Digital Marketing Superstars
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Ready for a new lesson?
Great! Until now, I showed you the importance of generating leads and how the overall process works. The process of turning website visitors into actual customers.
If you remember: the first part was actually getting their email addresses.
You first want their intent. You want them to ALLOW you to send content to them, materials, anything that could be of value. And yes, that does include discounts or amazing offers to your products and services.
There are 12 ways in which you can use your WordPress site to collect emails.
Getting Leads to Jump at the Opportunity – Step 1: Collecting Emails.
1) Top of the Sidebar
2) Pop-Up
3) Feature Box
4) Bottom of the Article
5) Slideup box
6) HelloBar
7) Use Content Upgrade Pop-ups
8) Redesign Your Homepage
9) Dedicated Landing Pages
10) Exit Intent Pop-Up
11) Top Nav / Sidebar / Footer Links to Landing Pages
12) Within Individual Articles
These are the 12 things you can implement in a website. These will be your tools for capturing leads and the interest of many people who visit your website.
I am personally going to keep calling these 12 things: Conversion Elements.
Yes, Conversion Elements. All of these are 12 Conversion Elements.
While you shouldn’t use all of them, you should certainly use MORE THAN ONE.
And the best thing is that you can always A / B test, in order to reach the right amount of such conversion elements.
We will have a Conversion Rate Optimization course, where I will show you some of the great lessons we’ve learned since starting Squirrly.
It’s gonna have some interesting ideas of how you sometimes want to get the highest conversion rate possible, but sometimes it will make sense to aim for the lowest.
Testing the ones that Grab the Most Leads
I’ve seen cases where a Hello Bar and a Dedicated Landing Page works best. It brings that respective company (one of our clients for content services) a conversion of 5% (that’s usually a very decent conversion)
However, for Squirrly.co (our own site), the Hello Bar we’ve used brought only:
1.33 % Conversion rate.
Of course, this should have been higher. We tested clicks, not email subscribers here, because we couldn’t get email subscribers from this.
So we had Number Of Displays | Clicks | Conversion. See them in this screenshot:
See? So, what you really need to do is: Test the best possibility!
And all of these 12 methods of capturing leads will be different from business to business.
They are influenced by:
a) the kind of people who come to your site.
Some kinds of website visitors hate Pop-Ups. Some love them.
It all depends on your audience. I’ve written more about this below in this lesson.
b) Copy (as in: the written text). The copy on each element
c) The Promise
If you only promise them new email every week, that’s BAD! I mean: terribly BAD.
Most people don’t know this, but just saying: Subscribe to out Weekly Newsletter doesn’t work anymore.
Think about this: many people migrate to Slack and other alternatives to email, because they can’t stand getting so much email from so many sources anymore.
So if you think they’ll want EVEN MORE email, then you’re clearly in the wrong here.
No, what you need to do is have an amazing promise:
– an ebook
– an infographic
– an audio book
– free lessons, free courses
– VIP Access to something (even a membership site)
– FaceTime with you or someone from the company to discuss their current problem (which you are helping them solve with your content, website, etc.)
Because of the 3 influencing factors, it’s MANDATORY that you test out every possible thing.
Anyway, we’ll have a brand new course in a few months, that will focus on how you can get even more leads from the methods you learn how to implement in this current course.
One final idea in this chapter of the lesson:
Just having a sidebar thing ain’t enough for most people / most personal brands / most companies.
See Buffer’s example. They’ve done their tests. Look at how mediocre sidebar stuff are for them:
Alright, let’s dive into each type of Conversion Element:
Conversion Elements: One by One
Let’s see all of them.
I’ll write great stuff that people won’t usually tell you. I want you to get the best knowledge there is on these things, because they will play a major role in how you get leads for your business.
1) Top of the Sidebar
This is the classic position.
Actually, it’s the most common thing that you can see on blogs.
We have that, Neil Patel has that, Unbound has that, and if you were to look at lists with top 10 blogs of 2015, you’d see that most of them have this.
The one from Squirrly 🙂
Neil Patel’s
Unbounce.com’s
And another one. From another blog.
You’ll be able to see that we actually “hacked” this method, and according to A/B tests and experiments that we’ve made we reached the conclusion that in order for us to get leads for our Agency line of business, we need to have a button that sends to a Landing Page, not an email form.
You live and you learn.
There are many things you can test on the Top of the Sidebar conversion element.
a) freebie
b) adding social proof to your opt-in form
c) making the form really long, or really short.
Now, at a website from one of our customers, they had a very cool value proposition for their top of the sidebar conversion element:
“Get Free Consultancy from us regarding the next party you’ll organize for your child. I’ll show you where to get the best balloons, toys and party theme ideas. All according to your kid’s preferences.”
Something like that. I think the wording was a bit better.
Anyhow, I saw that and I was like: “Damn. That’s a solid value prop for a desperate parent looking to solve the problem of next boring party he’s about to throw to his kid.”
I mean: that parent doesn’t have to read any content. He gets exactly what he needs through a Skype call with a consultant. Well, I’d give my email out for that.
Much better then the ‘ol : weekly newsletter thing, ey?
So I told them to drop the lame weekly newsletter thing and get the value prop from the top of the sidebar conversion plugin and into the Pop-Up on their website.
2) Pop-Up
This is what I’m talking about!
Best conversion thingy ever. No wait, you have to test this first, but here’s what I’ve learnt placing conversion elements on tens of websites for tens of businesses:
People say they TOTALLY HATE pop-ups. But the results show otherwise.
Seriously.
Read this great article from Seth Godin:
Are you really going to tell me that after reading this, you are still going to try and optimize for the 2% ?
Maybe 2% of your visitors will talk poorly about you and your pop-ups.
But the thing is: those same 2% could NEVER become your Leads. So why would you care about them? They SHOULDN’T even be on your website!!
They are worthless to both you and your website (business).
That’s why even though most people claim they hate pop-ups and that pop-ups ruin the world, kill unicorns, etc. you shouldn’t really care.
If the value proposition you place on the Pop-Up is great enough for them, they will give you their email. They will become your Leads. They will hardly wait for you to reveal the great thing they can purchase.
This is what you need to know.
And the best part is that this Florin guy from Squirrly doesn’t talk the talk:
He walks the walk and has all of this backed up by data.
Our own data @ Squirrly shows that pop-ups are great. For us: they are the best conversion element (besides Landing Pages) that we’ve tried so far.
Pop-Ups are a Can’t Miss call to action!
Literally, you can’t miss it. It opens up over the content you’re reading 😐
The things you can tweak (and should tweak) at pop-ups are:
a) Frequency
– set up your pop-up so that it doesn’t show up every time someone visits your blog. This can potentially (doesn’t always happen) annoy people enough to make them leave without saying Good-bye!
Set it up so it only shows up every once a month as a simple reminder that they can sign up (to get something Awesome).
b) Timing
– Asking people to subscribe to your blog before they even get a chance to read your content might seem like it doesn’t make much sense. Well, you’re right. Or wrong. As I said earlier on: it depends a lot on the audience.
I can tell you from our tests and our experience that if you’re writing content for Developers and you place a pop-up that shows up only after they read the text, that will be very helpful. They will be happy. Otherwise, any sooner than that (let’s say 60 seconds) they will leave.
Happened on all the game dev and software dev blogs we’ve worked on.
BUT: if you target marketing people, then your best bet is 5 seconds to 10 seconds since they open the article for a good read. Yup, tested and converted. Best conversions.
Completely different from the Developers industry.
Some tools for implementing Conversion elements will allow you to play with Timing even better: you could even choose to have the pop-up appear only when your visitor that starts reading another article from your website.
More than that: you can even choose to have the Pop-Up shows when the visitor wants to leave the website.
Most people like to subscribe @ this one, because they’ve liked the content on the blog and they realize that “yeah, I should get more stuff like this from these guys. They had cool things on this website.”
3) Feature Box
First proposed and made popular by Derek Halpem of Social Triggers, a feature box is a large .. well it’s a Box.
It’s placed above the content on a blog (above the content, NOT over the content, so it’s not a pop-up).
It presents a snapshot of what the blog is all about and gives incentives for people to sign-up and become leads of that website.
You can pitch the benefits of your newsletter (or your Ebook, or your course, free consultancy, etc.)
Few other places on your website will give you the ability to explain why your site is worth signing up for.
In the beginning, when Squirrly as a Company had just the WordPress SEO software, we used this idea. It worked amazingly well for bringing us leads for our software.
The conversion rate from email subscriber to customer was really big. It converted much better than other channels we were trying out back then.
Here are some examples from other companies using Feature Boxes.
Okay, now we’ve had plenty of things to go through in this one lesson.
We’ve managed to cover 3 of the 12 conversion elements that you could use on your website to capture Leads. In the next lesson we’ll cover more.
See you soon.