The Whitelist: Conversion Is About So Much More Than Copy

Two weeks ago, we started a weekly content roundup known as The Whitelist, and we already missed a week!

I was out in beautiful Denver, Colorado at the first annual Copyblogger Authority conference (read a recap here) meeting new people and learning tons about great marketing. I’ll be including tips and tricks that I learned in some of our upcoming posts so stay tuned.

In the meantime, some excellent posts have been written by our favorite bloggers and they deserve to highlighted. Here are some of our favorite posts from the past week. Conversion is a central theme and these posts will open your mind to new ideas for converting readers to subscribers and leads to customers.

Is there something great we missed? Just let us know in the comments or on Twitter.

How to Find and Fix Conversion Problems

Longform content has to be really, really good in order to keep our attention, and The Daily Egg does it right. This 1,500-word post, which is the fifth in a five part series, covers testing landing pages from top to bottom.

To optimize anything, you need to conduct a scientific experiment, carefully analyze the results, select the optimal result, and repeat. If everything is done correctly, the results get better and better over time.

This concept applies very nicely to website design.

A good website design is one that delivers consistently high conversion rates. But even the best websites can increase conversions. You simply need to know how.

The homepage is dead, and the social web has won

The New York Times website is so massive that it’s traffic can be representative of global web trends. In addition to social media, email is one of the main reasons that home pages receive less traffic than ever. Rather than going looking for news and content, people get it delivered to them. Just one more reason to spend extra time developing strategic email newsletters.

How to Find and Eliminate “Friction Words” in Your Web Copy

This post is more than a year old but after hearing Joanna speak at the Authority conference, I felt it was important to share. She breaks down which words are great for conversion and which words should be avoided at all costs. It’s a great read.

Friction words are words that describe things people have to do – not things people want to do. They cause cognitive friction. Web copy that converts is focused on what people want to do.

Can win-back email campaigns help reactivate lapsed customers?

This post provides a pretty interesting look at “win-back” email campaigns. It’s a good read overall but I pulled one very important tip from it: Clean your email lists.

Major mailbox providers such as Gmail and Outlook commonly use engagement metrics to decide whether or not a particular sender should be considered as a spammer.

Furthermore, if a former user hasn’t logged into their mailbox for an extended period of time then providers sometimes turn them into ‘spam traps’.

If marketers consistently send messages to spam traps then it’s a sign they aren’t cleaning their email list, which is another warning signal that they might be a spammer.

In order to avoid being incorrectly labelled as an evil spammer, marketers should consider using win-back email campaigns on lapsed subscribers before ultimately scratching them from their database for good.

4 Tips for Killer Calls to Action in Your Emails

The fabulous Lexi Rodrigo wrote this post for the Vero blog this week. It’s loaded with great information — backed by studies, reports and surveys — about how to craft a perfect sales pitch in your emails. Read the full article for more gems like this:

Does the location of a CTA within your email make a difference in click rates?

In this study, Canopy Labs compared the performance of CTAs placed in different locations in an email and found that a CTA at the bottom of an email outperformed CTAs placed on the left or right side of an email.

53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts

A number of studies prove that images in blog posts and social media can increase click-thru rates and sharing. But what about email?

A look at our own data indicated that emails with images had a 42 percent higher click rate than emails without. This list of free image sources, curated by Buffer’s Courtney Seiter, can be just as useful for your email marketing as it can your content and social media efforts.

Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution or even create your own image from scratch.

We’ll explore all of these and then some in this post about free image sources.

Any great posts we missed? Be sure to let us know.