#32 - Most Media Buyers Don't Understand Copy

I was speaking with a friend on media buying nuances the other night, and he was sharing how most media buyers don’t know how to test copy correctly.

They slap on a bunch of creative/copy variations and call it a day.

It’s mindless, and at the end of the day you don’t know why the copy worked and what exactly worked.

He breaks copy down further into:

• Copy Structure/Type (are we running story types, testimonials, unique mechanism driven copy.etc)

• Audience (and no, this is not interest targeting. for example, if you’re running a t-shirt brand, you’re not only going after ONE audience. there’s subsets like single men wanting to look good, married men who want to look stylish.etc)

• Angles/Messaging (think pain points, dream outcomes.etc)

And understanding this allows you to tap into the blue ocean, without having to take your competitors head on.

Similarly, most email agencies don’t dive into segmentation enough.

And this becomes a problem for big sale dates, like BFCM for example.

So in today’s newsletter, I wanna walk you through an example of how we segmented for BFCM, and why we think this way.

Let’s get started.

BFCM / Segmentation Breakdown

We look at BFCM in three main chunks - early access (3 days), public access (5 days), and post (1 day) [not accounting the ground work of collecting emails/sms before BFCM].

The audience was split into 4 main buckets.

1) Subs (all active customers)
2) Non Subs (BFCM list collected from pop-up + a variety of different software)
3) Engagers (regular broadcast/campaign list)
4) GT Churn (purchase but none in L120)

We then offered a different discount (eg: 10% off + free shipping for life, 15% off, free shipping at $x.etc), based on where the user was in the journey.

This is because different offers are going to speak differently to different users.

And understanding where they are in the journey is going to be key on if you can get them to return.

For example, a 10% off might be enough to tip a current customer over the scale, but might not be as enticing for one who hasn’t purchased for the last 120 days.

And what ticks me off is when brands come to us after working with a previous agency, only for us to uncover they’ve been using a single offer across multiple segments.

Tracking / Email Breakdown

If you’re short on time, the above was the meat of my message (I’m now going to be talking about the big picture stuff).

So we’re driving so much traffic to the site - how are we going to differentiate who’s coming as a result of what?

What we did was:
a) Insert a different UTM for each different offer
b) Based on the offer drive them to a different landing page (with a different banner displaying a different offer)

This helped make it incredibly easy identifying what email campaigns worked (we sent 15 - 20 emails), and what could be improved upon.

(some of our learnings below - but note it varies from account to account):

• SMS tends to drive higher AOV vs emails

• Reminder messages are incredibly effective

• Personalization crushed it for VIPs (purchased >3x), putting them at about a 1.5x order value vs normal customers

And that’s a wrap!

I could go on, but also want to make sure that the content that we’re putting out is digestible (love to hear any thoughts of how we could improve this for you, so please feel free to hit reply!).

And if you suspect that your agency or in-house team might not understand segmentation as well as they say they do…

Feel free to reach out to us here.

More than happy to bounce ideas with ya.

Have a good weekend.