Actions, Pages, and Bears - Oh MY!

Actions, Pages, and Bears – Oh My! Watch the webinar video & see blog post Chip Fox: Welcome everyone to our webinar series "Action, Pages, and Bears, Oh My!" It's going to be a great session today. I now going to turn it over to Kim Albee and Margaret Johnson.

Kim Albee: Hi everybody. Welcome to the webinar today. Hi Margaret.

Margaret Johnson: Hi Kim. How are you?

Kim: I'm good. All right. Are you ready to get going?

Margaret: Let's go. This is going to be a good one and we're so happy you're all with us today.

Kim: It was fun. I hope everybody's starting and enjoy summer too.

Margaret: Let's start up by tracking why we're doing this. For those who have been with us on prior webinars you know that we asked a question, in a past webinar, what's your biggest boggle? In our last session we address the number one issue which was attractors. The number two biggest ball goal that we heard is action. When you can cause visitors to take action, a certain set of things happen.

You can track their interest. You can become increasingly relevant to them which is critical, so critical and ultimately you get more customers. Frankly, if we're not getting more customers as a result of all the marketing work that we're doing, I'm sure you'll all agree we're just having fun. We've got to make more customers to make it all work. Enough said.

Kim: Very good. Let's do a really quick review. Really quick review. We've already talked to you guys about attractors and how to build them, that was our last webinar. Once you have those attractors and you gain your audience, you send those out and the people really engage on those, you add them to your lead database. Then what you've got, is you've got three types of emails that you can respond with. Go for it Margaret.

Margaret: On those three types of emails are simple. There were the broadcast emails which are the emails that you send everyone with specific links inside them. We've talked about this a number of times before and I do want to insert if you missed the attractors webinar and need the past webinars, it's on our blog at contentzap.com/blog. We have a broadcast emails, your nurturing emails which are how you get people further down their journey. Then your fulfillment emails where you're delivering to them the thing that they purchased this or your delivering the services or your simply saying thank you for buying or thank you for engaging. © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Those are really the three types of emails that you're going to send after you've got to lead in your database.

Kim: The cool part about a fulfillment email is that when you had a lead capture form and they complete your lead capture form, you're basically saying, "Hey, I'll give you this really cool thing that you want in exchange for your name and email likely, maybe more information." When they give you that, you want to verify that they gave you a good email address, right? It's part of the exchange. You want ... If you then take them to a thank you page that says, "Thank you so much. Please check your inbox and email will be arriving shortly with a link to the resource you requested." You're all good to go, right? Then you know and you can continue to track that.

That's why fulfillment emails are such a good thing to have in your kit here.

Margaret: Kim that's a great point. Don't have your fulfillment email just, don't have your thank you page just deliver the content that they requested or the price quote that they requested.

Deliver that via email so you've got a confirmation that you've got a good email address.

Kim: Exactly.

Margaret: Kim, what's today's focus?

Today’s Focus Kim: Today, what we're going to talk about is when you're sending your emails, what's a reasonable ask in an email? In other words, you could think of as a call-­‐to-­‐action, a CTA, what we're calling an ask. What could you reasonably ask people to do from an email? Why do some landing pages convert better than others? We're going to be exploring. When you have a link in your email and you drive them to a page, we can call that a landing page. Why do some convert better than others? What's an example of a bad landing page? We're going to kind of give you some things to think about around that. How do I keep this going? Email after email. How do I keep it all humming along? Where do the bears come in? I know all of you are wondering, "What the heck is this to do with bears?" We'll get to that.

Margaret: We will get to that.

What’s A Reasonable “Ask” In An Email?

Kim: Margaret, what's a reasonable ask in an email?

Margaret: That's a great question and we hear it all the time. In fact the reason that we're doing this webinar is because we heard that question over and over and over again. The key to what you want to ask in an email is you want the recipient to do something that that recipient © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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sees as valuable. They have to get value out of this transaction. Not you. What kind of things are valuable? Things that are helpful or informative or educational or insightful or attractive.

Kim: Thank you, Margaret. Thank you for the compliment.

Margaret: You're totally welcome.

Kim: That's not what we're talking about. Is it?

Margaret: No. Kim: When something's attractive it means it offers attractive. What you're asking them to do is attractive to them. I wanted to cover when we were coming up with this, "Yeah you want to be helpful, you want to be informative and educational," all that stuff. That's all good stuff. There are times when, "Hey, twenty percent off." If you act now it's absolutely what you should be doing. I wanted to say, "Well, attractive and," so we have this whole conversation about it but it's an attractive offer. What's an offer that your recipients going to see as valuable that they could do? That's why we put attractive in the bottom.

What’s Wrong With These CTAs? Margaret: Exactly. Let me ask you this question folks. What's wrong with these Calls to Action?

Here's our latest news. We're giving discount on our product or service, or buy our stuff or sale, sale, sale. Worse and, Kim and I both have a pet peeve about this. You download a paper or you look at a piece of content and the next thing you know, you're getting a non-­‐dated with messages from a sales person saying, "When can we meet? When can we meet? When can we meet?" What's wrong with those? Here's what's wrong with them. Only two percent of your audience is ready for this. Two percent because you're depending with CTAs like this on intersecting with a buyer at the exact moment they are ready to make a buying decision.

Intersections… The Mindset Shift That's a problem because ninety-­‐eight percent of your audience isn't there. What we need to explore are those intersections and we need to shift our mindset from, "Buy now and you'll get value" to, "Here's value, would you like more? Here's value, how else can we help you?" Go ahead, Kim. Kim: That's really good. It's perfect because now, when you can do this think about it. You can engage not just those two percent that might want to become a customer today, but you can include the ninety-­‐eight percent that doesn't. You're not losing anything by taking this kind of an approach. You can turn lurkers into leads and those who are ready to buy into customers.

You don't lose out here by shifting your focus. Right? © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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There are these challenges, there's these challenges that's shifting the focus. One of it is that people are so self interested. The truth is, is that if where you go to as buy now what I want you to do, when can I get you to do and all that. Your focus is clearly on you and what you want.

What we're saying is your focus needs to shift. The hard part is shifting your focus to actually be concerned about them. Be concerned about your leads. That's the shift. It isn't all about you.

You got to give up that self-­‐interest in order to gain the value and the results you really want.

Margaret: Exactly. In doing so, will also engage the other ninety-­‐eight percent because part of the point of lead nurturing is that we nurture people along their journey. When that ninety-­‐ eight percent falls into that two percent when they go further down in your sales funnel, you'd be engaging with them all along. Now you're the default choice when they hit the point of making a buying decision.

Kim: Exactly. That's what we all want. You want to be the preferred vendor going in to the sale.

Margaret: Top of mind. You want to be known as the people who help. In fact, it's kind of funny, we talked sometimes about how our content lives forever and all that we do lives forever. In a past life for me, I actually was a Genoo customer for many, many years and I did a ton of webinars and events and newsletters and things like that.

I remember a sales person coming up to me once and saying, "You know I met so and so." I'm like, "So and so, I think he's on our list base never attended a single event that we've done our webinar." He said, "Well, here's the thing. The reason he chose to do business with us is because he knows that we're an organization that cares about educating our customers."

This guy never showed that he was consuming any of our content but he was noting that we were providing it and if was the deciding factor when it came time for him to determine what vendor or what partner he was going to choose to do his, in that case technology implementation with.

Kim: In that case you went from lurker to customer?

Margaret: He went from lurker directly to customer exactly.

Examples of Effective Email CTAs Kim: Kind of interesting. All right. Let's look at examples of effective emails CTA like calls to action in your email. What we're going to do is show you this is a webinar invite series. I want to highlight that webinar, what we do is we never just send out that one email about something, ever. We'll send out, so this is a three email series, we know that email one looks a particular way. Email two has a slightly different message. Email three is sent the day of. It's hard to see. I guess you're going to have to look really closely but you can see the subject line © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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on emails number two and number three the way I created the screen grabs. Go for it Margaret. Talk about email number one.

Margaret: Email number one, this is all webinar invite as Kim said and what we do is we do three different invites. Each with a slightly different tone but still a very collaborative voice. The first one, you can't see the signature line on the first one but it's a note from Kim saying, "Here's what we're doing and I'm really excited about it and here's why it's going to be valuable to you."

The second one is a little bit more formal and is not from Kim, and in fact at the bottom of it there's photos of the speakers. The third one is, "Hey, can you join us a little later this morning?" Those three emails work really well together but here's the critical piece. If you signed up for this webinar as a result of getting invite number one, you'll never see invite number two or three.

If you sign up use from email number two, you'll never see email number three because we're able to say this person has taken the offer so don't give them the offer again. In fact, that's another one on the pet peeve list, in fact I'm currently getting emails from somebody who's trying to convince me to attend a workshop. Clearly, he doesn't have a record that I was at that workshop in December.

I'm kind of amused by it because this particular person is very highly thought of in the email marketing space. I'm looking at him and going, "Um. Amateur Hour." He doesn't know I was there? Why is he pitching me so hard on that?" That's a really key component. Right?

Kim: It is.

Margaret: When people take your offer, don't keep offering it to them.

Kim: On these, you can see on email number one, you can see a call to action here, more information and registration. We also have this register now link down here. We've provided this information. I can tell you that every webinar that we've done, this right here gets a majority of the clicks to conversion to register. This right here gets us that little tiny fraction.

That's what we learn.

Margaret: We looked at that and we discover it's ninety-­‐five percent are on the second call to action and only five percent on the first call to action. That's interesting because most people will teach you that the first call to action is the one that people will generally accept. Not true.

Kim: What's important here is to test and to look and see which ones are the ones that, you know which link is working the better, a better. On this email, here's what interesting. This link right here, far out performs this link down here. More information and registration, more information and registration we could conclude that that as a link as a call to action is less effective than register now to reserve your seat or register now. Those tend to perform better © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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in all of our testing when we're actually out that's have people register in the webinar or attend the webinar.

Going on to email number three. This is what's interesting. This email right here, we added into our series in terms of how we invite people. This goes out the morning of and it basically says the subject is, "Can you join us at 10am central time. This is important stuff." What I just read with the test that went off from Marketing Sherpa was that people are so busy, if you can direct them to a time and if that fits with them, that can be a very effective call to action. We've been doing this and in fact, we get a lot of registration the morning of. It has improved our overall attendance rate for the webinars well.

Again, you'll only get email number three if you don't register on number one or number two, you'll get email number three. Then we only have one call to action click right here. We tell them what's it's going to be about and then we say, "If you have time and you think this sounds like something you want to really get started with and pursue, you can do that." It all works really nicely. Anything else you want to add to that Margaret?

Margaret: I think you did a great job with that. Let's go to the next one.

Kim: Okay.

Examples of Effective CTAs Margaret: This is another example of effective cause to action. I got to tell you, this is a super interesting story. If you've been with us for a while, you know that we produced this document called, "Scoops." These three emails is the series of three emails that with minor edits we send out when we release a new Scoop. What's really super interesting about this so first of all, I should say like the webinar, if somebody takes the offer. If they download the Scoop from email one they never see two and three. If they take the offer number two, they never see number three.

Here's what's really fascinating. Email number one, it doesn't say a word about what we're asking them to download. Here's what it says, "This is really important and I want you to have this information. Click here to get it.

Kim: Include the subject line though. Tell them what the subject line is. I mean.

Margaret: The subject line of this one is one word invisibility. This is the email that accompanied our Scoop called, "The Single Biggest Reason Your Emails Aren't Being Read."

Nobody knew that was the subject line of the Scoop. It's not in the email. It just says one word invisibility. The message is, "We've been looking at a particular issue in Marketing and we want © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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you to have this stuff. Here you go." Totally, what we call totally blind. It's a blind email. Kim, how are the results of that?

Kim: They were the best results of all three. I mean by far, it was wild. Here's the thing: They clicked on the first link, it far out performed the second link in this email. Again, that's why you have to test and look, there's no hard and fast rule. This first link totally outperformed. The downloads that we've got out of this initial offer, this one far out produced all of the other. The blind email, where people didn't know, that means they have to go off of trust of who you are and your brand and what they know about you. That's what has them taking action. It was very interesting.

Margaret: I want you to remember that trust word. As we move forward, that's an important thing. I'll tell you why in just a few minutes. The second email, if they didn't take the offer from the first one, the second email, the subject line is presenting a single biggest reason your emails aren't being read. It basically says, "Have you ever wonder if you ever really wanted to fully understand why your emails don't get read? Click here, we've got a paper for you that'll tell you that."

Then email number three is a very logical, rational email about, "As a marketer, I know that you really want to understand things like this and we've got some great information for you that will help you and here's how you get it."

Kim: The second performing one was number two and the least performing one was number three in this particular series, in this particular test. Again, if you took the offer on number one, you'd never see email number two and you'd never see email number three. Again, because we take out the people would take action automatically. The ones who have got it already, we are continuing to offer them the same thing.

Margaret: Here's another example of an effective email CTA and this is in an email that sits in a nurturing sequence. The key thing I want you to hear about this email, is that this is not an email that goes to a landing page. This is not an email that has a form that needs to be filled out. Here's what's going on behind the scene. When people click that link, we're tracking it.

We've got points assigned to it so we're scoring. The lead who clicks that link and the lead record reflects that they took that action. We can now do even further nurturing. The other key thing though is that if that particular link goes to a blog post. On the blog post, we have calls to action on the side bar and even inside some of our blog post, we have calls to action. Kim, why don't you expand on that.

Linking To A Blog… With A CTA Kim: Yeah. Let me show you what we're talking about here. You can link to a blog so this was a blog post of our turning lurkers in the leads webinar. What we did, this is call to the action, with © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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our word press plugged in, you can easily create these calls into action. When you hover over, when the mouse hover over, it ends up changing. If you were to click this link, then what happens is you get a little pop up form and you can fill in your pop up information.

We will pre-­‐fill it in certain cases for you, but if you forwarded the email and somebody wants this thing then they'll go in and they'll change the information. Then you click download now and you get a confirmation. You've never left this page. You can take this, go through this whole process and continue to read the blog post. This is all part of, I'm showing you here, this is our content zap sites a WordPress site. We're using our WordPress plug in and that's our CTA library and our calls to action that come right with that plug in that you can utilize. That make it super easy to do your lead capture then say, "Hey, check your inbox. It's been sent."

Margaret: The other thing to think about there too is that onward press in particular, it generally speaking kind of tough to have different side bars for different blog post and I just want to mention in passing that our WordPress plug in does allow you to do that. You can create CTAs that are relevant to the blog post that you're sending people too. That's important.

Kim: You can have all the same side bar. That's a really good point, because I know, I've tried all of the different side bar widgets, they suck. They're, let them manage them all the time and all that.

Why Do Some Landing Pages Convert Better Than Others?

Right. Quite frankly, what you want is, "I have this blog post. What's a good call to action?"

Build a call to action library and specify it and you can generate more leads. Just by making that available and easily making that available. Let's move on. Now that we've shown a blog, sort of a blog "landing page" let's look at why do some landing pages convert better than others? A couple examples of good and bad, these are going to be more a generalized. What you would think of as a landing page not necessarily a blog post. Right, Margaret?

It’s All About Those Forms…

Margaret: Exactly. Let's look. The system one when I have trouble not singing but I might sing anyway. It's all about those forms, about those forms, about those forms. Here are some examples from we call our, "Hall of Shame." These are actual forms, lead capture forms, that are on people's landing pages. Get the white paper. Get the download. Download now. They're asking a tremendous amount of information. Folks, the more you ask, the higher the friction, the higher your abandonment rate is going to be. These things are not, even the one that looks shorter wants to know what your quarterly advertising budget is. The one on the right hand © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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side get the white paper now. They want my first name, last name, title, company, address, city, state, zip, country, phone number, my primary business, my job function.

That's ridiculous. It's crazy. It's all about those forms. I got a question for you and that question is I know they're important. I like you to just take a minute to answer these questions. When you get a giant form to fill out like those that we'd just showed you, do you tell the truth?

Kim: We're going to do a quick poll so you can answer and see how everybody answers and then I'll tell you what I do.

Margaret: This is fascinating. We've got a few people here that actually say, "Yes." Let's see.

Everybody voted? Okay. Forty-­‐seven percent say, "No." Twenty-­‐seven percent, "Heck no."

Twenty-­‐seven percent say, "Yes." Kim: Think about this. Just think about, if you want everything under the sun, think about when you walk into a party and you meet somebody for the first time. You barely even say, "Hey, I'm Kim. I'm you know, whatever, right?” Then imagine if you introduce yourself and then they said, "Where do you live? Do you have kids? Are you married? Where do you work? What's your job?

What's your job title? How long have you been there? Where do you go to school? Where'd you grow up? Where were you born?"

Lower The Friction… Get Better Results.

Imagine if you had to answer a barrage of questions right after meeting somebody. What would you think of them? What you want to do is you got to ... If you have a lot of friction, you have to look at where are you in your relationship for one, given the kind of content you're offering.

Then, what's appropriate to ask given what you're out to get? That's the part of the issue here.

Margaret: It is definitely part of the issue and in fact we have a really relevant question that's come in which is, "If it's bad to use forms that ask too much information, is there a way I can get that info after the initial form catcher?"

Kim: That's awesome.

Margaret: Okay so, the question that we were addressing is if you can't ask too much in an initial form, is there a way to get information later? The answer to that question is yes, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more. What we're showing you here is the lead capture form that we use for our content distribution quick start guide.

As you see on the form we're only asking first name, last name, email, and then email confirmation. We've discovered sometimes that people do a typo in the email, so when we put the email confirmation in it does get that a little bit cleaner. Of course the download now © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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button. Very very simple. Let's look at the next one. The next one shows you that now ... Well okay, it's a different one than I expected was coming up. On our event registration pages we do ask for more information. We'll be circling back to that in just a moment.

This is another example of a landing page and Kim, do you want to talk about this one a little bit?

It’s All About The Value…

Kim: Yeah, I would just say this is a really simple landing page. It just highlights the value that benefits what you're going to get, and then you have your download now, which pops a little form. You fill out the form, you get a conformation, you're all set to go. This is another sort of landing page and a different type that you can do. This is just a straight. You'll notice there's no navigation up here, we've suppressed all the navigation, it's what some people would call a "Squeeze Page." You either take the action or you leave. There's not a lot of clicking around to anything else.

Margaret: That's right, and when you hit that download now button, a little form pops up and in this case I believe it only asks first name and email address. This is a very light form.

Kim: Here's the answer into a couple of different things and Margaret, in just a second, but what your answer is you can do progressive profiling. Progressive profiling would be you get the lead and then as you nurture that lead and you offer them other kinds of downloads you create a form that has more information that you want to gather one field at a time and you pre-­‐fill with the information you know. You make it super easy for them to just fill in the remainder, boom, get their next thing.

That's one of the ways you can expand what you learned about a lead. This one we actually ask for more information, so go for it Margaret.

Scale Your Fields Based Upon Value Margaret: Well in this one we ask for the organization name. First name last name is in here as well, so if somebody can in on one of our landing pages for The Scoop and became part of our lead database, and all we have is their first name and email address, well now they're getting invited to our webinars. When they sign up for a webinar, now we're getting first name, last name, email, and organization.

Here's the thing, and I just want to reflect for a moment on those big giants forms that we saw.

Those big giant forms have one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to qualify a lead as © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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much as possible in a form fill, which is the most ridiculous thing you can think about because it's not the job of a form to qualify a lead. That's up to sales. You get them to a point where they're what we call, "marketing qualified," which means that they're expressing all this interest and you give sales as much information as you can.

Don't think about asking things like, "What's your quarterly marketing budget?" Even if your organization only deals with people who have a, let's give an example, an office supplies company, maybe if your organization only deals with people who have an office supplies budget of a million dollars a year, it's not marketing's job to figure that out in the process of a form fill.

Kim: Right. Think about it this way, you're getting the new lead and that question, what does that leave you with? It makes me think you're already trying to dig in my pocket and all I want is this little download. Right?

Margaret: Exactly right. Here's the tip that really answers the question we got earlier, is that your fields in your lead capture forms are scaled and included based on the value that the recipient is getting from you. With a paper that's not necessarily high value before they've read it. It may be hugely valuable after they've read it but until they read it they don't know. If you're ask them for too much information you're going to get crap data in your database because they're going to lie, right? Or they're going to abandon.

Kim: Right. If you think about nurturing that interest, say they download that white paper, if you have a really good nurturing sequence that's go into effect, that deepens every aspect of what you cover in the white paper, maybe by sending them to relevant links or blog posts just like we just did, that offer them more things like an assessment, grade yourself on this or a checklist, how you can do this better, or cheat sheets: how you can implement this. Think about those kinds of downloads to supplement somebody downloading a white paper sort of thing.

Now every time they go in and they get something new you can ask for more information just progressively through each one as you step them through that process. Now you've got a fully qualified lead in terms of the kinds of things your learning but you're doing it really appropriately.

Margaret: Now the other thing I want to ask just to address that one question is that Genoo and some other systems in our space actually will also do a social profile retrieval based on an email address. You can also get more information about your leads behind the scenes depending the email address that they've used to engage with you. There are ways to get more information outside of lead capture forms. That's kind of an important, but it's a very side note to what we're talking about.

Kim: Right, just as a caveat there if all you ask for was email addresses and somebody completed that with Genoo, we'll go out and do a whole social look up returning back many times, their first name, their last name and their organization name, right away for you and © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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their picture and all kinds of things that you can now know that we just fill in in their profile for you. It matches probably 50% of the time. You actually find a match that way.

Margaret: Exactly. Side note, but in answer to the question that's another way to do it. The key message here, scale your feeds according to the value that your recipients will receive and the commitment that you have. Things that take a bigger investment on your part, if you can demonstrate that that investment is valuable to your recipients you can generally ask for a little bit more information.

Kim: I would say what you really want to do is you want to ensure that your call to action, that you do in your email and the way your emails set up, to your landing page, experience of that landing page better be consistent. You don't want this you click through and then it's like, "What? What the heck is this," and it's this complete jarring kind of experience because it's so different like a bait and switch thing. You want to make sure that that doesn't happen.

Ensure CTA-­‐to-­‐Landing Page Consistency Kim: You want to make sure your CTA's connect appropriately to your landing pages, right?

Margaret: Right, and in the column of pet peeves here's some other examples and maybe these will resonate with some of you. Here's a paper, wouldn't you like my paper? Here's a paper, here's a paper. You take the offer and it says, "This paper is available once you subscribe and it costs x dollars per month." Or, "Once you purchased this membership or once you buy this product." You've just been baited and switched, and that is very uncomfortable. Don't offer value and then send people to a buy now page. That's going to alienate your lead pool quicker than just about anything.

Kim: Right.

Margaret: You got to be consistent in your value statements so you're landing page should augment the value statement that enticed them to click in the first place. The look and feel should be similar, even if it's a very different looking landing page, at least your colors and fonts should be similar so it feels brand consistent. Your tone and voice should be consistent too.

Don't go from, "Hi, I'm super collaborative and awesome," and then you get them to a landing page and it's all like, "Don't look now! This is the best mop in the world." It needs to be consistent in tone and voice as well.

Mostly don't make people feel like they've gone to some foreign land when they act on your CTA. That's super important.

Kim: I would say, I think enough has been said there but you just want to make sure that you're consistent all the way through and that your landing page picks up where your email leaves off. © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Margaret: Exactly.

Can You Have CTAs Without Landing Pages?

Kim: Another question, can you have CTA's without landing pages?

Margaret: Well, thanks for asking. Yes, you can. You can absolutely link to undated content. It could be a blog post like we showed you before and I think we're about to show you again.

Margaret: Just make sure it is in your platform.

Kim: Score! Score! Score! Right?

Margaret: Exactly.

Kim: This is Margaret's mantra: Score! Score! Score! Lead scoring, because it helps you separate who's interested from who's not really quickly. Then who's more interested than others. It helps you kind of grade and score that really quickly.

Margaret: If you're not scoring, your leads might as well be snoring.

Kim: You're funny!

Margaret: I just made that up. Again, we're taking you back to that example we showed you before, right? This is a nurturing sequence email, has a link in it, there's no landing page, there's no form to fill out, but we're tracking the clicks, we're giving points. Their lead record reflects that they took that action and based on them doing that we can now do further nurturing and as Kim pointed out earlier, we're also giving them an opportunity when they land on that page to take a related call to action that's sitting out on that right hand side bar.

Kim: Or within the blog post itself, right?

Margaret: Exactly.

Kim: Which bring us to this really big point because we've talked a lot and there's a lot of emails, right? A lot of content going on here, so how do I keep this going? Email after email?

How Do I Keep This Going, Email After Email?

Margaret: That's a great question Kim and I'm sure you have an answer for that. © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Kim: Build habits and a library. That's my answer.

Margaret: That's the answer. Exactly.

Kim: Don't say everything in your email. Like we've said in previous webinars, don't put everything in the email. Make them click. Link them to someplace else to get more. Make that a habit. Regularly create a new call to action or a download. Start with one a month. put it together, it could be a checklist, it could be a cheat sheet. We covered this on our last webinar on attractors; we gave you a whole bunch of different ideas on what you could do there.

Create just one and then one per month, that's all you got to do. Pretty soon before you know it, you're going to have a CTA library that you can use in reference all over the place and really maximize. We have three Scoops right now, and we've leveraged the heck out of those Scoops.

That's all we've done in the last six months. We do webinars on a regular basis but we're adding content and we do lots of different things with our content but in those, we've leveraged the heck out of those.

Margaret: Exactly. Here's another great tip too, is look at your website today and figure out whether there's content on it that you're not gaining that you could gain. One of the things we see a lot is people create white papers and it's click here to get the white paper and you click it and there's the white paper. The web browser turns it into a PDF displayer, we've all seen it, right? Could we gate that content? Absolutely we could gate that content, and by gating that content of course I mean putting a lead capture form in front of it. Now guess what? You're starting to build your library with stuff you already have.

Kim: Right. We worked with one of our customers to do just this. They had content that's really rich awesome content, and they've written books, and everything else. They had, literally they were having people drink from a fire hose, they had so much content. People didn't know how to sort their way through it. It was freely available. What we did is we created a site for them for their book and I featured this in other webinars that we've done. Basically we gated access to the content and we guided people through getting the different "tools" that were available and they had in a one year period, they had twenty-­‐five hundred leads, that they never even knew that they had before because people had to sign up.

They were doing lead gen, they knew what people were looking at. They knew what people were getting, what they were downloading, and then they could engage with them.

Margaret: Did they turn lurkers into leads?

Kim: They did, but they did it through just putting gates on their content. It wasn't anything amazing and they actually started to guide people if you're doing ... Here's another tool you can add to your tool chest. We did a whole nurturing sequence with them that allowed them to really guide people and then what we found out, this is what's amazing, this is how good their © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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content is, when someone comes in to a site you think, "Okay we're going to offer them this primary piece of content and we'll nurture to follow up with them.

Well, we offered them a primary piece of content and then they kept looking through this site and we had other links in there. People were downloading an average six downloads per visit.

That's extraordinary and they were starting to see this. They could see that interest and they could get on the marketing qualified and they could actually follow up and find out if they wanted to go through their certification training, if they wanted to go to their annual conference. There were all kinds of ways. If they had a consulting interest for a certain issue that they had in their organization.

It was a pretty neat thing to see them go from totally ungated to really guiding leads. It's a really good case study from that perspective.

Margaret: I think the big point there is, it was content they already had. That's what you need to do folks is evaluate your websites. See if there's content that you could be gating or if you've got things on your website that would be effective links to include in email, even if you don't want to gate it. When people take action, you score, you track, you record, and you show it in their lead record.

Kim: You're always asking people to take an action.

Margaret: Exactly. Finally, look at what you've already done. Have you done webinars or videos or white papers? Have you built assessments or checklists? Are they sitting out there? Are there things that you reserve only for your customers that maybe you could start offering to your prospects, and getting them deeper engaged with you. That also builds your library. This is how you keep this going email after email, month after month. Absolutely.

Kim: Margaret, where do the bears come in?

Where Do The Bears Come In? Margaret: Oh my goodness Kim, they've been here all along! Here's the thing folks, if you follow the best practices that we've outlined here, you won't see the bears. If you're doing things or if you know people who are doing things like saying, "Here's value," and when they get to a landing page and it's a, "Buy now, spend money, give me your credit card number" kind of landing page, that's a bear. You're turning your leads into bears. When you are misleading your leads you're turning them into bears. When things are not consistent from your offers to your landing pages, you're turning people into bears.

The bears have been here all along, but you now have the power to eradicate the bears and make sure that your leads don't turn into bears. That's really the key message here is if you © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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alienate your leads, what are they going to do? They're going to unsubscribe. They're going to tone you out. They're going to stop engaging with you. You will have lost them. Just like email has the power to get leads, it also has the power to kill leads. That's the part that we need to be very careful of in how we communicate with our audiences, right?

Next Session – What Converts?

Kim: Right. That leads up to our next section, what converts? We're going to do a session on conversion and landing pages specifically. Landing pages that evoke action, we're going to be looking at the different options that are out there for you to build landing pages, the format of landing pages, how they work long form or short form. Should they be longer or shorter, in what case is one better than the other? How to incorporate lead capture forms for maximum conversion. Do you show the form right there? Do you click on a button to get to a form pop-­‐ up? Do you take people from your landing page to a download form page to then a thank you page? What's the best funnel?

Then how do you test accurately? How do you get some good tests that give you an idea of how your leads respond so you can try new ideas and things like that. That's going to be on Thursday June 25th, we're changing the time from the morning to 1:30pm CT in the afternoon. We've had so many requests for people on the West Coast that have to get up and be there at eight in the morning to hit our 10am webinars. We're taking that into account and we're changing the time on this one to 1:30pm. We're going to start testing out a 1:30pm webinar time, so please make sure you note that.

We're going to send a registration link to you when we post the recording of this session. We'll also include a bonus opportunity in that email so watch for that, and you'll be able to register.

Margaret: Excellent. It's going to be a great session.

Questions???

Kim: With that, open the question box and type the answer to this question, given all the stuff, and a lot of you have participated on many webinars with us, some of you are brand new, but what will make the biggest difference in your successful implementation of online marketing?

What are your biggest gotchas? What do you want to know? Please fill in the question box right now. Just let us know what that is and we'll take all your questions from this webinar as well.

Do that, first tell us what your biggest boggles, what your biggest issues and challenges are with your online marketing.

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Do that and I'll give you a minute or so and then also think of your questions because we love questions.

Margaret: We do have a number of questions that we could actually start addressing ...

Kim: Oh cool.

Margaret: While folks are typing in. One of the questions that we got was, and one that I'm not quite sure how to answer which is, what is the best format for download forms? Not sure, if you can clarify that, the person that asked that question, if you can clarify that a little bit more for us we'd love to answer that. I'm not sure we can answer it the way you worded it.

Kim: You mean horizontal or vertical or? Yeah, if you can just clarify it I'd love to engage with that one.

Margaret: Here's another one though, where are landing pages stored? Are they blog pages?

You want to take that one, Kim? Kim: Sure.

Margaret: Certainly we're going to go in more in-­‐depth in our next session on the twenty-­‐fifth but how would we answer that today?

Kim: I would say landing pages are on your website. You could think about a blog being a landing page but that's distinct. Landing pages that we showed are actual pages on our site.

They're not blog pages, they're actually a page of the form on them with a particular headline and call to action. Those are specific single purpose landing pages. I want you to come in, I want you to complete that lead capture form, and get the resource.

Whereas a blog is more, you don't want to use your blog as just a form, right? People are going to come out, they expect content in a blog. A blog can act as a landing page as we illustrated here but you've pages. If you've got a website, with Genoo we have a content management system that has a blogging platform and pages, so you can do pages and landing pages, or you can do a blog or you can use our WordPress widget, and you can do all of that within WordPress also. There's a lot of flexibility on different platforms depending on what you have.

We could clarify but hopefully that helps. You want to make sure however that your landing pages are on your property. They're on your URL, they're not on some services URL, they're on your URL. That's what you want.

Margaret: Exactly. The prior question came back with, horizontal or vertical, which one is recommended?

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Kim: I would test it with your audience. We do vertical a lot. We find we get good conversions there. I've seen differences. Sometimes you have to be careful and make sure that if you go horizontal that you're tabbing works really, really well for going from page to page. Field to field to field, because depending on how you do that it can get kind of funky. I would say either way, you just test and see what works better.

Margaret: I think it's relevant to add here something that's kind of important is there are people in this universe who are extreme specialists in things like landing pages and they employ things like eye tracking studies and color studies and all kinds of science. In fact there's all kinds of science about just about everything that you can do, but the average small and medium business or educational institution doesn't have the budget to engage with some of those huge studies.

What we're trying to do is giving you the benefit of our expertise without you having to spend boatloads of money to get into those studies. Certainly if you have boatloads of money to spend some of those studies might be worth investing in depending on what kind of business you're in but what we're trying to do is make this simple and accessible to you as a small or medium business people and educational institutions who are trying to increase enrollment.

That's what we are here for.

Kim: I would say one of the things that you could look at, I would test it but, what you want to do is you want to look at, "Okay, if I send an email out, how many people click through and go to the link?" From that link how many people take the action I want them to take on that page I sent them to? What's my drop off? You should be seeing ... Once you have those numbers you can then compare to more campaigns and see, well did this work, did that work better? You could do that. That's metrics, that's basic, right. Many people just don't even do that basic level and there is no right answer.

There is no right answer. It's not that horizontal forms are better than vertical forms. You can see huge conversions because it's about the content, it's about the call to action, it's about a lot of different things that you've evoked in your visitor your user that you need to pay attention to. That gets into psychology and emotion and all that kind of stuff which I totally dig and read all about. Hopefully we're going to have some webinars in the future about just that. The psychology of it all.

Margaret: A couple of other questions in kind of response to the question that we just asked as well, I want to pay attention to this one, "I'm working with a consulting company, which deals in IT and business, do we need landing pages?" Well landing pages aren't whether you need them or not is not relevant to what industry you're in. It's relevant to what offers you're providing to your audience. You want to expand on that, Kim? Kim: I would say that yes, my answer would be yes, you need landing pages. Here's the thing, what's your website looking like? What are your calls to action? If they're contacting us, request a quote, join our mailing list, those are the lowest forms of, and the lowest performing forms of © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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calls to action you could have. The best thing you could do would be to have landing pages. If it's hard for you to do that on your website that's why marketing automation tools like Genoo exist because we make it easy.

You can match the look and feel of your site and build landing pages that are easy to build and easy to use when you need them without having to go to your IT staff to get that done. I say, "Yes, you want to explore landing pages," because if you bring someone just into a page, you also want to look at, do you guide people through your pages? How well optimized is the page you're going to take people to and is the action you want them to take very clear?

A lot of times with web pages and websites, specifically from IT consulting firms they're more like brochures than interactive really engaging vehicles. In that case I would say, "Yes, you want to make sure you can do landing pages."

Margaret: I would just add that my past history in in IT consulting, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that landing pages work. Landing pages absolutely make a huge difference.

Keep in mind this: Landing pages have this air of mystique about them, but in reality you all, everyone on this call, went to a landing page to register for this event. It didn't look like the download the Scoop page, it was just a page with a little form that said, "Register for webinar."

That's a landing page too.

That plays into one of the other questions we got, "It looks like it's better to have a pop-­‐up form than a separate page or a built-­‐in box form, do you have data on that?"

Kim: Right.

Margaret: Want to handle that one, Kim? Kim: Do I ... Sorry I missed the question. I thought you were still answering.

Margaret: It looks like it's better to have a pop-­‐up form than a separate page or a built-­‐in box form, do you have data?

Kim: Yeah, there is data. In fact I watched a video about that this morning where somebody had a form right on their homepage, it was an opt-­‐in form, and they replaced it with a button that just popped a form, and it went from a five percent conversion rate to a eight and a half percent conversion rate on their homepage. You would have to test that for yourself. I know that pop-­‐up forms with lead capture forms are actually really, really effective. Rather than taking somebody to a whole landing page, but then again you can take them to a landing page with the form right on the page and those can also be super effective, like our webinar registration forms.

It just depends and I would say, again my answer to everything is, "Test it with your audience.

Play with it." © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Margaret: Exactly. If there were only one answer there would only be one book, there wouldn't be a whole marketing section at Barnes and Noble, and it really is your business, your business model is unique, and how do we best talk to your audience is really the key. We have some other questions and feedback that have come in, but we've got a minute or two left, and I know we want to wrap up.

I want to first thank everyone for the great feedback we've been getting through the questions panel, and thank you for the nice comments that we've seen as well. Very much appreciate it.

Kim, let's take it home.

Kim: All right well, basically thank you very much. It's been great having you, please send us your questions when you have them to both and friend us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, talk to us. We're happy to hear from you guys, because we want you guys to rock and roll with your marketing, that is our biggest commitment. Both Margaret and I are committed to small business marketing success. With that I look forward to seeing you on our next webinar, hold the date, Thursday June 25th at 1:30pm pm, CT. Okay? Without any further ado, thank you so much.

About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-­‐up sequences, or to augment content development.

We sponsor events and webinars that provide practical, very useful ideas and strategies that will help marketers be more effective quickly.

Sometimes reverent. Sometimes irreverent. Always relevant. contentzap.com

About Genoo Genoo is one of the most full-­‐featured marketing automation solutions available, and targeted to the small and midsized business space. We love helping companies succeed with their marketing, and we are committed to building the best and most useful integrated digital marketing tools available!

Inquire about a 30-­‐Day initiative. www.genoo.com

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Notes:

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