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Learn from the Breweries and Maximize Word Choice on Your Homepage

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Believe it or not, breweries aren’t only good for beer. They can teach us something about how to build an engaging website.

As the craft beer industry explodes in our country, so does the need for breweries to create a competitive edge and distinct brand. Which is why offering a professional, engaging website is so important.

Breweries have the enviable opportunity to make their sites fun and creative, because that’s the culture. They don’t have to take themselves too seriously, nor would their customers want them to.

The role of the homepage

The general “fun and creative” business philosophy has resulted in some cool examples of brewery websites and how they present their homepage.

Although these sites don’t have to be perfectly buttoned up, they still need to offer a simple experience that helps visitors accomplish their goals for visiting the site.

No matter what your business is, your website homepage is an essential hub for your customer’s experience. Though you’re not in front of your customer physically, the words of your homepage should still sound like you. Plus, because this is a static interface with only a little room to communicate, you really have to make your words count.

Basically, the words on your homepage should do three major things:

  1. Inform the visitor about where they are
  2. Guide the visitor to know where to go
  3. Motivate the visitor to take action

Almost every homepage has elements that the user expects to see to recognize it as a website. These elements typically include:

  • Navigational menu
  • Banner
  • Textual introduction
  • Buttons/calls to action

With each of these elements, it’s paramount to get the words right, otherwise you’ll leave the user uniformed, unguided and unmotivated.

Today, we’ll take a look at how breweries are effectively using words with the major elements of their homepage.

1. Navigational menu

The primary navigational menu is what your visitor sees when landing on your page, before scrolling over or clicking on the menu.

Due to limited horizontal space and the need to catch skimming eyes, menu items must be 1 to 3 words. They also have to be broad enough to encompass all the other pages beneath it in the sub-navigational menu.

With the primary menu, it’s more important to be familiar than interesting. Visitors want a clear picture of where to go on your site.

Take Stone Brewing’s homepage for example. These guys make some of the tastiest, hoppiest beer on the planet, but they also understand how to guide their visitor through their site. Have a look at the simplicity of their primary navigation:

With only four items, a visitor doesn’t need to do much skimming to choose an option. After all, a simple hover over the items will reveal all of the other pages/paths one can navigate to.

For your own site, consider simple, well-known word choices for your menu, such as “Services,” “About,” and “Resources.”

With the sub-navigational menu, you can be more nuanced. As long as the menu item is clear, it can be more flavorful.

Sierra Nevada, one of the country’s largest brewers, offers a good example of word expansion with their sub-navigation.

When it comes to your site’s navigation, clarity is paramount. People generally don’t click on things out of curiosity. Use clear word choose for menu items and you’ll effectively guide people through your site.

2. Banners

Banners are attention-getters and have prime real estate on your homepage. Words are generally punchy and meaningful, and seek to promote a product or offer a brand’s value proposition.

One brewery that uses effective banner copy is Deschutes Brewery out of Oregon.

Here, Deschutes uses the banner space to reinforce the value proposition of their brand, that they make beer to bring people together. While some breweries are edgier and may promote a party atmosphere, this will resonate with the more laid-back craft beer drinker.

Another good example is from Great Lakes Brewing:

Notice how the headline is attention-getting, punchy, and easy to consume. Then, the sub-headline is used to reinforce the headline and informs us where this goodness exists.

For your banner copy, ensure your headline is interesting and stands out. If you introduce a sub-header, make sure it flows with the headline and reinforces it. You only have room for a sentence or two, so make it count.

3. Textual introduction

Sometimes, images and punchy copy aren’t enough to achieve the message you’re wanting to deliver on your homepage. Finding space to offer an introduction to your brand is important.

One brewer that does a nice job of this is Trophy Brewing, one of our top local breweries here in Raleigh.

In just one sentence, Trophy conveys some important points about their company. First, they’re definitively a Raleigh brewery. Also, they highlight the food and community aspects of their business, both things they do particularly well and differentiate them from brewers who only brew beer. Also with Trophy, you can have a different experience in each of their three locations.

For your homepage, consider crafting a value statement that distinguishes you from everyone else. You don’t need to say a lot, just enough to whet your visitor’s appetite to explore the rest of your site.

4. Buttons/calls to action

On your homepage, you’ll use buttons to direct visitors to other pages on your site.

Typically, button copy is very simple. In most cases, it should be succinct and action-oriented. But it doesn’t hurt to be more specific if it clarifies to the user what to do.

Here’s a simple but helpful example of button copy on the Sierra Nevada site:

In this “beer finder,” it would’ve been easy to label the button “Locate.” However, adding “beers” to the label reinforces the header, makes the button stand out more, and is a little more fun, fitting for a beer website.

For your homepage, look for opportunities to make button labels specific while remaining concise.

Wrapping up

Your homepage should aim to guide, inform, and motivate your visitor to take action. By using the right word choice in your navigation, banner, textual introduction, and buttons, your homepage will be a major contributor to the overall customer experience.

Five Must-Haves to Make Your “About Us” Page Worth Reading

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Is your About Us page an afterthought? 

That’s perfectly natural, of course. Whenever you built your site, you spent most of your time creating your landing page, product page, blog, and pretty much anything else to engage your visitor.

Then maybe someone said, “Oh! And we need an About Us page in case anyone actually happens to care about who we are.” And because of its natural deprioritization, the About Us page is often thrown together as a couple of paragraphs and bios that check off a box for the site being completed.

Of course, many people who visit your site won’t click on your About Us page, which further affirms the sense of its deprioritization in your site navigation. But for those who do click on “About Us,” the page becomes vitally important. So we have to ask ourselves why people click on this page.

Why people click on “About Us”

When a customer clicks on “About Us,” it’s likely they are asking one of two questions: “Why should I care about this company?” and “Why should I trust this company?”

For the care question, a visitor may simply be intrigued by the product and like it enough to consider buying into the brand.

The trust question is especially important. Trust can be a crucial part of the buying experience, particularly when the spend is large. If you can nail this page, you can take a casual customer and turn them into a loyal follower, which is big for your revenue and your brand.

So here are 5 must-haves for your About Us page:

1. A purpose that connects with the customer’s need

Being that you’re a business, you exist to solve a problem. If people need exercise, you open a gym, and if people have foot fungus, you cure it. People want to know that you’re in business to make their world better.

Generally toward the beginning of an About Us section, you describe when and why you went into business. Here, call attention to the major problem you set out to solve, the reason you went into business in the first place.

Your purpose should identify with the customer’s greatest need for your product or service. Making that connection is the most powerful way to make the customer care about your business and feel like they can trust you.

2. An explanation that what you do is better than what they do

It’s not likely that your business is one of a kind. Even if you sell peanut butter pickles (an obvious craving choice for pregnant moms), you’ll still need to convince visitors why no snack satisfies cravings like yours.

It is likely that your business is similar to others, but is just different enough to be interesting. When it comes to fighting foot fungus, you’re not the only game in town. No one will read another boring story about how some company’s product cures foot fungus.

But people will listen to why the offering is different; that it’s environmentally friendly, that it’s the fastest working, or that it’s the toughest stuff on the market.

A good About Us page unabashedly claims why your business is better. Naturally, a customer will care about your business if you offer something they can’t get anywhere else.

3. A personal touch that makes you seem less like a business

People like doing business with other people. When we first interact with a business, it’s often purely transactional. We tend to perceive that this entity is just out to capture our dime.

Yet once we can associate a brand with a face, our perception quickly changes. We see that it’s not simply a nondescript machine collecting our cash, but a company with well-meaning people behind it who should be paid for their helpful service.

When writing about the people who created and run your company, include human elements that visitors can relate to. This is a great time to be open about why you yourself needed the product, how family values have been passed down through generations with your business, or how you involve yourself in the betterment of the community.

With a personal touch, a visitor can trust that you’re not an evil money maker and your business (and its people) is out to help them.

4. A consistent message that ties in to the rest of your site

The About Us page is also a place to reiterate your value prop at a deeper level. Visitors may already know what you’re about from using your product or service, spending time on your landing page, or getting your messages in advertisements.

Now is the time to ingrain that message by backing up why you believe so passionately in it.

As you tell your story, weave in the features and benefits of your offering and reveal why they matter to you. Messaging that’s consistent across your site enables your content to resonate more powerfully and stick with your visitor.

5. A narrative that the visitor buys into

Of all the ways you could present your message, nothing beats a story. But there is a time and a place for it. It’s probably not on your homepage or landing page, where you’re really just greeting the visitor and offering passages into other rooms of the house.

But with an About Us page, they’ve “walked around” a little, grown comfortable, and want to know more about you. So you tell your story.

Here, the visitor actually wants to hear your story; they want to connect with it. An About Us page can be fairly bland, but it pays to put some work into it and create a compelling narrative. This is your shot at solidifying someone’s status as “loyal follower.”

Wrapping it up

If you’re creating an About Us page, implementing these “must-haves” will take your page from an afterthought to one of the most compelling pages on your site.

If you already have an About Us page, revise it using the filter of “must-haves,” and your page is sure to resonate more with visitors.

Need help telling your story? Let’s talk.

How to Write a Stellar Marketing Email That Increases Conversions

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Are you concerned your marketing email isn’t getting read?

According to followupmachine.com, the average adult receives a staggering 147 emails a day.

Think about if you actually read and responded to all of them. You would be highly informed, highly connected, and you wouldn’t get a damn thing done.

So you become a super scanner, creating systems to filter through the junk and find the meaningful mail that matters most to you, like mail from family, friends, and…ahem…email marketers.

Don’t you love marketing emails? Of course you don’t—and you’re an email marketer! In a sea of personal mail, a marketing email looks like a piece of trash, like six pack plastic rings that disgust you as they drift by because you know they’ll eventually choke a seagull. With this level of cynicism, how can your email stand out, get opened, and convert?

There is hope. In fact, I recently received a marketing email from a company I never heard of, for a service I didn’t need and for a problem I didn’t know I had. Yet it got my attention and kept it all the way to conversion.

Four sales tactics for marketing email

Being that I’m so cynical about marketing emails and kind of couldn’t believe I’d buy from one, I had to evaluate why it was so successful. What I found was that the company expertly used four universal sales tactics to craft a concise yet highly effective email. The sales tactics in the email included:

  1. An attention grabber
  2. A problem and solution
  3. An objection silencer
  4. A non-pushy offer

In this post, I’ll share the email with you and explain how each tactic was used appropriately to give you inspiration for crafting your next marketing email.

The marketing email worth studying

At first glance, this email isn’t very impressive. The design is fairly minimal and the text and page elements together aren’t particularly attractive. In fact, some of it looks downright off-center.

But upon closer inspection, part of this is by design. This screenshot was captured in desktop, but the mobile view of the email looks more structured and tightly aligned.

Even though it’s not pretty, the center-aligned text actually looked different than the standard left-aligned email. Which was a good way to trick my mind out of thinking, “same old marketing email.”

But honestly, I would’ve never even opened this thing if its subject line hadn’t grabbed me.

An attention grabber—the entry to engagement

If you’ve now read the email, you can see it’s from a web hosting service called HostMetro, who I’d never heard of. I have a couple of websites, and the host to one of those sites is Bluehost.

Bluehost is a solid web hosting service, but that’s never mattered much to me. A web host is kind of like a referee. You don’t pay much attention to it until it starts screwing up.

Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about my web hosting service until this email dropped in my inbox with the subject line “Bluehost Raising your Renewal Rates.”

The subject line stopped me in my inbox skimming and quest to delete all unworthy messages. How?

  1. It was timely. The importance of this factor can’t be overstated, because there’s only about a three-week window during the year in which hosting services would consider me a target prospect: when my hosting service subscription is set to expire. In fact, I was aware of this, because I had received a few subscription reminders from Bluehost already. So, the timeliness was huge because I was already slightly engaged in this idea of resubscribing.
  2. It offered new knowledge. I hadn’t considered my rates being raised. HostMetro knows that customers don’t give subscriptions much thought and often set services to auto-renew. So they gave me a new thought that caught my attention.
  3. It appealed to my fear. Few things perk us up like our most primal instincts. HostMetro’s email was targeted to a sole prospect: the cost-conscious one. I don’t like getting overcharged, which meant I would need to investigate this further. (Got me.)

A problem and solution

The subject line alerted me to the problem, but I still didn’t understand what the true problem was. Like a good email marketer, HostMetro wasted no time telling me.

In fact, notice that they don’t even offer a greeting. I’m so used to seeing a welcoming sentence, or a “Hey Carson,” that I often ignore it. Yet here, they skip the pleasantries and immediately help me understand my problem. Just what I wanted.

The problem presented (my rates going up 600%) actually made me do what I should’ve done weeks ago: check out my auto-renew rate from Bluehost. Which was easy to do, because Bluehost had sent me a renewal reminder just five days before, with the new price in the email. Sure enough, I was going from $3.95/mo to $10.99/mo.

It’s worth reiterating the timeliness of the HostMetro email. They were capitalizing on their competitive knowledge of when my rates would go up, the only time they’d have a chance of swooping in to grab my business.

It’s also worth noting the conversational way in which they presented the problem. The “Pretty similar, right?” and “Don’t believe us?” lines do a great job of engaging me so I’d keep following along. All in all, this was a concise and effective presentation of the problem and solution.

An objection silencer

I was sold on the problem and HostMetro’s ability to solve it. But like any good sales presentation, this email would need to anticipate and handle objections.

So HostMetro addresses two of the biggest concerns a web hosting customer has about switching: contracts and transferring files.

No matter how great your offer is, you’re still up against the human tendency of inertia. I liked HostMetro’s offer, but figured switching might be more painful than the extra cost. So I’d do nothing.

HostMetro overcame my inertia by giving me the impression that their service was easy to acquire. The response to objections here gave me the feeling that not only could HostMetro solve my problem, but could do it easily and with little effort on my part.

A non-pushy offer

Following engagement, problem solving, and handling objections, it was time for HostMetro to make an offer. The offer begins with a discount, but then continues into a surprisingly unaggressive close.

Typically, a best practice for marketing emails is to create a sense of urgency. This can be done with an expiring offer (creating fear of loss) and a “don’t wait, get started now” approach with the copy leading into the call to action.

Yet, following the discounted offer, HostMetro eases off. The best sentence of the email for me was this: “Not quite ready? That’s fine. Your code never expires, and you can cancel anytime.”

At this point, I released any of my remaining defenses to switch. HostMetro wasn’t desperate for my business, and I wouldn’t lose anything if I waited. Perfect.

The brilliance of this is that HostMetro didn’t need to create urgency. My problem was already urgent; I had to make a choice about my web hosting subscription in the next 30 days anyway. Why would HostMetro be pushy when they didn’t have to be?

Then they close with a quick list of benefits and a “sign up” button. Simple, clean, concise; it was an offer I felt like I couldn’t refuse.

What we learned

A good marketing email can convert the most cynical of email readers, even email marketers themselves! It’s wise to employ tried-and-true sales tactics, yet have copy that’s clever enough to not come across as salesy.

As email marketers, we must grab readers’ attention, present the problem quickly and solve it, counter any objections, and present a compelling but non-pushy offer. If the email is timely and meets people at their point of need, you’ll have an excellent chance of converting even the most cynical of readers.