Welcome to the 2,132 new subscribers this week! Excited to see so many new @'s. This week we cover AI eye contact, freebies in-store, and short free trials.
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On average, 20% of emails don’t hit the primary inbox. Often this is closer to 30–50%. That’s why we teamed up with Drew Price to bring you Own The Inbox.
Drew scaled Grammarly’s email program from 0 to 3 billion emails while hitting the primary inbox nearly 100% of the time. In OTI, you’ll learn how to avoid big penalties, scale your email program without damaging your sender reputation, and maximize the ROI you get from each email. Interested? Join the waitlist here.
You’ll get 20% off Own the Inbox, as well as first dibs on the remaining 140 spots when we launch this Thursday (Jan. 26). 1. Maintain eye contact using AI
Insight from Neal, NVIDIA, and Business Insider.
Eye contact is one of the most powerful persuasive tools on the planet. But staring down the lens of a video camera is an insanely intimidating and challenging task.
Seriously. It's really difficult. Despite that, maintaining eye contact can: - Make you more persuasive.
- Make your words more memorable.
- Make YOU more memorable.
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Make people more honest (and they'll also think you're more honest).
- Create and deepen attraction.
In short: making eye contact in your videos by staring at the camera is hugely beneficial. Here's the great news: AI can now make you maintain eye contact even if you spend the whole time staring at your speaking notes. Or awkwardly darting your eyes around the room desperately waiting for it to be over.
For example:
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Windows 11 already offered this. But honestly, it looked creepy.
NVIDIA took a step out of Uncanny Valley. It's basically impossible to tell that it's fake.
This will likely become the norm. Try it out before everyone else is doing it. |
2. Place your freebies in your shop
Insight from Sarah Renae Clark via Creative Elements. Creator Sara Renae Clark offers a lot of freebies to her audience. It's a really effective strategy. In fact, it's our entire ethos at DC. Provide a ton of free value. Slowly build people's trust over time. Eventually, they'll trust you enough to buy one of your paid products. But instead of only offering her freebies as instant downloads or newsletter rewards, she places some as products in her online shop. |
To get them, users have to go through the normal purchasing process: create an account, add the item to their cart, and check out. But they don’t have to pay, of course. According to Sarah, offering her freebies this way “warms up” leads into becoming paying customers. It’s a practice run that builds her credibility.
The idea is that by going through the motion of buying something without actually spending money, leads will feel more comfortable making a real purchase later on. And they'll already have an account. Making checkout even smoother. Other creators, such as Jack Butcher (Visualize Value), offer both a free and a $1 product. |
3. Shorten your free trials for more conversions
Insight from Ariyh. |
The entire point of a free trial is to prove value and convert leads into customers ASAP.
So how long should your trial be to maximize conversions? Most companies offer free trials of 7-30 days, though some run as long as 90 days.
You can justify both ends of the spectrum. - Longer trials mean users have more time to get familiar with a product.
- Shorter trials create a sense of urgency.
So which leads to more customers? In a study of 7-, 14-, and 30-day trials for a SaaS product, the shortest length (7-day) did best at increasing subscriptions, retention, and revenue.
Meanwhile, there was little difference between the 14- and 30-day trial results. According to researchers, urgency explains why. With a short trial, we use a product more intensively because we want to maximize its use in the limited time frame. But with a longer trial, we tend to use the product much less per day. And as a result, we forget about it in the trial’s last days—the most important period because that’s when we decide whether or not to become a customer. Experiment with short trials to boost conversion. Let us know how it pans out. |
4. Use data to make better marketing decisions
Sponsored by Segment. We've been using Segment at DC for over three years. It's one of my favorite tools.
Why do I love it? Segment:
1. Simplifies tracking. Instead of needing to log every event with 8 different tools, I instead use Segment to do it once. It then sends data to all the tools we use, like Amplitude, Customer.io, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Intercom.
2. Empowers the marketing team. Once you have Segment installed, the marketing team can decide to add a new tool without bugging an engineer to install it. And in my experience, engineers hate doing things for marketers.
3. Pumps data from various tools into others. For example, use Segment to pump data from Intercom and Customer.io into Amplitude where we then analyze our data. Because of Segment, we're able to make informed, data-driven decisions. We have the data we need in the tools we need them. We're also able to make personalized email campaigns. And we massively cut down on engineering resources needed on the team to handle integrating with 8 different APIs on an ongoing basis. And Segment is free for early-stage startups. Apply for the Startup Program → |
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News you can use: -
Google plans to add chatbot features to its search engine this year. Bing is reportedly preparing to do the same with ChatGPT.
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Google Optimize, the free A/B testing platform, is being sunset. To capitalize on the news, VWO created a free plan for 50k visitors/month.
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If it feels like TikTok’s algorithm favors some accounts more than others, it might actually be because of “heating”—a manual boost by ByteDance employees to ensure specific videos get views.
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Are Twitter Bookmarks more like “quiet likes”? That’s what Elon says. After updating how Bookmarks are displayed on iOS, Twitter plans to show the number of Bookmarks a tweet receives in a future update.
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Not to make analytics more confusing or anything, but Meta’s replacing the word “people” with “Account Center accounts” in its ad reporting. A person with one Facebook account linked to one Instagram account will count as a single Account Center account. If they weren’t linked, though, they’d count as two separate Account Center accounts.
Content we recommend: Ahrefs Ahrefs creates some of the best marketing content on the planet. We're big fans.
Nobody knows how to grow organic traffic and convert it into paying customers better than the Ahrefs team.
Learn how to grow your blog past 100k monthly visitors and turn thousands of your readers into paying customers in their Blogging for Business Academy.
*Sponsored by Ahrefs |
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| Top new marketing jobs If you're looking for a top growth role, check out the opportunities below from our job board. |
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See you next week.
— Neal, Grace, Joyce, Dennis, and the DC team. |
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