Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling a little but trepidant about the topic today because depending on which
side of the website you sit on, you might find the topic today slightly sensitive.
We’re going to be talking pop-up opt-ins for our website.
As a consumer as you’re going from website to website, I’m sure they irritate you.
But as a content marketer, as an online professional they are a godsend so we’re going to be
exploring those on Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers on DottoTech.
Yes, indeed.
In my journey to growing my YouTube channel to 100,000 subscribers, I made a discovery
fairly early on which I’m sure you are all aware of – that my subscribers are YouTube’s
customers; they aren’t my customers, just like your followers on Twitter are Twitter’s
customers, not yours and your followers on Facebook, as they let us know in no uncertain
terms, are Facebook’s customers, not ours.
These people do not become our community until they sign up for our newsletter, get on our
mail list and get into our system so that is a goal.
As a matter of fact, I probably think more about how to get people into my system, into
InfusionSoft than I think about something else.
Coming up with good lead magnets, good offers for them to come onboard that are relevant
to the different segments that I want to promote, that’s essential.
I’ve seen the results when I’ve launched products and I’ve seen the benefit in sales
by having a great, vibrant, healthy mail list.
We get that by getting the right people opting in at the right time and one of the techniques
that we do are these pop-ups.
Now I understand the sensitivity.
In one aspect, we think we’re invading their time and their space.
We’re kind of pissing some people off.
I don’t like it when I go to a site to read something and these things are constantly
popping up.
Fair enough.
But if you are a valuable content creator, if you’re creating good content materials
and giving away lots of free content, is it really that much to ask for a few seconds
for you to close a box or to enter your email address in order to join the community if
that’s the proper thing to do?
I think the risk that we run of estranging the odd person is far less than the damage
we do to ourselves by not inviting people to our mail list and growing our business
properly.
And you have to ask yourself this: if somebody is that cheesed-off by you popping up a little
message inviting them to sign up for your newsletter, are they ever really going to
be your customer anyways?
Highly doubtful.
So I think that’s something you have to come to terms with yourself as far as comfort.
And I had an internal dialogue.
I went back and forth with that.
I’d like to be able to do it without it but at the end of the day, the early numbers,
as I’ve just started doing it, tell me that I should have done it much earlier.
So have that conversation but you’re probably going to end up where I am at some point.
So I chose the tool Optin Monster for mine.
There’s a variety of different ones.
AppSumo, there are a lot of different good pop-up managers that will help you out.
I can’t say for sure but I know Optin Monster has two different aspects.
It’s a WordPress plug in and it’s also a web client that we work with.
So here’s the web client working here.
Let’s just jump into it and you can see that I set it up.
I haven’t had it running for very long, really only a few days for some of my opt-ins
and a little bit over a week for the others.
But oh my goodness, I wish I had done it earlier.
Here are my different opt-ins.
Now they don’t necessarily have to be those sorts that just pop in and kind of invade
your space.
You could also have bars that happen.
You can have in-line ones.
I’m running an inline opt-in for all of my blog posts.
So you can create all different sorts.
But it looks to me like all of the PR that I hear about these stuff is accurate, that
the pop-up ones, the ones that invade the space and get right in your face, they convert
at the highest rate.
I'm running a widget one.
I’ll show you these in action in the website as well.
I’m running my main Evernote Quick Start which is kind of my main lead generator on
my main page.
I’m running a screen casting opt-in on all of my blog posts and then I’ve got an inline
one that’s running at the bottom of all of my blog posts.
Now if you want to see how any of these look or how I create them, let’s just us take
a look.
This is the screen casting opt-in.
I click here to I go into it.
We edit it here within the web browser interface and then we sync it with our WordPress installer
in order to transfer the information into WordPress.
I will show you that in a moment.
But here’s the ad that I created to learn how I create these videos.
Now if we scroll down here on the left-hand side, we see the management area where we
can choose different themes which give us different looks for each of them.
You can choose how they are basically expressed as far as how they present themselves within
the website.
You can choose to have additional fields.
I’ve got name and email address but you could also ask for first name, last name.
You can just ask for the email address.
And you can split test for everything.
Say for example, a great split test that I’m going to do very shortly is I’m going to
have some where I ask for their name and email address and the exact same ad only asking
for their email address to see if that changes the conversion rate.
You can split test everything in Optin Monster, which is one of the strengths, one of the
reasons that I chose this tool.
In the configuration area, you determine exactly how the different offers are presented.
You can set it by time.
You can have them swing in as this one.
You can have them sliding.
You can have a variety of different ways for it to be presented as well as an anticipatory
exit.
So when it sees your mouse moving out of the window or moving towards the next page, at
that point there it pops up which been proven to be a very valuable way of capturing people
just before they leave your page for the next page.
Again, you should be experimenting with each of those.
The integration is as you would expect integration into your email autoresponder so that all
of the leads can be captured into the correct area.
Analytics, as we go along, mine are a little bit early but you can integrate it with Google
Analytics so that you can get more much more data and you can make much more intelligent
decisions with what you’re doing.
Then you can also target individual pages, individual URL slugs.
So there’s a lot of customization that happens.
I won’t go to all of those details but instead let’s jump into the website side or the
WordPress backend side and we see all of these opt-ins resolve here.
Now what happens is you created them all in the website and then you refresh the options
here in WordPress and then it populates each of them in.
When it populates them in, they won’t be live but instead what they will be is they
will say that they’re ready to go and you have to go in and you have to basically go
into their settings and you turn on and you have kind of a final setting series of selections
that you do, first of all enabling it so you have to basically turn it on and say we can
start running it on the site, and then you’ve got a variety of options of where it’s going
to appear on your site.
So this is kind of the final check that you have for your opt-ins before they go live
on your pages.
Then you save the settings and then they should start to run.
So let’s just take a look at how they look as they’re running.
I’m just going to create an anonymous log-in so there are no cookies, so that it’ll look
like I’m coming for the first time.
I’m going to go to DottoTech.com and when we visit the site, my first pop-in is set
to drop in 5 seconds after the page loads.
So there’s the page loading, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, there it is.
The Evernote Quick Start guide and I’ll show you the results of this in a moment.
I’ll show you what the statistics are and how it’s been running.
But we see it’s a straight pop-in, no animation, nothing like that.
It’s a quick little thing and we can see the close button is easy to find, which gets
us right back into our main content.
If I scroll through it now, I’m going to watch one of my blog posts.
Again, I’ve got a different opt-in that’s set to run here.
I could actually set it up that if they’ve opted in on the first one, not to see the
second one.
But here’s the second one dropping in.
This is a format called a light box format, where you see it’s kind of in a light box
out in the foreground and then the background dims behind.
So it’s a very common way of doing it.
We can see the second one comes in and I’ve got the little swing thing happening to draw
the eye.
I think this one looks pretty good, don’t you?
I like this one even better than the first one because it’s got a very clean closed
box.
Despite the fact that I’m encouraging you to think about doing this, I still feel a
little bit guilty about doing it.
But my guilt is being assuaged quite nicely by the number of people who are opting into
my mail list.
Thank you very much.
So we’ve got that there.
The other two styles that I’ve got don’t pop up at all.
One of them is here and if we scroll right down to the bottom, we see this “Sign up
for DottoTech news,” which is called an inline which I have set for the bottom for
every one of my blog posts.
And the other one I’ve got is in my header, my sidebar.
Now my sidebars in my theme here actually are invoked by the person clicking on the
little down arrow here.
When you click here, you’ve got my different sidebar items.
So I’ve got “Subscribe to my YouTube Channel” and here’s the sign up.
It’s very simple and very plain for DottoTech news but it’s there in the sidebar as well,
as well as right now I’m running an ad for Optin Monster, which full disclosure, I’ve
signed up to be an affiliate for.
So if you do decide that you’re going to purchase the product and you click on the
like that I’ve included, I will be rewarded for that if you choose that.
If not, just search for them direct and you can go straight to their site if you don’t
think I should be paid.
But really, why would you do that?
Why?
Now it’s all set up.
Let’s go back into the website and let’s take a look at my dashboard.
We can see the conversion rates.
So we get the immediate statistics on how each of these is performing.
There’s quite a wide difference you’re going to see.
That top widget opt-in which you’ve seen, it’s actually had quite a few people look
at it.
859 people have looked at it but only 7 people have converted to it, which is 0.08%, not
a very high percentage.
But having said that, those 7 people in the past week or so that it’s been running now
are on my mail list, that wouldn’t be on my mail list.
So I’m not completely unhappy.
Now a lot of people have pop-up blockers running on their browsers.
That’s where the discrepancy in numbers come from.
So 164 people have seen my Evernote Quick Start ad or a pop-up and 18 people have converted,
nearly 11%.
This is phenomenal.
This conversion rate to me is something that is going to ultimately make a big difference.
If we think about this now being extended over weeks, months and years, this is going
to add hundreds or thousands of people to my mail list, which ultimately is just going
to benefit me downstream financially and make my whole business that much healthier.
The screencasting one, which has just been running for a couple of days now has had 97
views and it’s running at just over 5%.
I’m thinking this is going to climb.
This is going to increase and I’m also going to kind of flip.
As we’re doing this screencasting course coming up soon, I’m probably going to flip
this one to the homepage and move this one into the second page and do those sorts of
things and play around.
You don’t have to leave them where they’re set up for all time.
Here’s the one that surprised me, the inline one which is at the bottom of each of my blog
posts.
It’s been viewed 3,400 times in the past little week and a bit.
So 3,400 people have read our blog posts, seen the inline one.
Now more people see that one because it’s not a pop-up so it’s not being blocked by
any ad blockers or pop-up blockers that people have running on their browser but only 16
have converted, which is a big number overall but it’s half a percent, less than half
a percent of people who see it.
So just putting an opt-in on your page regardless, which is all that this one really is, is never
going to convert as well as it popping up in front of people’s places.
Do we need more proof than this?
It’s by a factor of 2,000% is how many more people—my math might be weak—but it’s
a heck of a lot more as you can see.
So the lesson is there for you to take, should you choose to listen to it.
If you want more people opting in on your mail list, set some sort of pop-up opt-in
on your website.
If you choose not to, fine, it’s your choice.
But if you choose to, success may be thine.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
Now there are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is of course subscribe to my channel.
The second, ever more important than subscribe to this channel, subscribe to my newsletter.
Then I can send you information about our upcoming webinars, tutorials and courses.
We have a screencasting course coming up in the not too distant future.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel supported by the generosity of our
viewers through the crowdfunding site, Patreon.
Drop by the Patreon page and have a look.
See how you help us crate the videos and what we can give you in return.
The perks are kind of amazing.
That’s it for today.
Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!