How to Succeed at The Most Critical Point in SaaS Sales

If you’re like any other SaaS marketing maven, you want to drive more sales in the best way possible.

And if you’ve given it any thought, you realize the epochal importance of the free trial.

Everything about the free trial is important. I would argue that the free trial is the most critical phase in SaaS sales. Most SaaS sales models place an enormous amount of emphasis on the trial, because, taken broadly, it’s the only marketing method that makes sense.

But that’s where a certain amount of distraction sets in. We obsess over all things free trial, completely missing the whole point of the trial — to get users to use the product!

My goal in this article is to clear the table on the free trial period, and get our heads screwed on right so we can understand how to capitalize on the most important point in SaaS sales.

Let’s Describe What’s Going on Here

Most SaaS sales processes go like this, generally:

1. Customer is aware of a need.
2. Customer considers alternatives.
3. Customer zeroes in on your product.
4. Customer starts a free trial.
5. Customer converts into a customer.

At point four in the list above, the customer is already deep in the funnel. The funnel diagram included below expands it a bit. You can see that the customer is there — starting the trial. They have just a couple microsteps to go until they are a full customer.

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Let’s look at another diagram of this point. This time, I want you to see just how critical it is based on what comes after the purchase point.

At the nexus of those two triangles is the transition from free trial to paying customer. You can’t experience the benefits without moving them on from the active use/free trial phase.

See Where You’re Losing Customers! Using the Kissmetrics Funnel Report, you can create a funnel and see how many users are dropping off after they signup for a trial. You’ll even be able to drill down and see exactly who upgraded to paying and who did not. See this blog post for more details, or sign up for Kissmetrics to get started!

And that’s where we need to focus on — getting the customer over the hump of free trial and into the utopia of a closed deal.

Understand What Motivated the Customer to Begin With

One of the best ways to figure out how to get the customer to buy for good is to figure out why they started the trial to begin with.

Let me explain.

Why is a customer going to buy your product? Think through the answer, because this is kind of the whole point of your SaaS, right? What does the customer want to achieve, do, or experience?

That’s the reason why your customer started a free trial. The motivation should be no different.

If you are able to satisfy the customer’s need during the temporary trial, then you can compel them to remain a customer by continuing to satisfy them in the future. SaaS isn’t a one-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing process of serving the customer.

The cause for conversion into free trial and the motivation for conversion into a full customer are one and the same. Problem: solved.

Use the customer’s free trial motivation as the tool to drive engagement beyond the trial.

Map Your Customer Journey

To drive further into the reasons and motivations for attracting and retaining customers, do yourself the service of mapping the customer journey.

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Why? Because you’re going to experience an epiphany of sorts. Every customer is going to follow a path that takes them from awareness to completion.

One of the most valuable insights from a customer journey map is that you will find out what customers do and see when they sign up for a free trial. You’ll discover whether it’s encouraging or demotivating. You’ll learn what obstacles they may experience when they move through the process.

Look at it From a Long-Term Perspective

Pictures or diagrams are so much better at explaining things than I am. So, here’s what I want you to do. Look at this diagram for at least ten seconds.

Source

What do you see? I see that you’re going to gain 5-30% of a customer’s revenue at the initial sale point. I see that a whopping 70-95% of the revenue is going to come a week, a month, or a year down the road.

What does this tell you?

• To me that says that I need to take a long term view. Customers don’t prove their maximum value until some time has passed.
• It also tells me that customer retention is killer.
• Finally, it tells me that none of that revenue will materialize unless I close the sale. Forget 95%. I just need 5% right now!

Even a longview of sales informs me that this is a critical point. So let’s get into some of the tactics.

Get a Perspective On Your Goal: Engagement

If you’re honest for a second, you’ll realize that you can’t make the customer do anything. You can, however, coax them to do something.

That most important “thing” is called engagement.

Engagement can be a slippery term, so let me explain what I mean by it. I agree with Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures who explained that “Engagement is when your customer is realizing value from your SaaS.”

You see, the customer will only want to buy the SaaS when she actually experiences the value that it can provide. Engagement happens many times in multiple scenarios, but it all boils down to the same experience — value for the customer.

In the critical pre-purchase stage, you must drive engagement. The entire free trial period should be designed around engagement — getting the customer to smell, taste, and feel the value of the product.

Without engagement, there will be no purchase.

Know What You Want the Customer To Do

Engagement is meaningless unless you actually understand what action causes engagement.

A customer can’t realize value from the SaaS unless he is doing something with the SaaS.

Doing what? What do you want the customer to do? That depends on your product and your customer.

For Mention.com, as an example, that could be compelling their customer to create an online alert. So, what does Mention.com do with their free trial? They force customers to engage.

The word force sounds all cruel and violent, but it’s actually quite kind and compassionate. Why? Because they want their customer to actually experience the value of the product right from the get-go. There’s no better way to do so than to engage and launch the trial simultaneously.

Here’s how they do it:

Now, let’s talk about that little engagement action.

Make Your Customer Do the Engagement Action

Once you’ve decided what you want the customer to do, it’s time to make them do it. I used the word force in the preceding point. To divest the term of its negative connotations, let me provide a more cohesive set of suggestions around this concept.

Emphasize This Action in Your Email Marketing

Email message play a critical role in this critical point in sales. How you say it matters. So how should you say it? Beg, wheedle, whine?

No. Command them. Get them to do the action you’ve selected. Here’s an example of such an email. This email sample comes from Autosend.io, which provides an upsell schedule dashboard for SaaS. They want their trial lead to first log in. Makes sense.

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Put Dependencies on That Action

What do I mean by this? Show the customer that they will only experience the usefulness of the software if they do the specific action.

Mint.com compels users to add a bill or an account. These two actions are presumably Mint’s engagement action, which will draw the user in to experience the value of the software.

It’s kind of like a game. The user has to unlock the next level, so she needs to do a certain action.

Reward the Action

When the user does that action, give them a pat on the back. They’ve earned it. By applauding their action, you can drive them deeper into the experience and engagement of the SaaS.

Remember, it’s all about action. The user needs to do.

Trial users who stay active are more likely to convert. Notice how Totango sketches out the condition. Trial users are 4x more likely to convert when they are using the SaaS for three days. The opposite holds true, too. A user who cancels is a user who’s not using the SaaS.

Source

By encouraging activity through a variety of methods, you will improve your success at engagement and sales.

Be Sure to Send a Welcome Email Right Away

According to MIT and InsideSales, the odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the first hour. You need to be calling them within an hour of them becoming a lead. If you don’t, the chances that you’ll connect with them drastically decrease.

And you should automatically email the free trial user immediately.

The customer doesn’t know what to do after they start the trial. You have to tell them. The way you do that is by sending them an email.

What you say in that email is just as important. There’s a misconception that you need to send them an elaborate letter, complete with details, metrics, motivations, instructions, and all the other things that make for a warm-and-fuzzy welcome experience.

Not quite. The shorter your email, the better.

Here’s an example of a free trial expiration email that I received.

Am I going to read that? No. It’s way too long.

Will I read a short message like this?

Yes.

Short messages are important. You have several days and multiple emails to communicate with the customer – introduction, action, motivation, etc. The free trial is a process and a sequence, but you don’t need to give them every bit of information all at once.

Shorten that email. No, shorter. Shorter…There.

Send Them More Emails

Email is the communication method of choice for the vast majority of SaaS providers. Use email frequently in order to give the user all the information that they need to…

• Start using the SaaS.
• Complete the engagement action.
• Sign up for the product.
• Your emails should follow a logical series of actions and activities that push the customer to full conversion.

Conclusion

The better you get at converting customers past the free trial, the better you’ll get at SaaS marketing as a whole.

Once you bring customers past the free trial, you can enjoy the massive revenue opportunities, upsells, retention, and awesomeness that follows.

But first, concentrate on getting past that initial hump.

What have you discovered as the best method for converting trial users into full customers?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

CMO Tip: How to Make Sure Your Team Is Getting the Most Out of a Conference or Event

I have a lot of folks ask me if our INBOUND event (coming up Sept 8-11th) is valuable for them and their teams to attend.

(SPOILER ALERT: It's insanely valuable.)

And ever since I started managing marketing teams, I’ve had people ask me if they could attend conferences and events. Some VPs and CMOs I know evaluate each event individually and make a judgment call each time they are asked by someone on their team. However, I have always felt as though it's better to let people on your team decide for themselves.

And if and when they do decide to attend, I simply ask them to do a few things to ensure that they get the most out of it. This approach has proven to work out great for many members of my team ... and it just might work for yours.

With that said, below you'll find the six most important things I ask my team to cover every time they attend an event.

Not managing a team of your own? No worries. You can use these same tips to convince your boss to sign off on your trip to #INBOUND15.

6 Tips for Making Sure Your Team Is Getting the Most Out of a Conference or Event

1) Create a plan.

Ask your employee to create a plan of the sessions they will attend, what they are looking to learn at those sessions each day, and five speakers they want to meet in person (and what they want to talk to them about).

This shows they have researched the agenda and have thought about the conference content in detail. This can be important for events at resorts or especially fun cities to visit because people may be focused more on the trip than the conference.

Once you approve the trip, they should reach out to the five speakers they want to meet and try to set up times to meet with them. A few of my top picks of people to see at INBOUND are Daniel Pink, Scott Stratten, Ann Handley, and Michael King -- and we created some recommended agendas for different types of attendees.

2) Write a report.

I love asking people who attend events to write up a summary of what they learned in each session, some interesting observations from talking to people at the event, the most interesting people they met, and the key takeaways overall from the trip. You can also ask them to present this summary at your next team meeting, which is great for developing presentation skills on your team.

If anyone from your team attends INBOUND, I would expect them to have some interesting ideas about both your overall marketing and sales strategy, as well as tactical tips and hacks that will help improve the day-to-day things they do.

3) Implement a change.

A lot of people leave events energized and ready to conquer the world, but then get back to the office and fall into the old routine.

One way to combat this is to ask people who attend a conference to pick one new idea from the conference to implement when they get back, and hold them to doing that in the 90 days after the conference. This helps make sure the conference trip ended up making a positive change in how your team works.

4) Recruit new hires.

As a team leader you probably know that hiring is the hardest and most important thing you do.

Conferences are a great place to network and meet people you might want to hire. Personally, I'm always thinking about hiring opportunities every time I meet someone -- especially at conferences.

You can ask people from your team to come back with a list of the best people they met at the conference and then decide if you should try to recruit and interview them.

5) Hold customer, prospect, and partner meetings.

Most companies have customers, prospects, or partners in many different locations. Use the trip to a conference as an opportunity to have folks from your team meet with them the day before or the day after the conference.

Meeting customers is always a good idea -- especially when the cost is just one more night of hotel.

6) Create content about what you learned.

Most events will have speakers that can inspire content you can use in your own marketing.

At INBOUND, you'll find not only content about marketing and sales, but also leadership, communication, management, and more. In other words, for pretty much anyone you sell to, there's a session you can attend that will teach you something you can apply to a valuable piece of content.

To ensure that your team makes the most out of each session, ask them to use the conference as an opportunity to create one or two pieces of new content to use in your marketing.

Do you have any other ideas to help your team get the most out of attending a conference? What about ideas on how to convince your boss to let you register for INBOUND (or another event)? Let us know in the comment section below.

How to Cite Sources & Not Steal People's Content on the Internet

The best content marketers aren't afraid to share. Share content. Share links. Share ideas. Share data.

The thing is, sometimes marketers get a little protective of their stuff because there are less-than-scrupulous people out there who take content and then try to pass it off as their own. All that hard work, and none of the credit. Not cool, less-than-scrupulous people. Not cool.

But sometimes it isn't a matter of people being jerks -- they might just not know how the internet "works." You're supposed to share content, but you're also supposed to give credit where credit is due.

To make attribution easier, download our set of royalty-free stock photos here -- no attribution required.

So to clear up any confusion and ensure you (and anyone you do business with) is following generally accepted internet sharing etiquette, this post will outline how to cite internet sources.

How to Cite Sources in Blog Posts & Long-Form Content Assets

Blogs are hotbeds of source attribution issues, probably just due to the sheer volume of content the format offers. Gated and long-form content assets are prone to the same attribution issues, too, but perhaps to a lesser extent since the volume is typically lower, and turnaround times longer. So let's walk through a couple common scenarios bloggers come across and figure out how to address them -- but bear in mind you can apply these attribution methods to your long-form content assets, too.

Citation Scenario #1:

Let's say you're quoting another blogger in your post -- hey, sometimes you literally couldn't have said it better yourself. First of all, you have to actually quote them. Don't just take their words and adopt them as your own; they took time to think of that explanation.

But there's still some internet etiquette that goes along with quoting someone other than just throwing some quotation marks around their statement. Here's an internet-friendly way to quote someone in your content (taken from an old blog post of ours):

Not only does David Meerman Scott get credit for his quote, but his company is mentioned with hyperlinked text to his website. An added bonus is the link to his Twitter handle -- by no means necessary, but certainly a nice gesture. Aside from mentioning the person's name, it's also nice to provide them with an inbound link -- either to the page from which you drew your quote, or to another meaningful page on their site.

One thing to keep in mind when quoting text from someone else's website is that many companies have content usage guidelines that will let you know how, or if, they want you to use their content. Take a look at HubSpot's content usage guidelines to get an idea what these might look like, but in a nutshell, they're the guidelines laid out to try to ensure you use the right stuff in the right way. For example, one of the notable parts of our content usage guidelines is that you can quote our content on your website, but only up to 75 words; this is to prevent duplicate content issues that would impact both our own organic search rankings, and the other website's. So when quoting content from another source, do a quick check to see whether they have similar guidelines to which you should adhere.

Citation Scenario #2:

Now let's say you have data you'd like to cite in a blog post. What do you do? This:

The copy around the statistic not only gives credit to the company that published the data, but eMarketer also receives a link back to their site. That link, however, should not just go to their homepage. Point that link to the actual page on which that data lives. This is for the benefit of the reader, too, so they can dig into the research more if they're so inclined.

Citation Scenario #3:

There's one final caveat to your blog post/long-form citations that is just a matter of proper internet etiquette. If you found a quote, article, or data point via another website, it's nice to indicate that in the copy. For example, if you're newsjacking and you found the story via another website, give them a nod that they're the ones who broke the story originally. Or, if you're reading a blog post and there's a particularly compelling quote contained therein from an industry influencer, it's nice to give credit to the blogger that called that out. You might phrase it like this:

"Today we learned via the <link>New York Times</link> that <link>Twitter</link> is hiring a new type of CTO -- their first ever Chief Tweeting Officer."

The NYT link should head to the article they published on the subject, and the Twitter link should head to their blog post or press release announcing the news.

Make sense? Alright, on to social media.

How to Cite Sources in Social Media

When you're sharing someone else's content in social media, the approach you take to give proper credit changes depending on the social network. Here's the breakdown:

To Cite Someone's Content on Twitter:

Simply include a "via @username" somewhere in the tweet. If you're retweeting someone's content but you edit their original tweet, be sure to change "RT" to "MT," which stands for "modified tweet."

To Cite Someone's Content on Facebook:

Facebook makes it pretty easy to give credit when you're sharing someone else's content right from their own timeline -- they have a 'Share' button ready and waiting for you, and they make it easy to see the originating URL, originating sharer, as well as the names of people who shared it.

If you're citing content from elsewhere on the web, but want to give attribution to another person or company, you can find that person/company on Facebook and link to their Facebook Timeline in the status update. It'll look like this (note the WordStream hyperlink in the image below).

If you're sharing content from another source and they don't have a Facebook page, then the link to their piece of content will suffice.

To Cite Sources on LinkedIn:

Proper source attribution on LinkedIn is simple. Just include the link to the content you're citing in the update, and mention the person or company name.

To Cite Sources on Google+:

On Google+, it's customary to include the name of the person or company whose content you're citing in the text of your update, because you can then link to their Google+ profile, much like you would do on Facebook. Simply include a + or @ and their Google+ name -- they'll pre-populate just like they do on Facebook.

To Cite Sources Content on Pinterest:

Pinterest is all about content sharing, so it's no wonder proper source attribution is built right into the platform with their "Repin" button. When you go to repin content, however, sometimes the original creator has included a URL, hashtag, or other indicator of authorship. Don't edit that link out -- it's poor form.

And marketers, beware. If you include your link in the "Description" section of your pin, you may get flagged as a spammer.

How to Give Credit to Guest Authors and Ghost Writers

Maintaining a blog takes help, sometimes from guest authors or ghost writers. If you're using a ghost writer, you don't have to give credit to that author. That's the whole point. They're ghosts. You can't see them.

But if you're publishing a post from a guest blogger, you certainly should be giving them credit for their efforts. In a few ways, actually. Here's what you should be doing to give an e-nod to those writers:

• Provide space somewhere for the guest blogger to get not just their name mentioned (as a byline, ideally), but also the company they work for.
• Give them space to include a short bio that describes what their company does -- this usually accompanies their byline or a separate author profile page. Many sites allow guest authors to include an inbound link to their website within that byline, too.
• Let them include at least one contextual link within the body of their blog content, too. Some sites allow more than one link within the body of the content, but the minimum should certainly be one.

Some companies also outline very detailed guest blogging policies. If you're concerned about mitigating the differences of opinion on some of these issues, make sure you write out your own detailed guest blogging policies for your website so expectations are set up front.

How to Cite Images and Visual Content

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know we're behind sharing the wealth when it comes to visual content marketing -- and we love it even more if you can give credit to the original artist properly. Here's when you need to give credit, when you don't, and how to do it.

To Cite Visualizations, SlideShares, and Infographics:

If you've found an infographic or visualization on another site that you'd like to feature on your website, you should treat it similar to how you'd treat citing any other content on your website. Simply include a link to the original source's website where that visual lives, and include their name in the text.

You should also try your best to uphold image quality when republishing their visual content -- if the website has embed code for that visual, use that code. This is why we try to make a point of creating embed code when we create visuals (and why we love that YouTube and SlideShare make it easy to grab embed code). It makes sharing easier for those that choose to republish the visual, and helps them maintain the quality and resolution in the process. If embed code isn't provided, you can also include instructions like "click to enlarge" for static images -- this helps ensure the visual fits the width of your website, but still provides a good reader experience.

To Cite Sources Within a SlideShare, Infographic, or Visualization:

And what happens if you hired a designer to create something for your site -- how do you give credit to the designer? Well, it depends on the terms you've worked out together. You could hire a ghost designer (kind of like ghost writers) so that the content looks like it was designed in-house by your company. In that case, you don't have to worry about attributing the design work to anyone. If, however, you've agreed to give credit to a designer, there should be some space in the visual (not a lot, but some) that gives them credit for their work. Here's an example of how we gave credit to the designer in one of our infographics -- check out the bottom left:

And what happens if you cite content from other sources in your infographic? Use that bottom section for that, too. Here's an example:

If the list of source URLs is getting too unwieldy, you can also set up a URL to send people to for the sources:

And remember, if you're creating a SlideShare, you have the benefit of being able to make links clickable within the SlideShare. If you'd like instructions for doing that, check out this blog post -- but this means that you can treat source content in a SlideShare with the same level of respect you treat source content in a blog post or elsewhere on your website.

How to Cite Photographs and Other Images:

Much like your infographics and visualizations, how you cite photos and images featured on your website depends on where you sourced them. When you buy stock imagery, it's license free. You bought it, you own it, and you can do what you want with it.

But many marketers are trying to find images for content such as blog posts, and don't want to pay for a stock photo every single time. Some people go to Google Images and simply find an image they like ... thing is, all those images have varying levels of permissions. So while it may be okay that some of them are used on your blog or website, that's not universally true of all of them.

Some marketers have started to use Creative Commons to deal with this issue because they have filters that let you select images you can "use for commercial purposes" and/or "modify, adapt, or build upon." Unfortunately, you can't always trust those filters -- users have been known to upload photos and images that perhaps they have the license to use, but you do not. So if you want to be totally safe, I recommend purchasing a license to a stock photo site. There are also some free stock photo sources, like HubSpot's free stock photos and Death to the Stock Photo, that you can check out if you're on a tight budget.

The Caveat (There's Always a Caveat, Isn't There?)

Of course, some people who have content online, including some marketers, don’t want to share content at all and will get very upset if you do so -- even if you give them full and generous credit for it, links and all. What happens when you share content from them? Well, it's possible they'll contact you to take it down. Or, if they have the resources, they'll send a lawyer to do so. If that happens to you, I recommend respecting the fact that they don't want to share data, quotes, visualization, etc. -- it's probably not worth the headache to fight it.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in August 2012 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

3 Companies Creating Perfect Omnichannel Ecommerce Experiences

Before we get too far into this how-to, let’s first talk about what “omnichannel” actually means. Too many times, a brick-and-mortar store will put together an ecommerce site and call their sales experience “omnichannel.” In reality, offering more than one way to make a purchase just gives buyers a multi-channel experience.

Now that you’re aware of the difference between omnichannel and multi-channel, how can you be sure you’re offering buyers everything at any given point in time? Here are a few companies that have the omnichannel thing down to an art.

Starbucks

Whatever your opinion on Starbucks, you have to give them props for making buying from them so easy. Their app makes shopping online and in the store easy for everyone. Consumers can check their balance and reload their cards within the app, on the website, and in the store. Any changes are reflected immediately, so customers are never left in the cold when they’re ready to buy a drink or merchandise in-store and online.

To make the Starbucks app even more user-friendly, buyers can use their phones or rewards cards at the register. No more digging for the card while holding up a line of impatient customers. Just swipe the code on your phone screen, grab your coffee, and go.

L’Oreal

L’Oreal knows that buying cosmetics comes with a bit of risk. Without the opportunity to test in person, consumers have no idea if they’ve made a good choice until they get their purchase home to try it on. They offer two separate apps that provide solutions. The first is the Makeup Genius, which lets users upload photos and experiment with different looks before buying. The other is the True Match app, which ensures buyers get the right shade when purchasing in a store.

On their website, L’Oreal also offers workshops and consultations so customers can learn how to use the products before buying. It’s a very full and robust experience from web to store, and they deserve some accolades for making it all happen.

Macy’s

Macy’s is a mainstay in retail, but most don’t consider its ecommerce abilities. However old school you may expect Macy’s to be, they’re actually quite the opposite. With an easy-to-use website, various apps for mobile devices, and some in-store features others don’t offer yet, Macy’s is pretty modern.

By using the SHOP. SCAN. SAVE. app, buyers get real-time updates on items for sale, special discounts, and clearance deals. For buyers that don’t use apps, there’s also the option to sign up for texts. That includes phone-only users, which provides one more channel of communication. Then, of course, there’s the option to pick up in the store even after ordering online. This helps buyers cut down on the cost of shipping and gives Macy’s one more way to contact buyers.

Offering multiple ways for buyers to make purchases and keep in touch isn’t easy, especially as technology continues to grow and change. Only the very best manage an omnichannel experience. These are three companies you could really learn a thing or two from.

7 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Performing

Most articles with titles like these are usually designed to educate people with little understanding of the inbound to redesign their website with the said methodology in mind. While good for people who don’t know anything about Inbound, they're rather redundant to those who have already made the switch and designed their site with conversions in mind. This article is for the latter.

Instead of telling you that you need CTAs on all of your web pages and that you need to implement landing pages, this article will focus more on the smaller things that will help the websites and pages that were already built to convert, do it better. So without further ado, here are 7 reasons why your conversion optimized website might not be performing at its full potential.

SEO Reasons

1) Poor Performance Due to Poor Traffic

A website can be optimized to perfection and have all the right content in the world but that means nothing if it can’t be found through search engines. A properly optimized site makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl and index its pages but if an error in a few key sections occurs, all hell can break lose.

How to Diagnose:

Utilize Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any crawl errors making it so that people can’t easily find different parts of your site. The helpful dashboard will give you a list of anything wrong as well as directions on how to fix them.

How to Fix:

This is dependent on the errors brought up by Google. While there are a number of different problems you may need to fix, the most common solution will be the implementation of 301 redirects for any major 404 errors that are occuring.

Promotional Reasons

2) Your Current Promotion Strategy Is Attracting the Wrong Audience

Before you make any crazy changes to your site or content strategy, consider the people currently coming to your site. Are they the right people or are they unqualified, irrelevant visitors that are quickly leaving your site once they realize what you do and sell?

Are you promoting your business and website in the correct areas that attract the correct demographic? If you aren’t, you could be wasting precious time and money bringing in meaningless traffic while your true target market continues to live without knowing of your existence.

How to Diagnose:

Utilize your website traffic tracking app (Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc.) to review the bounce rates attached to your site while also checking your website analytics to see if particular sources of visitors are generating fewer conversions compared to others.

If you see high bounce rates and low conversion rates connected to particular sources, you may want to consider a new promotion strategy through that source.

How to Fix:

The solution to this problem depends largely on where and how you are currently promoting your website and its content. Here are a few different options for you depending on what you are currently doing:

• For paid advertisements: if you are currently paying for traffic in one way or another (Google PPC, social advertising, display ads, etc.) and are not seeing results from these campaigns, you may want to either completely cut off any that aren’t showing ROI (are you paying more than you are receiving back in potential leads/business?) or consider targeting different avenues that can offer you better results. If, for instance, you are a business that targets a very specific segment of a market, you may find more success with a paid advertising tool that allows you to target with demographics and job info like LinkedIn versus a PPC campaign that can only target through keyword selection.
• For organic promotions: if you are finding it hard to successfully promote and draw out engagement for your website’s content through organic social posting you may want to consider performing an audit of your current social media strategy (if you have one at all). Ask yourself, your customers and your prospects where they go for information (social media- which channels, industry-specific forums, etc.). From there, get into the mind of your personas once more to understand what information they are looking for and what they will find useful so that you can create and share that type of information on the correct channels in the correct way so that the right people will not only find it but also interact with it and hopefully end up on your optimized site for conversion.

Design Reasons

3) Your Website Isn’t Responsive

Google’s “Mobilegeddon” has all but terrified anyone without a responsive website and for good reason. For those of you unaware, in April of this year Google released a new algorithm update focused on boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly websites and pages in mobile searches while pushing unresponsive sites down the ranks. Even without this new update, it’s been proven time and time again that mobile-friendly sites receive lower bounce rates and higher conversion numbers compared to those that aren’t.

How to Diagnose:

Use Google Analytics to see how many people are coming to your website and within that demographic how many of them are bouncing. If these numbers seem unusually high, especially when compared to your desktop traffic, utilize Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool for a final answer.

How to Fix:

While there are many services online that will either create a mobile site or help you to take a currently unresponsive site and make it mobile friendly, there’s something to be said about utilizing a platform that is responsive right out of the box. An example of one of these platforms is the HubSpot COS.

4) Your Website Has Unclear or Cluttered Navigation

Your navigation should include a small selection of clearly-labeled page options that match your users’ needs. If you’ve filled your navigation with every product and service you offer or have created awkward side navigation that adds to the confusion, you may be distracting your visitors from key conversion points.

How to Diagnose:

Utilize Google’s Page Analytics plug-in to view just how your site’s visitors are engaging with the different parts of your navigation. If there are areas on the navigation that are receiving significantly lower clicks compared to others, you may want to consider consolidating.

How to Fix:

Write down every page you have connected to your website’s top row of navigation and include its click rate from the Page Analytics tool next to it. Highlight any pages that have received low click rates and either look to group them together with other, more generalized navigation items or consider taking the link off the navigation and having it live on a specific page instead.

5) Poor Landing Page Design

One of the more obvious areas to look, your landing pages can be a tricky piece of business when it comes to fully optimizing them to help your website perform. Everyone knows the general best practices regarding landing page design.

HubSpot wrote an ebook on it and it has to be one of the most downloaded pieces in their library. Even with a landing page optimized to best practices, conversions aren’t always guaranteed and minor tweaks can bring on major results.

How to Diagnose:

Utilize your landing page tool to review all of your pages’ conversion rates. Depending on your industry and products/services your business provides, you and only you will know what a good conversion rate is for your landing page.

Knowing this, look through your list to find any pages that show below-average percentages. If you believe that your average conversion rate should be higher, you may want to look into your overall landing page design.

How to Fix:

In an attempt to save precious space in my article and avoid wasting your precious time and patience, I’ve gone ahead and listed out a few smaller tweaks that you might look to implement that can help to better optimize your already well set up landing pages.

• Focus on the right content: Spending 2-3 sentences explaining what the offer is and then dropping 4 bullet points on what the reader will get out of it is all well and good but maybe you should consider other angles. Try including testimonials and social proof regarding the offer or service it is connected to or breaking up your content so that people can read a short excerpt and make a quick decision on whether they want to download it or not.
• Spend time creating and promoting the right imagery: Are you using stock imagery or bulky photos to show off what your landing page is trying to promote? Should you instead use offer-specific .png images that take up less page space and quickly tell the reader what the offer is right away? Maybe you should consider taking out the image all together and replacing it with a video that explains everything in a more easily digestible manner?
• Experiment away from the standard 2/3 -1/3 layout: The idea of a “landing page” isn’t the digital marketer’s secret anymore. More and more Internet users are catching on to the idea and can more easily spot the generic template of 2/3 content on the left, 1/3 form on the right. Several companies have caught on to this and have changed their formats to be less content heavy, more visual and all about the simple form. Maybe you should give it a shot, too.

Content Reasons

6) Blog Topics Aren’t Connecting With Readers

They say that content is king. What they should really say is that the right content is king. If you are spending more time thinking about blog topics than you are about who you are writing for then you may be missing the boat on your content creation.

Your blog content is only as good as the reader says it is and if you and your words aren’t connecting well enough with them your brand, traffic, conversion rates and lead generation could suffer.

How to Diagnose:

Utilize your blog dashboard to review the average blog views as well as CTA clicks attached to each one. While digging into analytics, collect qualitative data by monitoring shares and comments, requesting feedback from your readers both in your article content as well as through different feedback applications such as Hively, Feedbackify or Qualaroo. If your analytics are low and you continually receive negative or no feedback from readers, you may want to step back and review your current content strategy.

How to Fix:

If you find that you need to spend more time on your content creation strategy, start from the beginning with your buyer personas. If you have them set up and in place, fill out a buyer persona workbook with the information that you currently have and then test that against current customer and prospect interviews to see if there are any discrepancies. Once a full persona is finalized, utilize the goals, challenges and pains collected in the interviews to develop targeted content before mapping out your content with an editorial calendar.

7) Page Content and Offers Aren’t Strategically Connected

The success of a lead generation website hinges on its ability to convert visitors into leads. In order to do that, best practices ask for CTAs to be placed on most if not all site pages to always provide visitors a point of conversion.

Unfortunately, some site pages may contain CTA’s that promote content that is irrelevant to the topic covered on the page that houses it, leading to poor click through and even worse conversion rates.

How to Diagnose:

Utilize your site page analytics to find pages with CTA’s that are not being clicked on. From there, dig into the content to see if the offer being promoted is either irrelevant compared to the content on the page or does not have the necessary context on the CTA to connect the two. If this is the case, you may want to consider a new CTA and/or offer.

How to Fix:

For any pages with CTA’s that need new CTA design but not a new offer, reword the designs to better connect with the persona and content on the page. From there, you will want to take the remaining pages and sort them by the main topic they discuss. Do the same for your entire library of content. If you have any overlaps in topics between pages and offers, place that offer’s CTA on the page.

For any pages with topics that aren’t covered in your current library, you should either use that list to help you define your offer creation strategy moving forward OR see if there are other pieces of content that you might be able to promote on that page including specific blog posts or bottom of the funnel conversion pages.

The Bottom Line

While a properly optimized will outperform a static website any day of the week, many people who have utilized inbound marketing for enough time will tell you that there is always more that you can do to improve conversions.

If you are one of these people, I hope you found a few new ideas in this list and can now head back to the drawing board to start on more improvements. If not, I would love to hear your thoughts on different things that you can look for that might help you turn around a poor performing website.

How We Increased the Conversion Rate on Our Mobile Landing Pages [New Data]

Is your website ready to attract and convert mobile website visitors into leads?

According to Adobe, companies with mobile-optimized sites triple their chances of increasing mobile conversation rate to 5% or above.

If that's not enough to sell you on the importance of delivering a mobile-optimized experience, Google recently announced that more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 different countries including the United States and Japan.

All this talk of mobile got me thinking about how website visitors were accessing our offers. And after a closer look, I discovered that conversion rates on our landing pages were 20-30% lower from visitors coming from mobile. (As a lead generation geek, you can imagine how psyched I was to uncover such a huge opportunity for gathering more leads.)

With this information in tow, I set out to solve this problem -- and I think you'll be intrigued by what I found.

The Methodology

The hypothesis of this experiment was that by making content more easily digestible on mobile devices, it would increase conversion rate. However, getting inside the heads of our mobile visitors took a bit of reflection. I had to ask myself, "What would cause someone to bounce?"

Some answers I came up with were:

1. The form is too long.
2. There is too much text on the landing page to read.
3. The design isn't formatted for a mobile phone.

When presented with information that is not super mobile-friendly, a visitor won't hesitate to bounce from your landing page.

Why?

Not only are poorly formatted pages time-consuming, but they also don't appear very reputable, which often causes visitors to lose trust. With that decided, we knew we needed a way to condense all the information on the landing page to fit the size of a mobile screen.

The Experiment

To give you a better idea of what we were working with, check out what our landing pages looked like initially:

As you can see, it was quite long with a lot of content. So in order to improve the user experience on these landing pages, we leveraged smart content to shorten the display for mobile users. (To learn more about how smart content works, check out this resource.)

The first step we took was shortening the content and formatting the images for mobile:

Once that was completed, we tackled the form:

Voilà! With the help of smart content, mobile visitors are now shown a shorter, more digestible form.

The Analysis

With the changes in place, we decided that measuring the page's bounce rate would help us determine if the mobile smart forms helped improve our conversion rates. Essentially, bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who only viewed a single page -- it's the number of people who visit our landing page and then "bounce" without converting on a form.

For this experiment specifically, we needed to figure out how many people filled out the form that came from a mobile device. Here's a step-by-step explanation of how we approached this:

1. We used Google Analytics to find the number of "new users" to hubspot.com. I measured new people to hubspot.com on mobile (and not repeat visitors) because existing people in our database would not be net new prospects (which is what I'm solving for).
2. I used HubSpot to determine the number of new prospects from the mobile smart form.
3. I calculated the conversion rate using the following formula: Conversion Rate = New Prospects / New User PVs
4. I calculated the bounce rate using the following formula: Bounce Rate = 100% - Conversion Rate

The Results

Results from Mobile Smart Form Test

By switching to mobile smart forms, we managed to decrease bounce rate (and therefore increase conversion rate) on each landing page tested by an average of 27%. Bounce rates that were previously between 50-90% are now between 20-50%.

Visitors now have a smoother experience and are less likely to leave the page before viewing and completing the form.

Results from Mobile Optimized Content Test

After optimizing the mobile smart forms, we tested shortening the content and optimizing the images for mobile. This produced a 10.7% decrease in bounce rate. (We expect this number will keep decreasing with continued optimization.)

The Takeaways

Through this experiment, I learned to solve for the user. I also learned the importance of placing myself into the shoes of the user to better determine why and how conversions happen (or don't happen) in the first place.

While marketers don't always think of UX, this experiment proved that there is no denying its importance. If your website is slow to load, visitors might leave. If the user has to scroll through six screens worth of content to reach a form, they might leave. If the form they arrive at has 10 tiny fields, they might leave.

See my point here? To improve the odds of a conversion actually taking place, always solve for the user.