INTRODUCTION:
Each week, we select a company and review their visible email marketing tactics. We never know what’s going on behind the scenes, but there are always lessons learned by looking in the window.
We don’t know this company but we were intrigued by their business.
This week we review www.abacus.com
We don’t know this company but we started looking at their website, like an interested web visitor might, and noticed there was one strategy that email marketing could help with.
Let’s dive right in and look at the home page.
1: Split test your headlines
Here’s the home page:
The headline is pretty good at getting my attention, so I’m naturally inclined to give a few more moments of my valuable time to see what else is on this page.
The hope of this headline is that it has sufficient power to get you to do one of the two prominent calls-to-action. You are asked to sign up for a free trial or request more info.
The first step in professional marketing is to have your conversion number handy. You must know how many people are visiting this page, how many request a trial, and how many request info. Now you have your baseline or starting point.
200 visitors = 1 trial and 1 request.
How do you go about getting that number to increase?
Split test your landing page and headline. What if you used some other headline and it changed your formula to this:
200 visitors = 2 trials and 1 request.
Suddenly, with no increase in traffic, you have 2X the number of leads. If you were to double your traffic you’d now have 4X the number of leads.
The key to doing this well is to leave your marketing ego at the door and make an effort to beat the current headline. It’s not always easy to do, but the numbers don’t lie, and at the end of the day doubling your lead flow is a noble cause.
But we’re not done.
Let’s see if we can’t get more requests for info.
2: Request for info
Here’s the page you land on when you click on the request more info button. We’ll call this a landing page for this discussion.
The thought here is that if people want more information, they’ll simply ask. Marketing doesn’t work that way. It’s like saying when a fish is ready to be caught, he’ll jump in your boat. In reality you need to do some work to get the fish in your boat. Just like here.
Instead of relying on the prospect to know when to ask and what to ask for, put a nice, juicy piece of information right there and make people request it.
I might try something like “For our free report on how expense reporting is killing your morale AND costing you money fill in the form below”. Now you’re offering a really good incentive for a potential prospect to leave behind their email address.
Suddenly the formula might look like this.
200 visitors = 2 trials + 5 requests.
Now you are starting to grow a nice healthy prospect list for your bus dev team.
3: Pursue a proper content strategy
Let’s look at their blog for a moment. On the blog are great articles (content) and on the navigation bar we have our earlier landing page (Request More Info), so the intent is to get some visitors to become requests. In it’s current form it’s not working as well as it could.
What I would do with all this great content is now add ads for our report. I would post the Report Request on the nav bar, and I would post the Report Request at the bottom or in the body copy of EVERY blog post on the site. Suddenly there are lots of chances for your visitors to leave behind an email address and get on the list.
What if that changed our conversion formula to this:
200 visitors = 2 trials + 9 requests
We’re almost there.
3: Use autoresponders to increase conversions
The next thing I would do is create a very compelling autoresponder series to send to the people that are on the request list. My goal would be to move them from requests to trials.
I wouldn’t be unusual to convert 2 of the 9 from request to trial. Here’s our formula now:
200 visitors = 4 trials
With this fundamental email marketing framework using testing, a free report, and an autoresponder series, we’ve increased leads by 400%. Not a bad start.
4: Analyze and Repeat
Here’s the fun part.
In the base case, we were starting with 1 trial from our 200 visitors. If the marketing efforts increase traffic by 10 times, the company would have 10 trials to work with.
Let’s say we followed our strategy from above and could turn 200 visitors into 5 leads, when traffic increased by 10 times, the company would now have 50 trials to work with.
JUST WHAT A GROWING COMPANY NEEDS!
CONCLUSION:
This review is short but really allows us to demonstrate for you the power of testing and the leverage that comes from basic email strategy done well.
What would it mean to you if your lead flow increased by 500%?
Call us. We’ll help you do it.