Statsbot is a tool that can connect your analytics solution, like Google Analytics or Mixpanel, to Slack and automatically alert you when there’s an unusual spike in your data.
This comes in super handy, because you simply can’t monitor your data all the time. But software can. Which allows you to react more promptly and potentially find opportunities to capitalize on a current event much bigger.
What Statsbot Alerts does for you is:
a) examine patterns in data
b) use machine learning and anomaly detection
c) sends you a slack message when critical changes in your data occur.
I run a community pharmacy, and we have multiple pharmacies around Australia. The challenge we have at the moment is that there is a big-box in Australia, called Chemist Warehouse, with a huge marketing power, and we’re trying to differentiate via service, and adding value there, but we don’t really seem to be winning the game. So the question is, how does a small community pharmacy with service and relationships in mind compete against a big-box, very powerful conglomerate?
Now, without giving it a second thought, here are the questions Jay asked after hearing this:
What is your definition of service that you’re extending? What does it look like specifically? What is it that you’re doing exactly to distinguish and differentiate?
What is the most profitable part of the pharmacy?
How many average clients do you have in each of the pharmacies?
How many pharmacies do you have?
How do you market right now?
How many referrals do you get per pharmacy per whatever calibration group you like (day/month/week)?
It’s fascinating to see how quickly his mind went to examine these specific points upon hearing the preceding question.
Here’s the whole video for you if you want to know what this led to. (The relevant part starts at 11:34 if you want to skip the introductory blabla.)
Come up with a story around your product launch. Why should anyone care? Why is this meaningful and shareworthy?
optional: create a dedicated landing page and/or special offer for the Product Hunt community
Create a list of 10 influencers
(people with a large following on Product Hunt)
also look for people with a large following that have posted about your competitors on Product Hunt
Get one of them to commit to posting your product on Product Hunt by sending them an email. Give them enough context so that they will care enough to not just post your product on Product Hunt, but also leave a comment on your product.
Post in the morning hours (For the Drift launch, they benefited from posting at 7 a.m. Eastern because there were few other products being posted at that time, and this gave Drift the #1 spot)
Email your list to upvote your product (Don’t link directly to your Product Hunt page. Always link to the Product Hunt homepage and ask people to upvote your product from there. That’s why being #1 is so valuable, because people will see it right away).
Also email the press to get some PR
Assign everyone on your team maker status for this product, so that they can be involved.
Leverage your Product Hunt Success for PR exposure. Send out another email to PR people and tell them that the product you emailed them about earlier was now #1, and that this is obviously something that’s getting people’s attention, and ask for a conversation.
For the Drift.com team, their Product Hunt launch resulted in 800 new signups and 6500 unique visitors to their website within 2 days.
Google recently made some changes to the way it’s showing data, especially for advertisers with “lower monthly spend” (without elaborating what lower monthly spend exactly is):
Advertisers with lower monthly spend may see a limited data view in the Keyword Planner. For example, you may see values such as 0, 1-100, 100-1K, 1K-10K, 10K-100K, 100K-1M, 1M+ in the average monthly searches column. In addition, other advertisers may trigger the limited data view by reaching a limit on the number of searches for search volume data.
If you’re on of those advertisers with that lower monthly spend, and you’d still like to view the non-limited data in Keyword Planner, here’s a neat little workaround:
If you care about writing high-converting emails, there’s a great video for you. Ben Settle and Kevin Rogers dissect some great email copy and go into why it worked so well.
To view the video (which is about an hour long), you need to scroll to the bottom of this sales page and then click on the video play button.
If you’re going to do this, be sure to set aside an hour of distraction-free time and have a notebook ready at hand.
Case studies of A/B tests where a website changed their order button color from green to orange and saw a 30% increase in revenue have been popular among the web.
A huge improvement as a result of a tiny change.
And while this sometimes does happen in the real world, it’s a rare exception. But it makes for a fascinating story—so people love to read and re-tell this story. Kind of like someone winning millions in the lottery: Yeah, it happens, but no one would argue that playing the lottery is a feasible way of becoming a millionaire.
Now the truth is that most A/B tests won’t yield clear wins. If you decide to start running A/B tests, you need to make a long-term commitment and realize that a lot of A/B tests will be inconclusive.
I’ve conducted my own fair share of meaningless A/B tests.
Do you know what happened next?
Other people on the team started questioning whether it was worth running A/B tests at all.
Why keep doing these? What have we learned from them? If running these A/B tests don’t yield any meaningful insights, why are we wasting time with them?
You don’t want to get in that place.
So the first take-away is to test big things that will most likely make a real difference.
Err on the side of testing the extreme version of your hypothesis. Subtle changes don’t usually reach significance as quickly as bigger changes. For the A/B test you want to know if your hypothesis is correct. Once you know that, you can fine tune the implementation of the hypothesis.
Sendbloom is a prospecting automation platform that helps you build your sales pipeline.
If you’re using the cold calling 2.0 model popularized by Aaron Ross in his groundbreaking book Predictable Revenue, then you’re sending cold emails to get people to take the next step in the sales funnel – whether that’s responding to your email, getting on a call, requesting a demo or actually making a purchase.
Manually sending cold emails is a tedious and overly repetitive task. And while it allows you to really laser-target your prospects and reach out to them with more relevant messaging… it’s hard to scale and not a practical approach for most sales organizations.
But automating email follow ups often aren’t as effective. They’re easy to set up and run, but generally less effective, because most prospects can immediately see that this is an automated email and will either ignore your sales emails… or hit the spam button.
Sendbloom tries to solve this problem by allowing you to create personalized, automated email cadences.
Stop wasting time to manually research prospects
Sendbloom automates the prospect research part. Their software will crawl the web, third-party and their own company databases to get more context around each lead.
Information like company size, founding dates, what kind of software applications they use, which industry they’re in, where they’re located, their funding history, job titles, and a lot more.
All this data will be available to you and allow you to set up and automated email campaigns at scale.
Prospect list segmentation
Sendbloom also helps you to easily segment your lists based on any combination of attributes you’d see fit.
Let’s say you’re selling CRM solution to ecommerce sites that also have an iOS app.
You could for example upload a list of contacts that are working at companies that have iOS apps into Sendbloom, and then filter out all those contacts who’s job title contains the word “Manager”.
Then you could filter out all the contacts whose company is using E-commerce solutions like Shopify, Magento & OpenCart.
Then you could further filter out all contacts who are in Retail, and exclude all companies that have more than 500 employees.
And then you could filter out all those where the average iOS app rating is better than 3.5.
Even if you do not need this level of granularity – it gives you a good idea of what’s possible in terms of targeted email campaign outreach. Segmenting your prospect lists and criteria that you can define on the fly is very easy.
This will allow you to operate agile and constantly test and iterate with your sales approach.
Personalized emails at scale with merge tags
All the attributes associated with a contact can then be inserted into the email templates you set up for your sales email campaigns.
Combined with Sendbloom’s Segmentation Designer, this is a very powerful feature for highly-targeted outreach that can improve your email response rates significantly.
Eric Siu from Growth Everywhere wrote about this the benefits of Sendbloom in a blog post:
The main differentiator that I saw was that Sendbloom can actually automatically put your prospects into different segments and hit them with different e-mails. It’ll scan your prospects and see what type of software they’re all running on their websites and if they see something that you have specified, they’ll place them into a different segment.
For example, let’s say you started a Analytics company and want to see which companies run MixPanel or KISSmetrics. You could have a brief e-mail go out to these prospects indicating that you have a better solution to solving their analytics issues. The rest of the people that don’t have MixPanel or KISSmetrics can receive a generic e-mails.
Built-in reporting
Sendbloom shows you which prospects open or responded to your emails, which emails bounced and who clicked on a link in your emails.
In addition to that, you also get high-level campaign metrics.
Overall, their reporting isn’t as powerful as of many other sales email automation tools.
CRM integrations
Sendbloom can be integrated with Salesforce to log all correspondence data in your CRM. I’m not sure how much of the data will be in Salesforce, and how the data exchange between Sendbloom and Salesforce exactly works, so this is probably an area that you should look into yourself if this is something that’s important to you.
Conclusion
If setting up highly-targeted cold email campaigns is a regular part of your sales process, then it’s definitely check out Sendbloom.
The ease of use with which you can set up highly-targeted sales email campaigns is really where Sendbloom shines.
Competing vendors for Sendbloom are PersistIQ, SalesLoft & Outreach.
Check out their website for more: https://www.sendbloom.com
When it comes to creating marketing websites, a lot of people think that: “People don’t read.”
“There’s too much text.”
“Say this in less words.”
“Who’s gonna read all this?”
And while you definitely don’t want to overwhelm your website visitors with excessively long text-blocks that distract from the core messaging…
… don’t make the mistake of pruning away too much copy from your website, especially if it comes to copy that conveys your value proposition.
A recent experiment by the ConversionXL team showed that a bullet list with descriptions helped readers understand and recall the value proposition more accurately than shorter versions.
You can see the 4 variations here. The red boxes highlight the areas that have been modified.
Variation B, titled “Bulleted Descriptions” is the one that got the most views.
A lot of people would describe this page as “overloaded” and containing too much text.
But the test revealed that this very version was the one that was most successful at helping website visitors understand the value proposition of this website.
Unfortunately, they didn’t test (or if they did, they didn’t share the test results) of these landing pages and what the engagement metrics were. All they did was survey participants and track participants’ eye movements on the website.
So we don’t know if Variation B got less engagement than other variations – but the main takeaway from this experiment is this:
If you want people to actually read the value propositions you’re composing, limit other elements on the web page. Elements that stay on the page should be extremely relevant to the value proposition’s message.
The eye tracking also revealed that more text caused visitors to notice the value proposition faster, and spend more time reading it.
Most content marketers agree that writing less and better content is the way to go.
The day of churning out a ton of low-quality content are long gone. This is something that worked in the past, but the algorithms (Google, FB, etc) are getting better at surfacing quality content that provides the best experience to the person spending time on the web.
This kind of summarizes how content marketers think about this topic nowadays.
He looks at the Washington Post, and how a strategy seemingly spearheaded by Jeff Bezos led to a 28% increase in traffic between April 2015 & April 2016.
There are a lot of things that played into this growth (like Bandito, that allows editors to publish different versions of the same article, and then automatically optimizes the article to perform best. A kind of multivariate content testing tool), but according to Steve Rayson, the main factor was:
PUBLISH!
MORE!
CONTENT!
Less isn’t always more
He compares Social Media Examiner with Hubspot:
* these numbers are rounded and exactly accurate. But close enough to be viable for making the point.
Even thought SME gets A LOT more shares than HS per post… in the end, Hubspot is ahead by roughly about 1 million shares because of sheer volume.
When I looked recently at the most shared content published by marketing and IT sites, the data confirmed that on average long form posts achieved more shares. But when I looked in more detail at the 50 most shared posts, 45 of them were short form and under 1,000 words.
Which is interesting, cause it’s not what is commonly believed in content marketing land.
Steve Rayson also makes a point that you can’t just start churning out a ton of low-quality content. Google would most likely penalize you for that. He believes you first need to build up some authority, and only at some point can you really start pushing the MOAR-CONTENT button.
What’s “valuable” content?
As someone who cares about quality content, I had to really keep an open mind to his arguments, because
I
HATE
CRAPPY
CONTENT.
So here was a point that really made me think:
Maybe the way we’re measuring “quality” is flawed. Maybe in some cases, it’s not about the quality of the writing and the message, but more about timeliness and relevance. He brings up sports reporting as an example. What people care most about are the results.
Ultimately, people aren’t visiting your site because they want to be on your site. They want it to get something out of it. Give it to them as fast as you can, and make it easy for them to get it (with the least amount of effort).
Determine the cadence with which your brand can create uniquely valuable content, which Rand defined and described in a 2015 Whiteboard Friday. The key is to focus the lion’s share of your attention on creating content that’s exclusive and recognized as best-by-far in its class.
He points out that most brands aren’t media companies.
He also mentions that we shouldn’t over-emphasize the importance of shares, and calls them “the cotton candy of content marketing”. (Which I think is on the money!💵)
But shorter content?
He does agree that content marketers have become infatuated with long-form content. It doesn’t have to be long. It has to be valuable. The length of the post should be determined by the needs of your audience.
In a nutshell, what Ronell advises content marketers to do is:
When creating content, we should begin with empathy being top-of-mind. That’s when you can allow your inner journalist to soar:
Who benefits most from this information (i.e., who, specifically, am I talking to?)
What are their specific needs?
Why is my brand uniquely qualified to satisfy those needs?
How can I best depict and share the information?
When is the optimal time to create, share and promote it?
Notice I never mentioned length. That was intentional.
The length of your content should be determined by your audience, not your brand.
The key element with this approach is that it ensures I have a clear, strong point to make, then can back it up with supporting facts. The real genius of this approach is once I’ve covered my three points, I’m done.
The goal isn’t to write everything there is to write on a topic; the goal is to share sufficient information that leads to learning and/or opens the topic up for further discussion.
If you decide to use this approach/style of post, keep these numbers in mind:
100: Number of words to make your point in the initial paragraph
300: Total number of words for the three supporting points
50: Number of words in the closing paragraph, including the call to action
