Growth Newsletter #050

The best testimonials start with skepticism.

It's easy to think that start-to-finish positive testimonials drive the most conversions.

But "reverse testimonials" can be more effective. They start with skepticism: fears, doubts, or obstacles.

Everyone has objections. Testimonials that address them first build connections with others who are on the fence because of their own reservations. Plus, they add a storytelling arc, from problem/concern to success.

You can get better, transformational testimonials by asking your reviewer a few key questions:

1. What was the problem you were having before you discovered our product?
2. What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve the problem?
3. What obstacle would have prevented you from purchasing?
4. What was different about our product?
5. Take us to the moment when you realized our product was actually working to solve your problem.
6. Tell us what life looks like now that your problem is solved or being solved.

Asking questions also gives helpful guidelines to testimonial givers, so they aren’t staring at a blank screen trying to think of what to say.

Bonus for higher-converting testimonials: If possible, align a testimonial's messaging with its placement. If your customer talks about a specific feature, spotlight their comments in your marketing surrounding that feature, like a dedicated landing page or re-engagement email. If they came across your brand through a YouTube ad, how much more effective would it be if the testimonial giver also discovered you through YouTube, clicked, and is now thriving?

Email open rates have always been kind of a vanity metric.

They rarely have any effect on business outcomes. And they don’t tell you how good your email is. They tell you how good your subject line is, and how much recipients liked your past emails.

With the release of iOS 15, they’re even more useless.

Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection keeps senders from knowing if an email has been opened. It also blocks senders from seeing recipients’ IP addresses.

Instead of caring about open rates, here are some better metrics to monitor:

• Click reach rate: percentage of subscribers driving clicks. Calculated by dividing unique clicks by unique sent over a given period.
• Click-through rate: percentage of unique subscribers who click on an email. This is an obvious, yet important metric.
• Revenue per subscriber.
• Revenue per email.

Focus on improving these metrics—and avoid the rest—to increase the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Content with minimal search value might hurt a website when left unpruned.

This happens all the time, yet most companies don't realize it's negatively impacting their search ranking.

To find out if your site suffers from a thin content problem, follow these steps:

• Open a fresh tab to Google search
• Type in the search modifier "site:www.your-domain-url-here" ex: site:demandcurve.com
• Head to the absolute last page of the search results and scroll to the bottom

If you see a message from Google that says something like:

"...we have omitted some entries very similar to the [big number] already displayed"...

Then you've got a thin content problem on your hands.

To fix it, use Google Analytics + AHREFs (or SEO tool of choice) and:

• Delete no-traffic, no search-value pages, OR
• Rewrite and optimize them using a premium tool like Clearscope

It may hurt to kill underperforming pages that you've spent time creating, but you want to be swift and complete here.

Unless your site is new or suffers from mission-critical technical SEO errors, expect to see an uptick in rankings within a few weeks.