buy.

One mistake we see tons of first-time Amazon advertisers make: they fail to optimize their Amazon product pages.

Here's how you can optimize yours:

• Add a compelling title that includes at least one keyword. When you run an Amazon ad campaign, you’ll gain critical keyword insights that will help you further optimize your product page, based on which search terms are converting. Until then, use competitor research tools like Helium 10 or AMZScout and keyword tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google's free Keyword Planner.
• Keep your product description between 250 and 1,000 words. Most Amazon shoppers don't read—they'll skim your description specifically to make sure it solves their problem. High-converting pages will list about five bullet points. Give shoppers what they want, and nothing more.
• Use keywords, but don’t repeat them. Keyword stuffing is as frowned upon on Amazon as it is in content marketing—and Amazon might demote your product's organic ranking if you repeat your keywords too many times.
• Good photos might not be enough. Consider adding a high-quality, high-resolution video. Your video should show the product in use. Pictures can hook shoppers, but a quality video demonstrating the product is often what converts shoppers who are comparing your product to competitors. Aim for around seven images and one video.
• Make it honest. Your product reviewers will be the first to call you out for overpromising or being inaccurate.

Customer reviews are important, but you might not have them yet—all the more reason to launch Amazon ads and drive conversions.

If you sell a high-ticket item like a program or a service, you're likely relying on some combination of free content, ads, and sales to move leads through your funnel towards purchase.

But consider this complimentary tactic: Create a paid email course.

Build a low-cost course or challenge (under $100) delivered via email, designed to give users a quick win by solving a specific problem in a short amount of time—ideally no more than 7 days.

The benefits of these courses are threefold:

1. Compared to longer, more intensive courses, they're easy to make. If you're already creating content, it'll be easy enough for you to repurpose existing material.
2. Because they’re a paid product, these courses filter out users only looking for freebies—when there's skin in the game, people take your content seriously. And the low price point attracts those who are hesitant to purchase your more expensive offerings.
3. They build on your credibility, giving customers a taste of what you have to offer.

A paid email course moves users further down your funnel, making it easier to upsell more rigorous programs or services later on.

Some examples and ideas for paid email challenges:

• Sean Anthony's 7-Day Challenge → Funnels users toward Sean's Email Side Hustle course
• An intro to design course → Leads to retainers for a creative design agency
• How to Start a Keto Diet in 7 Days → Funnels users toward customized meal plan services

Content with minimal search value might hurt a website when left unpruned.

This happens all the time, yet most companies don't realize it's negatively impacting their search ranking.

To find out if your site suffers from a thin content problem, follow these steps:

• Open a fresh tab to Google search
• Type in the search modifier "site:www.your-domain-url-here" ex: site:demandcurve.com
• Head to the absolute last page of the search results and scroll to the bottom

If you see a message from Google that says something like:

"...we have omitted some entries very similar to the [big number] already displayed"...

Then you've got a thin content problem on your hands.

To fix it, use Google Analytics + AHREFs (or SEO tool of choice) and:

• Delete no-traffic, no search-value pages, OR
• Rewrite and optimize them using a premium tool like Clearscope

It may hurt to kill underperforming pages that you've spent time creating, but you want to be swift and complete here.

Unless your site is new or suffers from mission-critical technical SEO errors, expect to see an uptick in rankings within a few weeks.

Email open rates have always been kind of a vanity metric.

They rarely have any effect on business outcomes. And they don’t tell you how good your email is. They tell you how good your subject line is, and how much recipients liked your past emails.

With the release of iOS 15, they’re even more useless.

Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection keeps senders from knowing if an email has been opened. It also blocks senders from seeing recipients’ IP addresses.

Instead of caring about open rates, here are some better metrics to monitor:

• Click reach rate: percentage of subscribers driving clicks. Calculated by dividing unique clicks by unique sent over a given period.
• Click-through rate: percentage of unique subscribers who click on an email. This is an obvious, yet important metric.
• Revenue per subscriber.
• Revenue per email.

Focus on improving these metrics—and avoid the rest—to increase the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

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.