Feedback beacons are going to change your life. Give me 4 minutes and I’ll show how.

You’ve worked so hard to construct your Sales Pitch. How do you know your Sales Pitch is working?

Let’s say this is your Sales Pitch:

How do you know which part was good and which part sucked? If you relied on just the A/B test result you’ll know if the Sales Pitch (as a whole) was good or bad. If it is bad you’d have to rewrite the whole pitch.

But if we could pinpoint where we lost the buyer it would save us from having to rewrite the whole dang thing– we could focus on fixing the precise point that broke the shopper’s attention. That’s what Feedback Beacons fix.

Nature of Feedback Beacons

Feedback Beacons are simple. After each key Selling Angle has been presented to the shopper the marketer simply adds this line: Did this make sense? 👍 / 👎

When 👍 is clicked show this message: Thanks for your feedback.

When 👎 is clicked show this message: I’ll share this with my team and rework this section. Thank you.

In the back end, you are having your developer record these responses along with the Selling Angle they are associated with.

The beauty of this architecture is that we’re collecting feedback from actual hot prospects as they are consuming our sales pitch.

Why Knowing the Precise Breakage Location Matters

Let’s look at two shoppers.

Shopper A drops off at the end of paragraph one because she doesn’t resonate with the first Selling Angle that was presented to her.

Shopper B loved the Selling Angle that was presented in paragraph 1. He also loved the Selling Angle that was revealed in paragraph 3. What didn’t work for him was the stinking Selling Angle that materialized in paragraph 5. The moment that idea infected this shopper’s mind he was out of here.

The A/B testing tool would simply say we lost both shoppers. It wouldn’t tell us where we lost them. Next, I’m going to show how having access to that type of insight is an unfair advantage.

How Feedback Beacons Are An Unfair Advantage

Marketing is warfare and marketers are combatants. Company A and B are fierce competitors. Both companies make curling irons.

Both companies are constantly testing new sales pitches and A/B testing them.

There are 40 hours in a week.

For company A it takes 20 hours to construct a fully orchestrated Long-form Sales Pitch which means they can run two tests a week.

If test 1 fails they could either speculate on why it may have failed or they could simply start from scratch.

Company B also takes 20 hours to fully orchestrate a Long-form Sales Pitch. But company B deploys Feedback Beacons along the Long-form Sales Pitch. When a test fails they don’t speculate on why it failed or start from scratch. Instead, they open up the test and look at the votes placed against their Feedback Beacons. Once the weak link has been identified the marketer simply rewrites that section. This takes 2 hours and relaunches the test.

Can you see how the 18 hours company B is saving every week is basically guaranteeing they will always outpace company A?

Frequently Asked Questions

Couldn’t I use a tool a feedback tool like Hotjar?

Hotjar is a great tool. I use it too. But the poll prompt . . .

. . . is activated at the page level. But questions form in the minds of buyers while they are reading product descriptions. We need to address these questions the moment they appear. Can’t afford to rely on a timed prompt.

Isn’t this increasing page friction?

In marketing, we are taught to always remove friction. It’s a sin not to. So at first glance, it might look like adding Feedback Beacons is a bad idea because they increase friction. It’s important to understand the difference between good and bad friction. If inconveniencing the shopper with one extra click to gain insights into exactly where the shopper lost us, so we can fix that section and improve the shopper’s satisfaction level then that’s a good tradeoff– it’s good friction.

Next Steps

We’ve done a lot in this step: you’ve Deconstructed your most important page, identified key Selling Angles, added a bunch of Micro-improvements, constructed a killer Long-form Sales Pitch, and added Feedback Beacons.

Now just one thing remains, having statistical confidence that our new template truly is better and making micro-adjustments so it ends up perfectly even if it doesn’t start that way. That’s covered here: Building An Effective A/B Testing Strategy.