MarketingSherpa Blog

Every Wednesday we hold a free Marketing LiveClass as part of ChatGPT, CRO and AI: 40 Days to build a MECLABS SuperFunnel. Marketers and entrepreneurs ask questions in the webinar chat. And we answer them right here…

Do you see it to be an issue that we’re all designing first for desktop and analyzing pages on desktop, but the majority of traffic will likely be on mobile. Is it a best practice to design for mobile first?

It is a best practice to put the ideal customer first. If the ideal customer is more likely to be using a mobile phone, then yes, start with a mobile landing page. Even better if you focus on the most popular device size (if you have a website already, you can find this info in your analytics).

But don’t stop there. How else can you put the customer first?

• Speed first – how fast is the connection where they are located? Some nations and areas have faster connections than others. If they are in an area with a slow-loading page, you should start by stripping the page down to its essence and only adding an element if it’s absolutely necessary.
• Contact-preference first – Phone? Email? Chat? Social media? How do they want to contact your company? You should likely provide several options, but for a landing page that revolves around an action, make sure you are starting with the action most preferable to the customer.
• Price first (or not) – Is the ideal customer more likely to want a deal? Or care less about price and more about service or durability? Lead with what is most valuable to them by, for example, including a coupon code front and center.

These are just some ideas to get you thinking about how to put the customer first. And if you do have an ideal customer that is likely to be on mobile, this article may help give you some mobile-specific ideas – Exploring the Mobile Customer Experience: Three discoveries for designing an effective mobile experience.

But a word of caution – don’t just design for mobile first because it’s a general best practice. Remember, it’s only a best practice if the majority of your brand’s ideal customers are accessing your landing pages with a mobile device. There are still likely many companies that would better serve their customer with desktop-first (or perhaps laptop-first) designs – for example, B2B companies or those serving older customers.

And lastly – a thank you to this questioner. One reason I hope Flint McGlaughlin and I have been able to add value to participants of the MECLABS SuperFunnel Research Cohort is by bringing the MECLABS methodology and conversion psychology to bear on their funnel, their ads, and their landing pages as we offer conversion optimization and marketing strategy suggestions.

But another reason I’ve brought value is because I’m simply not steeped in their business every day. I have an outside perspective. As Mark Twain said, an expert is just “an ordinary fellow from another town.” Being from another town, I can help point out their blind spots.

The SuperFunnel Cohort community has helped point out my blind spots as well. And this was one. I have provided optimization suggestions to many cohort participants’ landing pages, but I don’t think I ever challenged them to design for mobile first. Thanks to this questioner, I realize that this is a really obvious approach I overlooked.

But that’s how blind spots are, right? You don’t notice them at all. Until one day someone points it out to you, and then it seems breathtakingly obvious.

As an attendee, what’s the best way to get started with AI?

I like that this questioner didn’t ask – “what’s the easiest way to get started with artificial intelligence?” They asked for the best way to get started with artificial intelligence.

And I would say – take a look at the answer above. Don’t begin with AI, just like you shouldn’t necessarily begin with mobile. Begin with the customer:

1. What goals does the customer want to achieve in their life? What challenges do they want to overcome?
2. If you find many answers to Question #1 that have nothing to do with your brand…fantastic! You’re doing it right. You’re laser focused on your ideal customer, not your own self-interest. However, unless you have chosen the wrong addressable market, your brand should be able to help with some of those things. So how can your brand help?
3. Break down your answers to Question #2 into two buckets – ways that require a monetary payment from the customer (this is your “product”), and ways that do not require monetary payment (this is your “marketing”).
4. Now, how can you deliver the value identified in Question #3? This is where you discover what role artificial intelligence can play.

The rest is experimentation. Experimenting with AI tools to see how they can deliver that value. But also, conducting marketing experiments to see if the addition of artificial intelligence is helping you “move the needle” in your funnel. We answer questions about running tests in Marketing Experimentation: Answers to marketers’ and entrepreneurs’ questions about marketing experiments.

+1000 Daniel, when everyone has AI and a bot, who cares that you do?

In fairness, this isn’t a question, so to speak. The participant agreed with something I said in the LiveClass.

But I included it, because it is the reason for the four-step framework I gave to address the previous question.

When you approach your marketing with a technology-first mindset, someone else will always be breathing down your neck. Ready to replicate or outpace your success. Always ready with a better, faster, cheaper technology.

Which is why you should approach these types of decisions – yes, even technology decisions…especially technology decisions – with a value-proposition first mindset. This is how epic brands are built, and how you architect a sustainable competitive advantage.

Here’s a great example. Anyone can put an AI-powered chatbot on their site. But Medieval Times implemented a chatbot that helped communicate the dinner theater’s value proposition. You can read how they did it in – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Marketing: What marketers (even those who don’t care about tech) should know about AI and ML.

Incidentally enough, we published that article in the Middle Ages of AI – September 23^rd, 2022…more than two months before ChatGPT’s launch as a public prototype on November 30^th. However, in my (biased) opinion, the takeaways discussed in the article are just as relevant today because we focused (less) on the technology itself and more on the humans behind it – the ideal ‘customer’ for our content, marketers and entrepreneurs.

How can I join the next cohort?

How can I join a cohort? Is there info on that? I have purchased MarketingSherpa books and watched videos, but would love active feedback on my new project

At the end of the LiveClass, we answered questions about joining the MECLABS SuperFunnel Research Cohort. Feel free to join us for a Wednesday LiveClass to get ideas for your marketing funnel, and if you stick around to the end, we’ll answer your questions as well.

Here are some quick experts from previous LiveClasses:

Can we put all 8 micro-yes(es) on the landing page?

How do we measure the strategy?

How do we weigh the appeal or exclusivity of a claim?

When I was writing this past Thursday’s case study with Wattpad, a writing and storytelling platform with a large mobile audience, I began considering the ways that marketers are still underestimating mobile.

With Wattpad’s story, it seems almost heroic that they focused on community in the mobile ad experience instead of treating it like most others do — as an obligatory necessity that they just assume users will tolerate. Until, that is, you understand the dividends that focus paid, boosting in-app video completion rates by 98%.

A MarketingSherpa Award’s Readers’ Choice nominee, Skyjet, also understood how profitable focusing on the mobile experience could be. The marketing team experienced a lot of disruption due to mobile marketing habits in the charter marketplace in Q4 of 2014, according to Jonathan Levey, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Flexjet, and his company had to begin experimenting to keep up.

Read more…

There are no dumb questions, only dumb marketers who don’t bother to ask. That’s why we’ve decided to begin publishing quick, snackable posts that will help you expertly navigate any project, no matter what team you’re working with.

Today’s term is one you might encounter when working with your dev or design teams, and it has a particularly delicious moniker: the hamburger menu.

It’s something you’ve seen a thousand times before, and now you’re cocking your head thinking, “Huh. That DOES kind of look like a hamburger.”

Read more…

“I think that mobile is one of the most profound changes we’ve seen in marketing in years,” John Costello, Global Marketing & Innovation, Dunkin’ Brands, Inc, said when I sat down with him in the MarketingSherpa Media Center at DMA’s event &THEN.

‘America Runs on Dunkin’ is more than just a slogan, he said. It really infiltrates every aspect of the brand to customer relationship.

“Because of that, mobile is absolutely perfect for us,” he said, adding that, “mobile has really evolved from a small phone to a smart phone to a hand-help computer, to really, the remote control for your life.”

That decision goes back to being customer-focused, John said.

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For email marketers, tackling mobile email is a relatively new challenge, but a challenge that needs to be addressed. According to research from Litmus, the email testing and analytics vendor, 49% of people access email via a smartphone — a figure that’s risen fivefold since 2011 and continues to trend upward.

To provide some insight for you, the MarketingSherpa Blog reader, I reached out to five email marketers who addressed the mobile email challenge with two basic questions on the topic.

Read on to find out what this expert panel had to say about mobile email:

MarketingSherpa Blog: What one tactic has the most impact on mobile email campaigns?

Justine Jordan, Marketing Director, Litmus

Ah, the million dollar question! As with most things with email, it’s hard to make a generalization since it can vary greatly based on your industry and audience. If I had to pick just one tactic, I’d go broad and say responsive design has the most impact on mobile email. MailChimp sends billions of emails every year, and they’ve seen a 15% increase in unique clicks for mobile users when responsive design is used. Even without huge gains in performance, sending responsive campaigns sends the message that you care about providing the best possible user experience for your subscribers.

 Brian Graves, UI Team Lead, DEG

Simplifying the experience. In addition to helping deal with the smaller amount of screen real estate available on mobile devices, statistics show that customers typically spend less than 15 seconds reading marketing emails, with iOS users spending the least amount at around 3 seconds or less. Look at repositioning your email layout to lead with your most important messaging. The most effective emails are typically concise and have a clear focus. This is not only a good tactic for mobile but is one way in which a mobile-first approach can help improve your campaigns across every platform.

Ted Goas, Designer and Developer, Canfield Scientific

Work as a unified team from day one. Having product managers, marketers, designers and developers working together from planning through to execution helps ensure a campaign’s quality doesn’t degrade as it gets ‘thrown over the wall’ in a waterfall process. Everyone knows what’s happening and why.

Dan Denney, Front-End Devevloper, Code School

Designing an email for scanability has the most impact. We want everyone to read every word, but people want to find what they’re interested in and move on. Make it easy for them.

Fabio Carniero, Lead Email Developer, MailChimp

Spongy development (sometimes called hybrid development), in my opinion, has the most impact. There are a fair number of pitfalls associated with mobile email, and the spongy development method — a combination of fluid and non-fluid email markup — can generally resolve most of them. The most pertinent example is the Gmail app on Android and iOS; the app doesn’t support media queries, which are generally necessary for responsive design. The spongy/hybrid technique serves as a work-around for providing ‘responsive’ email in clients that don’t support the technology specifically.

This development technique, with its inherent flexibility and robustness, also has the benefit of being stable in a very wide variety of email clients and platforms, from desktop to tablet to phones.

Read more…

I’ve always felt that the aphorism about true wisdom being a byproduct of first admitting you don’t know everything to be accurate.

When I attended the ClickZ Live conference in Chicago last October, I got the chance to be exposed to some great new content. However, I felt one of the stories still being told was something I’ve been hearing on repeat since 2011. The story I’m talking about is that of mobile marketing and how it is the “wave of the future.”

We here at Sherpa have been preaching the shift in marketing budgets to mobile for years as well — just take a look back at this chart from last April.

Taking a look at some of the mobile channel data

I don’t think there’s any argument on where the industry is going anymore. That being said, I do feel that some of the most convincing data about focus on mobile is being under-utilized by marketers, or even worse, it’s being used by marketers to justify decisions that are not in the best interest of their business — decisions that will not show the best ROI and could be spent more effectively in other channels.

Working on partnerships in different industries over the past several years, I have seen both the good side and bad side of the mobile revolution, while making plenty of mistakes along the way. Seeing just how terrible mobile conversion rates can be compared to other channels is often disheartening.

It’s not enough to just say “mobile is the future.” We need something more actionable. Marketers admitting as an industry that we don’t know everything is the first step.

Read more…

Seldom do I condone a selfie.

Nothing makes me want to cut a slice of humble pie for someone more than a pointless, self-taken snapshot. If you’re doing absolutely nothing but think you look darn good, it’s pretty clear you’re pulling for some strokes to the ol’ ego.

In the driver’s seat of your car? Not a photo op. Working at your computer but having a great hair day? Don’t click the cam.

However, I do think there are some exceptions — and perhaps even necessary occasions — for a selfie. If I run into Jennifer Aniston on the street but no one’s there to take the pic, you best bet I’ll hold up my iPhone and do it on my own.

While my iPhone’s photo album doesn’t have celebrity-accompanied shots (I’m working on it), it’s not selfie-free, which brings me to my other exception: fashion.

Putting an outfit together or buying a piece of clothing is often stressful. I can look in the mirror as long as I want to see if I think a shirt looks funny or if my shoes go with my dress, but there’s nothing better than a second opinion.

I can get that second opinion by taking a photo of myself in the outfit, texting it to my girlfriends to weigh in. What do you think of this top? How does this skirt look with these earrings? Should I buy it? All of my friends and I do this.

Fashion retailer ModCloth, a brand my wallet knows all too well, integrated this selfie behavior into its mobile app. I learned all about it when ModCloth’s Chief Technology Officer Udi Nir chatted with me in the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE.

Udi co-hosted an IRCE session in Chicago titled, “Mobile Commerce: Get Ready Today for Tomorrow,” where he gave me the scoop on ModCloth selfies along with how crucial it is to have a strong mobile presence.

“It’s really important because that’s where our girl, our customer, is,” Udi told me. “We are wherever she is. If we want to serve her, we have to be in all those places she wants to access our site.”

On the marketing side, mobile unlocks new opportunities for marketers to reach customers in ways and at times they couldn’t have before.

“Mobile basically provides us new moments of found time,” he said. “Those two minutes in line, a few minutes on the bus or whatnot that weren’t able to be used before.”

ModCloth has channeled its mobile focus into its app, which has helped the company achieve both entertainment and engagement among its customers.

One particular feature is the app’s Style Gallery, a place where ModCloth customers can upload their outfit photos to show how they’ve styled their clothing to give others inspiration, Udi explained.

  Read more…

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, I grabbed Manny Ju, Director of Product Management, BlueHornet, and asked him about mobile email marketing for our latest episode of Marketing Research in Action …

Here is a closer look at some research Manny shared. First, Manny discussed research from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report (Full discolosure: BlueHornet is the sponsor of this Benchmark Report, and was a sponsor at Email Summit 2013). As you can see, increasing sales conversion/revenue is the top business objective for mobile marketing.

Q: What are your TOP BUSINESS OBJECTIVES for mobile marketing in the next 12 months?

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, financial return on investment (quantitative return on email investment) was the most important objective as well …

Q. As CMO or the senior marketing executive in your organization, how important are the following factors in helping you determine and communicate the value of email marketing programs?

  Read more…

While looking through the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, I noticed a parallel between the top mobile tactics to be implemented within the next six months and the most recent case studies MarketingSherpa has published on mobile marketing.

Recent MarketingSherpa case studies have focused on four of the top five tactics, even touching on the top tactic, mobile website. Some marketers have started the implementation process of mobile marketing, and they have already seen great results. To help you get started on these top tactics, we pulled out the key takeaways from these case studies.

Read more…

The MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report shows a staggering 55% of marketers reported lacking an effective mobile marketing strategy, as well as not having adequate staffing, resources and expertise.

With MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 quickly approaching, speaker Diana Primeau, Director of Member Services, CNET – who will be presenting a session on win-back campaigns and list cleansing at the event – has insight to offer on this topic to fill in the knowledge gaps when it comes to developing an effective mobile newsletter strategy.

Diana said she knows many marketers become overwhelmed when upper management demands “mobile” without understanding the time and work that goes into it.

“It is not a little magic wand … because if it was really easy, every single email we look at today would work well on mobile,” she said.

Tip #1. Know what your audience expects

Mobile newsletters take quite a bit of planning, Diana said, and the most important question to ask is: “Who are you going to design for?”

Knowing your audience will allow you to not only understand what their expectations of you are, but what types of devices the majority of them use, and how often they interact with your emails on their  device.

The MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report also shows 31% of marketers don’t know their mobile email open rate – start by determining what that rate is, and become better acquainted with the needs of your audience.

“Who is your audience and what do we need?”  Diana asked. “If somebody has a business that requires them to have certain attributes in their emails, what are those attributes and will they work on a mobile platform?”

Tip #2. Consumers expect a multi-device experience

Like most aspects of marketing, mobile newsletters are not something you can wash your hands of once it’s accomplished – it is a constantly evolving process where your customers will always want more.

With mobile, Diana said, “Our customers are just like everybody else’s customer,” meaning every aspect of an average customer’s day from dawn to dusk is filled with multiple devices, and they expect their emails to reflect that.

“They might be commuting to work and they are on their phone, and they might be sitting at their office and they might be on their desktops. They might be going to meetings and they might have their tablet with them, and they might be sitting at home and they have their tablets or … their phone with them,” she said.

Knowing how your customer spends their day will help you develop your mobile email program, and decide how expansive you need to be.

Diana knows with CNET customers, “the idea of being able to move from device to device is an expectation, not something that is like, ‘Oh wow, that is really cool.’  It is expected and we know our customers look at their email across multiple devices.”

Read more…