After your newly converted leads fill out a form, you should always send them to a “thank-you” page, which delivers the content you have promised on the landing page. This is where you bring back the navigation and direct people to other parts of your site or more offers in which they might be interested. Just as for landing pages, there are a number of distinct strategies that you can use to optimize your thank-you pages. The four most important components of an effective thank-you page are: access to your offer, social media sharing links, secondary calls-to-action, and auto-response emails.
1. Access to Your Offer
First of all, your visitor has just taken the time to complete your form, and has decided to download your content or sign up for your offer. So begin by making sure you cover the conventional purpose of the “thank-you pages,” and say thank you!
It is also a good idea to include the title of the offer in the title of your thank-you page to reassure the viewer that they are on the correct page. Then, if applicable, provide a means to download or view your content. This may take the form of a link to the PDF of a whitepaper or embedding a video in the thank-you page itself. If the offer revolves around a consultation, be sure to set expectations and explain to people if they should expect a phone call or something in their inbox. – The Anatomy of Conversion-Optimized ‘Thank You’ Pages by Sarah Goliger
The Anatomy of Conversion-Optimized ‘Thank You’ Pages
Mastering the Art of Slow Blogging
Several years ago, I hired a personal trainer and we’d work out in the park near my apartment. One day she had me run the loop around the park and noticed that I had difficulty keeping a consistent pace, I would stop and start a lot. She suggested that I run slowly (which she claimed was smoother than jogging—running experts, feel free to debate). The result was that instead of being either in a short-lived sprint or an exhausted, limping jog, I could sustain a smooth, slow running pace by dialing down my intensity.
How many people start a blog and then quit after two months?
When you take off blogging at a sprint, posting daily or even three times per week, your idea generating and writing muscles can cramp up pretty quickly. Over the past three years, I found that not only do I prefer to post irregularly—I average about every two weeks—it keeps me from burning out. I’ve even taken a month off from time to time. For example, I took November off to complete a content-creation challenge. I haven’t posted in weeks because my new website isn’t ready yet. (Stop gasping in horror.)
Fast blogging can lead to “content inflation”
Economic inflation causes our currency to be worth less. Content inflation is what happens when your content decreases in value—you have more of it, but it’s not that powerful or interesting. When we’re so obsessed with posting frequently, we risk churning out less than exciting stuff, and this can water down our brand.
My blog exists primarily to support my claim that I write well, know what I’m talking about and have interesting ideas to add to the conversation. I don’t want to fill my blog so full of content-for-content’s-sake that it’s hard to find the good stuff. Plus, most of us are better writers when we are expressing something we feel strongly about or just had a flash of insight, and that doesn’t happen every day. – Mastering the Art of Slow Blogging by Kelly Kingman
Top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of January 7, 2012
Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of January 7, 2012…
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5 Questions and 5 Reasons Your Customers Want the Answers
Where are you online?
What’s your domain name and what are your keywords? If you don’t choose keywords relevant to your product or service, then your people (your customers and prospects) can’t find you.
It’s all about the keywords. When people search for your subject, the way they discover you is by the words that are in your domain name, article titles, article descriptions and the body of your content.
Your website should have a theme that connects to your product or service, and your keywords should relate to that theme. You can use Google Keyword Search to find out how many people search for the phrases that you come up with. This way you can choose relevant words and phrases that people are actually looking for. It’s not enough to rank on the front page of Google; you have to rank for the language that your people are using.
What does working with you feel like?
Don’t just tell your potential clients; show them through testimonials and case studies so that they can hear what other people say about you.
Show them through your website design and in-store or website experience. If you say you believe in simplicity but your design is overcrowded and your first point of contact is scattered and confused, it tells your prospects something. Are you sending out the message that you want them to hear?
Who are you and who cares?
Identify your target market and then do the research—by asking questions and listening to the answers—to understand them. Once you know who your audience is, then you can tell them who you are in a language that matters to them.
The better you know your audience, the easier it is to write a relevant and personable bio or product page. And if you choose to hire a copywriter, then you’re in a better position to edit what your writing team crafts for you. Remember, you have to actively participate in the message creation surrounding your business. – 5 Questions and 5 Reasons Your Customers Want the Answers by Jamillah Warner
Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort
Every so often, a storm erupts in the blogosphere over comments, and whether they are worth having or not. The latest entrant in this ongoing debate is TechCrunch writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler, who doesn’t have comments on his blog and has written several posts defending his decision, saying they are 99-percent bile and a waste of his time. On the other side of the debate is fellow VC Fred Wilson, who says Siegler is missing a lot by not allowing comments. I think Wilson is right — while comments can be a royal pain at times, they are a crucial part of what makes a blog more than just a bully pulpit.
Siegler’s blog posts were triggered by another blogger’s decision to turn off comments: developer and user-interface designer Matt Gemmell made the move a month ago, and recently posted an update about his decision, in which he recommended that all bloggers take the same step (Siegler hasn’t allowed comments for some time). Gemmell reiterated some of the arguments made against comments, including: They are only used by a tiny minority, they allow anonymity — which he said “encourages unhealthy behavior” — they don’t contribute much and they place a burden on the blogger. – Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort by Mathew Ingram
17 Silly Missed Lead Generation Opportunities
Offers are the heart and soul of lead generation. After all, you need to put something on the other side of that lead-capture form that will motivate visitors to complete it in the first place, right? And it needs to be good. That’s why you spend hours upon hours creating ebooks, perfecting webinar slides, and building up your arsenal of offers. And if that’s the case, you want to pump as many leads as possible out of those offers’ landing pages.
That’s where promotion comes in. Creating that awesome offer and its optimized landing page is all well and good, but if you don’t give your offer any more visibility than that, you’re going to be hurtin’ for leads. Luckily, the promotional possibilities are numerous. Are you leveraging all of these different places to promote your offers? If not, you might want to get to work. Your lead generation goal will thank you for it. – 17 Silly Missed Lead Generation Opportunities by Pamela Vaughan
6 Tips For Building a High Quality Blog Following
In 2010, New York City startup, Birchbox launched a blog about beauty products before it had any customers. The beauty sample delivery service – and its blog – exploded in popularity.
Today, to keep up with its readers’ appetite for content, Birchbox employs multiple editors and publishes half a dozen posts a day, along with an online magazine. According to compete.com, Birchbox.com traffic grew 6,500% in 2011, to over 110,000 monthly unique visitors at last count.
But raw traffic data doesn’t tell the whole story about the value of a publication. Birchbox’s blog drives customer acquisition and retention, which means its readers are loyal enough to become subscribers, followers and customers. At last count, the company had 44,000 Facebook Likes, 14,000 Twitter followers, and 9,400 Youtube subscribers. New blog subscribers – people who had willingly opted in to Birchbox content – pile on every month. (The company declined to release hard numbers on total blog subscribers).
Ironically, the hit-based nature of social media means many blog owners have difficulty cultivating long-term loyalty from their users. It’s easy to get excited when the occasional “viral” post brings in a spike of traffic. But often that traffic melts away as quickly as it arrived.
Brian Clark, CEO of CopyBlogger Media, says a building a quality blog following means “attracting the right people in order to accomplish your specific goals.” In other words, he says, “you’ve got to put quality ahead of quantity.”
So, how do upstart blogs like Birchbox’s build such voracious followings? – 6 Tips For Building a High Quality Blog Following by Shane Snow
Dead? Social Media’s Explosive Growth is Only Beginning
Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.
Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says “It’s time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks.”
“No matter how you slice the data,” Vivek Wadhwa said on Twitter, “the exponential growth in Social Media is no more. Just gradual growth now.”
Wadhwa is an astute observer of long-term technology trends and is likely correct within a particular understanding of the situation. For one thing, I can’t help but imagine raw user numbers still have a long, long way to go in many parts of the world just beginning to come online.
Even within the US and the rest of the West though, such conclusions require an assumption that the key metric is number of new users in total. “Instead of raw user growth,” Eldon argues on Techcrunch, “the numbers to watch going forward will be around engagement.” – Dead? Social Media’s Explosive Growth is Only Beginning by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of December 31, 2011
Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of December 31, 2011…
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The 5-Step Test to Determine Optimal Email Frequency
You know there’s a delicate balance between infrequent email communications and bombarding your email recipients with messages to the point that they opt out. Maybe you’re interested in ramping up your email marketing in 2012 but don’t want to see all your hard lead generation work go to waste by increasing your sending frequency. How do you know what email sending frequency is the right frequency for your subscriber list?
If you guessed “test,” you’re right on the money! While we’ve performed tests and released research on email sending frequency, every brand’s email marketing campaign objectives and subscriber lists are unique and thus require fine-tuned testing to determine appropriate sending frequency.
So how do you get started with an email send frequency test? Many people have been nervous about performing this test for fear of ruining their lead generation efforts, but it really is quite simple. Let’s break down the steps you can take to perform this test so you can start understanding how often you should communicate with your email subscribers. – The 5-Step Test to Determine Optimal Email Frequency by Corey Eridon
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