After almost four decades, I believe the best choice for another shot at a conversion is still that quaint old communication medium: email. Email still can't be beat for rich content, for conversations that feel one-to-one, and for getting another shot at a future customer. It's the original social media platform.  Liz Willits is a self-professed email marketing nerd, and the Senior Content Marketing Specialist at AWeber, one of the ‘OG; email services. She has worked with some of the most...

"CMOs are abdicating their strategic position in their businesses." Just when I was marveling at how much CMOs really must do for their brands, Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing, said the above statement that stopped me in my tracks. I wanted to get to the bottom of this. Why does Laura believe CMOs are losing their seat at the table in the c-suite? Resources and links discussed: Fornaise Marketing Group study: https://www.fournaisegroup.com/ceos-do-not-trust-marketers/

"Marketing needs to generate more leads," says sales.  "Sales needs to follow up on the leads we're sending them," says marketing.   Sales and marketing: two functions that are critical to a business’s success. And from the first time something was sold, sales and marketing have worked independently.  This gulf, this canyon, this gaping sinkhole between sales and marketing has been around for a long time. That’s where Chris Wallace (@ChrisWallaceIVG), Co-Founder and President of marketing...

People like funnels because they provide us with some sense of progress in our marketing efforts, but the marketing funnel is under attack, especially in the B2B lead generation space. Carman Pirie (@pirie) is the co-founder of Kula Partners, an agency built to help leading manufacturers digitally transform marketing and sales to deliver more leads, close more prospects, and grow their competitive edge. The solutions that purport to step into the funnel's place come with their own baggage....

Having a true understanding of your target customer is the first step in building an effective marketing plan.  How are they spending their time? Are they able to use the time they have to focus on their area of expertise? And do they have an interest in doing even better work? Come to think of it, we could ask these same questions of ourselves. It’s a full-circle approach that leads to better clarity about our target audience, enabling a more robust and focused marketing strategy. On this...

There is a ceiling on your conversion rate. It's not your price. It's not your copy. It's not your form. It's eating your website from the inside out. It's causing your SEO to atrophy. It's causing your paid search placement to drop. It's causing your visitors to bounce, and it's only getting worse as mobile traffic grows.  What is the ceiling on your conversion rate? It may be....your page load time. On this episode of Intended Consequences, Lukas Haensch, founder of Pathmonk and former...

Mobile best practices don’t really exist. Every audience is different, and Intended Consequences host Brian Massey has the tests to prove it. What works for one business doesn’t always work for others. In this episode, you’ll hear design ideas for your website’s mobile call-to-action buttons, so you can test them and discover what works. How can mobile call-to-action buttons increase conversions? Can you place more than one CTA per mobile page? What are the top placements for these buttons?...

We're told terrifying things: that people have the attention span of a goldfish, that Millennials don't read, that we only have 8 seconds to make our point. No wonder we're confused about how to communicate through copy. However, the words we use to establish our value and persuade visitors to take action can be tested. Data to the rescue! Olivia Ross (@ortdesign) is the Director of Conversion Rate Optimization at Directive Consulting. She is a designer turned conversion optimizer who...

As a customer, do you really want to create an account for every single website you interact with? Absolutely not.  On the other hand, you want online retailers to know who you are. Having a guest checkout is one way to keep people from leaving your ecommerce site before they buy. This is also why a website without a guest checkout is regarded as a “conversion killer.” In this episode, Intended Consequences host Brian Massey (@bmassey) dives into how you can test and implement guest...

Lance Loveday (@loveday) is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop, a digital advertising agency that specializes in paid media management.  As an optimizer by nature, digital marketing comes naturally to Lance. He’s analytical but also creative - he uses his left brain and his right brain.  In this episode of Intended Consequences, we discuss the tough questions to ask when bringing on external resources to solve your most important problems. Listen in as we explore how to find an agency...

Erin Collis, Marketing and Communications Manager at Corradi USA, has a lot on her plate (as we suspect you probably do as well).  Most marketers are holding dozens of ideas in their minds, many of which are in opposition, and then these poor souls are expected to be creative and thoughtful amidst all of this. It’s a barrier to a culture of experimentation in marketing, product development, and more. Listen in as Erin discusses the challenges of being a digital marketer in 2019. Resources...

Barbara Cavness is the CEO of (un)Common Logic, a digital marketing agency that enables talented people to do great things. Her team investigates digital marketing data to find surprising facts that can solve their clients’ toughest problems. Barbara is very purposeful in her approach to building teams, even though she encounters all of the same obstacles that Conversion Sciences does.  In this episode, you’ll learn how this former Duke University lacrosse player became the head of a...

Chris Mercer (@merecertweets) aka ‘Mercer’ is not only good at analytics, but he's also good at teaching analytics. That's what he spends his days doing as the Co-Founder of Measurement Marketing.io.  Chris and his team help people like you discover how to grow your business using tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio and more. Essentially, Chris helps people get to know the numbers - to grow the numbers.  He is genuinely excited about analytics, and Google...

What if you could see the analytics of any of your competitors' websites? Mike Roberts (@mrspy) is the Founder and CEO of SpyFu and Nacho Analytics. He’s also one of the most interesting people in online marketing. A digital marketing pirate, if you will. Mike founded Nacho Analytics because he’s passionate about the bootstrapper entrepreneurs of the world. You know - the people grinding away drinking coffee at midnight. He wanted to empower them, to disrupt the system. So now, Mike is...

Dr. Diane Hamilton is an expert in emotional intelligence and behavioral science. She is an author, radio host of “Take the Lead Radio,” and creator of the Curiosity Code Index - which we will dive into on this episode. Curiosity is a topic that is at the core of everything marketers do. We're all about experimenting,  discovering data, and getting answers when it comes to website redesigns, launches, and campaigns. What drives the desire to get these answers? Curiosity. And curiosity is a...

Tim Ash (@Tim_Ash) started his career in the ‘interwebs’ back in 1995, focusing on data-driven websites. On top of leading his CRO company SiteTuners, Tim is a digital marketing keynote speaker, founder of the Digital Growth Unleashed conference events, and author of the book Landing Page Optimization. To begin to understand how our visitors think, Tim suggests we stop looking inside our companies and turn our gaze outward. Who is showing up to your website? What’s their relationship to...

Chris Nolan [not the Batman movie director] is the Senior Growth Strategy Manager at BigCommerce - and a former Conversions Sciences employee. Although Brian Massey and the team misses Chris, they have enjoyed seeing how a conversion scientist takes on a big organization like BigCommerce, a company that builds e-commerce software for businesses. Chris jumped out of his lab coat and into the fire as BigCommerce recently redesigned its website. You’ll hear Chris’ challenges and triumphs as a...

Imagine your website is a doll. You choose the clothes, hats, and shoes for it. Some you buy, some you make yourself. Your website is similar. You rent server space from a host and drop a content management system on it. It’s a generic, website-shaped form that you can begin dressing. On this episode of Intended Consequences, we’re talking with David Vogelpohl (@wpdavidv), VP of Web Strategy at WP Engine, a premium WordPress platform. You’ll hear how - contrary to popular belief - data...

On this episode of Intended Consequences, host Brian Massey (@bmassey) is pulling in Joel Harvey (@JoelJHarvey) - Chief Operating Officer at Conversion Sciences - and they’re talking website redesigns.   In this episode, the duo is going to tell you something that may surprise you. Website redesigns don’t have to be all or nothing. You don't have to push all your budget in and wait 3, or 6 or even 12 months later. Brian and Joel are letting you in on a little secret: slow and steady wins...

Trying to understand what a company thinks they need to accomplish compared to what they actually need to accomplish is not an easy task. That’s where Dan McGaw (@danielmcgaw), CEO of Effin Amazing, comes in. Trying to understand what a company thinks they need to accomplish compared to what they actually need to accomplish is not an easy task. That’s where Dan McGaw (@danielmcgaw), CEO of Effin Amazing, comes in. On this episode of Intended Consequences, we’re talking about ICE Framework -...

In this episode of Intended Consequences, we’re digging into agency management - how to leverage the relationship and how to think about the relationship. You’ll hear from Garrett Mehrguth (@gmehrguth), CEO of Directive Consulting, on why regardless of the research done, the pitch meeting is a tough time for the agency. That initial agency pitch meeting brings out bias. It becomes about pleasing the client - not the client’s customers. This is how failed campaigns get launched. This is how...

Are visitors engaged enough to get through the pages of content on your website? On today’s Intended Consequences, Hotjar’s Andrew Michael is breaking down a tool that’s focused on helping you understand your users. You’ll also hear how to understand which tools are truly valuable, and which are just giving you "interesting" insights. If you’re striving to learn how tools actually empower marketers to serve their online prospects better, listen in. Resources and links discussed: Follow...

On this episode of Intended Consequences, we’re talking with Lindsay Tjepkema, Director of Marketing for the Americas at Emarsys. Lindsay is a marketer who markets to marketers. Find out how she walks the line between creativity and efficiency, crayons and spreadsheets, design and databases - and how she uses marketing stacks to create stacks of cash. Listen in as we dig into the question of "why is it that marketers seem to struggle to get to that next to the next level of success?” ...

Key Takeaways: Moore’s Law. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that we’d be able to fit twice as many transistors on a microchip every year. We are experiencing a golden age of tools - the tools are getting better, less expensive and getting easier to use. The future of marketing AI. Is it all about personalization? Are the metrics you’re optimizing for clear? And if not, can AI even work for you? Or how do we take all this data and make it matter? Contextualization. We are taking this...

Key Takeaways: The Human Biases Holding You Back. Learn more about human biases, how they work together, and why it impacts your role as a marketer. Gain Executive Buy-In. How do you know what made your customer buy to begin with? Who is your buyer? And when you get the answers to these questions - how do you get buy-in from leaders in the organization to make the pivots needed based on the data? Understanding What Drives. It’s important to know which calls to action tend to drive the most...