We're back in LA after a whirlwind week in Boston attending HubSpot's INBOUND conference. Last year just two of our team made the trek to the East Coast, but this year there were 7 of us representing Salted Stone and soaking up as much inbound marketing knowledge as possible.
The highlight of the event had to be the stand-up set by Amy Schumer -- she killed it! We all knew she was funny before, but man... she is like, SUPER funny.
2 seconds till Amy!The big keynote and spotlight speakers are always exciting -- this year Marc Maron, Brené Brown and Aziz Ansari were on hand -- but it's in the smaller sessions where you really get the opportunity to hear from people who are on the leading edge of what's next in marketing.
Here's a quick wrap-up of a few of the tips, tricks, and strategies we learned this year at INBOUND15.
The 4 Corners of Conversion
Oli Gardner, the Co-Founder of Unbounce, gave a highly-entertaining, lightning fast talk packed with tons of great tips and advice for how to build landing pages and calls-to-action that convert.
He suggested taking a look at your headlines and subheaders to see if it might make more sense to flip them. Turn the subheader (usually the more descriptive part of the set) into the headline (usually the more cutesy/clever part of the setup) and vice versa. Don't make people guess at what you're offering. Save clever for later.
Gardner also talked about "protecting your CTA" by removing any distractions such as social share buttons and non-focused links. Distraction is enemy of conversion, so make one thing stand out on the page and focus on it. Interested in learning more? Check out his Attention Driven Design ebook.
As for CTAs specifically, he offered that "Get My eBook" outperforms "Get Free eBook" and suggests refraining from using the word "free" at all because visitors know that it's not in fact "free" when they have to "pay" with an email address. And also that "click" may work better than "get" within CTAs because it's an action verb and people are likely to listen when told what to do.
Jose and Alex at Club INBOUNDInflux in Info = Shift in Sales
Daniel Pink, New York Times bestselling author, gave the final keynote on Friday and talked about how technology has shifted our consumer culture from a "buyer beware" scenario to a "seller beware" situation.
Before the Internet came around, people relied on businesses and advertising to help solve their problems. But now we can do our own research and find answers to our problems without the interference of ads or salespeople.
So Pink discussed how it's paramount for brands to help consumers uncover problems. And then provide resources and content that assist them in their research of how to solve that problem.
Right before we got a shout out in the HubSpot Partner Keynote!5 Email Tips from a HubSpot Email Pro
Tom Monaghan, an email expert at HubSpot, offered some tried and true advice from analyzing over 1,000,000 sent emails!
1. The best day to send email is on Monday, then Saturday. Avoid Tuesday. And the best time to send email is in the late afternoon.
2. Don't waste money buying email lists, just build landing pages with forms and collect names from your inbound efforts. Dan said, "Don't invest in imports. Invest in your content."
3. If a contact doesn't open your first 3 emails, take them off your list because the chances of them opening an email after ignoring the first three is dismal. Also, at that point, inbox providers and anti-spam companies are docking you points and you don't want to end up getting blocked. Instead, if someone hasn't opened your first three emails, simply shelf them for awhile and try a different campaign with them 3 months later. Just start over and try a new approach.
4. Don't ever say FREE in the subject line.
5. Make the CTA button/image obvious and add repeat text links throughout the body of the email. Make it easy for your contacts to buy-in whenever they want while reading your email.
And finally, here's a picture of our team being recognized during a HubSpot Partner presentation for being a top-performing Partner this past year!
Salted Stone for the win!
