In the world of tech and marketing, it’s never a best practice to rely too much on hypotheticals and guesstimations when building out a content strategy. It’s far better that decisions are backed by real data — both qualitative and quantitative.
The more information you collect, the better able you are to attract qualified leads, engage the right audience, and ultimately boost conversions. By making a data-driven copy for your email and blog, you’re strategically setting your content up for success.
The big question is, “How?”
How do you create a data-driven copy? How (and where) can you find all of the information you need to write content that generates the best results?
This guide will answer all of these questions and outline five actionable steps you can take to write a better copy. So without further ado, let’s get started.
1. Know how people engage with your email and blog.
In order to make your copy more data-driven, you first need a baseline understanding of your content’s current standing. This means tapping into the analytics side of your email and blog’s past performance.
Open rates, click-through rates, and heat map touchpoints — are a few of the many types of data you can pay close attention to during this first step of the process. Take this opportunity to learn more about what you are and aren’t currently doing well.
If your blog posts aren’t getting much organic traffic or certain emails have a higher open rate than others, these are things you need to know now so you can implement changes soon.
Once you’re updated on recent and past analytics, you can spot all of the key issues and start workshopping solutions. One resource that can help you do this effectively is customer feedback.
2. Compile a ton of customer reviews & feedback.
Taking that first step to analyze your blog and email engagement is crucial, but compiling customer feedback is the next step that gives you even more insight into the user experience. There are a few ways you can collect this type of data, so let’s explore the best options:
Review websites
If you want to find out what customers are saying about your company, a third-party review site like Trustpilot or G2 is a great place to start sourcing that information. You’ll be able to read through the entries and start identifying trends in customer feedback.
For example, maybe some customers are frustrated with the blog’s load time or feel like they’re receiving emails that aren’t personalized for them. Hopefully, this won’t be the type of trending feedback you’ll get, but regardless, these sites can help illuminate areas of improvement.
Your customer support team
When it comes to understanding your everyday customers, you already have access to one of the best resources available: Your customer support team.
Day in and day out, customer support professionals are engaging with all of the people that you’re wanting to connect with via email and the blog. By reaching out to this team and getting their insight, you’ll better understand your target audience.
VoC research
The third and most direct way to collect new data about your customers is to conduct Voice-of-Customer (VoC) research. This can take shape as an email survey, focus group study, one-on-one interview, etc.
Essentially, VoC research allows you to ask direct questions and get direct answers from your audience. It gives your customers (and anyone else involved) the opportunity to share how they feel about your company in their own words.
This is a great way to gather a ton of qualitative and quantitative feedback, but it does take a fair amount of work on your part to conduct the research and analyze the results.
3. Use SEO early and often.
Getting a blog post to rank on the first page of Google results isn’t easy. In fact, 90.63% of web pages don’t actually get any organic traffic from this search engine. To give your blog a competitive advantage and earn more page one rankings, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial.
For blog copywriting especially, SEO-driven keyword research is one of the most effective ways that you can find out what type of content piques your target audience’s interest. Once you know which keywords are most popular, you can write blog posts about those topics.
Instead of guessing what your customers want, you can know with certainty and then optimize your blog to be more relevant to them.
4. Get in the habit of running regular A/B tests.
As you write copy for your email and blog, you can learn even more about your audience’s interests and engagement by running regular A/B tests. Not to mention, making informed improvements based on test results could boost conversions by 400%.
Email in particular is a great channel for this type of split testing because you can test different subject lines, previews, CTAs, and more to learn what copy variations people respond best to. For the most accurate results, just focus on testing one aspect of the email copy at a time.
That way, you can know with certainty what is responsible for an increase or decrease in engagement.
5. Audit the email and blog every few months.
No matter how data-driven and optimized your copy is now, improvements can always be made.
After implementing all of the previous steps in this guide, it’s time to find out whether the copywriting changes you’ve made have actually produced the results you wanted. This is where regular audits pay off.
When you audit your email and blog channels, you’re essentially taking a step back, gathering as much data as you can, and then analyzing the effectiveness of your content strategy. You identify any specific improvements that still need to be made and then make them happen.
Ultimately, all of the steps outlined in this guide are only effective long-term when implemented over and over again — not just once. To write more data-driven copy, you have to constantly seek out new data from different sources and then implement changes.
Mackenzie is a copywriter at Soundstripe, a stock music company that provides filmmakers, creators, and advertisers with non-copyrighted music such as royalty free music for Instagram (and many more genres).