Picture this: You’ve spent countless hours (and dollars) on your content strategy, and now the website traffic is starting to pour in. Awesome.
But wait… if you take a closer look, you start to notice your site visitors are rarely converting. Conversion goals may vary from business to business, but generally, it all begins with obtaining a prospect’s email. You’ve got all this website traffic coming to your site – why aren’t more of them filling out your forms and giving up their email addresses?
Hint: It’s probably not the offer, the CTA, the content, or the landing page itself.
More than likely, they’re not being guided in the direction of that offer. Sometimes we think a webpage is optimized because we just assume people will know where to look. But you can’t bet on that. It’s up to you to steer people in the direction of filling out a form, by displaying the right message at exactly the right moment.
A Client Case Study
Take for example a kitchen & bath design client of ours. People were browsing through a lot of their portfolio pages but not taking the next step to get in touch. Why? We determined that the leads who did not take the next step were in the “idea phase” of their kitchen remodel, or rather at the very top of the funnel. This is where content marketing comes into play.
But it’s not enough to just create great content – people have to see it. One way we’ve been able to do this is by using what I call a marketing trifecta approach, integrating three platforms that work together seamlessly: Sumo + Zapier + SharpSpring.
Using Sumo to Capture Leads from Website Traffic
First of all, what is Sumo? Sumo is a suite of marketing tools aimed at conversion, analytics and social sharing. By using Sumo’s list builder, we were able to target our client’s visitors with content at exactly the right moment. We could also target them based on specific pages they had visited, how long they’d been on the site, how many pages they’d seen so far, or even by a UTM source.
For our kitchen & bath design client, we used Sumo to display a message on the portfolio pages, but only as visitors were about to leave. This is called an exit intent since obviously, we don’t want them to exit the website – we want them to convert. Right before they leave, we offer them a free, downloadable guide of the client’s best projects. For someone at the top of the funnel who’s still pulling ideas together, this is the perfect type of content to keep them engaged.
We also have a second list-building form set up through Sumo called scroll box. The scroll box only triggers when a visitor scrolls down 25% of the target page. The form quietly slides in from the bottom and simply asks the visitor to sign up for a newsletter. That’s it.
How do you know when to trigger the scroll box? Simple. Just turn on Sumo’s content analytics. Content analytics tells you the average page-depth someone scrolls down your page. So let’s say, for example, on one of your blog posts, the average visitor stops reading about 50% of the way through and exits. Set your scroll box to appear at 45%, so you can offer them a content download that’s complementary to the article before they bounce.
Enter Zapier and SharpSpring…
For visitors who opted in, we then used Zapier to pass their addresses over to SharpSpring. From there, SharpSpring handled the rest of the lead nurturing through an automated workflow we set up – helping us continue to send the right message at the right time, all the way through the sales funnel. We also use SharpSpring forms throughout our websites because they’re great for triggering automations and profiling our leads. What Sumo can do for you is help you get more people to those forms. Getting your leads’ attention at exactly the right moment is critical to getting them into your marketing automation system, so you can nurture them to a sale.
Even cooler, once a visitor opts in by filling out a form and downloading the guide, Sharpspring’s Life of the Lead feature gives us a bird’s eye view of these contacts and how they continue to interact with the website. Over time, we can see them moving down the sales funnel on our SharpSpring pipeline, which makes it easy for us to reach out at exactly the right moment once they’re ready to make a buying decision.
We’ve Seen Great Results
Here are the results so far from our kitchen & bath design client:
- The first form we implemented with this process was converting at 4.97%. We thought we could do a little better. 🙂
- We’re currently A/B testing the new form with the portfolio guide, and the two versions are converting at 5.56% and 8.06% respectively. (I highly recommend A/B testing this, since it’s one simple change that can make or break your conversions.)
A 5% email conversion rate might sound small, but for context, the average email opt-in rate is 1.95%, according to Sumo. My client and I are thrilled with the results, and as we continue to drive more traffic to the site, we’re seeing even more tangible conversions.
It’s a Numbers Game
Great content isn’t a “Field of Dreams,” where if you build it, they will come. You need to guide your leads along the path you want them to take. This is true whether your target audience is at the top, middle, or bottom of the funnel. The content will be different, but the method of getting the content to them at the right time will be the same.
The thing is, you already have great content that you’ve worked hard to create. Make sure people are really seeing that content by using the trifecta approach of Sumo + Zapier + SharpSpring. Sumo captures the email, Zapier passes the email along, and SharpSpring automates everything else to help you seal the deal and convert more visitors into customers.
More emails –> More leads –> More sales –> More happy dances. It’s a numbers game.
The number we’re often too focused on is how much we’re putting into our content strategy. But with a simple conversion strategy like the one we use, both of the numbers will come – the conversion numbers and the dollars.
