Goal:
Promote your content upgrade on your site using a popup to grow your email list.
Ideal Outcome:
You will be able to easily start growing your email list.
Prerequisites or requirements:
- You need to have Sumo installed on your website. If you don’t have it, check out this SOP 024 (web version) to learn how to do it.
- Obviously, you need to have a content upgrade to share with users. It should be attractive enough for people to give their email addresses. It can be a PDF with interesting information, a worksheet, an ebook, a podcast, a video, etc. Basically, it can be any piece of content that you create and offers value to users.
Why this is important:
It helps you grow your email list in an organic way without disrupting the user experience.
Where this is done:
Wordpress & Sumo
When is this done:
Every time you have a piece of content that you want to offer in exchange of email information.
Who does this:
You or the digital marketing specialist in your company.
Environment setup
- Make sure that your content upgrade is ready to post online.
- Go to your website.
Create & configure a content upgrade popup
One piece of advice before we begin. Make sure that your content upgrade is interesting and high-quality. Invest time in creating it because if you don’t, people will feel cheated. You you may get their email addresses, but your chances of converting them afterwards will be close to zero if you give them bad content.
Ok, so let’s get started. For this exercise we will use our usual website, http://www.asiteaboutemojis.com and, as a content upgrade, an SEO checklist we have created.
- On your website, locate the Sumo badge in the top right of the page and log in. Or, if you are already connected, click on “My Tools”.
4. Next it the “Form Type”. As you can see, you have several options to choose from. We know that you want to click on the “Cart Casio” one, but don’t. We recommend you to go with “Popup” or “Welcome Mat” because, in our experience, these two have the highest conversion rates.
Check the image below to see what you need to modify so that your popup matches the content upgrade.
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- No. 1 is the headline. Click on it to change the copy and the design.
- No. 2 is the subheading. Click on it to enter your desired text as well as change the design.
- No. 3 is the preset. In our case, you as asking for an email address. If you click on it, you will be able to change this preset and ask for phone numbers, names, website URLs, etc. But leave it to email now because we are growing your email list.
- No. 4 is the call-to-action. When you click on it, you will see several options for the button. Do not choose “Download Content Upgrade” because this will enable users to download your content simply by clicking the button, without leaving their email. Choose “Submit Form” instead, then change the text to an appropriate copy.
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- Make it easy for users to understand exactly what they are getting in exchange for their email. Don’t exaggerate and don’t give them false information.
- Keep the number of fields to a minimum. If you can, just ask for their email address.
- Make the copy attractive and compelling. Try to answer their two most important questions - “Is it worth it giving up my email for this?” and “Why does this content upgrade interest me?”.
- Include power words in your copy. Check out this list created by Sumo to get inspiration.
- If possible, use numbers and quantify the benefit of this upgrade (E.g. “get 20% more customers”, “avoid 10 common SEO mistakes”, etc.).
- Make sure the call-to-action is short and written in the first person.
For popups, we recommend you to select the option “Show before a user leaves” and “if a visitor hasn’t seen the popup in 1 month”.
Make a list of the pages on your site where you don’t want users to see this popup. For example, these pages could be:
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- Checkout pages
- Thank you pages
- Webinar registration pages
- Terms & Condition pages
- Privacy policy pages
- Pages available only to members (if you have a membership website)
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- You can exclude specific pages using the exact match of URL paths. Select “URLs” ⇒ “Paths” ⇒ “Exactly Matching”, write the URL path of the page you want to exclude, then click “Add This Condition”.
- If you select “URL Paths” ⇒ “Beginning With” you can exclude entire subdomains (e.g. members.asiteaboutemojis.com) or entire subfolders (e.g. www.asiteaboutemojis.com/subfolder/*).
- You also have the option “URL Paths” ⇒ “Containing”, but we don’t recommend it unless you understand your website’s URL structure really well, because it is too broad and you may end up excluding pages that you didn’t want to exclude.
7. Click on “Success” to configure what happens after the user sends their email. You have two options to enable users to download the content.
Choose “Redirect URL”, then add the link in the redirect box.
Or, only if you have a paid account, you can select “Download Content Upgrade” to upload your file and prompt the download automatically after the user leaves their email.
Select your service from the list. Configure how the new subscribers will be added to your email list.
