Grow Your Email List Faster with the 1-2 Nav-Link Hack
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- The 1-2 Nav-Link Hack can boost your email list by 2x.
- You only need existing lead magnets or content upgrades to pull off this easy hack.
So you want to grow your email list faster and you're looking for some low-hanging fruit opportunities to do it. Well, in this video, I'm going to show you my 1-2 Nav-Link Hack for growing your email list fast, which is super easy to implement.
My name is Matt Ackerson, I'm the founder of AutoGrow.co, and welcome to another edition of "10-Minute Matt Hacks." This a weekly edition where I put out a daily video targeting a different section of your sales funnel to help you grow systematically and to predictively double your business month after month. These are easy tips you can implement in just 10 to 30 minutes a day.
So first, what's the problem? The problem that I'm looking to address for you here today is, if you're looking for the low-hanging fruit opportunities, maybe you don't have a lot of time to work on growing your traffic right now. You may just want to grow your email list faster based on the existing amount of traffic you can find, and you're looking for some non-obvious ideas to do it. Well, the solution is the 1-2 Nav-Link Email Opt-in Hack.
Introducing the 1-2 Nav-Link Hack
The way the 1-2 Nav-Link Hack works is, you find your highest-performing content and you turn it into a lead magnet that people will see displayed in your navigation bar.
Why the navigation bar? This is probably the most visible part of your website. It's going to get more views and attention than any single page because it is displayed across the entire website.
If you have a fixed navigation bar, meaning the type of navigation bar that stays with the user as they scroll down the page, it's going to get even more attention and more visibility as a result, so I do recommend you use that as a best practice.
The Proof Behind This Hack
So what does this actually look like in practice? Here’s an example.
I was brainstorming with my team last week in preparation for this week. As you may know, the Growth Funnel Framework says that every week we focus on a different part of the funnel. By doing this and taking massive action each week, our goal in terms of making these videos, and helping you as you follow along and do something similar for your business, is to see predictable growth month after month and to start doubling your business.
We were looking for ideas to drive email list growth faster. For our business, right now, a challenge for us is that we see a lot of opt-ins, but many of those people just aren't engaged and we have an automation that runs and removes people. Anything we can do to grow the rate of total subscribers, which will translate to total engaged subscribers, to a higher level of total engaged subscribers will help us grow the business faster.
What we found from our own research is that for the rate at which people come to the website, rather, organically versus people who are on our email list and come back to the website, the purchase rate for our courses and other products is double the rate. So the faster we can grow the email list, the faster we can grow our business.
The idea was, "Well, why don't we use the Matt Hacks as an opt-in opportunity because we're putting these videos out daily, and it's going to become a staple of what we're all about, just putting out these daily short tip-based videos."
I decided to apply the Law of Visibility. This was mentioned in a guest blog post I wrote for Kissmetrics a couple of years ago.
The article goes over the seven different laws that inform how your funnel is going to convert, as well as the different levers and mechanisms that you might see in there. The Law of Visibility is one of them. What it says is basically that the rate of conversions is directly related to how visible your offers are.
Now, let me give you kind of a morbid example of this in real life. So if you've ever heard of the book "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell, that book was all about what makes ideas spread in a viral fashion in society. One of the case studies and stories that Gladwell looked at in that book was on a small island in the Pacific, and they found that the suicide rate for teens was abnormally high, yet they couldn't understand why that was the case.
Well, eventually they figured it out, and the answer was this: it was that people were more likely to commit suicide after someone else committed suicide.
Why was that? The newspapers and the media would publicize the story of this person who died. As a result, because suicide isn't something that people normally think about on a daily basis, it was increasing the visibility for this idea which led to an increase in the overall suicide rate at that time, immediately following the news story. It had this terrible, cyclical rippling effect.
Anyway, bringing this back to digital marketing and funnels within this article, I found a couple of examples from Mixergy.com. Andrew over there has his navigation bar, and there's very clearly a link to go premium and sign up for a membership.
Similarly, I cited some research where I was able to show that we got more leads and traffic to specific pages that had a high-dollar value. In other words, it translated to more leads for our business when we made our offer that we wanted to drive the most visibility and conversions for. When we made that more visible in the navigation link, we saw more conversions for it.
How the 1-2 Nav-Link Hack Works
All right, so getting back to the 1-2 Nav-Link Hack again, the way it works is this:
Make your top-performing lead magnets or content upgrades (an incentive for people to opt into your email list) more visible.
The one action that I want you to take from this video is I want you to find your top-performing lead magnet or content upgrade, and I want you to put it into your navigation bar in a way that will get it more visibility and attract more attention. In addition, as a best practice, I do recommend that you have a fixed navigation bar implemented if you don't already have that. It's a very simple thing to implement, and if you know anything about CSS, you can implement it with a couple of lines of code. If you have a developer, they can do it fairly easily for you.
So you might say at this point, "Well, Matt, this sounds like a good idea. I see the proof behind it, but I'm really tight on time and I don't have an existing high-performing lead magnet. How do I start seeing the benefits and how do I implement this faster if those are my constraints?"
Well, the answer is pretty simple. If you don't have a top-performing lead magnet, or any lead magnet or content upgrade opt-in opportunity and you want to implement this and test it out for your business and start seeing results, here's what you can do.
Go into your Google Analytics and see which pages are on your website. Look at the top 10 performing pages in terms of traffic. Are any of those pages related to a blog post? If they are, what you can do is you can turn that article into a lead magnet fairly easily.
Create a condensed version of that article and offer it as an opt-in opportunity within the navigation bar. This takes just a few minutes. All you have to do is copy and paste the relevant information into a Word document. Make sure to do your best to make it look nice. You can put your logo in the beginning and have a nice call to action at the bottom. If you're looking for more consultations, then the call to action should be for consultations. If you're looking for people to buy your info product, it should be for that. Lastly, turn it into a PDF.
Then you can set up a simple landing page like I did here. It doesn't have to be a lot. You can see I created this landing page. It's not a lot of text for our Matt Hacks video. I'm actually running an A/B test on here. I included a little visual reference as an example to show people that yes, these are real videos they're going to be getting every weekday, and a clear call to action.
Now, if you want a different way to implement it that's even simpler than creating a dedicated landing page, you can make a two-step opt-in using Leadpages or Thrive Themes.
If you don't have any blog content and you still want to apply this Matt Hack to your business and increase the visibility and get people opting in at a higher rate than they are today, look at the top landing pages that are getting traffic and then look at the intention behind that traffic.
For example, if you look at the keywords that are bringing people into those top landing pages, what sort of simple lead magnet can you create based on what people are searching for? Keep in mind, checklists perform and convert extremely well.
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Tune in next time, where I'm going to be talking about pop-ups and how to effectively implement them for your business. This is one of those tips that a lot of people have talked about. You've probably heard of using a pop-up to grow your email list, but I'm going to go a little more in-depth on that so it's not exactly what you might expect.
Until next time, keep hustling and stay focused. I will see you tomorrow. Peace.
For more information on increasing traffic, download Matt's 22-Point Perfect Blog Post Checklist or invest in our new Rocket Content course, which is currently discounted.
