Curiosity makes you a better marketer
One of the most important traits to have as an email marketer (or as a marketer in general) is curiosity.
Curiosity leads you to ask questions like:
- What if we send the email from Barack Obama with the subject line ‘Hey’?
- What if we put some quotes on a newsletter signup page, will that increase sign ups?
- Is it better to get people to sign up for your product or get them on your list first?
Other than running your own experiments, one way you can learn and get inspiration is by asking other people about their marketing (build an inner circle of people you talk to about this stuff).
For example, I’ve chatted with Brennan Dunn about playing “the long game” when it comes to a marketing strategy.
Brennan uses ad-retargeting with his product Planscope. Most people use ad-retargeting to try to encourage people to return and sign up for a product. However, Brennan was maybe a bit more curious than most. He thought: What if my retargeting ad sends people to sign up for an email course? An email course / autoresponder series is lower commitment than signing up for a product. Sending people to a course first also allows Brennan to teach people his philosophy for how he built Planscope and teaches them to become a better customer.
Other than ad-retargeting to a list, one strategy that so many B2B companies have found success with is the “Surprise personal email“. We certainly championed this email, but it was invented by some curious marketer who thought: “What if we automate an email that looks like it was written by someone on the team?”.
I’ve been asking a bunch of “what if?” questions recently and have started quite a few experiments. Most of the data isn’t ready yet, but I do have one experiment to share with you.
We wanted to do a homepage redesign but make sure we didn’t kill our conversion rate. The goal with the first pass is to match our previous rate, not beat it.
(old on the left, new on the right)
Assuming we didn’t destroy conversions, we would tweak and try other ideas to improve further.
Overall, the data suggests some positive things. 30% of people are viewing the features page vs 21% on the old homepage. There’s a slight increase in people viewing the pricing page too. Our conversion to signing up was essentially left unchanged. People are generally more knowledgeable about the product at the time they sign up.
Now I’d love to hear from you. What are the experiments you’re running or want to run?