August 9, 2016
How Instapage Drove $30K in Revenue in Less Than 2 Months by Nurturing Stale Leads (Webinar Recap)
Instapage, the popular landing page builder, has spent years accumulating leads, many of whom haven’t engaged with marketing, product, or sales in months. These leads went stale like an old bag of chips. But instead of purging their database of these cold contacts, Instapage launched a lead nurturing journey that generated $30,000 in annual recurring revenue in less than 2 months. We sat down with Instapage’s Senior Marketing Operations Manager (Stefano Mazzalai) and Content Marketing Manager (Brandon Weaver) to talk through exactly how they did it. You can watch the full webinar replay here:
Specifically, you’ll get a behind the scenes look at:
The actual lead magnets Instapage uses to attract potential buyers
How to design high-converting landing pages for your gated content (with a real-life example)
Why personalized call to actions convert better than boring “submit” buttons
The follow up qualification journey to distinguish between hot and cold leads
How Instapage structures their lead nurturing journey on the Autopilot canvas, including timing, emails sent, and behavioral conditions
The right content to drive engagement and conversion throughout your whole marketing funnel
Here’s the slide deck if you’re short on time:
We didn’t have time to get to all the questions asked during the webinar, so check out our written answers below.
1. What do you recommend for teams who don’t have much content to work with?
Start with a 15-minute content audit of your blog posts, website copy, marketing emails, social sites, and videos. This’ll give you a solid grasp on what content you’re working with. If you don’t have much, consider extracting some smaller content pieces from longer ones. From there, create the “nurture your contacts with 4 emails” journey in the Autopilot Guidebook. It’s a great journey to start with if you’re running low on content. Another great technique is to package together related blog articles into an ebook or tip sheet and offer it as a piece of gated content (e.g. lead magnet). This way you don’t have to create something brand new just to get new leads entering your marketing funnel.
2. Are plain-text emails or HTML emails more effective?
_Instapage: _HTML emails tend to have higher overall click rates from our testing, while text-based emails tend to perform best when you only have 1-2 links in the text. _Autopilot: _Depends on the use case and audience. For example, branded HTML emails don’t typically jive with technical audiences like developers, while proactive text-based support emails do. More generally, branded HTML-formatted emails designed to welcome new users to your service perform as well as plain text welcome emails, while also delivering a red-carpet new user experience. But for call to action emails, lead follow-ups, or segmented offers, plain text formatted tend to have higher open/click rates and convert at a higher rate. The bottom line? Run A/B tests to determine what works best for your industry and audience, using the above as starting guidelines.
3. What’s the best frequency to follow up with leads?
_Instapage: _We sent an email every five days for two months. We tested against sending every seven days, but landed on five because we wanted a shorter cycle to gage interest and convert leads into customers. This frequency worked well for us, but is worth testing with your particular audience. _Autopilot: _In our own testing, we’ve split nurture journeys into 5, 10, and 15 day delays to discover which send frequency works best. Surprisingly, we haven’t seen any significant differences between open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, or even customer conversion rates, that is attributable to the timing and frequency of lead nurturing. We see most of our customers who have nurturing journeys timing their sends every seven to ten days, and in past studies we’ve found that companies who stay in touch with contacts at least every 2-4 weeks generate double the leads as those who are in touch less frequently.
4. Why do you think “I want more conversions” performs better than “get more conversions”
We found that “I want more conversions” performs better because we put ourselves in their shoes as they read the call to action. It’s what they say in their mind, whereas “get more conversions” is you talking at them. We’ve seen both work. It’s just that the first person language works better :-)
5. Are you planning/formulating your journeys prior to creating them in Autopilot? How do you plan these beforehand? Spreadsheet, drawings, on a whiteboard?
All of the above. There was a lot of moving parts to creating our nurture journey. We had to lay out the structure and flow, figure out what content goes where, and define our condition checks. You get tons of ideas during the creation process, which usually ends up living on napkins and spreadsheets and whiteboards before going live in Autopilot. Also we like to be as data-driven as possible here; we only use our top-performing content, which is the content that has the highest conversion rate to paid based on historical data. Now it’s your turn. What were your biggest takeaways from the webinar? What follow up questions do you have for Instapage? Let us know in the comments.
