Would you like to learn how to get more people on your list from the traffic that you're already getting?
We did some experimenting and found, what we believe to be, the best solution for us.
The Problem
The opt-in rate on our blog hasn't been what it used to be.
At one time, we were getting hundreds of opt-ins per day.
Over the months and years it slowly started to drop off.
We sort of resolved ourselves to the fact that email marketing was dying and that we should just rely on paid traffic and SEO to generate new traffic.
The problem with that is that we became like a shark that never gets to stop swimming. We have to continually drive new eyeballs to be effective.
The fact of the matter is that email marketing is still alive and well. We'd just gotten complacent with the things that were working and just left good enough alone.
Within the last few months, we've been on a bit of a journey to re-invigorate our email list growth. Unfortunately, there were things about the various options that we tried that just didn't work well for us.
For example, we were using Thrive Leads for a long time. We even recommend it in several of our courses and podcast episodes. We were fans and we spread the word whenever we could. The problem came when it stopped working for us…
We ran into some sort of bug where our opt-ins just stopped appearing. No big deal, we thought, we'll just head over to support, submit a ticket, and have it resolved tomorrow…
Nope. As it turns out, Thrive Leads actually charges extra if you actually want support for the product that you paid money for. Our options were to send them more money to get a fix for the plugin that was no longer working or to find a different option.
We chose to look at other options. I turned to Opt-in Monster, a tool that I had used back at LearnToBlog and had really liked.
For the options that we needed for our business, we were looking at $49 per month… That's not TOO bad for everything that it did, however, that price is if you paid annually. Our “all-in” cost to get setup was actually $588.
On top of that, I wasn't a huge fan of the designs. They weren't very customizable and they looked a bit outdated to me.
We got an account with Opt-in Monster anyway and put it to work.
There were two problems that I had with it… First, the designs were ugly. I already mentioned that but it really was my biggest issue and, second, our opt-in rates sucked.
We were getting a 3.6% opt-in rate. Out of every 100 people that came to the site, less than 4 of them would join our list.
We obviously needed to optimize!
The Hypothesis
A tool called ConvertBox was brought to our attention by our good friend, and highly respected marketer and software developer, Josh Bartlett.
Josh was an advisor to the developer of ConvertBox so, of course, he was a little bit biased towards it. However, we looked at it and it looked real clean.
The opt-in boxes looked slick and modern. The back-end dashboard was absolutely beautiful and intuitive. The features that we needed were all there and it had some new twists that we hadn't seen in a lead generation tool like this before.
The opt-in boxes that slide-in on the bottom right of the screen kind of reminded us of Intercom, a customer support and insight tool, common in tools like Clickfunnels and LeadPages.
It looked like what people are used to seeing as a trusted resource to get help with their problems.
The other thing that stood out about these forms is that you could add your profile picture to the form. So it kind of looked like a customer support agent was helping you because you could see an actual face on the message.
Our hypothesis was that these elements would certainly improve conversions.
The forms looked like a commonly trusted support platform that people were used to using to ask for help. Maybe that perceived credibility and trust would pass over to an opt-in as well?
Our face being right on the opt-in, adding a personal element, as if we were personally asking them to join us, seemed like another great element that could potentially endear people to us and want to join us on our list.
To top things off, ConvertBox was a one-time price. It wasn't $49 per month like Opt-in Monster and they weren't tacking on extra fees in order to get support, like ThriveLeads. You pay once and your done…
We had little to lose to test our hypothesis.
The Results
We grabbed our copy of ConvertBox and “installed it.” I put “installed it” in quotes because there really wasn't much to install. If you're on WordPress, like us, you install a WordPress plugin. If you're not on WordPress, you add a line of code to your site and you're done.
It was simple.
Creating an opt-in form the first time around took us a little bit longer. I probably spent 2-hours creating my first one. However, this isn't to say that it takes long to setup. I actually spent a lot of time clicking around, testing the different features, turning on and off functions to see how they effected the look of my opt-ins, and generally had fun playing around with it, putting it through its motions.
Things you can add to the slide-in:
ConvertBox Triggers (That Make It Pop Up):
And you can even add a ConvertBox on other people's content that you share!
And you can do some cool targeting stuff so different people see different forms:
All said and done, I created a brand new opt-in form for the exact same lead magnet that we've always promoted… Our marketing tool kit cheat sheet.
The copy was the same, the offer was the same, the traffic coming to our site was the same, everything about the offer was the same as it always was.
[mks_col]
[mks_one_half]Old Opt-in Form:
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[mks_one_half]New Opt-in Form:
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The only differences were that we were using ConvertBox, meaning the look and design were quite different, and my face was now beautifying the top of the opt-in form.
The actual result after several weeks of it running… Our opt-in rate doubled!
My mind was blown.
I proceeded to swap out every opt-in form from our entire site with ConvertBox opt-in forms and the results had consistent. Everywhere I added it in, the opt-in rate doubled.
We were on to something!
How We Did It
To be honest, there really wasn't much to the process of getting this all set up.
The platform is pretty intuitive, as you can see from the screenshots above.
It takes about 5-minutes to set up the integration with your autoresponder.
Right now, it supports:
- GetResponse
- MailChimp
- ActiveCampaign (we use this)
- Aweber
- Infusionsoft
- ConvertKit
- OntraPort
- Drip (we also use this)
- ConvertFox
- MailerLite
- Klaviyo
- Plus pretty much anything else via webhooks and custom HTML forms
- They promise to be adding more integrations all the the time.
Once integrated with our autoresponder(s), we installed the WordPress plugin on our site.
It installs just like any other WordPress plugin. You essentially go to plugins in your dashboard, search for ConvertBox, and install it straight from within WordPress.
One thing that I absolutely love is the WordPress keyword based targeting. This was a game-changer for me, in terms of simplicity.
When creating an opt-in form in ConvertBox, I tell it that I want to have the box pop up on any post with a specific keyword.
For the Marketing Tools Cheatsheet, I created a tag in WordPress called “00-LM: Marketing Stack”.
For our Evergreen Wisdom book opt-in, I created a tag called “00-LM: Evergreen Wisdom”
All of my lead magnets have a tag that begins with “00-LM:”. I did that so, when I'm in my WordPress editor, I can simply type “00” (zero zero) into the keyword section and it will give me a list of my lead magnet options.
That's it. Done. Now, any time I want to add a lead magnet into a blog post I just created, I simply add a tag with the name of that lead magnet and it magically appears on the post.
What You Should Do Next
If you're already using an opt-in plugin like Thrive Leads or Opt-in Monster and you want to improve your opt-in rate and/or you want to ditch the monthly fee, definitely give ConvertBox a try.
Don't worry about transitioning over. I was scared about all the work it would take to set up all my opt-in forms again but, honestly, I could have had everything setup within an hour, had I not spent so much time just playing with all of the options.
Now, here's the thing…
ConvertBox is not publicly available at the moment. Dean, the creator, has allowed a handful of people in to test it for a one-time price.
He did, however, give me permission to share the link with our audience. He knew we had a smart, tech-savvy community, that would really appreciate a tool like this.
To be quite honest, I have no clue when the pricing will change.
You can grab it for the one-time price here. It is our affiliate link. However, we use this on our site and fully endorse it. We'd be telling you about it even if we didn't have an affiliate link.
Again, you can see in previous screenshots, that we used the exact same lead magnet, the exact same copy, and the exact same traffic and blog posts. The only thing different was the ConvertBox design and integration… This alone doubled our conversions.
At a one-time price and no monthly fee, there's not a lot to lose.
What We'll Do For You
Since I mentioned that it is an affiliate link, I want to give you a little bonus if you do grab it using our link.
I'm putting together a little training series where I show you exactly how we implemented it on this site. You can watch over my shoulder as I build out all of our sites opt-in forms and optimize them to convert.
Not only that but, I'll also hook you up with some bonus training on how to create a great lead magnet and an in-depth traffic training to show you how to drive people to your site to get them on your list.
You'll have everything you need to get rollin' right away. You'll have the tool that we use to grow our list, training on how we've implemented it, a system to create amazing lead magnets that people want to opt-in for, and a method to drive traffic into your content so that they can opt-in. Get the full scoop on our ConvertBox Bonus Package here.
What's Next?
You can pay monthly for another existing solution and get what you're gettin' or you can test a new tool with no ongoing fee that actually proved to double our conversion rates.
ConvertBox is still in its infancy. There's still so much being added to it constantly. Some of the upcoming logic and A.I. type features that are being added in will blow you away…
Any you can get on board now, for a single price.
It doubled our opt-in rate and we're not even done optimizing yet.
What can it do for you?
Want to see more of Convertbox's capabilities? Check out our Convertbox Review here. We also dive into some really “outside the box” ways that you can use Convertbox. (It's pretty freakin' ninja)
