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 them to take any action that shows some kind of commitment. 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.
So, how do you start collecting emails? Good news!
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.
These are the 12 things you can implement on 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, as they help convert site visitors into email subscribers. Let’s go over them, one by one.
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
While you shouldn’t use all of them at once, you should certainly use MORE THAN ONE.
And the best thing is that you can always A / B test, in order to find the right amount of such conversion elements for your site.
Testing the ones that Grab the Most Leads
I’ve seen cases where a Hello Bar and a Dedicated Landing Page works best. One such example is a company which was one of our clients for content services and which achieved 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!
Not everything will work for your business, but you won’t know what works and what doesn’t until you try and measure the results.
And all of these 12 methods of capturing leads will provide different results, 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 emails every week, that’s BAD! I mean: terribly BAD.
Most people don’t know this, but “Subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter” kind of promises don’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.
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 interesting eBook
– a cool infographic
– a useful audiobook
– 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 conversion element.
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 take a look at all of them.
I’ll share 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 this year, you’d see that most of them have this.
The one from Squirrly 🙂
Gary Vaynerchuk
backlinko.com
Search Engine Journal’s
Search Engine Watch’s
And another one. From another blog.
You’ll be able to see that we actually tested 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 one of our services, 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) offering a freebie
b) adding social proof to your opt-in form (for example, happy customer reviews, number of customers, and so on)
c) the length of the opt-in form (making the form really long, or really short).
Let’s take a look at a website from one of our customers because 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.”
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 direct call with a consultant. Well, I’d give my email out for that.
Much better than the ‘ol : weekly newsletter thing, ey?
2) Pop-Up
This is one of the best conversion thingy ever. No wait, you have to test this first, but here’s what I’ve learned 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: that same 2 % will most likely 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 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 at Squirrly shows that pop-ups are great. For us: they are the best conversion element (besides Landing Pages) that we’ve tried so far.
And here’s an example from Buffer.
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 once every 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, it’s been tested and converted. It delivers the best conversions.
It was completely different from the Developer’s industry.
Some tools for implementing pop-up 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 show when the visitor wants to leave the website.
Most people like to subscribe to this one because if they’ve liked the content on the blog, 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.)
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 subscribers to customers 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.
^^One from Squirrly
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.
