This Company Puts Handwritten Letters with Orders

I had so much to put into this week’s newsletter that I decided to break it into two. Let’s see how that goes.

A Tactic You Should Test 🧪

This is where I share smart, creative ideas that are worth trying. Not theoretical fluff. Just real-world tactics that have the potential to lift conversions, retention, loyalty, or engagement. Try them, test them, tweak them.

eCommerce: Varsity-Level Customer Retention Strategy

Do you want varsity-level customer retention?

Include a personalized, handwritten note with every order...or even do it just for new customers.

Increased lifetime value (LTV)? Check. ✅

I will be giving them more money over time.

(Would this impact non-marketers as much? Maybe not...but it definitely has positive effects to some extent.)

Live Leak Alert 🚨

These are real-world examples of where a site is losing revenue. It might be a small miss or a full-funnel breakdown. Whether it’s your industry or not, use it to sharpen your own site. Great insights don’t come from your industry alone. If it is your industry, consider it competitive intel.

Company: Dealfront

Industry: B2B Software / SaaS

Category: Sales Enablement, Marketing Technology

Where: Homepage & Demo Signup 

I’m in a few online communities. This came up this week in one of them: “We recently launched our new homepage hero section as part of our new positioning, designed with conversion and user control in mind. Let me know what you think.”

My top points of feedback:

(1) The homepage messaging, particularly the hero, doesn’t contain a strong value proposition answering any of these questions: who, what, when, where, why, or how. Your offering is unclear. That’s immediately a huge issue.

(2) Your primary CTA is “Try for free” but it leads to a demo signup form. That’s immediately going to frustrate users as it’s not a true PLG motion. They’ll be confused as well because the demo form still has the CTA “Try for free".

(3) Related, the demo signup page doesn’t have any information about the demo so users aren’t going to be as likely to convert. How quickly will they hear back? Will they get to schedule immediately after submitting the form? How long is the demo?

(4) The bullet points on the demo page aren’t compelling. They’re very generic, expected things that aren’t going to be very motivating. They could offer more detail relative to each at a minimum.

(5) The demo signup page could offer more social proof, like testimonials, statistics, award badges, ratings, etc.

(6) Back to the homepage hero, sometimes it’s a beneficial B2B SaaS strategy to offer a secondary CTA that leads users down an educational route first instead. Not all users are going to be ready to sign up, especially given that it’s difficult to quickly tell what the value proposition is.

(7) I’d also consider that the transitions from section to section throughout the rest of the homepage design could be optimized as it goes from being extremely crammed together with nothing but a white background to a banner style.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), But Correct ✅

CRO is done poorly so often. There’s tons of misinformation. Untrained people. Poorly trained or undertrained people. Confusion. So on and so forth. Here’s a source of truth for you to help you learn how to do CRO in all the right ways.

Do you struggle to get your tests to to reach statistical significance?

This is likely the reason why, and it's what teams mess up most when they're testing: PRE-TEST PLANNING.

Most teams aren't even doing it...or they're barely doing it. If they are doing it, it almost never involves any type of calculations. At most, they're looking at sample sizes only. WRONG MOVE. (To be fair, that's what most "testing calculators" are built to calculate.)

The factors you should care about most in a calculator though are minimum detectable effect and estimated duration, but unfortunately, there are almost no calculators set up correctly for these.

Sample size calculations are somewhat irrelevant because the inputs should be traffic and conversions. The outputs should be MDEs and estimated durations. (*Not that you don't consider sample size at all as an output though.)

This calculator is the only one I've seen to allow for this. Optimizely's is all wrong, for example, which I told them when I worked there. I specifically asked multiple people why MDE was an input and what users were supposed to put there. I always got this answer: it's arbitrary or just what you want to get. It's the wrong way to think about test planning.

Most dedicated CRO practitioners don't even do test planning correctly. Many don't even know about these concepts when you ask...or they don't understand them correctly.

This is something that makes or breaks testing.

Haley Unfiltered 🧠

Open Industry Jobs

• Braze: Senior Product Marketing Manager (Link)

• Salesforce: Senior Manager, Customer Marketing (Link)

• Smartcat: Director of Growth Marketing and AI Ops (Link)

• Karbon: Chief Marketing Officer (Link)

• The VET Recruiter: Associate Marketing Manager (Link)

• Loopback Analytics: Director of Marketing (Link)

• News UK: Experimentation Lead (Link)

• Duolingo: VP Growth and Product Marketing (Link)

• Rover.com: Senior Product Manager, Growth (Link)

Was this email forwarded to you? Like it so far? 🤞

Most brands treat CRO as a “someday” project. It’s really an “always, anytime” project.

Stay Chirpy,

Haley 🤘