Having a marketing automation engine is an integral part of your nonprofit’s marketing strategy. When you boil it down to the basics, the engine revolves around two concepts: providing your customers with what they want, and getting them to take actions that align with your organizational goals.

Simply put, your marketing automation engine is about creating a win-win relationship between you and your customers. It’s about respect both for your customers’ time and needs and for your organization’s vital mission.

Read this guide to learn how to set up your marketing automation engine in 5 easy (not simple!) steps.

Step 1: Map out your big picture goals

Your organizational goals may be slightly different, but here’s how we mapped it out at FEE:

• Increasing donations — We wanted to automate the process of asking engaged people on our website to support our mission’s work.
• Increasing programs — Programs are the center of our mission. By setting up conditional logic to send certain customers timely and appropriate CTAs (Calls-to-Action), we can increase customer satisfaction along with the number of programs booked.
• Business intelligence — We wanted a section in this engine dedicated to helping us understand more about our website visitors. Are they coming from a domain name that’s tied to a grant-making organization? Our development guys will want to be notified of that. Are they potential partners? External relations needs that information, etc.
• Customer journey attribution — One thing that donors and grant-making organizations often ask is, “How do you know that you’re having an impact on your target demographic?” Setting up a simple customer journey section of your engine will help your organization approach donors with accurate and quantifiable results. You’ll be able to say X number of people saw our videos, Y number of those signed up for an e-newsletter, and Z number of those are highly engaged with our content.

Step 2: Draw a diagram

Now that you have a good idea of what you want the marketing automation engine to accomplish, draw out a simplified diagram of how you want traffic to flow.

The diagram does not need to contain every bit of conditional logic (it shouldn’t). You may even deviate from the diagram when you run into technical obstacles in your marketing automation software. But it should provide a good understanding of how the engine works.

When you build the engine, think adaptability. You want to be able to switch out parts on the fly if you discover they’re not working the way you want them to. Baking in long-term structure with easy adaptability is both an art and a science.

Start by separating it by the four organizational goals outlined in Step 1(you can add more as we did in the diagram below, but it’s not necessary).

Then break it down into 5 easy-to-visually-differentiate components. This is extremely important as you share this with decision-makers at your organization. The following are some of the main ways we chose to break this diagram down:

• Entry points

Where do the rules and conditional logic start that determine which path your customers take?

• Automations

Include some (not all) of the automations you have running behind the scenes. This will also help decision-makers at your organization better follow the logic of your diagram.

• Conditional logic

The bulk of your automation is built on easy-to-comprehend (yet not simple to execute) conditional logic. IF/THEN.

• Automated emails

Any strong marketing automation engine employs automated touch points with customers. In fact, this is the central piece of your automation. While you can’t spam people (and you don’t want to — it would be counterproductive to your goals), you do want to reach out to them tastefully if they complete certain actions on your site.

• Customer Journey = “TRUE”

Adding a few of these visual markers in your diagram can help your organization’s leadership grasp how customers are qualified as having been on a journey.

We chose page engagement, specifically, 25 pageviews. For example: If someone comes into the funnel from a webinar and joins an e-newsletter and has >= 25 pageviews, then we label their customer journey as “TRUE” — and we can share that beautifully simple funnel with our donors.

Step 3: Create each piece of the engine

While it’s possible to create one large flow in Pardot Engagement Studio, Hubspot, MailChimp, or whichever email automation software your organization has, that would make it very difficult to understand in real time what your customers are doing and troubleshoot issues.

Just like an actual engine exploded-view image, breaking the engine down helps to better comprehend what each piece does and, when something goes wrong, what exactly went wrong.

As you can see below, we’ve broken down the engine into multiple parts.

Within each section, you’re going to want to break it down further. Below is an example of one part of these sections broken down further:

For example, what you see above is that based on easy to grasp (yet complex) rules, if someone meets certain criteria such as being highly engaged and not being a teacher or student and subscribing to a certain email newsletter, we send them an automated email to ask to support our mission. If they open it and don’t unsubscribe and are still not a donor after a few days, then we send them another, and so on.

Step 4: Add detail upfront

While not necessary, you can save yourself and your team a lot of trouble by putting the hard work in upfront and adding as much complexity as possible to each part of the engine.

While we could just make do with one of these for the entire Donations section, we wanted to see in real time how people are interacting with our automations by age and acquisition source.

We also wanted to send different automated emails to different segments. For example, if someone is a highly engaged parent on our website, is not currently a donor, and is subscribed to the LiberatED newsletter (parenting and education), we want to reach out to them in a very different way than if they’re a Gen Zer on the Words and Numbers email newsletter.

Segmenting based on psychographics and consumption goals (needs-based) is vital to not only not annoying your customers, but also achieving much higher conversion rates.

Detailed segmentation also helps you understand in real time what’s working and what’s not, so you can adapt quickly, changing out parts of the engine for others where needed.

Step 5: Test, test, test

The last step before going live is to test your engine. Create an internal list of people from your organization and have them run through each piece of the engine. Chances are, they’ll spot issues that can be remedied before going live.

Bringing it all together

Setting up your marketing automation engine is a win-win-win exercise.

It’s a win for your customers as they get better, more targeted CTAs in a shorter period of time.

It’s a win for your organization as they get more donations, more programs booked, and, essentially, “free” employees through automation.

And lastly, it’s a win for you, the implementer. You get to spend less time hurrying around completing tasks and more time engaging your faculties and attention in more specialized pursuits.

As always, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about implementing a similar system at your organization. Thank you for reading!

How to build a sleek marketing automation engine for your nonprofit in 5 easy steps was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Know Thy Customer

One of the strategic goals for FEE in 2020 is to truly know our customers. Thanks to the free market, we now live in a society where access to big data (accurate data from disparate sources that can be drawn upon quickly) is now cheaply available for even small nonprofits like ours to wrangle, mine, and act on.

First, What Tools and Resources Do You Need?

Google Sheets — a free service.

Tableau — or any data visualization software.

A marketing analyst — someone with the skills to regularly update the sheet and build and refresh the dashboard.

How Much Time Should You Allocate per Week?

Expect to allocate about 1 hour per week on gathering data and updating the dashboard. The effort is more than worth the result.

Step 1: Decide on Business Goals

The first step you need to take is to decide what to measure. Align it with your strategic goals. We chose three main KPIs to focus on: reach, engagement, and subscribers. Here’s how you can break it down by channel.

Reach:

• Website: Sessions
• Social Media: Impressions
• YouTube: Video views

Engagement:

• Website: Average session duration
• Social Media & YouTube: Likes, comments, and shares

Subscribers:

• Website: The number of people on email lists
• Social Media: People who “like” your page
• YouTube: Channel subscribers

Step 2: Decide on a Timeline

How often do you want to collect and analyze content and marketing data? We chose to analyze the data on a weekly basis — a Friday to Thursday timeline. We chose this specific timeline for practical reasons. Mondays are hectic enough. Having all data available on Friday morning allows the team enough time to carefully ask the data questions, brainstorm across departments, and prepare for Monday so that we can hit the ground running with an updated plan.

Step 3: Gather Your Data

Create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets with columns like the one above. Some columns like Non-Student % and Organic % (traffic to social that isn’t paid) are optional.

Log onto your social platforms, download your weekly social metrics, and enter that data into the spreadsheet. Yes, there are faster ways to do this, but we recommend starting here as it’s easier than querying an API.

Step 4: Design a Dashboard in Tableau

Let me walk you through the layout of the dashboard we use at FEE.

Section 1: Overall metrics.

Like us, you may want to see the big picture front and center. That includes overall reach and subscribers as well as the change in these KPIs over time.

Section 2: Target customer breakdown.

Add in these eight sections:

• Total weekly reach. This component gives you a quick snapshot of how you’re doing with your target audience each week over the last four weeks.
• Total reach over time. A good long-term snapshot to understand if our tactics and strategies are working, broadly.
• Total reach by channel. This is a great indicator of channel health and will get your content and marketing teams’ juices flowing as they see trends.
• Total reach by channel (rolling 12). A great overall snapshot of which channels are bringing in most of your target audience in the long run.
• Net subscriber additions, weekly. A quick component to validate whether or not you’re performing better with your target audience compared to the week prior.
• Net subscriber additions by channel. Answers the question: which channels brought in most of your subscribers this past week?
• Total target subscribers over time. Self-explanatory.
• Current total subscribers by channel. A quick glimpse of where your target subscriber base lies.

Section 3: Product/channel breakdown.

While sections one and two are more geared towards strategic decision making, section three is meant to drive operations — making it the most powerful and heavily utilized section of the dashboard.

The section is further broken down into 1-week and 7-week change for reach, engagement, and subscribers.

This allows you to react, but also keep the bigger picture in focus. For example, by selecting the product Revolution of One, we can see that Revolution of One subscriber growth on Instagram compared to last week was only 13.6%, while 7-week growth is over 280%! In other words, the overall trend is great, even if last week we didn’t do as well. Keeping both long-term and weekly trends in focus is necessary for making smart marketing decisions.

Section 4: Number of Posts.

One of the best aspects to include in your dashboard is the number of posts your team is doing on each platform. We chose to focus on Instagram by product, but you could include post frequency for each channel (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.).

By including this productivity measurement on your dashboard, you may quickly notice a correlation between posting frequency and reach, subscribers, or engagement. This can be very motivating for your team to actually see how their hard work is paying off.

Alternatively, you might find that increasing posting frequency too rapidly is actually reducing reach due to a platform thinking your brand is spamming. Keeping on eye on this component along with the metrics above can improve your week-by-week decisions.

There are more sections that you could include, but these are the most important to your everyday business decisions.

Step 5: Bringing it All Together

The last step is to get your team together to analyze and report on the data. What is the data saying? The old way of marketing was to act based on well-honed intuitions. But with a tool like this dashboard, you can make smart decisions in real time, based on the facts. Layering your intuition on top of the facts that give context will set your team up for success.

I hope you found this guide helpful. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at sernst@fee.org if you have any questions.

Step-by-Step Guide on How to Create a Powerful Customer Dashboard and Increase Your Reach and… was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You’ve probably heard the common refrain,“there are lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Anyone who deals with numbers on a daily basis knows that an uncritical look at aggregate data can lead to ineffective (or counter-productive) strategies and tactics.

The details matter. In fact, when it comes to marketing analytics informing overall strategy and tactics, details are pretty much all that matters.

To maximize the impact of your marketing strategy, you need to drill down beyond the surface numbers.

You’re probably aware that Gen Z is the most digital generation yet. But where are they really spending most of their time, what attracts them to this platform, and how can you use this information to increase your social following?

Let’s find out.

Where Are Gen Z on Social Media?

A recent Pew poll claimed that over 50 percent of Gen Z use Facebook. This data has been trumpeted around as to say: “See! Facebook is still relevant with Gen Z!”

Unfortunately, the overall stats are meaningless, and in this case, incredibly misleading.

Gen Zers Who Have an Account (percent)

While >60 percent do have a Facebook account, only 36 percent actually use Facebook at least once a week, compared to 89 percent using YouTube at least weekly.

On top of that, Gen Z mostly use Facebook for events and connecting with family members, so that may also further decrease the importance of the platform for achieving your organizational goals.

While Gen Z engage far less with Facebook than even the top stats would claim, the exact opposite is true for YouTube. The vast majority (95 percent) of Gen Zers visit YouTube every month, with half of them spending around three hours daily on YT.

Looking at this data, it becomes very clear how deceptive the surface numbers can be for marketers.

When a poll claims that Gen Z use Facebook, the word use takes on an entirely different meaning than when saying they use YouTube–both in how they utilize the platform and the amount of time spent using it. Gen Z aren’t just ~20 percent more on YouTube–they’re on YouTube far more.

Why Do Gen Zers Go to YouTube?

One reason Gen Z go to YouTube is to get a break from the stress of daily life and the pressures of marketing their personal brand on social media. When marketing to Gen Z on YouTube, keep in mind that many come to the platform to escape, not to promote their online personas through content sharing.

The benefit of this to marketers is huge. Hidden away from the spotlight, Gen Z browsers aren’t “on”–they’re their most authentic selves on YouTube, and most open to being influenced by your organization’s narrative.

When not “on”, people are more relaxed. And because they’re less guarded, they are, by extension, more emotionally vulnerable.

Use this as an opportunity to connect with your audience, through video, in an emotional way. Build a connection based on person, not persona — a connection based on your authentic self, not an image of yourself that you wish to convey. Gen Z expect a basic level of production values. But they don’t go to YouTube for your After Effects skills. They go there to unwind emotionally. Open up to them, and they will listen.

And more good news: Gen Z also go to YouTube to learn something new. If you run an organization that is dedicated to educating young people, then YouTube should be the primary channel you employ to reach your audience. After all, 85 percent of Gen Zers go to YouTube at least once a week for this specific purpose, and 59 percent say that YouTube is their preferred learning method — that’s more than in-person group activities, learning apps, and far more than books.

How Do Gen Zers Learn on YouTube?

We’ve already established that Gen Zers are on YouTube far more than other social platforms — especially when seeking to learn something new. And we know why they visit YouTube. But how exactly do they learn?

While we may think of Gen Z as a generation of autodidacts, in reality 78 percent prefer that teachers help them learn. Having someone guide them through complicated learning processes in a sequential manner could help attract more Gen Z to your organization.

You also may have heard that Gen Z prefer personalized learning, with a large number of Gen Zers not willing to return to a brand that doesn’t meet their tailored preferences.

Your organization may create a variety of different kinds of content. Publishing everything to one YouTube channel is easy, but may discourage subscriptions. We at FEE have found this to be true.

People who love our Out of Frame series exploring political/economic topics through the lens of Marvel and other movies may not be interested in our How we Thrive women’s empowerment series. Fans of our inspiring entrepreneurship series, Revolution of One, may not enjoy the funny educational cartoons we produce for Common Sense Soapbox.

Segmenting audiences takes some work, but the reward is worth it.

You may also have heard that Gen Z have very limited attention spans, or the opposite. The answer is actually a bit more nuanced than this.

While the ability to focus may actually be increasing overall, Gen Zers are much more selective with which content they choose. Gen Z are the popup generation. If the story can quickly capture their attention, then they will devote a large chunk of time to engaging with it.

If your organization seeks to educate Gen Z on YouTube, factor in that while they may have long attention spans to devote to watching video, catching their attention quickly is a must. You don’t need to resort to flashy graphics or puerile, base tactics. But you do need to offer value more quickly for Gen Z than for other generations.

Get Serious About Marketing to Gen Z

Overall numbers are mostly useless when it comes to marketing decisions. In fact, they might lead you in the wrong direction! Taking a critical eye to statistics is the first step to moving from being a novice to an expert marketing analyst.

Often, I find that there are two major deterrents to generating solid marketing insights: laziness and impatience. Either one of those leads to simply grabbing the surface data and running with it. The good news is that you don’t need to be a genius to develop solid marketing insights that boost your ROI. You don’t need to think incredibly fast…you actually need to slow down. And most people, with the right amount of discipline or external helpers, can accomplish this!

I hope that these insights will help you create a more effective content marketing strategy for Gen Z, and that you can foster a culture of critical thinking at your organization. I look forward to providing you with a more nuanced look at other areas of marketing in the future.

Gen Z Online: A Critical Look at the Numbers was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s talk about five principles that help the marketing team at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) communicate more effectively with our customers.

1. Clearly state the value proposition

Every message should clearly communicate the value our customers will gain from the product we are selling.

Let’s break that down:

Although FEE is a non-profit organization, we consider everything we do to be a product which can be sold to a customer just as much as McDonald's offers a tasty Big Mac to their customers.

Every marketing conversation begins with a review of our audience:

• Who are they? What do they care about?
• What do we have that they will value?

For example, when we segmented the market for FEEcon (our big conference this summer), we:

• Split our customers into three groups: college students, young professionals, and older supporters of FEE.
• Brainstormed the values that each group gets from attending FEEcon. From these values, we identified 4–5 value propositions for each group.

Here are two value propositions for FEE donors:

• “Personally witness how your investment in educating the next generation transforms their lives”
• “Interact with the leaders of dozens of partner organizations and major philanthropists across the freedom movement”

And for students:

• “Real skills for professional success and a solid theoretical education”
• “Networking opportunities: Engage with successful entrepreneurs and student leaders”

These value propositions inform all the messaging that we create for this product, whether the medium is an article, email, or Facebook ad.

Consider this ad for students:

And this ad for young professionals:

And here is an ad for donors:

2. Present a single, clear call to action

The motto of FEE’s marketing process is “Always Be Closing.” Everything we do as marketers is designed to move our customers further toward closing the deal. Every message we make, be it a landing page, email, SMS, facebook ad, flier, whatever, asks the customer to take an action that moves them further down the conversion funnel. Each marketing communication has to have a large, prominent request to take a single action which will give the customer some sort of value.

This doesn’t mean that every marketing message has to ask for a deep commitment. We have a conversion funnel for each customer person which consists of a series of small messages. If we want students to apply for a three-day seminar, we first ask for their email so we can send them a free book or guide. The goal of each communication is to deepen awareness of our products and lower the barriers they have to the next step.

3. Make messaging personal

The essence of our communications strategy is to make every message we send feel like it was written just for you by a real human being who cares about your concerns and is eagerly awaiting a reply, then use marketing automation to scale up that personal feel to thousands of people.

There are a few ways we do this:

• Every email comes from a real human being. We don’t use any noreply@, support@ or sales@ emails. This includes transactional emails such as payments, registrations, reminders, etc.
• Emails use a first-person informal tone. We never say “we.” Messages take the tone of “I would really appreciate if you could do x.”
• We sign all emails with a name just as we do with our personal mail.
• We use plain text format whenever possible, especially if we expect a reply. When we use CRM tools to target messages, we export the names into Gmail or send a plain text message whenever we can. Marketing messages sent in plain text from Gmail avoid both the junk mail and the “Promotions” folder.
• We make messages short and to the point. Because we can speak directly to the recipient's values, we can offer something that we know they’ll care about and don’t have to waste space addressing everyone.
• We talk like a normal conversion. We experiment with short, informal, lower-case subject lines such as “quick question:” or “you’re missing out.”

Marketing email from our CRM tool sent via Gmail

4: Focus messages on specific customer personas

It’s easy to say that every message should push the customer down the sales funnel. The hard part is to track who each customer is, and where they are in their journey.

At FEE, we use HubSpot to split our users into a lifecycle stage funnel (lead, subscriber, opportunity, customer) and a customer persona (college student, parent, interested donor, casual reader, etc). HubSpot tracks every visitor’s web and email interactions, and dozens of workflows use specific triggers, e.g., visiting the donate page recently, to classify people into personas based on recent behavior.

This allows us to tailor messages to the specific customer profile and offer them a product that we think they are most likely to be interested in. This minimizes our unsubscribe rates and keeps followers interested in our content.

Additionally, we make heavy use of retargeting for our advertising. We show Facebook and Twitter ads based on specific pages people visit. If you’ve visited FEEcon.org recently, you’ll start seeing more FEEcon ads in your Facebook feed until you register, which will switch you from our “promotion” (please register) to the “nurture” campaign (please share this with your friends). If you’re not on our daily email list, you’ll see a lead form in your feed, otherwise, you might see donor messaging if you’re a heavy user of the site.

Partial snapshot of personas and lifecycle

5: Experiment to identify the best strategy, then automate it

We don’t plan a grand marketing strategy for each product. The fact is, we have no idea what kind of message will resonate with our audience. Our marketing strategy is basically this:

A. Define the audience
B. Define the value proposition
C. Experiment with campaigns based on A and B at a small scale until we find something that works
D. Scale-up C.

We build workflows that capture the most effective strategies and automate them for each customer journey. We use HubSpot to build one or more workflows for each product which contains a series of calls to action, triggers, messages, and rules. First, we capture leads with a CTA on a website or ad, then we enroll customers in workflow and nurture them until they convert (buy the product, register for an event, donate to us). This enrolls them in a new workflow which is designed to deepen their commitment and cross-sell other products, starting the process over again.

Five Principles of Effective Marketing at FEE was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Grant Brown

All your surveys and analytics aren’t enough to tell you why your customers use your product. People don’t buy things because they’re Gen Z or “urban” or albino; they are “hiring” your product to do a job. Figuring out what job will give you the laser focus you need to make your product stand out.

In this guide, I’ll share the open-ended question and interview techniques that will help you uncover those jobs to be done. Your customers will spill their guts! And I’ll give you the tool you need to spin those guts into gold. You’ll be making data-driven decisions in no time.

Identify your assumptions

If you’re going to have a chance at making products people love, you need to start by getting to know those people. Understanding a person starts with talking to them like a human being and genuinely listening to what they have to say. That means you need to get out of the building. It also means you’ll need an interview script. But resist the temptation to start writing questions right away!

Instead, start by formulating a hypothesis. What problem do you believe your product is solving for your customers? How do you think it solves that problem? Can you test it? Despite our best efforts, we all make assumptions about our products. Good interview questions will test those assumptions. When we created a script for our networking conference, we started with the assumption that attendees wanted to network with like-minded people. That led to the hypothesis that attendees were sharing contact information with other attendees. We can test that!

Create a research plan

Once you have a testable hypothesis, it can be helpful to create a research plan. Identify a handful of goals for your research and a few bullet points for each to help you focus your questions. If your hypothesis is that people eat ice cream when it’s hot out you might have goals for your research of discovering when people prefer to eat ice cream, what alternative products they consume, and what activities they engage in when it’s hot out. This is a mental exercise to get you thinking about what you hope to accomplish from your research. If you put in the legwork here, the next part will be a breeze.

Craft your questions

Now you’re ready to craft your questions. You’ll want about 3–6 to keep your interviews short. The most important thing to remember here is to avoid inserting your own biases. Like armpits, we all have them and they stink. We bring our own bias to everything we do and most of the time we don’t even notice it. If we ask biased questions, we get biased responses. Most people want to be nice and will tell you what they think you want to hear, often without even realizing they might be bending the truth. To get honest opinions we have to ask honest questions. This requires a disciplined approach.

Keep it open

One way to keep your questions honest is by keeping them open. Open-ended questions don’t have an answer baked in. That means they can’t be answered yes or no, or in less than a sentence. If you think your customers are annoyed by ads, don’t ask them if they’re annoyed by ads; instead, ask them how they feel about ads. Remember, you want to get your customers talking. You want insights you couldn’t get in a traditional survey, so open-ended questions are your friend.

Don’t lead them on

You’re probably expecting your customers to answer questions in certain ways. Maybe you think customers will bring an umbrella when it rains. Don’t mention the umbrella! Instead, ask them what they’d do when it rains and let them explain. The goal is to test your assumptions. You can do this by prompting your customer to recall a specific scenario and describe it to you. This is how you get them to open up.

Don’t try to predict the future

Don’t ask your customers what they would potentially do in a given scenario or what they would want in a perfect world. They don’t know because they can’t predict the future! They might make something up, but it won’t be reliable, and it will make them uncomfortable. Instead, ask about past behavior. Don’t ask if a customer would sign up for a service; ask if they’ve signed up for a similar service before, then ask them to tell you more. Don’t ask what their perfect tool would look like; ask about the tools they’re using now and the problems they’re experiencing with those tools.

Test your tech

Once you’ve written your questions, it’s time to test them. You’re going to need to record your interviews, so make sure you’re testing your recording equipment at this stage. You don’t need professional equipment; a smartphone on the table running a recording app can do the trick. If you can capture video that’s great, but audio is enough. Try to imitate an environment that’s similar to the one in which you’ll be running your actual interviews. Are you going to be in a noisy area? If so, make sure your recording equipment can filter out background noise well enough for you to review and understand the audio later.

Grab some colleagues and roleplay your script with them individually. Have them answer the questions honestly as if they were a real customer. Try to stay in character and ask your test subject to save any feedback about the process for the end. When you’re done, listen to your recordings. If a question isn’t working, change it! Also take note of the average interview length; when you meet your customers, it helps to let them know how much time you’ll need. It should be around 20 minutes. If it’s taking much longer, you may need to cut a couple questions. If it’s too short, your questions might need to be more open-ended, or you may need to ask more follow-up questions.

Find your peeps

Next you need to figure out where your customers are hanging out. Are there online forums where people are discussing the problem your product addresses? Google it! Figure out where your people are and go there. In-person interviews are much more effective. Walking up to someone and asking for an interview is far more likely to result in success than sending them an email.

Talk to them

You might expect difficulty getting people to talk to you. It turns out it’s pretty easy. People love to talk about themselves, and 20 minutes isn’t a huge time commitment. Still, incentives work, so grab a handful of $10 Amazon gift cards. $10 for 20 minutes of time is an easy sell.

As you approach a person, introduce yourself and get their name. Use their name as your talk to them (it gets their attention and builds rapport), and ask if you can record a 20-minute interview with them in exchange for a $10 gift card. Make it clear this recording won’t be shared publicly (and don’t you dare share it publicly) and you shouldn’t have much trouble getting some interviews. If people brush you off, just move on. You want people who are going to open up; pressuring them into an interview would be counterproductive.

Once you have permission, start recording and ask your customer a non-interview question or two to get them opening up. You want it to feel more like a conversation than an interview. Questions about their family, pets, and job are usually safe. Talk to them like a friend. You want them to be comfortable around you. Don’t be a robot!

After a minute or two of chit-chat, start on your list of questions. Be careful not to just read from the script; ask your questions as if you were conversing with an old friend, and then actively listen to the (most likely fascinating) human being who has taken the time to share their story with you. If they say something interesting, ask a follow-up question. Be cautious not to agree or disagree with them too much; you want their answers to be uninfluenced by your personal biases. A good way to avoid this is by using neutral language like “that’s interesting, could you tell me more?” Ask your customer to describe how that made them feel. Psychiatrists use this trick for a reason.

Timebox your interview! If it’s gone over the agreed time limit, wrap it up. It’s okay to skip a question or two. Finish your interview by asking if there’s anything you forgot to ask. Sometimes customers have something they’re just itching to talk about, and you’ll get the most interesting insights from asking this.

Analyze your data

After 5 or so of these interviews you should have enough information to start discovering data trends. Time to get nerdy. I recommend this template for the job. Don those headphones and make a copy of the template. Transcribe your interviews and sort the responses into columns in the CSV Export tab. Once you’ve entered all the responses, categorize them using the instructions from the template and make some pretty graphs.

Impress your peers

At this point, you could be done. You have some interesting data that you could go ahead and present to your colleagues. But this format isn’t great for sharing and you’re missing one of the coolest things: the quotes from your customers! If you want to up your game and impress your peers, put together a presentation. Pull in some of the most interesting graphs and pair them with direct quotes from your customers. Share it at your next meeting. And when people ask how you got all these great insights, feel free to send them a link to this article.

Here’s How to Get Your Customers Talking — and what to do with the results was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m proud to say that the last few years have been extremely transformative for FEE, taking us from an organization with no professional media capabilities at all to a movement leader in creative design and multimedia production. In this three-part series, I’ll share strategies I’ve used to find success directing and motivating my team.

PART ONE OF A THREE PART SERIES

Clarifying Your Vision

We have had to intentionally produce conditions where creative people can get into their most open and imaginative states of mind as quickly as possible, and where they have the time and tools they need to solve creative problems effectively.

I believe that there are three essential components to doing this well:

• Radical clarity of the creative vision and desired audience;
• Flexible working structures that allow individuals to quickly and consistently tap into their most open and imaginative mental states;
• Competent, collaborative, and honest feedback that helps shape unconstrained creativity into excellent and practically viable final products

The importance of being able to clearly articulate your creative vision cannot be overstated.

Without knowing what you’re trying to say, who you’re saying it to, and why it matters, you’ll have no hope of conveying the kinds of information your creative collaborators need to do their jobs effectively.

This does not mean that you should know what the end result will look like in advance — if you already knew that, then there would be no point in hiring specialized creative professionals in the first place.

What it does mean is that you should work to identify the specific problem you’re trying to solve by producing a piece of creative media and how to communicate your needs to the people who will ultimately be responsible for imagining and executing the solution to that problem.

It also means that you need to invest the time and effort to understand what you want to accomplish before you begin working on the final product.

There will be plenty of room to experiment and play with different approaches throughout the development and feedback process, but the one thing that should ideally never change is the goal of the project itself. If you begin a project by telling your designer or video producer that you’re trying to reach high school students in Dallas, TX with a message about how entrepreneurship is a path to personal fulfillment, the ideas they come up with are probably not going be useful if you suddenly change to a goal of talking to college students in Chicago about occupational licensing.

A set of creative goals that’s constantly shifting is like quicksand under the artists’ feet. Nothing will sink a project faster.

But the question remains: Once we have a clear understanding of the problem we wish to solve and the basic vision for the project, how do we decide what to create in a world of endless possibilities?

The Seven Criteria of Project Selection

Deciding which creative projects to attempt is an incredibly difficult job, both as an artist and as any kind of executive producer or creative director.

We live in a world of infinite creative ideas but painfully finite resources. Each of us has a limited set of resources and skills, goals and values, and most importantly a limited amount of time with which to create, so it will never be possible to pursue every idea we have, no matter how good it seems on the surface.

In my estimation, there are no fewer than 7 specific criteria that must all align before a project makes sense, and each of these is variable and carries different weight on the decision.

First, as obvious as it might seem, we must start with a genuinely (1) Good Idea that can translate well to the chosen medium (video, audio, design, etc.).

Ideas are easy to come by, but frequently (especially in the nonprofit world), they aren’t workable, interesting, or compelling. Over the past 15+ years that I’ve been producing original creative content, I’ve generated and/or been pitched several hundred different concepts, but very few of those were actually good for the intended medium.

Visual (and auditory) storytelling is different than writing an article, a white paper, or a book, and writing for video or designing artwork for digital or print distribution are special skills that take thinking beyond abstract concepts or dialogue, so finding an idea that actually makes sense for the medium is not easy — especially in an environment dominated by left-brained, systemizing thinkers such as economists, philosophers, and political scientists.

But beyond merely having a Good Idea, these ideas must (2) Fit Brand’s Vision, and they must (3) Fit Brand’s Tone.

For example, FEE is a 72-year-old institution with the crucial mission of advancing a free society, so producing any good idea still isn’t enough. It must be an idea that actually advances our vision of a free society in some meaningful way.

In addition, because FEE is an organization that caters to parents, young students, and the general public; because it has donors to attract and keep; and because we have a long-standing legacy to uphold, we must also be very careful about the tone we present to our audiences.

The tone we want to cultivate at FEE is “optimistic, empowering, dynamic, morally principled, credible, and collaborative.”

This is can be a tough needle to thread when we also want to dominate social media. It’s no secret that much of the most shareable content online is pessimistic or angry, sarcastic, insulting, tribal, and deceptive. In general, if you can get someone to feel outraged or present them with content that provides a new reason to hate an enemy or pat themselves on the back, you’re probably going to get them to click on your content and possibly share it with their friends.

For example, there is no shortage of content like this on social media:

Note that in both of these cases, apart from simply being poorly designed and ugly to look at, the images are intended to pit one group of people against another and rely on creating a sense of outrage or anger to connect with its intended audiences. My view is that while this is quite often the easiest path to success online, it is also frequently unethical and probably damaging to society in general.

More importantly, from the standpoint of project selection at an organization like FEE, “good ideas” that are mean-spirited, inappropriate, fail to honor donor intent, which violate 501(c)3 rules, or fail to comply with the law in some other way simply must be rejected.

From there, once we have a Good Idea that Fits FEE’s Vision and Tone, I begin asking questions about the idea as a matter of strategy. Is the idea (4) Relevant to an Audience that we’re trying to reach? Is it actually (5) Likely to Succeed given all that we currently know about what’s trending, what topics or styles are popular, and what kinds of stories people, in general, seem to respond to? Is it (6) Unique, both to FEE (ie. do we have overlapping projects happening simultaneously?) and to the market at large (ie. is someone else doing this already?) and thus unnecessary?

Last, but perhaps most importantly of all, we have to be realistic and ask whether this idea is actually (7) Possible to Execute.

Getting Realistic About What’s Possible

Like many other organizations in our network, FEE has an incredibly small production team — just 3 full-time staff members and a number of independent editors and producers who work on specific projects.

This means that we have serious limitations both with regards to time and to overall capabilities.

We have an excellent team, but quality media production is still an incredibly difficult and complex process that requires a variety of skill sets from understanding and internalizing aesthetic ideas like story, design, composition, framing, rhythm/pacing, etc. to hard skills like using cameras, lights, editing & visual effects software, and other technology. We also have a budget significantly under those found in the broader media industry, and yet a core goal of the YEAR project requires us to be able to produce a wide variety and large quantity of content, so we need to make all of our resources go as far as we can.

Another, often underrated, aspect of assessing whether or not a project is truly “possible” is how passionate the creative team that will actually work on it is about the idea.

Our now award-winning documentary series, “How We Thrive” is successful partly because the director/producer team contracted to shoot and edit those films went into the project with a strong passion for telling stories about female entrepreneurs. That passion inspires them to work harder, pay closer attention to the fine details, and care enough to get every aspect of the film right.

It’s a similar story with my own video essay series.

“Out of Frame” has generated several million views on YouTube since it started, contributing significantly to our rapid growth in subscribers on that platform — from a virtually dead channel to over 100k in around a year and a half. But that would not have been possible if I wasn’t personally interested and invested in the style of the presentation, the content, and the ideas I’m writing about each month.

In fact, doing a monthly series that I did not enjoy working on would become a nearly unbearable chore and would not be remotely sustainable.

Regardless of their level of professionalism and talent, pairing a producer or a production team with a project they aren’t passionate about will not create the same results as pairing them with a project they care about, and that fact should play a major role in project selection.

Even when a project is technically possible, a lack of creative inspiration can be even more destructive than a low budget or tight schedule.

After taking into consideration all these criteria, we end up with a pretty narrow set of projects that are truly viable and a lot of projects that might seem like good ideas on the surface but are out of reach. There are a lot of tough choices that need to be made in that regard, based on our judgment of what’s feasible.

These seven steps are essential to making effective production decisions and if well-understood can help organizations and individuals create their best possible creative work.

They’re also the basis for defining a radically clear creative vision, because that kind of clarity only comes with deeply understanding not only your audience, but also the goals of the project you’re trying to create and why such a project is actually the right fit for your organization.

Once your vision is clear, it’s time to figure out how to execute.

For that, we need to proactively build work environments that encourage openness and creativity so that our people are empowered to come up with their best ideas, and then we need to understand on how to use quality feedback to iterate better final products.

This begins with understanding the science of creativity.

Stay tuned for Part II, The Psychology of Creativity and Shaping Innovative Working Environments.

The Art & Science of Building Strong Creative Teams was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you have an event coming up with 50+ RSVPs? Would you like Richard Lorenc to speak to your team about how to craft excellent political messaging? Email him at rlorenc@fee.org.

Do you ever feel misunderstood when talking with friends about your political beliefs?

Young conservatives and libertarians often feel on the defensive today when discussing politics or philosophy in their friend groups, online, and mainstream society.

This is our fault, not theirs.

So what are we doing so wrong when we try to communicate ideas that we believe serve the best interests of each and every person in society?

Over the past two years at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), we’ve been searching for answers to the question: How do we communicate better to people “unlike us?” Under the auspices of our Youth Education and Audience Research (YEAR) project, funded in large part by the John Templeton Foundation, we’ve done this by pioneering different tonal, stylistic, and linguistic approaches in order to attract new audiences to the ideas of free-market economics and individual rights.

The results are still coming in, but I can share with you today some of our findings that I hope you can begin to apply in your political conversations

Know Your Goal

Do you intend to persuade, provoke, antagonize, or just try to sound smart? Many of us enjoy playing the bomb-thrower, but that isn’t typically the best way to get someone to see things your way.

Knowing your goal is vital to communicating well. When we set out to begin the YEAR project, I told our team that our goal by the end of three years was to be able to scale the top of Liberty Mountain (i.e., the collection of the many fine groups and individuals that make up our liberty movement), slam a book of messaging research findings down on the table, and declare just like Margaret Thatcher did when she presented F.A. Hayek’s classic The Constitution of Liberty from her purse: “This is what we believe!”

Perhaps we weren’t going to discover the silver bullet for being able to persuade every Millennial and Gen Z-er that liberty should be the premier goal of politics, but we were going to produce data to show that there are better ways to talk about our ideas with people who didn’t already buy into them.

In our case, our goal was to gather evidence to persuade our movement colleagues that thinking seriously about target audiences, messaging, and distribution is valuable–it should not just be paid copious lip service every time we attend a conference. We intended to prove that acting thoughtfully with a marketing-first mindset has real value to changing the political culture in the U.S., and we think we now have some great results.

Your communication challenges may be different than our research project, but every challenge should have a clear goal that informs your approach.

Code Switch

When we developed our message testing videos, for example, we set out not to discover just how much adjusting our storytelling approach would affect the average percentage of each video watched among three audiences: Conservatives, Liberals, and Libertarians. We borrowed from the previous work of economist Arnold Kling and his excellent book The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides.

Basically, Kling argues that each of these groups applies a very different basic lens to the world, and that speaking in the terms of each audience is essential to breaking through. Conservatives see the world in terms of civilization vs. barbarism; libertarians see the world in terms of liberty vs. coercion, and; liberals (or progressives) see the world in terms of the oppressed vs. oppressors.

This simple model informed how we wrote every variation of every story designed to address the issues of concern that our market research identified.

My colleagues Josh Sanders and Leisa Miller explain how our scriptwriting team lead by Sean Malone and Jennifer Maffessanti pursued their work: “In one of the videos we made, we told a story about a fictional character named Luis to explain the role that jobs play in wealth creation and prosperity.”

“We created three different scripts, one for each political audience. We kept the story the same but changed some messaging throughout to better address the spectrum of concern for each audience.”

Josh continues, “By telling our message in the language of others, we were able to drastically improve our performance with each audience. For example, we improved our performance among Liberals (formerly our weakest area) by over 370%!”

Referencing the importance of knowing your goal, I’ve been asked by many friends and partners whether these videos have actually taught their viewers anything about the topics presented, whether entrepreneurship, cost of higher education, or ways to address environmental concerns. My answer is: I hope so! We really can’t answer that question from this experiment because our goal was to measure each video’s “stickiness,” not its impact, with each audience. Other FEE videos aim to educate explicitly, and offer next steps that can better answer the question of whether we’ve successful changed someone’s heart or mind.

Be Creative

I’ve learned a lot about data and research methods by seeing how the experts on our team do their work. But fundamentally, I like to think of myself as a creative guy. My dad’s a designer (he launched his career by designing the logo for Target Stores back in the 1970s), and I’ve always had an interest in making our movement present its best face.

As my chef godmother says when referring to culinary presentation, “The eye eats first!”

As a part of our project, we set out to develop media that differed significantly in tone from the lectures and talking-head pieces FEE (and many other likeminded organizations) mostly produced. We launched new products such as the short, animated “Common Sense Soapbox” series by Seamus Coughlin, which tackles economic and individual rights arguments in Socratic, fun fashion.

Sean Malone launched his outstanding “Out of Frame” series that critiques ideas in movies and tv, and has lately had an emphasis on the Marvel cinematic universe. (Economics truly is everywhere.)

FEE’s Distinguished Senior Fellows Antony Davies and James Harrigan have grown an enthusiastic community of engaged fans of their Words & Numbers podcast, which combines their immense knowledge with outstanding wit to delve into complex current topics such as modern monetary theory.

And we’ve made a multi-award-winning documentary on the entrepreneurship of FEE friend and star presenter Magatte Wade who tells the story of how well-meaning handouts are fatal to the growing Senegalese economy. Lifting barriers to entrepreneurship and business, Magatte argues expertly in her chillingly moving way, is the only way to address poverty in her home country and elsewhere.

These different creative approaches in style, tone, and length have been successful in their own ways–many videos routinely get over 500,000 views on YouTube without advertising support. And they have given us the opportunity to observe effectiveness for making our ideas more visible. We’ve combined creative production with creative social media advertising by Leisa Miller and David Veksler in order to expand our reach and build our audience to achieve even more meaningful results in the future.

We may not always make these exact series and we are not aiming to simply “be creative.” This variety of content has given us the chance to exercise our creative muscles intentionally toward the goal of broadening our audiences.

Our beloved movement has so many excellent ideas that would appeal to the vast majority of people in our country if only they were presented in ways that new audiences want to hear them. It’s my hope that FEE can launch this conversation to a new place of prominence so that we provide well-meaning people as many opportunities as they need to begin to listen to our argument that free people–not government–are the best solvers of the problems we face.

Learning to Talk Liberty With People Unlike Us was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Getting people under 18 to engage with paid ads is tricky business. One reason is because Facebook doesn’t allow you to show some ad types (like lead gen) to anyone under 18. Another is because Facebook’s arbitrary policy enforcement could make it so your ads never see the light of day.

But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that teenagers are rarely the ultimate decision-makers in their lives. They have gatekeepers: their parents.

If you want to get the attention of high school students, you have to reach them through their parents.

In September 2017, we ran ads for a student event in Montgomery, Alabama. The goal was to get as many high school and college undergrad attendees as possible. We set up 3 audiences:

From the Law and Liberty event in Montgommery

Targeting broadly all high schoolers and undergraduate students in Alabama seemed to work fine, but when we broke down the performance by age demographic we saw this:

From the Law and Liberty in Montgomery

So it turned out that we had 2 responses from high schoolers, 6 from undergrads, and 6 from parents of high schoolers.

We ran ads for another event in Colorado Springs, Colorado a few weeks later, and saw something similar. We targeted both high schoolers and undergraduate students, and saw very few high school aged people respond to the event:

From an event in Colorado Springs

After noting all of this, we’ve started focusing our advertising efforts on parents of high schoolers instead of high schoolers themselves, and we’ve seen encouraging results.

From an ad for our 3-day summer seminars

Targeting parents on Facebook is extremely easy. When you’re creating an audience, you can add a demographic-based criterion called “Parents with teenagers (13–18 years).”

And that’s all there is to it! You can upload a custom audience or create a lookalike audience and apply this criteria to filter out the parents of high schoolers.

So if you’re putting on an event or looking to catch the interest of high schoolers using Facebook ads, your best bet is to target and appeal to their parents.

How to Get More High Schoolers to Convert on Your Paid Ads was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Overview

In marketing, it’s essential to get in the habit of measuring the results of your efforts. Most digital marketers choose to track page views or number of followers on social media to determine if their marketing is effective. But while those numbers are useful, they’re not great at telling you how effective you are at engaging your users in the long run.

The key to measuring long-term effectiveness is measuring conversions.

For FEE, conversion happens when a visitor provides contact information such as email or phone number. An email address or phone number is different from a social media page like because it opens up an opportunity for two-way communication.

Conversions give you, as an organization, the opportunity to make a more meaningful connection with your visitors, and that in turn gives your visitors an opportunity to delve deeper into the value you can provide for them.

This article is about how we at FEE delight and ultimately convert our users, and how we gauge our effectiveness in delighting and converting our users. We hope this will be especially useful for marketers at other non-profits in the liberty space.

Use CTAs to Engage Users Over the Long Term

CTAs or Calls-to-Action are images, lines of text, or ads that encourage your visitors to take an action. They’re the key to engaging your customers or users in the long-term. Coming up with a CTA is simple: just ask yourself, “What do I want my users to do after they watch my video or read my article?”

Possible CTAs include subscribing to your channel or liking your page, sharing the content they just viewed, opting into your email newsletter, or buying a product from your store. Remember: the goal of CTAs is to keep users engaged with your content.

Here at FEE, our favorite CTA tactic is recommending a related piece of content, and then asking for an email address to access the new piece of content. See below for an example.

As you can see, we published a video about market solutions to environmental protection. Then, we encouraged viewers to check out our free eBook, FEE’s Essential Guide to Protecting the Environment, to learn more about the topic. Users give us their email address to access the eBook.

Collecting emails (also called “lead generation” or “lead gen” in marketing speak) is a major part of our strategy to identify users and engage them in the long run.

We’ve experimented with collecting leads on landing pages, directly through Facebook ads, and through pop-ups on our website. Currently, our most powerful channel of lead generation is through pop-ups on FEE.org.

Read on to get a look at our strategy past and present, as well as some tips and tricks to make sure you and your visitors are getting the most out of your interactions.

Past FEE Lead Generation and Nurture Strategies

Using Facebook Ads to Collect Leads

There’s a type of ad in Facebook ads manager called “lead generation.” This ad type lets you collect an email address directly from anyone who views your ad without directing them to another page. It looks like this:

When you click the “Download” button, this window pops up:

This pop-up window pre-populates the fields with your information. So as the user, you wouldn’t have to type in your email address or name. You just click “download” and then “submit” without wasting any time. This process is effortless for both us and our users, the only downside is the cost.

Facebook ads used to be our most important lead gen channel — until Facebook made some changes to its algorithm. Those changes have caused the price per lead to increase by 475 percent, and ultimately exceed what we believe it’s worth. So we’ve stopped using it as of 2018 and decided to focus on other channels.

Using Landing Pages to Collect Leads

Bringing back the example from the Overview section, directing users from a new piece of content to a landing page with related content is another way we do lead gen at FEE.

This flow works well in theory, but the actual conversion rate (the ratio of total visitors to visitors who download the related content) is quite low. Let’s take a look at the flow and results:

Step 1: A user sees our new video about market environmentalism. In the description of the video, there’s a link to download our free eBook on the topic:

Step 2: User clicks the link and comes to the landing page to download the free eBook. They put their email in the form and submit it.

Results: Out of the 106,000 times the video was viewed, 226 people ended up clicking the link to the landing page, and 60 ended up downloading the eBook.

There’s a lot we can do to try to get more of those 226 landing page visitors to convert (download the book and give us their email address). We can try to optimize the page layout or the book copy. We can also experiment with the copy for the link in the video, and the placement of the link, in order to increase the number of people visit the landing page.

But while using this landing page strategy is better than not doing it, a 0.06 percent conversion rate (60 downloads out of 106,000 opportunities to download) isn’t promising. So before optimizing the process of driving and converting leads on landing pages, we decided to go after lower-hanging fruit and focus on what turned out to be a monolith of lead generation: pop-ups.

Using Pop-Ups to Collect Leads

Our original strategy (before February 2018) was to offer an eBook in a pop-up in exchange for an email address. We showed this offer to every website visitor. Every two weeks, we’d change the pop-up to offer a different eBook to keep things fresh.

Example of a popup

Using pop-ups to collect email addresses from site visitors turned out to be very effective for us because we have a large library of eBooks that we’re able to give away at no charge. We also have the skillset and manpower in-house to create custom eBooks specifically for generating leads. So, over time, we’ve expanded on this strategy and improved it significantly. We’ll talk about exactly what tweaks we made in the ”Current Lead Gen Strategy” section.

Nurture Your Leads to Build Relationships

We’ve talked about some strategies we used in the past for collecting email addresses, but what did we do with the emails we collected?

Like we said in the Overview, the purpose of having CTAs and doing lead gen is to foster long-term engagement. “Building relationships” is called “nurturing your leads” in marketing speak. Nurturing your leads is an irreplaceable part of fostering long-term engagement.

Before February 2018, we didn’t think much about how we interacted with the people who gave us their email. We dumped each new lead on both our Weekly and Daily newsletters.

Real-life footage of everyone we dumped on our email list.

Spoiler alert: This was not good for us or our users. People unsubscribed from our emails in droves, and our email sender reputation started tanking.

Problems with Our Old Strategy for Email List Growth

It took us a while, but we finally realized that collecting emails and dumping them on our daily newsletter is an aggressive, counter-productive strategy. The strategy made our email list huge, but it annoyed many of the people on the list. We could measure the annoyance quantitatively in our open rates: a very small percentage of the list was opening the emails.

The worst part of this strategy was that it was very tricky for us to know exactly who was on our daily newsletter email list. Were these subscribers mostly college kids? Parents? Teachers? Retired econ nerds? We had no clue.

So, we changed up our strategy. And since then, our results have changed a lot too.

Take a look at the change in open and click rates of our daily newsletter, comparing our old strategy to our new one:

Now take a look at the volume of unsubscribes:

It’s like night and day. The daily newsletter email list itself is smaller nowadays, but it’s much healthier, and our users are way happier.

We achieved these new successes by:

• Properly “nurturing” the leads we collect. This involves sending them content and products that are relevant to them. We’ll talk this more in the next section (“Current Lead Gen Strategy”).
• Using more specific, targeted offers to attract more leads and widen the top of the funnel. Since not everyone wants to join a daily newsletter, we realized we need to attract a wider audience to keep up some form of list growth. We’ll also talk about this more in the next section.

By taking the time and care to nurture our leads, we came up with a way to figure out who these people are and what their stations in life are.

Keep reading to learn exactly how we saved our sender reputation, widened our new lead funnel, nurtured those leads, discovered who precisely we’re nurturing, and started the process of turning our users’ fright into delight.

Current FEE Lead Generation Strategy: Targeted Pop-Ups and Nurture Campaigns

What’s Changed

Our current strategy for pop-ups looks similar to the past strategy, but we’ve made three tweaks that have refined our whole process — and results.

The gist of “Give us your email and we’ll send you this free eBook” is the same as before. But instead of running one pop-up at a time sitewide, we’re running 14 targeted pop-ups and 1 untargeted pop-up at a time. We’ve also added a step to the opt-in form: after users give us their email, we ask them if they are a student, young professional, parent, or teacher. Finally, we’ve stopped dumping users on our daily and weekly newsletters and, instead, enter them into a specially curated sequence of nurture emails. They have the option to opt-in to the daily and weekly newsletters at the end of the sequence.

Targeted Pop-Ups

We have a series of Essential Guides on topics ranging from health care reform to not letting politics get in the way of your friendships to poverty alleviation. Each book is very specific, and we publish content on the topics frequently on FEE.org.

Trigger Pop-Ups with URL Keywords

We’ve created a pop-up for each Essential Guide and set special conditions for it to display. For example, the eBook FEE’s Essential Guide to Health Care Reform will only be displayed on pages whose URLs contain at least one of these words: “health, hospital, medical, medicine, Medicaid, Obamacare,” or “doctor.”

We’ve set similar conditions for 14 different pop-ups that offer eBooks.

Setting URL keyword-based conditions is a common feature in pop-up management platforms. We highly recommend targeting your pop-ups like this if you have the content. It will boost your conversion rates.

But there’s also another option if you want to be even more thorough. Not all pop-up management platforms will have this capability. Ours didn’t, but we’re fortunate to have a web developer who could make this work for us.

BONUS: Trigger Pop-Ups with Metadata Keywords

The better trick is to trigger your pop-ups based on metadata keywords. That is, trigger pop-ups based on the topics or tags associated with your articles. We had our developer set us up so that whenever someone visits an article with the tag “Entrepreneurship,” a pop-up with our eBook FEE’s Essential Guide to Entrepreneurship would be triggered.

This was helpful because we like to have freedom in titling our articles whatever is appropriate and not being limited to what our pop-ups need. But if you’re using a pop-up platform that doesn’t let you trigger your pop-ups based on metadata keywords, then using URL keywords will work just fine.

Every Page View Should Trigger a Conversion Opportunity

To cover all our bases, we also run 1 untargeted pop-up at the same time as the 14 targeted ones. On the pages that don’t trigger a targeted pop-up, the untargeted pop-up will display. This untargeted pop-up is usually a classic eBook like Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism or a bundle of 4 or 5 eBooks (e.g. The 5 Essential Liberty Philosophers).

The goal is to make sure every website visitor has an opportunity to convert when they visit our site. We want each user to see one pop-up when they visit an article, and only one.

Don’t Annoy Users; Set Display Limitations

You might be thinking, “You’re running 15 pop-ups at one time? That’s got to be annoying for your users!” But another important display condition we set is “do not display this pop-up for 60 days after users close it.” This type of display condition is a feature in every pop-up management platform.

Results

We knew that targeting pop-ups worked when we saw the difference in our conversion rates.

Old strategy conversion stats

New strategy conversion stats

Higher conversion rates are an indication that the content is more relevant or useful, which means that our users are happier. So we prioritize conversion rates over volume of conversions.

And still, our 14 targeted pop-ups consistently outperform our one untargeted pop-up:

Targeted popup from new strategy

Untargeted popup from new strategy

Gather Persona Data

After creating all the targeted pop-ups, we set out to solve the problem of not knowing who any of our subscribers are.

We got lucky with this part. The first thing we tried ended up working really well.

We added a step in the pop-up, in between collecting the user’s email and letting the user download the eBook, asking if they are a student, young professional, parent of a student, etc.

Old Strategy Pop-Up Step-Through

Step 1

Step 2

New Strategy Pop-Up Step-Through

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

We designed this so that Step 2 is not required. Users only need to complete Step 1 in order to receive the promised eBook and be entered in the nurture workflow. So not all users complete Step 2 and tell us who they are, as we expected. However, it turns out that 98.5 percent do, in fact, complete Step 2.

After spending just a few extra minutes creating pop-ups to include Step 2, we can identify the station in life of 98.5 percent of all new opt-ins. This small change has been instrumental in helping us assess our effectiveness in engaging with millennials.

Nurture Campaigns

So, we widened our funnel by increasing the number of pop-ups on the site and setting targeted triggers, and we now know the stage in life of 98.5 percent of the people who convert on a pop-up. Next, we set up a series of email campaigns to give our new users content we think they’ll enjoy and to give them an opportunity to learn more about the products and programs FEE has to offer.

What Is a Nurture Campaign?

A nurture campaign is a series of emails designed to educate and provide value to leads who don’t know much about you or your organization.

After someone downloads an eBook from one of our pop-ups, they’re automatically enrolled in a nurture campaign. Our nurture campaigns consist of 5 emails:

• User is sent Email #1, containing the download link for the book they requested. This email also contains information about who FEE is and what we do.
• User is sent Email #2, containing 3–4 articles related to the eBook they downloaded.
• If the user did not complete Step 2 of the pop-up and tell us their persona data, they’re sent Email #3, which contains a survey to learn what their persona is. (If the user completed Step 2 and their persona is known, they skip this step.)
• If the user’s persona data is known (they completed Step 2 in the pop-up or they completed the survey in Email #3), they’re sent Email #4, containing links and descriptions of all the programs FEE has that they might be interested in. (If the user’s persona data is unknown, they skip this step.)
• User is sent Email #5, containing links to our social media pages and daily and weekly newsletters. We ask them to follow us and subscribe.

We want all users to interact with us to think, “Hey, these resources are pretty interesting, and this FEE organization is helpful!” We want to educate everyone on our lists about what we do, of course, and we want them to subscribe and follow us across the web. But first and foremost we want to take a customer-first approach and provide value to the people who interact with us.

Opportunities for Insights

Classifying our leads by personas and running email nurture campaigns means we can track exactly which resources are valuable to millennials. After making the above adjustments to our lead generation strategy, we discovered that 15 percent of all visitors who download an eBook from a pop-up are students or young professionals. According to Google Analytics, 47 percent of our website visitors are students or young professionals.

This 47 percent potential engagement vs 15 percent actual engagement discrepancy seems to be an indication that older audiences are disproportionately attracted to our pop-up eBook offers. This is something we will be testing in the future, and as always, we will continue to look for ways to improve how we interact with our younger audiences.

Conclusions and Questions Looking Forward

Conclusions

Our most important takeaways from our CTA research thus far are as follows:

Do Use Pop-Ups and Freebies to Collect Leads

The greater your website traffic, the more you have to gain from doing pop-ups and freebie offers to grow your lead funnel. When Facebook changed its algorithms at the start of 2018, pop-ups became our most cost-effective channel for lead generation.

Don’t Dump Your New Leads onto Your Newsletter Lists

We dumped leads onto our newsletters for several months. As we noted, our open and click rates fell, and our unsubscribe and spam complaints rose. Our sender reputation took a hit. And worst of all, we frustrated our site visitors.

All newsletter subscribers should directly subscribe to your newsletter. Not everyone will subscribe, and that’s okay. Weekly and daily newsletters should be seen as products, just like your eBooks or student programs or T-shirts. Not everyone will buy a T-shirt from you. In the same way, not everyone will subscribe to your newsletter. As a marketer, your job is to discover which product is most valuable to your visitors.

Do Collect Information Needed to Classify Your Visitors into Personas

If you don’t know who you’re emailing, you don’t know what products best suit them. It took us a while to come up with a way to sort our leads into personas. It turns out the easiest way to find out if someone is a student or teacher is to ask in a survey (which can be in a pop-up or an email). Once you know who someone is, you can run tests to find out which products or services are most valuable to them.

Do Make Your Offers as Targeted as Possible

When we started doing topic-targeting with our pop-ups (making a pop-up with an eBook about health care reform display after someone reads an article about health care), we saw a huge improvement in our pop-up conversion rates.

It might be easier to make a single pop-up with a single eBook offer display sitewide, but it’s better for both you and your users if you try to provide what’s most useful or relevant to your users.

Questions

How can we connect better with the younger portion of our audience?

According to Google Analytics, 47 percent of our website traffic is under the age of 35, but only 15 percent of the people who download an eBook from a pop-up identify themselves as students or young professionals (under the age of 35). So it appears that eBooks disproportionately attract established working professionals and retired folks. We’ll be experimenting with products and freebies to learn what might better attract students and young professionals.

How can we employ progressive profiling to learn more about visitors as they continue to visit FEE.org?

We learned that the more you know about your audience, the better you can help them. In the coming months, we’re going to explore ways that we can build more thorough profiles of our site visitors. One idea is to use surveys in pop-ups to see if we can get more information about our visitors.

Overall, the goal is to discover what products and topics are most valuable to our users and see if there are any trends among certain personas (e.g. Are students more likely to read long-form articles or short op-eds? Are teachers more likely to read an article than listen to a podcast? Etc.).

How can we better tailor CTAs to what a user is viewing?

We’ve created pop-ups that are triggered based on URL keywords and page metadata to display content that’s relevant to the page that the user is viewing. Looking forward, we’ll be looking for more ways to better tailor CTAs to what a user is viewing.

Strategies for Fostering Long-Term Engagement with Your Audience was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’re in the liberty space and creating Facebook ads, you may have noticed that your ads are getting rejected more often lately.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal reached its climax in April 2018, Facebook started feeling pressure to be more transparent about their advertising practices. As a result, they’ve changed a lot of things for advertisers. Some of those changes include no longer being able to target audiences based on religious affiliation or job title, or exclude based on political affiliation.

One of the most obvious changes is that Facebook now explicitly identifies all political ad content with a small banner.

All “political advertisers” are required to prove their identity by submitting their home address and social security number, uploading 2 forms of government-issued ID, and then marking each of their ads as “containing political content.” (Google has a similar process for “elections ads”, but for organizations, not individuals.)

Facebook’s definition of “political content” is both long and vague. See for yourself:

With a list this vague, how can Facebook enforce equal and standard compliance? They can’t, unfortunately. Which is why this happens:

Ever since this policy came into effect, we’ve noticed our ads are getting rejected more frequently. Even when they follow this political advertising policy exactly. (The above ad is for a video about political correctness and free speech. The kicker is that we set up 3 identical ad sets for this campaign — 2 were approved and 1 was not.)

Thankfully, getting rejected doesn’t affect your cost per result, reach, or ability to push ads in the long-term. It’s just a temporary nuisance.

So what can you do? How can you remedy the madness? Without further ado, here’s 3 things you can do to get your wrongly rejected ads back on track.

Option A: Appeal the rejection.

I used to get nervous, and sometimes offended, when my ads were rejected. Until I discovered what’s really going on.

Algorithms are what initially determine whether your ads are in compliance with Facebook’s advertising policies. They can guess what your ads are about, whether they’re videos, links, or images, without a human ever glancing at them.

The algorithms take a guess and sometimes they guess wrong. That’s why your totally compliant ads are rejected.

Your first option to right this wrong is to appeal the rejection. (Note: if your ad was rejected because “Facebook determines that it does/does not contain political content,” skip this solution and try Option B or C instead.)

You should receive an email from “Facebook Ads Team” that looks something like this:

Click the “Learn More” button to view the ad. At this point you should have the option to write a sentence or two to a real human and explain why your ad is compliant as is:

Option B: Edit your ad to be in compliance.

This option is ideal if your ad has been rejected because “Facebook has determined it does/does not contain political content.”

As we established earlier, the “political content disclaimer” policy is very vague, so it’s no surprise that its enforcement is arbitrary. My ads get rejected for “containing political content” when they actually don’t and for not being “political” when they actually are about political issues. Sometimes an ad will get approved, and then when I clone it, the clone will be rejected.

The simplest way I’ve found to get my ads through the approval process is to just do whatever Facebook wants. I use my best judgement to classify them initially. If one or more of them get rejected, then I just check or uncheck the “contains political content” box, resubmit it, and get on with my life.

I rarely appeal ads when they get rejected over the political content disclaimer. It’s much faster and more effective to check or uncheck the disclaimer box and republish the ad.

Option C: Clone the ad(s) and have them go through the system again.

Sometimes you just can’t get your completely kosher ads to be approved. You submit an appeal, or check the dumb box, and it’s been a day or two, and you haven’t heard back from anyone. Your ads are stuck in “approval limbo.”

I’ve waited weeks at times for my ads to be approved, and gotten no response. It’s immensely frustrating.

My new rule is to wait 1–2 days on an appeal. If I don’t hear back by then, I just clone the ad and publish it again.

I’ll clone an ad that’s stuck in “approval limbo” as many times as it takes to get approved. Usually, it never takes more than twice.

It’s Not Just Facebook

Google has also introduced a requirement to verify in run political content, and the strategies and frustrations described above apply equally to Google Ads:

Never Stress Over Getting Your Ads Rejected

If your ads get rejected, it’s definitely a nuisance. But there’s no reason to fret. Remember that it’s probably a mistaken algorithm. Take a deep breath and follow one of the steps above to get it approved.

Facebook’s “Political Content Disclaimer” and What to Do When Your Ads Get Rejected was originally published in FEE Messaging Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.