The Scratch Post
Creating Welcome Emails that Engage Subscribers for the Long Term: The Definitive Guide
You probably know about the power of email marketing to boost your sales, inspire people to take action, and build relationships. And yet, many businesses send Welcome emails that say little more than “thanks for signing up — please whitelist our email address”. With Welcome emails getting 86% higher open rates than other newsletter emails, that’s a tragic loss of a brilliant opportunity to leave a strong first impression and engage readers from the get-go. So in this definitive…
SEO vs. Conversion Copywriting
The world of online marketing is a maze of jargon, buzzwords and abbreviations like “SEA”, “SEO”, “PPC”, “Conversion Rate Optimization”, “Growth Hacking” and “Copywriting”. In this article, we’ll help you cut through the buzzwords and make sense of the marketing muddle. Together, Laura, our German SEO strategist and copywriter, and Sabine, a conversion optimisation and copywriting specialist will answer questions like: What is SEO and how is it different from…
Unique Selling Points are dead
Long live the minimum viable audience! Like many industries, the hotel sector is defined by commodification. To compete with one another, most hotels advertise their unique selling points. Typically, these unique selling points are based on the understanding that hotels are in the overnight accommodation business. For example, some brands try to attract visitors with their interior design, eateries or (equally ubiquitous) spa options — all mere extensions of the overnight stay use case.…
Functional Integrity: the Product – Marketing – Sales Relationship
As a communications consultancy for brands with integrity, we connect multiple meanings with the word ‘integrity’. Embracing ethical marketing to treat your customers, the market, society and the planet with integrity is one example. But ethical marketing is impossible without one important meaning of ‘integrity’ that regularly gets overlooked: the relationship between Product, Marketing and Sales in the organisation. At From Scratch, we use the term ‘functional integrity’ to describe a…
Why subheadings are good for blog SEO?
Karo Tak asked us about subheadings in blog posts. If you also blog with WordPress, you may have come across the Yoast plugin. It helps you write in a more readable way, but also helps you optimise for search engines. One of the things that Karo often sees in Yoast is that it tells her, “you don’t have enough subheadings.” Why should you have subheadings in your blog? How can you write better subheadings, and what do they have to do with SEO? In this audit, we’ll look at an example post to…
Is my sales page too long?
Alessandra, owner of Live More Offline, had 2 questions for us: 1. Is this web copy too long? 2. Is it OK to ask people to apply? Or should I offer them a checkout instead? Spoiler alert: The copy in this example was TOO SHORT. And for Alessandra’s offer, an application form was PERFECT. Watch the video or read the transcript to find out why.…
Mission failed — a guaranteed way to not meet the needs of your audience
How does empathy relate to the size of your target group? Nadine offers arguments as to why it’s easy to create less empathetic copy with “universal” or “one-size-fits-all” writing. Of course, you’ll also find plenty of suggestions on how to write empathic copy that resonates with your audience.…
Product Pages that Convert
In this Web Audit, Sabine takes a close look at a product page on a fair-trade, sustainable e-commerce website. What could the website owner do to make the product page convert better?…
How to reply to a customer asking #WhoMadeMyClothes — clearly & convincingly
During #FashionRevolutionWeek, social media is full of important questions which are tricky to answer. Especially in 280 characters. Even if you work for a responsible brand and you already know how to reply to a customer query, these kinds of questions can seem really daunting. So here’s a step-by-step guide for handling #WhoMadeMyClothes well. …
“Can you hear yourself?”
Why does the perception of our own needs and emotions have an impact on our understanding of our audience? Nadine shows that self-empathy can be a superpower for all copywriters committed to ethical marketing.…
Why showing empathy to customers is so important
Few would disagree with the statement “empathy’s important.” But what does that mean in practice? Jeffrey Coleman draws on his experience working in UX and recruitment to share his best advice.…
How to decide which call to action is best?
In this web audit, we’re looking at which call to action is best suited to a home page that’s supposed to generate leads. Our example is from a business-to-business service context. You can apply the same principles to decide which call to action works best in your individual scenario.…
Marketing an 80-page Guide to Ecopreneurship
How do you market an 80-page ebook for ecopreneurs? Should you offer it as a lead magnet — or as a paid product? That’s the core question we address in this website audit for London-based design studio, Little Green Space.…