Convert, B2B, Cold, SEO 🔎
👋 Welcome!
These last few weeks, audience-first products and newsletters have been big in the Maker Twittersphere. But let’s not forget all the micro-entrepreneurs building eCommerce businesses. Yesterday, I found this great thread on site conversion by Tayler Carraway. Tayler used to do eCommerce for brands such as J.Crew, Ralph Lauren and Victoria's Secret. She believes that site conversion must be most important KPI for any eCommerce business, as “small increases in conversion can lead to big increases in sales.” Using by Humankind as a case study, Tayler lists an array of things you can do to improve this critical KPI. These include:
Check page speed and improve if required;
Clearly indicate shipping policy;
Add “Shop Now” CTA;
Remember customers constantly assess value. Value = Price + Quality;
Remove cognitive overload from product descriptions;
Reviews are critical for helping customers choose; and
Make CTAs in the shopping cart super clear;
Tayler wants to do these reviews more often. If you know of a brand you would like her to review, send her a DM. Read the full thread.
😺 Products of the Day
August 3rd, 2020
🥇 Trickle: Make learning a daily habit.
🥈 Strings: In-app copy editing for UX writers and product teams.
🥉 Swarm.trade: Automatically share your stock trades with your network.
🚀 Maker News
B2B Growth Strategy
A great thread by Lenny Rachitsky with insights from his latest newsletter on B2B growth strategy. From his research, there are three common ways B2B businesses acquire their first 10 customers. They can tap personal networks, get press or find places where potential customers spend time. Whether they start bottom-up or are sales-driven, all the business have established sales teams. A number that started bottom-up had no paid plans when they launched. Instead, they figured these out while working with their power users. The majority charged a monthly per-seat fee, but “nearly every company offers a free option from the outset and occasionally a trial period.” Read the full thread or subscribe to Lenny’s Newsletter.
Cold Messaging
An interesting take from neer on the benefits of cold messaging. Over the past year, he’s reached out to “people doing interesting things with long, instinctive gut thoughts related to something they've been writing or thinking about.” Many of us know that “there's no greater feeling than being heard, understood and thought deeply about.” Cold messaging can simply be “curiosity reciprocated back” to a person, a thoughtful response on something someone has written. Neer recently put his Calendly on Twitter to have conversations with strangers. He believes that when there’s no agenda it’s a “strong signal” for a “good conversation”. Although we treat people differently depending on the context, we should remember that “it's just the same person with the same emotional needs.” Read the full thread.
UnSplash SEO
Harry Dry from Marketing Examples shares an awesome marketing tactic he recently learnt about. Max works for a Paddle Board Startup. They created some great branded images from photoshoots and decided to share these on Unsplash. A few months later, he learnt that the images had received 6m views and 24k downloads. He did a Google Image search for the images and found 50 sites using them. The businesses were doing nothing wrong, but for SEO purposes Max decided to contact them and see whether he could get a backlink. Eight replied and four have added links. The great thing is, he can do this every month with new sites using the images. Slowly, but surely your SEO will improve. Learn more by reading the full thread.
💭 Afterthought
To finish the day, a tweet by Sam Altman. He’s telling us that if we try hard and often enough, stay on course and don’t let ourselves be discouraged by others, then we will succeed. It’s OK to make a lot of mistakes, you only need to be right once to win. So “keep swinging.” Take care and see you tomorrow!
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