Spoiler note: While Ben references larger issues surrounding Severance’s second season’s finale, he doesn’t give away very much, and all but the most spoiler-sensitive among us should proceed with confidence.
Severance is wild.
The Apple TV+ show, which just wrapped its second season, is also hugely original and an incredible experience for a multitude of reasons — not least among them is its ability to teach us something while entertaining us. While the world of Severance is only ever-so-slightly like our own, it does provide some clear lessons on what happens when companies completely misunderstand their audience’s expectations, motivations, and values.
We see this often enough in the real world (see Nescafe, Pepsi, Bud Light, etc., etc.) — but Severance makes it easy to grasp. If you haven’t seen the show yet, now’s the time. The second season of Severance masterfully deepened the eerie, dystopian world of the first, exposing the unsettling consequences of severing work from life, literally. The show offers a frank reminder that some form of severance is what most people want, though with nuance: Thinking about work 24/7 is unhealthy, but surgical separation of your consciousness, between your worklife and your homelife, is, it turns out, not a viable solution to coping with challenges in either realm.
The show is beautifully done. The theme song plucks keys and chords that trigger your subconscious and lets your adrenal gland know it better get ready for action. Each component of the series isn’t merely additive but multiplicative to what makes it great. Full disclosure and incoming nerd alert: My wife and I have rewound scenes with zero dialogue just to try to pick up on all of the facial microexpressions between characters during particularly tense scenes.
American leaders have, for over a century, shared a certain preoccupation: planning — and more importantly, the costs of neglecting to do so. To fail to plan is to plan to fail, according to Benjamin Franklin (perhaps apocryphally). It was a central point in the 1970s bestseller You Can Become the Person You Want To Be, by Robert Mullen. And none less than the Wizard of Westwood — college basketball coach John Wooden — made it a central point of his coaching strategy.
What was good advice in the 18th century is just as valuable now, when business, media, and political cycles seem to move at ever-faster speeds. By carefully considering past downturns, we’ve uncovered some timeless lessons on how to recession-proof your business. What you’ll see below are the most crucial arguments from our co-founder, Ben Dandurand’s, deep dive into lessons learned from previous downtowns. You can see all of Ben’s findings — across a three-part series — here. Otherwise, you’ll find our most crucial strategies below.
Remember: The most salient point you’ll find here is that smart strategy can get around nearly any complication — and there’s never a bad time to think big. As another American leader — in this case, architect Daniel Burnham, a pioneer of the City Beautiful movement — put it: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood.”
You might hate The Bachelor, but you probably know how it works: 25 people show up at a mansion in Southern California with a single goal.
That goal? Not to fall in love, on that first night.
No, their goal is simply not to get eliminated.
And how do they avoid getting eliminated? By making a big, specific first impression.
Obviously, some of these are perhaps too over the top. Nobody’s telling you to dress up like a shark. But if you’re an equestrian, and you show up on a horse, nobody’s going to forget you’re an equestrian — as the contestant in the video above was no doubt reminded by her producer.
And in a sea of competitors who didn’t show up on a horse — well, everyone’s going to remember the woman who showed up on a horse. Who had the courage to tell her story, in a big and memorable way.
Too often — whether while competing on a reality television show or debuting a collection of deeply thoughtful products online — we shy away from telling our big, specific story. This is quite literally bad for business.
Let’s do a quick case study: Figgy, the Wisconsin-based maker of some incredibly well-designed play couches for kids.
Figgy couches cost more simply because they’re better, with higher-quality fabrics and superior construction. What parent wouldn’t want the best possible play couch for their kids?
While Figgy’s creators had gone to great pains to justify their prices on their product detail pages, the facts — like the specifics of the fabric weight, for example — didn’t tell the full story.
Copywriting is a key — if often undersung — element of conversion. Access to cheap — and now both limitless and mostly free — AI-generated copy has brought us to a natural endpoint. Instead of zeroing out the copywriting budget, though, it has only put the value of human-generated text at a premium. We’re at the point where text written by a person has become indicative of a luxury (or at least well-funded) product.
There’s one place which remains open to (human) writers of all skill levels: the founder’s story. It’s your story — truly no one can tell it better than you can. Sharing it in a thoughtful way can build, or increase, a trusted relationship between your brand and your buyers. And nowhere is this relationship more important than it is for brands in the wellness space generally, and more specifically, makers of vitamins and supplements. It’s beyond crucial. And here we’ll see how three brands, with just a couple hundred words, are creating a conversion-friendly environment with something as simple as their own story.
Elite supplement producers have long understood the high expectations placed upon their brands to gain not only their buyers’ interest but their trust — a much higher burden. Their products address our most personal and secret desires: to improve our health (the loss of which shames many of us), to address our age-related concerns (ditto), and to help us confront our loss of sexual potency and desirability (double ditto).
This is often deep, dark stuff, more often discussed between our most intimate friends and advisors (and therapists). We might be willing to share the results of our blood panel or our sexual difficulties from behind the anonymity of a burner Reddit account. We might research supplements that could address our problems. But will we buy something online from an independent brand, without the intermediary blessing of a vitamin or health foods retailer like GNC or Whole Foods? Will we then ingest their product — and expect it to radically transform our health?
The answer, rather incredibly, is an unqualified yes. Online sales of supplements were already rising in 2019, which saw increases of 2.8% in brick-and-mortar supplement sales, and e-commerce growth of 26.5%. The industry has continued this growth (if not at the exponential and unsustainable growth in the earliest days of the pandemic), with certain niches — like sports medicine, mushrooms, and women’s health — at the fore.
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Media Contour, a leading Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) agency, has been recognized by Design Rush as one of the Top 10 CRO agencies. Media Contour, based in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metro Area, guarantees a revenue increase of $150,000+ within 60 days or clients don't pay. Founded in 2005, they specialize in enhancing customer lifetime value, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Design Rush, founded in 2017 by Gianluca Ferruggia, helps businesses find the best professional agencies. The platform features over 30,000 listed agencies from more than 50 countries, categorized by expertise, reviews, portfolios, and more.
If you are looking to skyrocket your company's profitability and attractiveness to potential buyers, then this webinar is for you. In a recent webinar, Matt Dandurand, CEO of Media Contour, and Austin Masket, Senior Advisor at Pacifica Advisors, explained how conversion optimization can be used as a strategic tool to enhance EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) and acquisition value
Matt kicked things off by explaining that conversion optimization is all about turning more of your website visitors into paying customers. It's not just about more sales – optimizing your conversion rate not only boosts revenue but also significantly enhances a company’s valuation by improving its operational efficiencies and profitability.
The Make Each Click Count Podcast is a go-to source for anyone looking to grow their eCommerce company. This podcast series hosted by Andy Splichal offers valuable advice from specialists on how to improve your eCommerce sales and make the most of your marketing budget.
Andy Splichal is the World's Foremost Expert on Ecommerce Growth Strategies. He has over twenty years of online marketing experience, and is an expert in managing paid online campaigns, especially with Google Ads and Google Shopping, helping eCommerce businesses increase their sales profitably.
It's not enough to just drive traffic to your website. You need to convert those clicks into actual sales and leads. That's where conversion rate optimization (CRO) copywriting comes in. By crafting compelling and persuasive content, you can boost your website's conversion rates by keeping people’s attention and appealing to their most basic desires.
The conversion optimization copywriting process involves analyzing your target audience, understanding their pain points, and crafting messages that resonate with them. It's a strategic approach that combines psychology, data analysis, and creativity to create content that not only attracts visitors but also motivates them to take action. In this article, we'll explore the benefits of conversion optimization copywriting and provide tips on how to implement it in your digital marketing strategy.
Understanding your target audience is the first crucial step to writing compelling copy. Knowing the demographics, psychographics, and behavior of your ideal customer is imperative to creating content that resonates with them. You need to identify their pain points, goals, and desires and how your product addresses these in order to craft messages that speak to them.
One of the best ways to understand your target audience is by creating buyer personas. These are fictional characters that represent your ideal customers. By creating detailed profiles of your buyer personas, you can get a better understanding of their needs, preferences, and behavior. This information can help you create content that addresses their pain points and motivates them to take action. This strategy is great to create a high level overview of what your ideal customers day/life looks like and what major events motivate their purchasing decisions (i.e. new baby, new house, new job, retirement, grandkids, etc.).
Onsite behavioral analysis is another way to help identify which issues your audience cares most about. You can use tools like Google Analytics to get insights into your website visitors' behavior. You can see which pages they visit, how long they stay on your site, and what actions they take. This information can help you create content that meets your visitors' needs and addresses their concerns. This can also help you determine which pages are the most important to focus on first.
Landing pages are typically a single webpage or a standalone site page linked directly to a marketing campaign with the goal of lead conversion. Landing pages can be your most profitable weapon in an ad campaign. Increase your ROI (Return on Investment) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) without increasing ad spend by driving users to a specific page with one action in mind.
Landing page optimization is a must-have if you want to increase conversions. The average landing page conversion rate across all industries is just below 10%, yet landing pages remain the least popular type of sign-up form. In addition, only half of the companies that utilize a landing page have optimized it for conversions. Keep in mind, companies that utilize conversion rate optimization tools on their landing page see an average increase of 30% in their conversion rate.
A landing page is an essential part of any website. It serves as a hub for your visitors, allowing them to easily access the information they need and guiding them through the process of becoming a customer, subscriber, or donor. To make sure your landing page does its job effectively, you'll want to pay attention to five key elements: design, message, content, call-to-action (CTA), and optimization. Let's take a look at each of these in more detail.
Design is one of the most critical aspects of your landing page. It should be visually appealing and easy to navigate, while still adhering to your overall brand identity. If you're working with a web designer or agency on this project, make sure to provide them with detailed feedback and style guidelines. That way you can ensure that the design meets your expectations and accurately reflects your brand.
The message of your landing page should be clear and concise; there should be no confusion about why people are visiting this page or what action you want them to take after reading it. When crafting your message, ask yourself: What makes my product/service different? Why should someone visit this page instead of another? What value do I offer? Answering these questions will help you focus on the essential elements of your message and get visitors excited about what you have to offer.
Once you've got the design and message nailed down, it's time to start adding content! Content is crucial for engaging visitors and getting them interested in what you have to offer. Make sure that all the content on your landing page is relevant, informative, and easy-to-read—no one likes slogging through long-winded paragraphs! You'll also want to include visuals such as photos or videos if possible; these can be great ways to draw people in and show off what makes your product/service unique.
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When running a business, it's essential to pay attention to your website conversion rate and the total number of conversions—the number of website visitors who take the desired action on your website. After all, that’s how you turn visitors into customers and keep them coming back for more. But what is conversion rate optimization (CRO) and why is it so important? Let’s take a look.
Conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the number of people who complete an action (such as buying a product or signing up for an email list) on a web page or website. This can be done in various ways, such as by optimizing website design, making sure there are clear calls to action, improving user experience, and more. Ultimately, CRO is about understanding user behavior and how they interact with your site—and then using that data to make changes that will encourage them to take action.
Simply put, without conversion rate optimization your business won't get very far. You can have all the website traffic in the world but if none of those visitors convert into customers you won't see any real returns on your investment. On the other hand, when you focus on improving conversions you can drive more sales and generate more leads in less time than ever before. That's why CRO is so important—it helps ensure that each visitor has an enjoyable experience on your website and takes the action you want them to take!
The importance of CRO goes way beyond converting a visitor one time after an enjoyable experience. Customers are picker than ever, and will gladly leave your site for the competition at the first sign, hint, or whiff of a bad experience.
A CRO Agency aims to create a user experience that’s so intuitive and enjoyable, that the experience itself creates loyalty. CRO is a strategy for sustainable long-term success. Yes, it helps convert more visitors on their first visit to your site, but it also helps increase Average Order Value, Customer Lifetime Value, and loyalty.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. By testing different versions of your web page, you can determine which design elements, copy, and call-to-actions convert visitors into leads or customers.
If you’re hesitant about starting A/B testing or refocusing on improving customer experience before advertising, think about this one statistic. According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos invested 100x more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon. Considering Amazon is referenced in practically every article about superior customer experience, it becomes impossible to argue with his strategy.
Regardless of your industry, your business exists to create value for your customers whether it be in the form of a product, service, or content. Every customer interaction with your brand creates a measurable amount of data. But what are you doing with that data? Are you just sitting back and passively collecting it? The best companies aren’t storing their data for later analysis, they actively generate valuable data and customer insights through experimentation. If you want to grow in your industry, then implementing efficient and consistent A/B testing is essential.
The obvious benefit of A/B testing is to improve your company’s value and increase revenue, but there are other benefits to creating an experimentation culture. When you have the ability to quickly run an effective A/B test, your company has more flexibility to test out new ideas and no longer needs to rely on anyone’s “gut instinct”. Remove all of the guesswork from your strategic decisions, and get actionable insights into what does, and doesn’t, work.
In this blog post, we'll share eight keys to successful A/B testing. By following these best practices, you can maximize your chances of achieving significant results from your tests.
Before you begin designing your test, it's important to have a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve. What is the primary goal of the page you're testing? Do you want to increase conversion rates, click-through rates, or time on-site? Once you've defined your objective, you can design your test around that goal.
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you measure progress toward your goal. When choosing a KPI for your test, be sure to select a metric that's directly related to your objective. For example, if you're trying to increase conversion rates, then your KPI should be conversion rate rather than time on site.
It's important to only test one element at a time; otherwise, you won't be able to isolate the factor that caused any changes in your KPI. For example, if you're testing two different headlines, then keep everything else on the page the same. That way, if there's a change in your KPI, you'll know it was caused by the headline and not by some other element on the page.
Make sure your testing doesn’t involve the use of trivial changes for the sake of testing. You want to focus on making the smallest changes with the biggest impact. If that’s not an option, then sometimes you have to go big and bold.
This one is pretty self-explanatory. Sometimes seasonality can play a big part in the success of a test for a variety of reasons. Save your old tests and re-run them at different times. The results will often surprise you.
When testing changes, make sure that you’ve identified the specific reason why you think it’s affecting your KPI, and craft your hypothesis as to why this change should improve it. Make sure your addressing your customers' objections for why your goals aren’t being reached, and provide the counter-objections in your test. The last thing you want is to run a test and have no clue why it was successful.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process that uses data-driven methods to increase the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action (i.e. increase the number of conversions). It’s an invaluable tool for any business that wants to remain competitive in today’s digital marketplace. Let's explore some of the key Conversion rate optimization benefits and how they can help your business thrive.
One of the most obvious CRO benefits is increased revenue. By using techniques such as A/B testing, you can figure out which elements on your website actually increase conversions and ensure they’re optimized for maximum success. As your conversion rate increases, so does your bottom line. If you combine things like digital advertising, you can use conversion optimization to reduce those expenses while simultaneously increasing profit. It’s a magical combination when done correctly.
Conversion rate optimization can be used to increase revenue from new customers and maximize revenue generated from existing customers. By evaluating performance data and customer behavior on your website, you can identify areas where changes will improve user experience and increase sales. A/B testing, for example, is used to compare different versions of a webpage (your control vs. your optimized page) to see which performs better. Then you can continue to adjust layouts and showcase important features more prominently, eliminate unnecessary components that take up valuable page real estate, etc. Ultimately, when implemented well, conversion rate optimization can help businesses realize their full profitability potential by converting visitors into paying customers.
It’s important to remember that CRO isn’t just about increasing sales; it’s also about improving customer experiences. By focusing on creating better user experiences through well-crafted website designs, comprehensive content strategies, and easy navigation tools, you ensure that customers have a positive experience when interacting with your brand online. It leads to higher conversion rates, improved loyalty, customer lifetime value, and satisfaction over time.
E-commerce sites are losing an average of $29 on new customers’ first purchases. Having a strategy that ensures your website, visitors come back for repeat purchases is essential in any economic climate.
If your website isn’t intuitive, easy to use, and building loyalty, then you don’t have a sustainable strategy for longevity. The customer’s journey from start to finish needs gives them exactly what they are looking for while meeting all their expectations. A CRO Agency has the perfect strategy for ensuring you deliver all of this to your customers. And I want to make one last important comment here before I move to #3. One of the biggest mistakes we see is an overconfident business owner, marketing exec, web designer, UX designer, etc., who thinks they know what the customer wants and how that translates into an online process. They spend a lot of time and research putting together personas, wireframes, designs, etc., which is all incredibly valuable and extremely important. Still, it simply does not translate into the purchasing process. And not just the “purchasing process,” the unique process for your business and your product or service.
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In Part 1 we discussed our findings from McKinsey and covered how we can apply lessons from past recessions to help thrive in times of economic uncertainty. If you missed it, you can access it here.
Budget cuts and performance marketing are on every CFO and CMOs mind right now. The most difficult part of navigating tough times is doing more with less. Companies face more pressure than ever to justify their spending, find ways to save money, and prove they’re providing value. Our goal is to help every department get what they want and need while still delivering results.
While the focus of this article is for our CMOs out there, we’re confident the strategy discussed will keep our CFO friends happy as well.
This is always a challenge, but crucial during a recession. There isn’t much budget allocated to awareness campaigns, so retaining customers and creating relationships is more important than ever. Digital marketing is an overcrowded and segmented space. It’s becoming easier for users to ignore messaging and send your brand into the gray. In order for companies to succeed they need to focus on the following:
For the majority of companies, this doesn’t have to be a difficult procedure. Oftentimes it can be as simple as asking or interviewing your best, or worst, customers to see what you got right, and where you fell short. Utilizing your sales and customer service teams can be a great resource for getting in tune with your customer's wants and needs.
Gone are the ways of building 50 pay-per-click campaigns all targeting different and “identical” match keywords throughout the funnel. Big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence can out-think and perform our marketing instincts.
Utilize the power of big data to target your audience, and focus your efforts on creating meaningful content that speaks directly to your audience. Let the machines help you deliver.
However, it’s important to remember that AI and algorithms are learning “robots”. They are only as good as the data we give them. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s imperative you’re setting up your marketing campaigns with a feedback loop to identify what information and behavior is the most valuable to achieve your goals.
The on-site survey can be a mixed bag, sometimes. When done right you can get a lot of extremely valuable conversion optimization information from customers , but it’s not all gold. As we all know, sometimes surveys can be bothersome or poorly timed. When putting a survey on your site, it’s important to go into it with your expectations aligned.
Most survey tools will assist with the timing and placement of your survey. However, you want to be sure it’s not covering any important content on the page. Typically, the survey should go in the left or right corner so it’s not obstructing anything, and just visible enough so it can’t be entirely ignored by the people who want to engage with a brand they love.
As for the timing, please don’t just show it to everyone who lands on your site. That is the best way to guarantee poor results. First, you need to figure out what information you are looking for, and what people are best suited to give you that information.
The exit survey is ideal for improving your user experience and shows your survey to people about to leave the site without clicking or engaging with anything. You’re identifying and showing this survey to people who are leaving your site because they likely haven’t found what they’re looking for. If you have what they’re looking for, but people can’t find it, then it’s obviously important to know this information.
Typical exit survey questions include:
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In Part 1 and Part 2 we covered lessons from previous recessions and how to make sure you hit the mark with your current strategy during economic uncertainty. By now you should have at least a few valuable insights or confirmed your current strategies or trains of thought. Our last objective is to tie the whole series together and give companies some actionable items instead of just data to ponder.
Stick to tried and true strategies that deliver the highest return on your investment and are the cheapest to launch. Email marketing continues to bring home the ROI trophy each year. If you need help maximizing return on your email marketing campaigns, then check our page on email marketing.
It’s imperative that your messaging speaks directly to your audience's pain points, provides value, and drives them to a page designed to convert. You can’t just email prospects and hope they know what to do once they read your content.
If you're utilizing other digital marketing platforms, identify which ones are driving the highest conversion rates and allocate more budget to those while pulling back on others. If you’re on the display network, make sure you’re measuring customer interactions to create powerful remarketing campaigns. If you’re not sure what to do next, bring in outside help. Now is not the time to stop your marketing efforts. Now is the time to create a lean and efficient marketing machine that measures and delivers on your organization's goals.
Budgets will be cut, and heads may roll. Providing value and measurable results are a must.
Companies need marketing teams to respond on a dime to whatever is thrown their way. They’ll need a broad skill set, and can operate without a playbook, but have the agility and speed to operate in the gray to drive results.
That means you know your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Double down on your strengths, and outsource your weaknesses. Going back to Part 1, speed of response was a huge factor in boosting performance during the last recession. For example, if your team needs two weeks to figure out how to launch a campaign in a new venue, then you need outside support.
Get outside help to fill in the gaps until you can hire and train the right people. The purpose of speed and agility is to be able to quickly capitalize on opportunities during economic times when your competitors may be slower to respond. In past recessions, first movers were rewarded significantly more than their competitors compared to periods of economic boom.
The Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic have taught us valuable lessons that are important for companies to take to heart. Recessions aren’t unique and are all typically characterized by capital restraints, and tough labor markets.
While I’m not a master of macroeconomics like our friends at McKinsey, I do understand that my skill sets are aligned with their findings in what successful companies did to thrive in past recessions.
Part 1 and Part 2 will deal with findings from our research, while Part 3 is dedicated to actionable insights that companies can take to help navigate and thrive in uncertain economic times.
Improving profit margin beats improving revenue. Analysis of the past recession shows that companies that focused on improving their profit margins grew faster than their peers who focused on growth.
What McKinsey calls “optionality in the balance sheet” can be simplified to capital liquidity. Essentially, it stems from the first finding. A combination of increasing your margins, building your working capital, and decreasing your debt allows companies to be more flexible and respond faster to opportunities.
Being able to focus on growth and profit margins has an exponential effect. Increasing our margins and working capital gives us the flexibility to increase growth by exercising our options faster than the competition with our improved liquidity.
Companies that improved their margins AND were able to grow revenues experienced a “1+1=3” effect. This isn’t terribly hard to wrap our heads around, as this strategy tends to be successful no matter the economic climate. However, in tough times, it boosted companies ahead of their peers even more.
This McKinsey graph illustrates the point extremely well. Companies that improved margins outperformed companies that just focused on growth. But, companies that were able to capture market share while improving efficiency got an even greater boost to performance.
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