Don’t Shave the Yak. Remember to Use Data to Drive Website and Email Marketing Relevance and Results.
Product Messaging and Email Marketing [REVIEW]
Improve your messaging strategy through customer research and analysis
This blog is about creating your content which can be your sales copy and email, based on research and not on biases or subjective opinions that take the focus off what works for your customers and what impacts the bottom-line for your business.
SALES COPY
In CXL, you learn the systematic way to conduct your copy “tear down”. So, you can rebuild the copy, better version of it, more in sync with your customers minus the overused sales cliches.
But CXL doesn’t only teach psychology and research, they also do it for their clients at Speero Agency.
Here’s a run-through of how you can do a teardown of your sales page, according to Momoko Price, Expert conversion copywriter:
- Choose a landing page or a sales page of your own with an analytics setup like GA (Google Analytics).
- Check on the referral paths and traffic sources. Understand where people come from and what they see before they land on your page.
- And then conduct your own teardown using this framework. Identify the persuasive elements that are missing from your copy.
- Quantify the persuasive power of your existing copy.
For instance, assess the value proposition headlines, feature positioning, and feature benefit positioning. Create your own evaluation worksheet.
5. Identify & prioritize what you should tweak to improve your sales page copy.
You’ll want to back your copy teardown with proven CRO and persuasion principles.
- Provide information that your customers expect to see on your page. You can find a detailed discussion on this here.
Consider the level of awareness of your leads to guide you in the amount of information on your page.
So for instance, offer a good amount of explanation and storytelling when your leads have little or no sense of having pain and no sense of your solution.
Results indicate that for goal-directed visitors website content and customization play a more significant role in influencing their satisfaction and revisit intentions than convenience.
But for experiential visitors, content and convenience play a more significant role in satisfaction and revisit intentions than customization options at a website. Read the full details of the study here.
2. Nothing beats clarity in your copy. Call products what they are.
3. Speak your customer’s language. Refrain from using jargon and technical words if you can.
4. Lead with the benefits. Convince your customers and justify why they should choose your product over somebody else.
Rebuild your copy through rigorous voice-of-customer research:
- Surveys
- Interviews
- User test
Tips for Designing Messaging Surveys
- Pose questions to reveal information about your visitors or customers. Extract key messages on their motivation, values, and anxieties or pain points.
- Design the survey in ways that will get the attention of the recipients and keep them engaged.
- Create separate surveys for your audience.
Examples of Surveys
- Homepage surveys
Hotjar asked the above 30-second question after people landed on the page to help them tweak their designs.
2. Landing page surveys
This is where an on-page survey can help: while data points like conversion rate will give you a black-and-white view of how your landing pages are performing, asking questions will help you color in the data and find out what’s still missing, what’s not crystal clear, and what’s stopping people from continuing their journey across your site.
Interviews and User Tests
Creating your UVP (Unique Value Propositions)
- List your product’s top features
- Align those features to customer pains
- Rank your customers’ top pains by frequency & severity
Before I jump to creating data-driven email campaigns, I would like to wrap up the things presented here.
Conducting voice-of-customer research can help inform your sales page.
You can craft an authentic and relevant sales page for your customers. Weave your messages that trigger your customers’ real-life motivations. Craft value propositions that capture visitors’ attention & pull them in.
Most importantly, you can put together a story that sells.
EMAIL MARKETING
Jessica Best, VP of Data-Driven at Barkley asserts that email marketing has its place in your business’s customer journey.
This is true, despite a lot of companies these days use social media platforms in order to communicate their brand to large audiences.
Email can send directly to every individual on your list at the most relevant time with automation. It can show the product that the individual is specifically interested in on your website. You can track the individual engagement. You can know what to send you in your follow-up emails.
Most especially, email gets read and delivered with twenty-five percent to thirty percent open rates while social media a measly two percent read rate.
Jessica said it best about why you should optimize your email marketing with data:
“Optimizing your email marketing using data that drives relevance and, for us, marketers, that means revenue...When we can make an email campaign more relevant to our subscribers, they respond to it. So we’re spending less money to get to the right people to have them take the action we want them to take.”
She talks about how to make your data-driven email marketing and how to use your data to prove what campaigns are working.
Using Data for Personalization
The customized email content is more than inserting the subscriber’s name in the subject line. Personalization use data-driven techniques that make recommendations and attractive offers based on purchase history and craft dynamic content that matches consumer preferences.
Example of Email Personalization
Using Data for Segmentation
Segmentation is used as a personalization tactic to send more relevant email marketing to subscribers according to geographic location, interests, and purchase history.
Use data to determine when to send to whom, and who gets which message.
To segment your list, use RFM to analyze and evaluate which customers are of highest and lowest value to an organization based on purchase recency, frequency, and monetary value, in order to reasonably predict which customers are more likely to make purchases again in the future.
Using Data for Automation
In automation, the question is: when do you send directly to your subscribers? So use data to know the timing of our emails.
With email automations, you create targeted emails that send when triggered by a specific date, event, or contact’s activity.
Example of Automation
Using Data for Optimization
Data for email optimization is everything from your analytics to the testing plan.
Two Questions to Ask Yourself When Auditing Data:
- Am I gathering the data that I can use to make informed decisions?
- Can I trust the data I’m seeing?
For a step-by-step process to connect your email marketing with your conversion rate optimization goals, check out this blog post of Shanelle Mullin.
To conclude, you can increase conversions with persuasive copy and more strategic emails.
But you can only have this massive bottom-line impact through analytics that you can measure to provide insights and informed decisions.
Most of the things shared in this review are part of the Growth Marketing mini degree program. If you want to learn more about it, visit CXL Institute. CXL Institute offers digital marketing courses taught by the absolute best practitioners in the world today. Some of the companies that train their teams at CXL: Amazon, Google, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and many more.