I love this illustration on the home page of DigMyData. The graph lines with the bubbles of text does a brilliant job of quickly explaining a very complex subject (business data analytics – talk about a mouthful).

It not only succinctly explains a complex subject, it does it in a visually pleasing way. The multiple colors and informal language really works.

This is a great example of how smart illustration can help communicate a very important marketing message.

The Copywriting Essentials Workshop was run by the super talented Fiona Humberston, Founder and Managing Director of Flourish Studios, a small but perfectly formed Graphic Design and Marketing agency based in Guildford, Surrey.

As this was our first workshop outside of the Carsonified events spectrum, we were curious to see how another company would run their own workshops. But of course that wasn’t the reason we attended! As we are a small events team, our job as Event Producers ranges from researching content, scheduling the conferences and liaising with speakers to booking flights, hotels and ever increasingly – marketing our events and writing copy on the site.

Given that none of us have been specifically trained as copywriters we all admit that it can be difficult to consistently write newsletters, blog posts and content on the event sites without sounding like a broken record. After all – we want to deliver new and exciting information to our subscribers, as well as make it sound fun and interesting to read. That’s why you signed up, right?!

So it was particularly interesting to find out having reviewed some of our work, that we had quite a bit to learn in one day! Given that we had 7 hours (which didn’t seem a lot) we were ready and raring to go. The day was split up into theory and practical writing, handy tips on writing engaging subject headlines and most importantly ‘know who your audience is’!

It was a varied, small group of people (8 in total) and everyone was very friendly which for me, really helped me feel relaxed enough to engage in the group discussions. I’m sure I’m not the only one who hated putting their hand up in the classroom of 30+ people at school!

We’ve actually had quite a few Copywriting workshops and speaker sessions at our events from the likes of the fab Relly Annett-Baker. In fact, there will be a scheduled copywriting session on the 2nd track at this years Future of Web Design, London. And whilst it’s hard to find the time during a hectic event, I am most definitely going to try and take advantage of this and sit in on the session.

In conclusion, the workshop was a real eye opener. Personally it really helped me take a step back, look outside the box and reevaluate my writing style for our marketing materials, as well as on our event sites. I came away feeling totally inspired, ready to write and wanting to learn more! All we have to do now is put it into practice and wow you with our ninja style skills.

If you’d like to know more about our events please check out our event sites and get in touch if you have any questions.

Future of Web Apps (Run by me)
Future of Web Design (Cat)
Future of Mobile (Natasha)

Thanks to Fiona Humberston for the photos.

However, the great thing about Facebook Questions is that it’s already integrated into the powerful ecosystem that is Facebook. You simply write up a question, create some multiple choice options, and then post it to your wall. This makes it easy to compile quantitative data, as opposed to asking a question in plain text and then sifting through a list of comments.

My buddy Bob Baldwin was the lead on Facebook Questions, and for as much as I gripe to him about Facebook (sorry, Bob) I think Questions is my favorite feature. Why? Because Facebook Questions aren’t exclusive to user profiles; You can also ask Questions on a Facebook Page. This is a very powerful tool for Page owners, because you’re able to quickly gather market research from your existing community, negating some of the need for site surveys, contests, and more intrusive methods.

For example, say that you run a bakery, and you need to decide between three different baked goods for next week. Why not crowd source the decision to your Facebook fans (likely your best customers) and ask them what they would like to buy? With a large enough sample size, a perfectly split result is quite rare, so you should be able to make business decisions more confidently.

There’s no word yet on whether or not Questions will be coming to Groups, but it certainly is fascinating to watch Facebook continue to evolve. What do you think of Facebook Questions so far?

If you haven’t had the opportunity to see Alex at Future of Web Apps before then check out the video below from FOWA Miami, it’s certainly worth 20 minutes of your time.

Alex has worked for some of the biggest online brands and knows a thing or two about creating a successful digital marketing strategy as well as how to use bleeding edge techniques to keep your brand ahead of the competition. He’s also written a number of articles for Think Vitamin on startups, marketing and more.

Early bird passes are available for £295. Visit the “Adventures In” web site for full details.

We replaced the example tutorial video on the homepage with a 50-second overview of the service.

I thought showing people the product (the example video) right away was the right thing to do. Boy was I wrong.

The takeaway here is that potential customers want a quick summary of the product, not an actual demo. The bigger takeaway here though is this: you have to be testing your site to see what works and what doesn’t. Going on a gut feeling won’t work. In fact, this very method that worked better for us may not work for you. You won’t know until you test.

Here are some screenshots from Optimizely showing the results. We had a healthy sample size (1,997) with a very strong statistically confident result of 98.8%.

Now that we know what kind of video works best, we’ll start testing variations of it. For instance, what’s the most effect thumbnail to display on the video?

We use Optimizely for all our A/B testing and would highly recommend it. We secured a deal with them for you guys that gives you 40% off their Silver Plan for life. We’re not receiving any benefit for recommending them, I just think it’s a great product.

Make sure to also read the previous post where I covered how to create and measure campaigns.

These lessons have been learned while marketing Think Vitamin Membership, our new on-demand video training site for Web Designers and Developers. We’re humbled and excited to announce we just signed up our 1,000 monthly paying Member, after only six months. Thanks to everyone who has signed up!

Campaigns

The first thing you need to do is build ‘Campaigns’ into your app’s back end.

Here are the database tables you’ll need …

Campaigns

1. ID
2. Name
3. Description or notes
4. Start date (not required)
5. End date (not required)
6. Amount spent

Campaign Visits

1. Campaign ID
2. Date
3. Time

Campaign Signups

1. Campaign ID
2. Customer ID
3. Date
4. Time

Here is a screengrab of a campaign after it’s been running for awhile …

Once you create a Campaign, you should get a simple ID back from the system, for example: 112. You can then tack this ID on to any URL from your site like this:

http://yoursite.com/?cid=112
http://yoursite.com/prices?cid=112

When someone hits your site using that link, here’s what happens …

1. A cookie is created for them. This cookie will link them to this campaign if they sign up as a customer.
2. A record is created in the  Campaign Visit table, if it’s a new unique visit.

If they sign up, then the system checks to see if they have a Campaign cookie. If so, then it creates a record in the Campaign Signup table.

When you view the campaign report (see image above) then it also queries the Customer table to display the customer’s ID, name, email, current plan and LTV or Life Time Value.

LTV is simply a sum of all the money the customer has paid you since they signed up. This is vital as it allows you to see whether or not you’ve made a profit on the amount you spent on the campaign.

As you can see above, this campaign is the ‘Membership’ link in the Think Vitamin navigation. We don’t have to pay for that link, so the ‘Total Spend’ is $0.

Tracking the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Now that you’re recording Campaign data, here are the important stats for each campaign …

1. Profitability – The total Life Time Value of the campaign should exceed the amount of money you spent on the campaign. It’s also important to pay attention to when you hit profitability on a campaign. If it takes more than three months, then something might be wrong.
2. Conversion rate – Calculated like this: Campaign Signups / Campaign Visits. Obviously the higher the number here, the better.
3. Visits – The number of unique visits
4. Bounce – We currently get this from Google Analytics as it’s a complex thing to measure and we didn’t want to spend the time building it in.

A Real-Life Example

We’ve learned something very interesting: A lot more people (and I mean a LOT MORE) click on the ‘Membership’ link in the nav, than on the advertisement in the right sidebar. (We track this by using two different campaigns).

Here are the results from Nov 23rd 2010 – Dec 7th 2010:

Sidebar advertisement

• 1.42% conversion
• 6 signups
• 422 visits
• 0.37% click-through from Think Vitamin
• 39.57% bounce
• 3.02 pages/visit

‘Membership’ link in top navigation

• 2.33% conversion (64.08% increase)
• 30 signups (400% increase)
• 1,288 visits (205.21% increase)
• 1.14% click-through from Think Vitamin (208.11% increase)
• 25.00% bounce (36.82% decrease)
• 3.23 pages/visit (6.95% increase)

As you can see, the ‘Membership’ link in the site’s top nav is massively more effective then the sidebar advert.

I believe this is because people are much more trusting of a native link in the nav, then an advert. Even if the advertisement is from the same company that runs the site.

Next, we’re going to use Optimizely.com to test the performance of a couple different sidebar ads to make sure it’s not just this specific ad that’s under performing.

Graphing the data

In my next article, I’ll walk you through how to use advanced Google Analytics methods to visually chart the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can build this charting into your web app admin, but that takes extra time and effort. Google Analytics does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, which means you can launch more quickly.

Here’s a taster …

It was nothing short of Nerd Fun, watching New Twitter’s rollout. There was impatience, rollout envy, glowering, whining, begging and ultimately a lot of gushing! Incremental rollouts are highly planned, delicate, and impressively important user experiences. From tip-to-tail, a new product rollout to an existing app can be fraught with challenges ranging from downtime to bug discovery to user alienation with revised design and data loss. An upgrade is way more complicated than an update.

New Twitter did a Few Fine Things

• Created a quirky video
• Set up a product announcement page to prepare and educate users
• Using their Zendesk gathered feedback into tickets that their awesome customer support team fielded with timely and graceful response
• Blog announcement “A Better Twitter”
• Blog announcement of Kiva’s NewTwitter Integration
• Blog announcement about a special roadtrip to see NewTwitter in action with users across the continent
• Blog announcement about the %100 rollout to all Twitter users

Product enhancement rollouts include QA, user testing, thoughtful marketing, on-demand customer service, system administration, and responsive design and development fixes.

Most apps aren’t nearly as large as Facebook (maybe you’re still waiting for the new photos enhancements?), Twitter, or even Etsy (whose recent profile page upgrade met with many mixed emotions shared in comments and forums), so incremental rollout does happen a little differently.

Spencer Fry and the Carbonmade team recently rolled out a major upgrade to the Carbonmade platform that affected free and paid users in their ecosystem. Talking to Spencer before, during and after the rollout, I was impressed that his story had a lot of tips, tricks, dos and don’ts that can help a large audience managing apps in today’s fickle and fan-driven marketplace.

Migrate Without Mayhem

Carbonmade‘s Jason Nelson approached the migration of the old Carbonmade platform to the new platform by employing MVC (Model View Controller). MVC keeps things loosely coupled by separating UI from code and isolating the changes with versions. Here’s a quick user-friendly summary on how MVC works:

At the action level (within the controller) code is broken into versioned blocks. For example, when updating a project, you might have:

ProjectController->Update
If v1: old logic (it works - don't break it!)
If v2:  brand new awesome logic!

From the UI (the views), specify what version of the update method that you would like to use. For instance:

Going even further, scope entire “view sets” out by directory. Each directory specifies the versions of the code dependency, so when migrating groups of users it is easy to bind individual website addresses to groups of view directories with the new version of the app. E.g.

carbonmade/v1
carbonmade/v2

Incremental rollouts not only builds hype, allows for bug fixing and user feedback, but it also mitigates risk, downtime and slowness.

Carbonmade’s Rollout strategy Delivered in 3 Phases

1st VIP Users

This group of user are ones who Carbondmade grants all the privileges of a paid account without the cost. This group includes some of the most talented creatives on our website.

Getting the new update into the hands of some of the more heavily trafficked portfolios on Carbonmade, instantly provided the team with emails and tweets to the effect of: “I saw Nirrimi’s portfolio. How’d she get it to look like that?” According to Spencer, “It was exactly how we wanted buzz to begin to build.”

This group was also gracious and supportive, helping the team locate and refine bug fixes, and 5 days later, the app was baked enough to begin rolling out to the next user group.

2nd Paid Users

This group of users received the upgrade in groups of 1,000 users at a time. “It’s a business rule, “Spencer commented, “Paying users deserve the update in advance of free users, but only after things are working smoothly.”

3rd Free Users

This group received the upgrade in groups of “60,000″ users at a time. Relating to Steve Jobs, Apple, and build, Spencer keyed into some interesting observations:

“These guys were chomping at the bit! Many of them are so desperate for the update that they email in asking whether they will get access to the new features if they upgrade. Interestingly, we saw almost double our typical upgrade increase even though more and more of the free users now knew they could get the update anyway. This was certainly owing in part to the great new feature set in the update, but also to the build-up that preceded the expanding release. Hype is the best marketing money can’t buy.”

Usher Users Carefully Into the New UI

As the migration was rolled out to specific user groups (Carbonmade organized sub-groups in their paid and free plans), users were presented with a message bar at the top of their screen saying: “Thanks for trying out the new Carbonmade Let us know if anything looks amiss. Or go back to the old version.”

What was exceptionally important in this brief message was that “Let Us Know” linked to a feedback form where users could share both technical issues and functional (emotional) feedback with the Carbonmade team.

Key to gathering feedback was a new hire, customer service and community manager, Mike (aka Carbonmade’s “Morale Specialist”). Spencer and Carbonmade‘s lean team knew that customer interaction would increase simultaneously with the migration. It was critical to the business, who’s core value is to love their users, that they be prepared to scale for any and all increased interaction, which included:

• 3x the email load pre-migration
• 150-200 Feedback “shares”
• 5x Tweets & Facebook wall posts

The customer service routine certainly ramped up, but the only new addition was a 1.800 number that customers were encouraged to call to get human service, which definitely sets Carbonmade apart in the lean startup model. According to Spencer who has never been shy about the drawbacks of social media, he had some great insights:

“As much as I like to talk about the drawbacks of social media, they can be a really powerful tool for gauging people’s reactions when tied into customer service.”

Spencer also shared how his team made great use of some rather awesome free resources for organizing customer feedback,

“Gather up all the feedback (emails, tweets, and Facebook messages), compile them in Google Docs for everyone you work with to see and begin to sort through the messages. If you spot a bug, put it in your tracking system, so your dev team can prioritize and respond. We use Basecamp’s ‘To Do’ list. This is very important, your dev team needs a balance of feedback, don’t overload them with criticisms around the update. Keep their spirits up by focusing on the most positive feedback.”

Transparent Marketing Encourages Excitement

Being transparent and marketing wisely can reduce mayhem and encourage excitement. Four months before they rolled out the upgrade, the team rolled out a new marketing website and made an announcement about the future with a unique “Progress” page. Designer/co-founder, Dave Gorum, used illustration to tell the story of how the Carbonmade team was climbing a mountain and how when the team reached the top they were going to be excited to rollout something to their users that was a product of handwork and sheer awesomeness

Spencer and the team are careful with inundating their customers with communications, in fact before the upgrade Carbonmade had never sent out a single newsletter or announcement. They worked with writer, Angela Black (portfolio), to craft messaging and copy two their two user groups: Whoo! users (paying) and Meh users (free).

Spencer’s One Lament

“If we had had more people and time, we would have created a “What’s New” page similar to what Twitter launched to preview their new update. A “What’s New” page is great for existing users to get a sense of things that are coming in the new version. We tossed the idea around the office, but couldn’t justify the time in relation to this upgrade with our lean team and approach. It’s something we’d recommend to other teams!”

Lessons Learned

• Do segment your users for tiered and incremental rollout
• Do create transparency in advance
• Do communicate with direct email marketing
• Do scale your customer service model
• Do focus on the positive user feedback & shield your team from negativity during the stressful time
• Don’t rush, “release early and often, but don’t release foolishly (e.g. the *new* Digg)

Special Don’ts!

• Don’t move your office days before your rollout “Egads! While we were putting the final tests and debugs on our update, we had to deal with all the things entailed in an office move: furnishing the raw loft space, hiring a cleaning service, setting up Internet, getting the energy bill transferred over, a million Amazon orders, and so on.”
• Don’t move apartments either! Carbonmade is made up of five full-time folks: Spencer, Dave, Jason, Michael, and Mike. In what can only be described as a freakish act of bad timing, Spencer, Dave, and Michael all had to move apartments during the month of September. Spencer and Dave only from one New York City apartment to another, but Michael from Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter and all his belongings to NYC.

Lastly, if you can possibly do so, you should put a moratorium on hiring new people during the few weeks leading up to a release and the few weeks after. It’s not a great environment to bring a new employee into, and the time it takes to get him and her up-to-date is time taken away from focusing on a smooth release.

“Special thanks for the support of our customers! You’re the reason we’re here & we LOVE you!” – The Carbonmade Team

Conversion Rate

• New conversion rate: 0.46%
• Previous conversion rate: 0.39% (+18.62%)

Most of you will know, but this is the percentage of people that sign up to a paid plan. If you pay attention to only one stat on your site, this should be it. Our aim is to get our conversion rate to 1.00% across the entire site. Obviously traffic from thinkvitamin.com converts at the highest rate right now as all of you know and trust us (hopefully :D).

Bounce Rate

• New bounce rate: 42.29%
• Previous bounce rate: 54.86% (-22.90%)

This is the percentage of people that “Bounce” which is defined as a single-page visit to your site. The “Bounce Rate” is calculated by taking the total number of single-page visits (to your website or a set of pages, depending on what you’re looking at), and dividing it by the total number of Visits (to your website or a set of pages, depending on what you’re looking at).

It’s great news if you can decrease this number as it means more people are moving on to other pages on your site, which gives you an increased chance of converting them.

% Exit

New % exit: 39.14%
Previous % exit: 51.22% (-23.59%)

The Exit Percentage is calculated by taking the total number of Exits, and dividing them by the total number of Pageviews. The Exit Percentage doesn’t take into consideration whether or not any of the Pageviews were from visitors who viewed one page or viewed 50 pages.

Old Design vs New Design

The the old design was designed to give a quick overview of the three parts of Think Vitamin Membership (Online Conferences, Q&A Sessions and Video Training) but the glaring omission we made was not saying who the service was for. There wasn’t anything that clearly said it was aimed at Web Designers and Developers. Duh. I don’t know how we missed it, but we did.

Another problem with the old site was that you had to scroll quite a bit to see any valuable information. So on the new page, we tightened everything up so most of the page was above the fold. Here are a couple improvements and updates we made:

• Added the logos of our biggest customers (Disney, QuickSilver, Amazon, Citrix, etc) to lend credibility to the service
• We made it very obvious that the main product is video training, by placing a big iMac with a Vimeo video embedded. The message is very clear: Video Training.
• We added an image of an iPhone and iPad to visually demonstrate we offer iTunes feeds of all the videos so they can be downloaded and watched offline
• We list all the topics covered in the videos, at the top of the page (linked into the site) so viewers would bounce less
• Simplified the entire design to cause less confusion.

The most important thing about this is that we didn’t wait until the design was perfect to launch the product. We designed the site very quickly initially (in about two weeks) and got it live as soon as possible.

We then listened to feedback, measured the stats and then refreshed the site. You won’t know what the right message is for your site, until you get it out there and see what people think. Launch, measure, iterate and repeat.

The new design can be seen below or by visiting the live site.