In the AI Guild, I conduct a lot of group coaching of landing pages, emails, and other marketing. And I’ve found myself uttering the same phrase over and over…
Help, don’t hype
Think of it this way. Take off your hat as a marketing professional or business owner just for a moment and put on your customer hat.
You have a goal you’d like to achieve. Or perhaps a pain point you want to overcome. You go on a journey to meet that goal or overcome that pain point. That journey begins by not even understanding what options there are to meet your goal or stop your pain, and it ends by making a commitment, sometimes an expensive commitment (in not just money, but also, time and trust) with a specific company to buy a project or service.
What would you prefer along that journey? To be sold to? Or to be helped?
Anti-marketing sentiment
Tell someone at a dinner party you work in marketing. Or are heavily involved in marketing as a business owner.
You likely won’t get the same reaction as a doctor or teacher.
Ever wondered what truly drives a customer to choose your product over another? Last week, I examined six powerful factors in a webinar for SCORE’s Jacksonville chapter that can transform your marketing strategy and boost conversions.
We discussed marketing strategy, conversion optimization, value proposition, and what every creator of lead gen forms and online shopping carts can learn from the Chik-Fil-A drive-through.
Entrepreneurs and marketers discovered the factors influencing decisions in marketing, business, and even their personal lives. Our discussion was guided by the patented Meclabs Conversion Sequence heuristic developed by Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MeclabsAI (MarketingSherpa’s parent organization). Participants learned to steer outcomes towards ‘yes.’
I’ve gotten a lot of requests for the slides, so I figured I would do one better, and just give you the full replay. The video is below, and here are the slides. Read more…
Every Wednesday, we hold a free Marketing LiveClass as part of ChatGPT, CRO and AI: 40 Days to build a MECLABS SuperFunnel. Everyone is welcome to join and learn, as we build marketing funnels with members of the MECLABS SuperFunnel Research Cohort.
In the LiveClass, marketers and entrepreneurs can ask questions in the webinar chat. And we answer them right here…
Next steps – I have been testing big differences – how do we go deeper once we get some success?
This questioner is asking about testing big differences between a control and a treatment in a marketing experiment.
I’ll give you four options to decide what to test next. The option that works best for you will be based on the unique needs and strategy of your business. It should also be informed by what you learned in the original test. That is, after all, the main point of marketing experimentation. To learn about our customers so we can better serve them.
Continuously move through the optimization sequence
This means you should optimize your product before the presentation of the offer and optimize the channel last.
And if you think about it for a moment, it should make logical sense. If you optimize the channel first, you’re going to spend a lot of money sending traffic to an underperforming landing page presentation of your offer. And if you optimize the presentation first, people will be buying an inferior product that does not have a forceful value proposition.
This is the process we followed in the MECLABS SuperFunnel Research Cohort, without explicitly saying so. While working with the cohort and building their funnel, cohort members were challenged to identify how powerful their product’s value proposition actually is in the competitive marketplace, and how to present the offer. Then they tested in the channel.
I do want to note, this of course is not a stagnant process. Optimization is continual. So once you’ve gotten to the point of optimizing the channel factor and have a profitable flow going, you can circle back to the product and see how to further optimize it.
I also want to note that we break out these factors to help communicate information. In real-world testing, things can get messier and there can be overlap. For example, you can test in the channel to learn about your product.
Test a new place in your funnel
When I think of testing and optimizing a funnel, I think of a classic physical comedian like Charlie Chaplin or Lucille Ball. There is a long rope they need to keep straight, and wherever it droops they need to prop it up. Great, they’ve got it propped up the biggest drooping area. But oh no, now it’s drooping on the other end. Time to prop it up there. I can picture them comically running back and forth.
The same is true for your marketing funnel. You can look at your metrics to determine where to test in your funnel and try to prop up the most drooping area first. Where is your next biggest challenge?
Did you get more people from the landing page into your cart? That’s great. But maybe they are less qualified and now your cart isn’t converting as well. That is your next place to test.
Or maybe you started with the cart or form and improved conversion there. Now it’s time for a test to get more people to that optimized conversion point.
Move to another problem, solution, or tactic
When you first set up your experiment, you likely brainstormed many problems you might want to address, many solutions to those problems, and many tactics you can implement.
Based on what you learned in this test, what problem, solution, or tactic should you test next? There is a nice visual in Marketing Strategy: 4 steps to developing an effective and strategic test that illustrates this concept. When you look at that visual, you can see that you can ‘move over’ to the next problem, solution, or tactic with your next test.
Go deeper
If you tested big differences, you may not know what element of these big differences actually caused the change. For the next test you can go deeper to get an even better understanding of your customer. (Keep in mind though, the downside of this approach is why you tested big differences to begin with – if you get too deep, you may not find a statistically significant difference between the control and treatment).
For example, let’s say you have a shampoo bar. Maybe you tested the environmental friendliness of the shampoo bar versus the level of cleanliness the shampoo bar provides.
Let’s say, environmental friendliness won. But what aspect of environmental friendliness? Was it the lack of chemicals? Or less wasteful packaging?
Another way to go deeper is to test different expressions of the winning treatment. The winning treatment helped you identify an essence that was more effective with the customer – environmental friendliness. Now, you can test which expressions work best – which headlines about environmental friendliness, which images, which CTAs, etc?
Here’s one more way to go deeper – zoom into subsets of customers. You found the generally most appealing offer to the broadest set of potential customers. Now segment by, let’s say, US customers versus European customers. Start with your highest priority/largest segment and go from there. Which offer is most appealing to them? Which expression of the offer? And on and on.
Plan ahead for your testing
The above approaches don’t only have to happen after the test has run its course. In fact, you can consider many different tests when you begin, and then set a sequence for what to test next based on the results of your tests. ‘If the control wins, that means X about the customer, so next I will test…’ ‘If the treatment wins, that means Y about the customer, so next I will test…’
And to build on the previous question, yes, you should constantly optimize how you handle the micro-yes sequence throughout your funnel and on your landing page, based on what you are learning from your tests and other ways you are measuring customer behavior.
Essentially, you should ask – ‘am I serving potential customers, and the questions they will consider on their micro-yes journey?’ Your tests will help you answer that question and conversion rate performance will as well.
But also listen to their feedback directly to help you understand what you are seeing in the numbers. Talk to them. Give them an easy way for them to contact you. That qualitative information will help you make sense of your conversion and testing data.
Learn something interesting in a channel? How does that affect your landing page, and what followup tests will you run on the landing page to get the most juice for the squeeze?
Am I a free guest here watching a course that these folks paid for? How did they get access to this Q/A database?
You can RSVP now to be a free guest and learn from a Marketing LiveClass on Wednesday at 4 pm EDT as well. Here are some excerpts from recent LiveClasses to give you an idea of what you can expect…
Probably the most frightening thing I have seen in AI development
3 things you can do if your test data is not actionable
In the MEC200 LiveClass and MEC300 LiveClass for ChatGPT, CRO and AI: 40 Days to build a MECLABS SuperFunnel, we got a few questions in the chat. I’ll use this blog post to provide some resources to help you with those questions as you prepare for our next LiveClass on Wednesday
What is Customer Theory?
Is there an example of a fairly advanced custom theory profile? E.g., what’s the document or artifact and format, after multiple tests. Is Customer Theory an actual doc?
The Customer Theory is an understanding of the customer that enables us to more accurately predict the total response to a given offer. It is your organization’s collected wisdom about the customer. Hopefully this comes from a cycle of experiments. But at first, it may come from data analysis. Or even gut wisdom.
A successful landing page will tend to focus on one of these levels of value proposition, but have other elements as well. It’s like the 80/20 rule – 80% of your landing page will focus on one level, and the other 20% will support it with the other three levels.
For example, if you created a landing page for the Tesla Model S, the main thrust of your landing page would be a product-level value proposition. But you would also work in Tesla’s primary value proposition (perhaps showing Tesla’s charging network), prospect-level value propositions (perhaps showing why it is a good fit for a prospect focused on being environmentally conscious as well as a prospect interested in a sports car), and a process-level value proposition (perhaps there would be CTAs to sign up for a test drive, explaining the value of that process).
I missed the first 30 minutes, what are CFO again?
The CFO is your Customer-First Objective, a three-part framework for focusing your webpage and marketing messaging developed by Flint McGlaughlin, the founder of MECLABS Institute. This framework is an attempt to bring discipline to marketer’s approaches to their landing pages and messaging BEFORE they start to create their funnels, to make sure their funnels put the customer first.
Many marketing leaders intuitively understand the importance of putting the customer first. It is a common topic on the How I Made It In Marketing podcast. For example, when I interviewed Michelle Huff, CMO, UserTesting, she had discussed many stories with lessons that focused on understanding other people – like “Utilize customer empathy when trying to involve the customer in marketing efforts” and “Marketers should get involved with the sales team to learn from them” (you can hear our discussion in Product Management & Marketing: Surround yourself with the right people (podcast episode #38).
The MECLABS CFO framework helps discipline and codify that focus on understanding our customers, and uses it to inform all funnel creation activities.
Do you have any examples of a CFO that I can reference or do you recommend going back and reviewing the FastClasses?
You can RSVP here to join us for a Wednesday LiveClass. Here’s some feedback from current attendees to give you an idea what you can experience in these LiveClasses…
“…being able to come here and learn the ‘why’s’ behind things and getting the understanding has just been, like, life changing…and that was not a paid testimonial…” – Kristi Linebaugh, Sales and Marketing Specialist, Vigoa Cuisine. Hear directly from Kristi in this 51-second video.
“…My stress level has gone down because this is tough stuff…And Flint you’ve mastered all of this and it’s so nice to have access to this and you’ve been so gracious with your time and, well, what a generous soul…” – David B. Justiss, Agency Owner, Social Ink Works LLC. Hear directly from David in this 52-second video.
“…you said something very profound, and I’ve never heard this in the entire time of the Cohort yet. And it’s spot on to why we have the Cohort, why we need the Cohort, why the Cohort’s been so valuable as a community to us and I’m going to presume for so many, but it was something to the effect – be aware of incremental improvements to the wrong offer…” – Paul Good, Chief Executive Officer, PhotoPros, in this 58-second video
Here is the great struggle in all human relationships.
Me with my wife. Your brand with your customer. Even me with you, dear reader.
I am not you.
I am not my wife. You are not your customer.
However, we tend to think other people are like us. This is known as false consensus effect. Overcoming this cognitive bias – and striving to break down this barrier – is key to successful human relationships.
And thus, it is key to successful marketing. The better you understand how to truly serve your customers, the more successful your marketing will be.
Here’s one way to break down the barriers between your marketing team and your customers.
Visualizing the conversion journey is one way to break down that artificial barrier between you and the customer.
If marketers work on a landing page, direct mail piece or print ad in isolation, they overlook the real way potential customers make decisions in the real world.
Other than an impulse purchase, there is usually a step before. Or after. Or both. Or several steps. These other elements of the customer journey affect the overall success rate of whatever piece of marketing collateral your team is currently working on.
Here’s a simple example. MVMT used to send emails that linked to a general collection of its watches. When the team changed its strategy to use the emails to drive potential customers to specific landing pages that tied tightly to the campaign in the emails, they increased conversion 44% (see more in How the World’s Fastest-growing Watch Brand Used Email to Grow Revenue 98%).
To get you thinking of ways to visualize your customers’ conversion journey for your marketing team, here are a few tips.
However, just seeing webpage paths and conversion numbers is not the best way to try to get into the customer’s shoes. The customer does not experience the conversion journey like this.
So there is also a place in the tool to add in the actual screenshots of the funnel.
When using the tool, having the actual customer experience close at hand is a good reminder that conversion optimization is more than a numbers game. There are real people on the other sides of those numbers.
What does the world look like to them? The more you use data as a means to an end – to get closer to the human experience – the more you can leverage empathy in your marketing and increase conversion.
Immerse yourself in the customer experience
Many decisions that impact the customer are made in a meeting in a boardroom. The walls in that meeting room might be filled with generic art or company mission statements.
As a temporary way to bring the customer journey into that meeting – and set the right environment for your team to make customer-first decisions – print out each step of the customer journey and hang it on the walls of the meeting room as an oversize poster.
We’ll even use markers or Post-It notes to write the metrics right on each step of the conversion journey, or mark each step with potential conversion optimization changes.
This approach makes sure the changes aren’t made in isolation, and the entire customer journey is front and center. Should you change a certain headline or call to action? Well, when you see what customers are experiencing in the previous or next steps, you get a better sense if the entire journey is smooth and seamless.
Here’s an example of a more permanent way to visualize the conversion journey. In the MECLABS building, we had a Customer Experience Lab. There were a series of screens where you could pull up each step of the customer journey, in addition to magnetic boards if you wanted to include any print collateral and write on it. So as potential ideas are debated, the entire customer conversion journey is laid out clearly for everyone to see.
Of course, times have changed. Many people reading this article right now are not in offices or physical meeting rooms yet.
You can do a virtual version of the conversion journey over Zoom. Or print out the steps and hang them up in your home office. The core goal is the same whether you’re working in-person or remote – making sure you and your team can’t overlook the customer journey when making key decisions.
Map out the big picture
Visualizing the conversion journey isn’t just about seeing what the customer sees, you should also try to think what the customer thinks. For example, you could create a customer journey map clearly showing the questions potential customers have as they consider your product and map the marketing and sales material and interactions you are using to address these questions.
Or you can approach the customer journey from the opposite direction. Instead of focusing on the questions potential customers have about your product, identify the key conclusions they need to reach to keep traveling along the journey with your company that ultimately leads to a product purchase by creating a prospect conclusion funnel.
As you can see, there’s more than one way to visualize the customer conversion journey. The exact way you go about is less important than the intent behind it – better understanding your customer to better serve the customer and improve results.
You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.
We frequently receive questions from our email subscribers asking marketing advice. Instead of hiding those answers in a one-to-one email communication, we occasionally publish edited excerpts of some of these conversations here on the MarketingSherpa blog so they can help other readers as well. If you have any questions, let us know.
Dear MarketingSherpa:Hi there Daniel,
I quite like the sequence you have built, it’s quite relevant and well refined.
With regards to the personal note, very well done. I am guessing you get a mixed bag from this one.
I would like to ask a question, in your opinion, where do you think CRO is in the adoption lifecycle?
As an industry/set of processes do you think it is still early days or are we nearing the end or somewhere in the middle?
From: Kaleb Ufton, Director of Technology and Digital Marketing Strategy, EKOH Marketing
MarketingSherpa responds: The sequence Kaleb is referring to is the welcome email drip sequence, which includes emails written with a direct and personal tone, that marketers receive after subscribing to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.
But then he asks a thoughtful and provocative question about conversion rate optimization (CRO). If you’ve read previous Ask MarketingSherpa columns, you know they are usually how-to questions about topics like value proposition communication or finding clients.
Kaleb’s question is more challenging. It essentially requires the ability to predict the future. I needed a little help with this one.
Fortunately, I work every day with one of the pioneers of the conversion rate optimization industry—Flint McGlaughlin. So I walked down the hall to get his take on this question, and here’s what he had to say …
Moving away from just testing pages to testing for new products
I think CRO is in the advanced segment of the first stage and beginning to move into the second. I’ll explain:
When we began our research, no one had a conversion budget; there was no one to hire to do conversion work. There was no training available for conversion. Now companies everywhere hire conversion optimization experts and are testing, but they do it very poorly. Stage 1 has matured to the point where it has become a common practice, but the quality of the execution is definitely lacking.
Tests are often run with major validity errors that no one detects. The testing tools are still primitive, and the biggest problem in the industry is that people don’t know what to test. Having a tool doesn’t help you if you don’t know how to really use it. So I think we are in the advanced segment of Stage 1, and Stage 1 would represent the general adoption of conversion optimization. Clearly some industries are far, far beyond, but in general, things have advanced significantly.
Now, how far do we have to go?
We have a long way to go. Conversion as it relates to personalization is not even close to being executed properly. The next phase in conversion will come through the advanced development of existing technologies. AI (artificial intelligence) is making big promises but delivering far less in practice. There will come a time when it can do more.
In addition, conversion is moving away from just testing pages to testing for new products and also testing for entrepreneurial software rollouts (full stack testing). These are new fields with greater opportunity. I think there is a stage coming where the practice moves to new areas, and then there is a stage coming where technology makes new possibilities.
— Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute (parent organization of MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments), and author of the book The Marketer as Philosopher
Since this question requires essentially making a prediction, I wanted to leverage the wisdom of the crowds and get a few other opinions as well from your marketing peers and CRO practitioners. So here are some other thoughts on the state of the CRO industry …
I usually watch “Curb Your Enthusiasm” through the eyes of a fan. But recently I watched the popular HBO show through the eyes of a marketer.
And it struck me — Larry David is an extremely valuable customer. And not just because he has all of that “Seinfeld” money (some $900 million of it, according to Adweek).
Larry is valuable because he actually tells brands what he is thinking. Commonly derided as “complaints” or “rants,” in reality, Larry is offering up valuable customer intelligence.
Complaints are business intelligence
In a recent episode, Larry is staying at a hotel. When asked by the front desk employee if he had any feedback on his stay, he suggests that they shouldn’t tuck the sheets in so tight when making the bed. Who sleeps like that?
But Larry isn’t the normal, quiet customer. He’s a super-suggester. And he goes far beyond replying to a question from an employee asking for feedback. He offers unsolicited advice on topics the hotel doesn’t even think to ask about.
While the hotel brags about cookies made by its pastry chef, Larry isn’t buying it. He says the cookies are from Pepperidge Farm.
And Larry is none too happy about the cookie retrieval system the hotel has set up in its lobby. Larry doesn’t want to use tongs to grab the cookies — he is afraid the cookie will get crushed — and he suggests a wider cookie layout system so guests can pick cookies with their bare hands without touching an adjacent cookie.
The focus at MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 was inspirational stories of customer-first marketing, and so we mostly shared in person, live versions of the in-depth case studies we report on from your peers.
However, previous attendees have told us that they also want quick ideas for improving their customer-first marketing.
So in this quick-hitting session, my Summit co-host, Pamela Jesseau, and I shared ideas for improving your marketing from industry experts, your marketing peers and MarketingSherpa Award entrants who had outstanding ideas.
Sit back and watch the entire 30-minute video to get several different ideas. Or, if you’d like to jump ahead to a specific topic in a specific section, our copy editor Linda Johnson, put together these timestamp links for you.
All marketers should have three key questions in their head at all times. What do consumers really think about your business practices? What marketing approaches can I use to tell them about our business? And where do they want to hear these messages (i.e. channel preferences)?
To help you get an answer to these questions, we conducted research with 2,400 U.S. consumers, sampled to reflect a close match to the U.S. population’s demographics. But we also split them into satisfied and unsatisfied customers to understand how these marketing and business behaviors affect customer satisfaction, especially taking a customer-first marketing approach to all of these business decisions.
Customer-centric isn’t just a buzzword to us — those marketing efforts are the stories that we love to tell at MarketingSherpa. From our case studies to our data, we want to give you everything you need to keep your customer foremost in your marketing efforts.
In October 2016, we surveyed two groups of 1,200 about customer-first marketing. We asked one group 50 questions about the business, marketing and channel practices that make them highly satisfied with a company. We asked the other group similar questions about what makes them highly unsatisfied with a company.
We provided Sarah Esterman, Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Simple.com, and Jamey Bainer, Strategy and Planning Director, Pacific, with two of the charts created using that data, which asked 1,200 highly satisfied customers: “Thinking about the marketing of [the company they were highly satisfied with] which of the following is true about your experience? Select all that apply.”
(click image to enlarge)
The same question was asked of 1,200 highly unsatisfied customers — with a very different result:
(click image to enlarge)
Armed with that information, we asked Sarah and Jamey five questions about the trials, tribulations and tips for implementing customer-first marketing.
Editor’s Note: Sarah Esterman is speaking at MarketingSherpa Summit 2017, and Jamey Bainer participated in the sponsored Summit content “Inside the Industry.”
Q: What are some arguments marketers can use to push for customer-centricity in their organizations?
Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind
You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.
