The "Pop & Spread" Technique: How to Increase Your Lead Generation Rate by 59%+
Love is one of life's greatest gifts.
You know what else is one of life's greatest gifts? Bagels.
Why? Because they're delicious of course. But we're not talking about any kind of bagel here.
Long Island bagels are the best. A close second? Brooklyn bagels.
But what do bagels have to do with getting you more conversions and more leads? I'll explain in a moment. What you need to know right now is that it involves a simple formula I recently discovered that can dramatically boost your lead generation rates by 59%+ or more.
How do I know this?
Since I implemented this technique with the Growbo funnel, I can show you each step of the process as an example. Our site-wide conversion rate has shot up from ~5.6% to today where we're converting 8.96% (nearly a 60% increase) of all visitors with at least once of our offers.
That 8.96% includes:
- Primarily email opt-ins on our lead magnets (i.e. webinar, content upgrades, free email courses etc.)
- Leads on our premium service offers
So how did my team and I achieve this so that you can go and implement this winning formula in your business?
Watch the video below and keep reading to learn how.
Want free sales funnel training? Join me as I host our upcoming webinar titled "Fix Your Funnel." On the webinar, I'm going to show you why more people aren't going through your funnel and buying from you (and what you can do to fix it!).
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Step 1 - Figure out which lead magnet offer converts the best ("Pop")
Think of a bagel as your website sales funnel. Naturally, the bagel won't taste so delicious if you eat it plain, without butter, cream cheese, or another type spread.
Our goal here is to optimize for maximum deliciousness (conversions). After all, you want your target customer to eat the entire bagel (covert to a lead in your funnel), and not just take a bite and forget about it (visit your website and leave without taking action).
The best way to do this is to run a series of tests. You want to offer several lead magnets across your entire funnel.
In case you're not familiar, a lead magnet is simply something of value that you give away at various points in your sales funnel in exchange for a prospective client's contact information. This allows you to follow-up with them, educating them on your products and services.
Here are a few examples of lead lead magnets that I use here on the Growbo.com website:
- Free email course: "Double Your Leads in 30 Days" (although it's a 5-day email course so I should probably change that so say 5 days)
- Regular email newsletter opt-in
- Free email course: "Sales Funnel Training 3-day email course"
- 11 point sales funnel checklist (This was our highest converting content upgrade by-far and the lead magnet responsible for the 30% increase in conversions)
- "Fix You Funnel" Webinar (launching next week)
The tool that I used to quickly roll out and test these different offers on a daily and weekly basis is LeadPages.net. By some measure it looks a bit pricey, but I assure you it more than pays for itself.
Two less expensive alternatives are the SumoMe leads tool (for 2-step opt-in buttons), and Instapage for landing pages.
A far a where to place the lead magnet offers on your website, consider:
- Making them part of your navigation or linked to in a drop down from your top-level navigation links
- Placing them in the sidebar of your blog is a good choice for maximizing visibility
- Also consider putting 1-2 on your homepage
Remember, the offers don't have to be complex. It just has to be something people see value in and WANT.
Step 2 - Analyze the data and pick the highest performer ("Sniff")
Depending on your traffic levels, you want to let the experiments run for a bit. The goal is to collect enough data to be able to confidently make a decision about which offer we want to scale across your sales funnel.
If I recall correctly what my sophomore year of Stats professor said, you need at least 300 conversions to have a "statistically significant" amount of data i.e. get at least 300 conversions total to make an informed decision.
Once we have the data, it's time to see which lead magnet is on top as far as total conversions recorded.
Going back to the bagel metaphor, at this point you're about to choose a spread for the bagel (YES, I know it's a silly metaphor but you'll remember it if only for that reason!). You've popped-up open several container of possible spread and taken a quick sniff to see which is most fresh and most likely to please.
In the example that I'm showing you above, it was clear that our 11 point sales funnel checklist was converting like a beast. That would be the offer we would now seek to "scale across" the top of our funnel.
Step 3 - Scale the offer across your entire sales funnel ("Spread it and enjoy")
Now that you've optimized for "deliciousness" it time to spread your spread of choice across the bagel (website funnel) and hand it to the customer to see if they eat it all (convert).
The best way to do this quickly and truly "swing the hammer" (NSFW) to get an almost immediate result is with a pop-up. I recommend OptinMonster for this purpose. I specifically implemented the pop-up to show when a visitor was about to leave the site.
To create the pop-up I used a swipe file of high-converting pop-ups and landing pages I've been putting together over the last several months (FYI I plan on giving away at least one of these for free in the near future to newsletter subscribers if you're not already signed-up).
Here's what the pop-up design looked like:
Designing this took less time than you think. I didn't even have to ask for my designer's help with this one.
Here's how I saved time and produced the above example in about a hour:
- Paste into photoshop a picture of a high-converting pop-up whose design I already like
- Important Side Note: I knew if was high-converting because it was done for a website in partnership with BounceExchange. They charge several thousand dollars per month for their service since they do the design work and split-test it for you. So you KNOW that whatever template design their using, it has to be converting well!
- On top of this design in photosophy, I drew what would become out pop-up on top of it. It's kind of like paint by numbers when you have an example to follow.
- Finally, I changed the wording a bit as well as the offer and some of the colors to better match with our website and brand.
I didn't expect much of a difference since we were already running a timed pop-up with the SumoMe plugin.
Needless to say, I was surprised when I saw the spike:
- 22 conversions on day one
- Then 8 (I think is was broken on the second day and we fixed it)
- Then 11
- 17
- 19
- 19, and it's since then it has remained at that level and higher
Conclusion
Want free sales funnel training? Join me as I host our upcoming webinar titled "Fix Your Funnel." On the webinar, I'm going to show you why more people aren't going through your funnel and buying from you (and what you can do to fix it!).
For those skeptics in the audience who might be saying at this point "wow a pop-up, big deal, I could have told you that" -- allow me to explain with this technique is more than just a pop-up.
- First, it's about taking the time to find that ideal offer that will actually work to convert a large percentage of your audience. Finding out what people want is key to making this work.
- Second, the decision about what you're going to test at scale (i.e. in a pop-up across most or all of your site) needs to informed by hard data coming from a comparison of multiple lead magnet offer tests
- Finally, you don't have to guess when it comes to the design of your pop-up. Look at other website's the use a pop-up in their design and see if you can use that as a base-template for your own.
What are some other creative ways you can think of to apply the pop and spread technique to increase conversions and leads generated on your website? Leave a comment below and let me know.
