The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is an open-source initiative to improve website performance and experience. Its library provides a straightforward way to create web pages that are compelling and load near instantaneously. Here is a list of AMP Start templates.
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There’s one thing I hate about email marketing copy: You never know how it’s going to perform until the campaign goes live. What seemed like a rock-star line of copy could become the campaign’s kiss of death.
Sure, you can A/B test every element of each email all month, but taking that time means you’ll probably start losing leads. Fortunately, I’ve taken that route and want to share with you some valuable copywriting techniques that have bolstered the performance of my emails.
For 59% of surveyed B2B marketers, email is the best channel for generating revenue, likely because the majority of the audience voluntarily opted to receive the brand’s emails, indicating an interest in the company and its products or services.
59% of surveyed B2B marketers say #email is the best channel for generating revenue via @adage. #BtoBMagazine
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Given the value of email and my experience testing what works better, here are eight email copywriting methods to help you successfully transform your prospects and leads into customers.
One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered is the inclination to create an email quickly, assume it checks all the boxes, and accept the first draft as your final draft.
Here’s how I approach writing new marketing emails:
If you aren’t excited about the final draft, your audience won’t be either. Keep revising until you craft one you’re sure will convert prospects.
Many marketers forget that the email structure controls the flow of information – telling prospects how to read the email and interpret the information. Properly structuring the email is necessary to hold the recipients’ interest and have them view content in a desired order.
A headline at the top of the email can be the best way to grab your prospects’ attention and get them to follow through with your desired action (i.e., clicking the CTA and making a purchase).
I like to formulate headlines that intrigue and compel prospects to convert.
Always place the headline at the very top of your email. You never want to place it below a line (or several lines) of copy because your prospect will immediately read the headline and ignore the copy above. Structure your emails to mimic a natural reading flow: top-to-bottom and left-to-right.
Always place a headline at top of your #email, says @BArailrunner. #writingtips
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Here are a few eye-catching headlines I’ve used in successful cart abandonment emails:
Length is an irrelevant consideration when you’re creating a stellar email. What matters is the substance of your writing. If you can convey your message in two short paragraphs but spread it over seven paragraphs, that’s a problem.
Email copy needs to conform to the message, not the other way around. The message always comes first, otherwise, your recipients won’t have a clue what to do with your email.
Say enough to motivate prospects to take your desired action. The more focused your email is the better.
Sometimes prospects need a little more information and encouragement to convert. Focus on the prospect. That’s the bottom line. Forget about trimming your writing to fit above the fold. That doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is outweighing purchase hesitations with benefits that drive prospects to convert.
Believe it or not, using first-, second- or third-person nouns can make a huge difference on how your prospects react.
Choose which line of email copy you would respond to the best:
The first line focuses on the email sender (i.e., the company) using pronouns like “we’re” “us,” and “we.” The second line focuses on the prospect using language like “you” and “your.”
Create marketing emails that are about the prospect and not the brand.
Create #emails about the prospect, not the brand. Use second-person language via @CampaignMonitor. #writingtips
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Some simple rules to follow:
The internet is flooded with CTA best-practice recommendations, but I’m focusing on the four most important ones:
Don’t force your prospects to choose between two or more actions. Keep their attention focused on one thing. Just as cart abandonment emails have one purpose – to get prospects to purchase – each CTA button should have one objective – getting your prospects to click.
Use only 1 CTA button in an #email. Don’t force prospects to choose b/n 2 actions. @BArailrunner #writingtips
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There’s nothing wrong with having a secondary CTA, but it can’t be a button. Write your second CTA copy within a sentence and hyperlink. Always put the secondary CTA in a smaller font than the primary button CTA.
Don’t use a CTA to tell prospects what they’re doing, tell them what they’re getting. Saying “Download now” is a waste of copy. Conveying a benefit or end result, such as “Increase conversions by 10%,” is more compelling.
Structure every aspect of your email to encourage prospects to advance through to making a purchase. Placing your CTA at the end of your message can have the best impact because you’ve created a captivating argument in the main body that helps overcome purchase hesitations. The CTA is the final blow that pushes them to click and complete a purchase.
Ever watch an old movie that shows a house fire? The characters form a human train, passing buckets of water person to person until the final member hurls the water onto the blaze. That’s a bucket brigade.
The bucket brigade copywriting method grabs your readers’ attention and moves the reader through the copy – it holds their attention long enough to convey a complete message.
Here’s how it works:
Check out this example:
In this content marketing guide from Quick Sprout, you can see the bucket brigade copywriting technique in practice – a bold headline followed by a resolution, followed by another bold headline with another resolution.
I used the bucket brigade copywriting method throughout this article. Here are some successful bucket brigade copywriting elements for your marketing emails to hold interest and move prospects further down the sales funnel:
The goal is to get prospects to read your entire email and hold their interest long enough to earn a conversion. Start forming your own brigade with buckets of effective copy.
A great subject line is the most important aspect influencing your email open rates. Nailing a catchy subject line is vital to the success of your campaign.
Here are five subject-line tactics that lead to exceptional open rates:
Successful #email marketing includes subject lines under 65 characters, says @BArailrunner. #writingtips
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Generic subject lines are boring. Don’t settle for a subpar subject line. It’s safe to say I go through seven to 10 iterations before finding an appropriate subject line style and tone. Then I make another five to 10 iterations before I’ve got one I’m happy with.
Make as many new versions as you need to feel 100% satisfied with your work.
Look at these subject-line examples:
The first one sounds desperate. You might as well say, “Please come back and buy from us!” The second and third examples work for several reasons. They:
Focus on creating subject lines that convey the meaning of your email and incorporate some sense of curiosity.
This is one of the most valuable copywriting tactics you’ll learn and it’s conveyed best through an example.
Let’s say you sell office supplies and are trying to convert prospects who loaded up their shopping carts with back-to-school supplies before abandoning your website. You’re building an email campaign that targets cart abandonments and have a list of four questions you could include in your first email:
OK, now let’s go back through each question and determine if your prospects would agree with an emphatic “yes.”
The first question offers no motivation for your prospect to answer yes.
The second question is a yes. Every prospect wants to save money.
The third question is another no. It doesn’t indicate any benefit for the prospect.
The final question implies convenience that most prospects would find appealing and answer with a yes.
Every time you include a question in your email copy, ask if the prospect will agree. If not, delete and start again.
If you can get prospects to agree with you once, it becomes easier to convert them. Deep down they begin to feel that you “get” them and their barriers to purchasing begin to deteriorate.
That’s a lot of information. But, if you’re able to implement these methods into your next email campaign you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.
Just remember, never settle for the first attempt, focus on the prospect, employ smart copywriting techniques, and get prospects to agree with you and follow a predetermined flow of actions.
Hitting all those marks will result in an email marketing campaign that successfully boosts your conversion rates.
Do you want to be a better content marketer? Improve your knowledge and skills? Register for Content Marketing World and gather insight from over 100 presenters. Make plans today to be in Cleveland Sept. 4-7. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 8 Copywriting Techniques to Boost Email Conversions appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Your website’s data matters. By tracking your site’s most important metrics, you can get a valuable look at how well your SEO strategy is working; what a typical customer does on your site; and even what your competitors are doing differently. To understand your web analytics, you need the right tools – and there are plenty of powerful tools out there. Here’s a round-up of ten analytics tools that you may wish to consider using.
A display in Google Analytics
When it comes to web analytics tools, Google Analytics is the gold standard. It’s simple to set up, customizable, and provides all the basic information you could want about your site. With Google Analytics, you can collect data on your audience (such as age, location, and devices), and observe how visitors find, interact with, and leave your site. As it’s so popular, Google Analytics tends to be easy to integrate with other platforms. If you aren’t sure which web analytics tool is right for you, you can’t go wrong with this one.
Price: Google Analytics is free for most users. Businesses that need a large amount of data can also look into Google Analytics 360, the paid enterprise version of the tool. Cost varies based on each company’s individual needs, but expect the price to be steep – third-party sources estimate that GA 360 starts at $150,000 per year.
Crazy Egg’s heatmaps and scroll maps make this tool popular among data lovers.
Crazy Egg is a comprehensive but easy-to-use web analytics tool. One of its most useful features is its ability to generate heatmaps and scroll maps. These show you exactly how people are scrolling through your site and where they’re clicking most frequently. You can also use Crazy Egg to run A/B tests on your site.
Price: Crazy Egg offers four pricing plans. The most basic costs $29 per month, while the pro version goes all the way up to $189 per month. You can use Crazy Egg for free for 30 days before you commit to a plan.
Keep an eye on your data in real time with Clicky.
Clicky is a powerful, flexible web analytics tool that’s often compared to Google Analytics. However, Clicky has a few features that GA doesn’t. The Big Screen feature lets you see exactly what’s happening on your site – how many visitors you have, what they’re doing, and when they’re leaving – in real time. Clicky also has a Twitter analytics feature that lets you search for mentions of your business on Twitter.
Price: You can use Clicky for free, but to unlock all the features that make this tool unique, you’ll need to spring for the paid version. Prices start at $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year.
Capture all the customer data you need with Kissmetrics.
If you want to gather data on each customer’s journey through your sales funnel, Kissmetrics might be the perfect analytics tool for you. This people-focused tool tracks individuals through multiple visits to your site (something Google Analytics doesn’t do), which helps you understand how and why they make purchasing decisions. Kissmetrics also has email marketing functionality built in, so you can send automated emails to leads based on how they behave on your site.
Price: Kissmetrics starts at $500 per month.
Chartbeat is designed to capture and track data related to your content.
Chartbeat is an analytics tool that monitors how people interact with your content. If you publish a lot of content of any type, Chartbeat might be an ideal way to gather all your data into one place.
Price: Chartbeat doesn’t disclose their prices on their website, but third-party sources estimate that their pricing starts at $7000 per year.
Optimizely helps you improve your site through experimentation.
Testing your site is crucial for good UX, but running experiments without the help of specialized software can be slow, unwieldy, and error-prone. Optimizely was created as a solution to this problem. This tool helps you easily run A/B tests on your site so you can optimize based on data, not guesswork.
Price: Optimizely doesn’t publish prices on their site, so you’ll need to contact their sales team for a quote. However, other sources estimate that their prices start around $36,000 per year.
Ever wish you could spy on your competitors’ top-performing keywords? SEMrush will help you do just that.
SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing and analytics tool. While it comes with standard SEO- and PPC-tracking functionality, its standout features are its keyword research and competitive analysis tools. SEMrush shows you which keywords are sending your competitors traffic, which can help to inform your own keyword strategy. The tool also helps you find new keywords of your own, regardless of what your competitors are doing.
Price: SEMrush starts at $99.95 per month. Businesses and agencies that need more features can expect to pay up to $399.95 per month.
Matomo is a more private alternative to Google Analytics.
Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a popular open-source alternative to Google Analytics. Unlike GA, Matomo is hosted on your own server, and you own all of your data. Matomo is also highly customizable – if you need more features, you can search its library of 70 plugins. Matomo is a great analytics tool for companies that care about privacy.
Price: Matomo is free, but some of the plugins cost.
Mixpanel lets you specify which events you want to monitor on your site.
Mixpanel is an analytics platform similar to Google Analytics. Event tracking is one of this tool’s main features – thanks to Mixpanel’s intuitive interface, users can specify events to track without having to code those events by hand. Mixpanel also offers excellent customer service to all users, regardless of which plan they’re using.
Price: Mixpanel offers free accounts with limited functionality. To unlock the full power of the tool, prices start at $999 per year.
Monitor everything that happens on your site with Heap.
Heap offers users two main benefits – it’s simple to use, and it’s extremely thorough. This tool captures everything that happens on your site – every click, form submission, page view, and search. If you want a granular look at exactly how visitors are using your site, Heap might be the perfect tool for the job.
Price: Heap is free if you have fewer than 5000 visitors to your site every month. If you need more data than that, you’ll have to contact Heap for a quote, but third-party sources estimate that the paid version of Heap starts at $500 per month.
There are tons of analytics tools out there to choose from. To decide which one is right for your company, think carefully about which metrics you want to measure on your site and how simple (or technical) you want your tools to be. If your budget allows for it, there’s no reason you have to limit yourself to a single analytics tool – using more than one can give you a better-rounded picture of what’s going on with your site. Use this list as a starting point for your own research, and you’re sure to find an analytics tool that fits your needs perfectly.
Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer for No Risk SEO, an all-in-one reporting platform for agencies. You can connect with Amanda on Twitter and LinkedIn, or check out her content services at amandadisilvestro.com.
Last week’s primer described in layman’s terms some of the reasons that Googlebot, in particular, has trouble with modern forms of JavaScript such as Angular, AJAX, and others. This follow-on article addresses some of the solutions to compensate for bots’ limitations — to help drive more natural search traffic and revenue.
The post SEO: 3 Paths to Crawlable JavaScript appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
With the advent of free, effective, and user-friendly testing tools such as Google Optimize it’s getting progressively easier to run quick and impactful A/B tests in order to serve up relevant experiences to users and streamline the path to conversion.
In fact, Google recently updated the integration between Optimize & AdWords to allow for more powerful testing.…
The post Boost PPC Effectiveness with the Google Optimize & AdWords Integration appeared first on Seer Interactive.
