They identify questions, build hypotheses, plan experiments, and assess their results – but you won’t catch these scientists wearing lab coats.
We’re talking about our very own in-house creative team. Our content, design, and UX professionals are constantly testing new ideas to optimize our platforms and drive fresh leads. No detail escapes their scrutiny: How can the placement of a button impact its click-through rate? Is that banner too thick? What’s the least-irritating way to phrase a technical error message?
The team has been busy vetting best practices all summer long, and now we’re sharing 5 creative ways to drive more leads right now – straight from the pages of our own playbook.
1. Habla español.
If you’re trying to reach more consumers, you need to speak their language – literally. According to a study from the United States Census Bureau, between the years of 2009 and 2013, approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population spoke a language other than English at home. For more than 37 million people, that language was Spanish. Plus, the number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. is projected to rise by another 39 million to 43 million people by 2020. If your business isn’t already providing Spanish content for clients and customers, it’s time for a change.
Last month, our Allconnect creative team worked with our sales center to implement Spanish-language ordering options. During their first week live, the updates brought a significant boost in total sales! Allconnect isn’t our only team producing Spanish content, either. Other teams in the Red Ventures portfolio are also putting a larger emphasis on how their websites cater to Spanish-speaking audiences. If you’re interested in adding Spanish content to your site, ask a fluent or native Spanish-speaker to read over it first. Poor grammar looks bad in any language!
2. Get interactive.
Love a good Buzzfeed quiz? Or a Starbucks rewards game? You’re not alone. Games, quizzes, and other interactive features are great tools for boosting user engagement. Our MYMOVE team can prove it – only a month after its launch, the MYMOVE app is already displaying promising user data. One of the app’s features is a personalized moving checklist, which helps users stay organized during their moves. So far, more than 30,000 tasks have been completed by app users.
How can your make your platform more interactive? If you run a tutoring service, you could add a quiz to your website to help users determine which subjects they need the most help with. If you sell lawn mowers online, you could add a product recommendation tool to help customers select the right mower for their yards. If you manage a Hootie & The Blowfish tribute band, you could hold a contest to “name that Blowfish!” Regardless of the business, if there’s a way to make your platform more engaging than the basic read-n-scroll, do it!
3. Refine your headline.
First impressions are everything, which means your headlines play an enormous role in garnering leads. To make sure our headers were doing #themost, our Allconnect content team spent some time optimizing blog headlines in the site’s resource center. The results were jaw-dropping. For example, updating an article title from “Understanding internet data caps and which providers have no data cap internet” to “What you need to know about internet data caps” resulted in a 123% increase in page views!
If your pages aren’t getting the traction you’d hoped for, try reassessing the header content. Make sure the headline is short, simple, and easily conveys what the reader is going to see in the body copy. Adding numbers or action words (e.g. 5 Reasons Why You Should Eat More Eggs, How to Grow an Apple Tree in 3 Easy Steps, 72 Ways to Style a Bowl Cut) are also great ways to capture readers’ attention.
4. Use animations.
GIFs are hilarious in Tweets and texts, but they’re actually great for ad copy, too. If you’ve fallen into a rut with your ad strategy, give animations a try. Our creative team put them to the test on Facebook last month, and discovered that animated ads were up +119% on leads per impression versus static ads.
When choosing an animation, be sure the movement is visible enough to grab a customer’s attention… but not crazy enough to cause a headache. If you’re overlaying a message on the animation, you’ll also want to make sure the text is visible on top of the images.
5. Amp up your emails.
Video may have killed the radio star, but email is still kicking!
Several of our teams have been working on email strategy initiatives this summer, and they like what they see. One team reworked a promotional email for cart-abandon customers with information on a new offer, which drove a +63.7% increase on click-through rate. Another team added email fields to site error messages, offering users the option to receive an alert when the site was up-and-running again.
If your business is already using email remarketing, try making smaller changes to your strategy, like changing up the timing of your emails or testing new subject lines. The possibilities are endless!
Want more from RV Creative? Check out 8 Ways to Find Creative Find Breakthroughs, Faster & read our design team’s tips for How To Stand Out as a Creative.
