2016 Unbounce #CTAConf Takeaways – Day #2

If people were tired after the pub crawl the night before, the first speaker of the day quickly got people over the lingering hangover:

Rand Fishkin

The Wizard of Moz was dropping knowledge on how measuring vanity SEO metrics are good, but its even more important to measure the work that it takes to make the high-level metrics like page rank move. He related it to his FitBit, and although the ultimate goal is to lose weight, there are lots of different inputs that need to be done (steps, climbing stairs, sleep) to achieve the overall goal. One really good insight that we took away was the importance of actually talking to customers to get their feedback. They had a really poor performing pricing page and they simply sent an email to everyone who visited it and did not sign up, to find out why they didn’t. Turns out all their other products had free trials, except this one, and that was something a report would never tell you.

Mackenzie Fogelson

This session was all about the importance of being authentic. Anyone who went to the Marketo Summit this year knows that Will Smith mentioned that in this digital age, there is really no more smoke and mirrors anymore. I think Mackenzie was really focusing in on how customers see right through things that are not authentic, and then in order to truly connect with customers, and get passionate engaged employees, the whole business needs to be authentic. One good takeaway here for many marketers is that after you complete your persona exercise, you should actually try and find customers who fit each of those personas perfectly, so you can attach a face to the persona and make them even more accurate.

Brian Davidson

The city’s newest Vancouver Canuck’s fan, after Unbounce generously gave him a new jersey, was sharing how to best connect with audiences on Facebook. Given that the majority of Facebook’s traffic is coming from mobile, its absolutely essential to have mobile friendly landing pages if you want to convert them into customers. We can honestly say that we have never been that impressed with results from Facebook campaigns, but after seeing some of the tips Brian provided, we’re going to give it another try. One thing we will be doing for sure is adding the Facebook pixel to our website so we can re-target that traffic on Facebook. Looks like their targeting options have improved quite a bit lately, and according to Brian will be getting even better in weeks/months to come.

Matthew Sweezey

You can find Matt on Twitter @msweezey, and this well spoken salesperson turned marketing guy from Salesforce was giving some great tips on how to optimize your email campaigns. A self-proclaimed non-coder like many of us, turned to text only emails out of necessity. Knak wasn’t around when Matthew was initially starting to build email campaigns for Pardot. He shared some really great tips, I think the biggest one being that Marketers don’t HAVE to create all of the content that they promote. A company that shares valuable content through their email campaigns is creating value, even if they didn’t create that content themselves. Although we don’t agree with the fact that Matthew said we should “F%*# HTML emails’ we feel your pain Matthew, without coding knowledge and the proper tools HTML emails can be a real pain.

Kristen Craft

If you were ever curious about video analytics, this was the session for you. Kristen comes from Wistia, and they have a whole ton of stats on video, which Kristen was kind enough to share. Some real gems in this session, including that you should autoplay your videos when you’re promoting them in an email. Use faces in your thumbnail images, especially smiling/happy ones. It’s really good to script video as most people do not have the media training to really pull off winging it. The majority of people have been flying blind on video analytics.

Jonathan Dane

Poop emojis and Google AdWords improvements. That’s all you need to know.

Cara Harshman

Cara shared how they took an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach to optimizing their homepage. She walked us through the different variations they tested and some results. Loved how transparent this conference was, a good example is that Cara admitted that personalization has not yet proven itself to drive more revenue, although engagement is up significantly. The results were still early, so revenue could always be just around the corner.

Aaron Orendorff

This guy will speak on TedTalks soon, if he hasn’t already. Very good delivery on a topic covering engaging content creation. He went through the 3 content sins:

1. It’s not about you
2. It’s not about Sales
3. It’s not about Success

Given his content has featured in many by many of the industry’s top publishers, we think Marketers can learn a lot by following his lead on this.

Stephanie Grieser

Every Unbounce conference attendee would attest that they put on an excellent event, and Stephanie was the person behind the events for the past 2 years. She shared her secrets on how to make your next event a success. One of those being to have time-sensitive urgency offers to get people to sign up. And not the ones where you just say ‘limited time offer’ or ‘seating is limited’. It’s 2016 people so let’s use countdown timers (like the ones we offer in our templates) and give actual numbers of how many tickets are remaining. Also, Stephanie cited that although they make email marketing fails from time to time, the Oopsie emails that they send afterwards have some of the highest open and engagement rates. People like to look at the car crash – so don’t worry so much about being perfect, there are very good side effects.

Michael Aagaard

Last session of the conference, and what’s that saying? Save the best for last? Really great session on mixing psychology and landing page optimization. Two concepts in particular to take away. One being that there are two types of thinking. 1 being east, the other being difficult. Good landing pages do not make your brain have to work to get what you need accomplished. That is what everyone should strive for. The others, you have to really think, you have to really want whatever they are selling, and those are obviously going to have much lower conversion rates. The other concept was about priming your visitors to get them to take action. The example Michael used was SO_P. So what word did you make? Soup or Soap? Showing a picture of a bowl of soup prior to showing SO_P is much much more likely to get someone to write SOUP. And the same kind of concept can be applied to landing pages. So, keep it easy for your visitors and prime them to what you want them to do and you can achieve great results.

That’s it! Over and out Vancouver. Kudos to Unbounce for putting on a great conference.