For those not familiar, I led growth (and other functions) at The Motley Fool for a decade+ and have also been a part of other great growth & marketing teams.
This blog post is mostly a refresh of a popular thread from a few years back, with updates where I have em’...
Find what increases conversions
Facebook knew users needed 7 friends in 10 days, Airbnb discovered new hosts need a booking within 6 weeks, and LinkedIn realized users must create a profile and make at least 5 connections quickly.
Every successful company eventually identifies its "magic metric" – that critical number that can help predict future success.
In the example below, for email marketing campaigns, we knew prospects needed to open emails and engage with us (obvs). So we created incredible, multi-week campaigns that sparked interest, curiosity, and delivered massive value before even directing people to a landing page.
Example: we'd send multiple employees each year to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas to spend a few days covering events and product releases. They'd live stream, grab interviews, and send ALL that timely and relevant content via email to prospects. People were actually excited to receive these emails – it didn't feel like 'marketing,' just great content.
The results? People who opened our emails 3+ times (our magic number) had conversion rates nearly 6x higher than non-openers.
In almost every business, there’s that one metric -- that ‘thing’ that, when accomplished, helps to drive conversion (or whatever the metric is you’re trying to optimize for).
Gamification can work - when done right
For what seemed like forever, 'gamification' was the buzzword du jour – every company, product, and experience was being gamified.
Rarely did I see things that felt organic and authentic – mostly, gamification felt forced and friction-filled.
But we did use a subtle gaming element in one marketing campaign years ago. For each action a prospect took, they earned credits that could be applied to future purchases.
The results were striking: those with the most credits were 24x more likely to convert than those with zero.
Direct Mail is still the shit
Sure, the data's not fresh, but check this out – in a single campaign, we saw a staggering 56% lift in conversion just by adding a direct mail piece.
Here's your direct mail checklist:
- You're selling a high-LTV product
- Your buying process is frictionless
- You have a trusted brand or killer social proof
- Direct mail will complement your multi-channel approach
- You've created a clear digital path from mail to purchase
- You actually have data-driven marketers on your team
If you're nodding "yes" to these six items, direct mail is definitely something to consider.
Soft & hard closes are conversion goldmines
If you’re running a long marketing campaign - say, it’s a week or two, or more. For example… let’s say you’re Dropbox running an 8-week marketing campaign aimed at college students, or you’re Duolingo trying to get new sign-ups for a limited time..
You could simply offer new customers a benefit for signing up within x days. But what's more effective? Creating both a "soft" close and a "hard" close.
Example: At The Motley Fool, we sold a $4K annual Options subscription through limited-window campaigns rather than keeping them "always on." Let's say we opened enrollment January 1st with a January 14th deadline.
For early birds signing up between January 1-10, we'd slash the price to $3K AND throw in exclusive access to our Options Expert on day one, plus a personal options trading lesson. We created urgency with a hard countdown and highlighted both the discount and premium perks.
Then on January 11th, we'd reach out again: "Missed the first deadline? Good news – you've got four more days at $3.5K – still $500 off the regular $4K price."
Two deadlines consistently outperformed one.
Recency matters
If you've never studied "RFM" (recency, frequency, monetary value) in segmentation analysis, don't sweat it. For now, let's focus on recency.
The moment someone engages with you is precisely when they're most likely to convert. Did they just visit your site? Open an email? Abandon a cart? Hit em’ up as soon as you can.
We implemented an "instant upgrade" system that prompted people to upgrade to our premium product immediately after purchasing our standard offering. The conversion rate? 2.2% – compared to just 0.57% for people who saw that same offer 31-60 days after their initial purchase.
Turn Almost-buyers into your next buyers
This one may seem obvious, but finding new customers is always harder (and pricier) than converting people who almost bought.
That's why abandoned cart emails are so ubiquitous in e-commerce, and why you get bombarded with emails, texts, pop-ups, and now, actual phone calls (got one yesterday from SimilarWeb... great product, annoying call).
Anyway - in the example below - we segmented users who clicked on the order page and sent them a thank-you email with a digital 'gift' – their conversion rate jumped 69% higher than our control group who received nothing.
Short vs. Long-form
I'm sure some folks crush it with brief, concise order pages... but throughout my time at The Motley Fool, long-form copy consistently won.
When we packed our sales pages with compelling storytelling, persuasive direct-response tactics, and abundant social proof, they always outperformed short, simple, to-the-point- order pages.
We tested this relentlessly year after year – since everyone knows long-form copy can feel tedious and frustrating as a consumer.
Yet the results never changed: long-form absolutely crushed.
Summing it up
Marketing isn't rocket science, and some of these may seem obvious – but you don’t know until you test your assumptions, and then measure what actually works.
These seven tactics consistently delivered for our teams across different companies and on the whole, I don’t see any that don’t stand the test of time.
Find the right metric(s), talk to your customers where they are (yes, still in email), and don’t stop testing.
The data will tell you exactly what you need to know.
