excess voice: nick usborne's blog

Do you segment your email subscriber lists?

Segmenting your list means you can customize your messages in many ways.

How about those subscribers who always click on the links, but never buy anything? Write them a specific sequence of emails to tip them over into purchasing. Maybe send them a survey and learn a little more about them.

How about the group who clicked on and purchased Product A last year? Maybe they would be a perfect match for Product E which you are about to launch.

List segmentation gives the opportunity to speak with different groups of subscribers with carefully customized messages. It not only makes every email directly relevant to each reader, but also results in much higher conversion rates.

If your email delivery service doesn't enable you to drill down and segment in this way...you might want to consider upgrading to a new service.

What is an urgent pain point?

One of my coaching clients asked me that question this afternoon.

Here's how I replied:

If you haven’t been to the dentist in two years, it’s important that you make an appointment and go. But it’s not urgent.

If you get a blinding toothache, it becomes urgent.

If you weigh too much it’s important that you shed a few pounds. But that’s not urgent. When your doctor tells you your blood pressure is way too high, then it becomes urgent.

When a company knows that its home page isn’t expressing its core value proposition very well, it’s important that they fix it. But not urgent.

When their top salesman calls in and says he lost a major prospect because the prospect read the site, but misunderstood the company’s value proposition...it becomes urgent.

In life and business, nothing becomes urgent until we actually feel the pain or fear.

The dangers of testing copy.

I have a love/hate relationship with testing.

I love being able to do an A/B split test on a headline, block of copy or call to action.

It's great to be able to judge the writing according to actual conversions and sales.

In other words, I'm a big fan of what testing actually delivers.

What I don't like is when test results are poor interpreted.

Let's say I wrote two versions of a headline for a client. And we then tested them.

#1: Sign up NOW and save 37% on the regular subscription rate.

#2: Save 37% on the regular subscription rate when you sign up NOW.

Let's say that #2 outperforms #1 by 15%.

That's a great discovery. And by conducting the test the client make a lot more money from that page.

But here comes the bad part...

A few months later I write some more copy, but for a different product, with a totally different sales page.

But when I submit the headline and copy, the client says, "No, no! Testing PROVES that if you put the savings at the beginning the headline you'll make more sales."

Not true!!!!!

That test didn't prove any such thing. The result was valid only for THAT sales page, when viewed at THAT TIME, with THAT page layout, THAT supporting copy and THAT call to action.

At best, it provides a clue at to what MIGHT work best for similar products under similar circumstances.

It drives me crazy when people take the results from a single test and then extrapolate them across all their future marketing efforts.

That's bad science and bad marketing.

When clients want your skills, but not your brain.

Companies generally hire me because of my experience and skills as an online copywriter and optimizer

Let's say they want me to rewrite a home page.

Before I start writing the page, I'll spend a lot of time thinking about it. I'll think about the people arriving at that page. I'll think about what those visitors are looking for. I'll think about what their first impressions might be as the page loads for the first time. I'll think about how the page connects with every other page.

Then I'll think of the business owner's goals for the site. I'll think about what he or she wants new and returning visitors to do.

Finally, I'll look for the point at which both the visitor's and the site owner's interests intersect.

I'm in good shape now to start writing and making a few design recommendations.

I might even be quite pleased by what I have done.

Then the client takes a quick look at it and says something along the lines of, "This isn't what I had in mind. I'll need you to make some changes."

I'll explain my thinking, but to no avail.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the client is always wrong. But I have had numerous experiences where I realize, too late, that my real job - for which I'm being paid - is not to find that intersection point where visitor and business interests intersect.

I'm being paid to give the client what he or she wants.

I really hate it when that happens. I try to sniff out these kinds of jobs before they start, and back away. But I still get caught sometimes.

Write to an audience of individuals you don't know.

This isn't my insight. It's something Joe Vitale said during a radio interview.

He was talking about writing e-books, but the advice could just as well apply to copywriting or content writing.

Here's what it's all about...

Whatever you are writing, you should picture an individual reader as you are writing. That way, you write to just one person...and that person, the reader, will appreciate being written to as an individual, and not as part of a huge, anonymous "audience".

This is pretty standard advice for commercial writers.

Joe Vitale suggests that when you picture that individual, make sure it is someone you don't know, who is outside your circle of expertise.

When we imagine that our audience comprises people "like us", there is big danger that we will make assumptions about their level of knowledge. We will assume that they know what we know and have shared the same experiences that we have had.

As with all assumptions, this is a bad one.

It's much better to view your reader as someone you don't know, and as someone who doesn't know any of the stuff that you know.

We can still tap into some shared experiences, so long as they are common experiences.

But beyond that, always picture your reader as someone who needs as much information and advice as you can offer.

"If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse.""

That quote is, of course, from Henry Ford.

Which makes me wonder about the world of Web 2.0...where the customer's voice may one day dominate the "conversation".

Most companies are not very good at listening to their customers, which makes Web 2.0 a wonderful thing. For now. But what about the future?

What happens when more and more companies place greater and greater emphasis on meeting the demands of their customers?

Will the opinions of web users...aka customers...help us create something as remarkable as the automobile?

Or will they simply persuade us to create faster horses?

Or, to put it another way, is over-dependence on customer opinion going to take us down the road of mediocrity?

You've got to be able to see things no one else sees.

Last week I was watching some video clips taken from a high-ticket conference on how to make money online.

There were some very smart marketers featured, most of them making millions of dollars from selling products and services which promise to help regular people make money online.

Helping people make money online is a huge industry, and it is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The lure of being able to create a second stream of income is irresistible to millions of people who could use the extra cash.

Among the speakers featured was Jay Abrahams. Jay is not your usual "online guru". He is an elder-statesman marketing consultant with deep roots in the offline world, as well as online.

And he said something which I imagine some of the other speakers were surprised to hear.

He said, "You've got to be able to see things no one else sees."

While the other speakers we telling people they simply had to learn their "secrets" or follow their "systems", Jay let slip a profoundly useful and very basic nugget of business advice.

All great entrepreneurs "see things no one else sees."

It's what makes their businesses unique, remarkable and worth talking about.

The trouble is, 99% of us don't see things no one else sees.

Which is why 99% of people who invest in online money-making products and services don't see much of a return.