Hey y’all, came all this way, had to explain, direct from Spontivly: it’s another circle back!

If you read last week’s edition, which we sure hope you did, you’ll know that we were setting something up with you.

Stick around for Data Deep Dive to find out what it was and what we learned 🤭

Helping Hand: Game on 🎮

We’re here to help you as a professional. This segment is dedicated to enhancing your professional workflow through innovative solutions and best practices.

Marketing teams everywhere either know and love Arcade, or are wasting time on editing videos. The tagline on their website is ‘product demos that aren’t painful to make’ and holy smokes, they couldn’t be more right. Arcade is an incredible software (with a freemium tier) for making engaging, interactive videos to showcase the value of the story you’re trying to tell.

If Arcade has zero fans on Earth, we’ve travelled to Mars.

Data Deep Dive: “If you don’t do these three things, the whole world will explode”

We’re here to help you as an employee. This segment is built to inspire you with the transformative power of data in marketing growth and problem-solving, based on industry success stories.

TLDR: Last week’s edition of circle back tested out clickbait with our audience. Making use of our newsletter platform’s A/B testing feature, we determined that our clickbait title earned more opens, but what does that mean going forward?

Some of you may have noticed a rather interesting subject line in your last edition of circle back. Some of you maybe didn’t. How is that possible? A little something called A/B testing, of course.

In the true spirit of spooky season, we thought we’d give some of you a bit of a scare with last week’s edition. Our Data Deep Dive focused on the rise of the pop girlie, so the subject was “Apple’s rotten right to the core” as an homage to our girl Charli. However, to give us some spooky content for this week’s newsletter, some of you would have received a different iteration of this title. Specifically, AAAAAAAAAAHHH!

If you’ve never heard of the term A/B testing, well, it’s exactly what it sounds like. The TLDR is that it’s just a way to compare content performance by creating two different iterations of similar content with one differing variable.

Shoutout to our friends here at beehiiv for having a pretty simple in-house A/B testing feature. Through them, we were able to set some nice constraints around our test. Let’s illustrate it here.

As you can tell from our beautiful illustration, the jumpscare title worked! We promise we don’t normally do that, but we wanted to showcase our own data in today’s section. And tbh, what better time to do it than around Halloween?

A lot of the time, clickbait works. Some people have mastered it:

… but even good tactics can be overdone. How many emails from clothing companies have you unsubscribed to because every single day seems to have ‘the sale of the year’? Too much of a good thing is certainly a real problem, but the question is, how do you know when that grey area turns into a black and white line?

If it were that simple, we’d all have the Krabby Patty recipe by now. It really does depend on your audience - as we often discuss in this newsletter, knowing the behaviors, motivators, habits, and pet peeves of your ideal consumer helps you make decisions like these.

We’ll link a few good reads here about clickbait to give you some more rules of thumb:

This article from Responsive Inbound Marketing talks about the psychological impacts of clickbait and what humans respond to.
This article from Semrush discusses how to manage expectations when using clickbait.
This article from Brafton gives a few examples of clickbait structures that work.

It’s all about knowing your audience and knowing yourself. For example, at circle back, our branding guidelines and company ethos don’t align with misleading our audience or lying for effect. So when we decided we wanted to talk about clickbait and A/B testing for an upcoming volume, it was important to us that we do it in a way that stays true to what you want and what we want.

Enter the AAAAAAAH of it all. Of course, this was fishing for clicks from the sample it was sent to, but it didn’t cross any boundaries we weren’t comfortable with. While “Your account has been hacked” and “Our 100% effective recipe for doubling your ARR” may have welcomed more clicks, we weren’t willing to risk our reputation, even if you were the ultimate beneficiary of the experiment’s takeaways.

Upon completion of our A/B test, the variant group had a 20% higher click rate than the control group, which was even higher than we expected. However, we know you, and we know that if every circle back had a subject line like that, you’d start to get annoyed. We promise we won’t do it again - unless there’s something else up our sleeves.

So why do you care? There are many ways to leverage clickbait to gain traction with your audience. Paying mindful attention to frequency, expectations, trustworthiness, and values is imperative to ensuring clickbait works for you, not against you.

Fun & Flirty: What’s next, MLB on Netflix?

We’re here to help you as a person. This segment offers a lighthearted exploration of life beyond the workplace, focusing on cultural and lifestyle topics.

Every day, I wake up and check to see how many more days until 7 hours of commercial-free football. If we could add 7 hours of commercial-free hockey to the mix…

When pumpkin spice season starts and Mariah Carey begins to defrost, you know it’s time for the puck to drop on the NHL season.

Ice hockey is a popular sport in many countries and has had a lot of incredible North American success, but as we reflected on in a previous edition, it’s pretty clear that hockey doesn’t reach the same size of audience as its brother leagues like the NBA and the NFL.

Kudos go out to the NHL, though - they’ve been trying some interesting strategies to get more viewership. Last year, they piloted Frozen Frenzy, which was hockey’s own spin on NFL RedZone. All 32 teams suited up for matches on Tuesday, October 24th, 2023 with games staggering their starts every 15 minutes. ESPN covered all 16 matches on Frozen Frenzy, showcasing goal highlights, massive saves, powerplays, and more.

Frozen Frenzy returned for the 2024 season (last Tuesday, in fact), but the NHL has another interesting ‘grow the game’ streaming tactic up their sleeve for this year. Monday night games are going to look a bit different, with the league announcing a partnership with Prime Video. Instead of paying for cable or NHL Center Ice, anyone can watch national Monday night games with their Amazon Prime subscription at no extra cost.

Prime’s NHL coverage includes Monday night broadcasts and a Thursday live show.

Sports and streaming services are slowly finding more ways to innovate (like we’ve seen with Apple TV and the MLS), and Monday nights on Prime could be an interesting new addition. The broadcasts are hosted by an all-star panel, and for the best viewing experience, Prime Video is incorporating machine learning to curate highlight packages for viewers tuning in mid-game so they can get caught up on the important things they’ve missed.

Will you be tuning in?

Have a happy Halloween, everyone!

circle back Vol. 10: ✨ At the Marriott, googling A/B testing

Table of Contents

Helping Hand: Game on 🎮

Data Deep Dive: “If you don’t do these three things, the whole world will explode”

Fun & Flirty: What’s next, MLB on Netflix?

About the author

circle back Vol. 10: ✨ At the Marriott, googling A/B testing

circle back Vol. 9: Apple's rotten right to the core 🎧

circle back Vol. 8: Hey, are you still watching?