Creating Forms That Make Sense For Your SEO Optimized Content by Nick Dimitriou of Moosend

Nick Dimitriou from Moosend joined the Clearscope webinar to discuss Creating Forms That Make Sense For Your SEO Optimized Content.

Nick covered the types of lead capture forms including modal pop-up, inline form, floating bar, floating box, and full page. Then he shared 9 tips for driving bottom line results with forms.

There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding forms. And more use cases than only collecting information. Nick uses forms to move website visitors around the site. For example, use an Exit Intent form to reduce your bounce rate and introduce visitors to more engaging pieces of content.

Nick shares one of Moosend’s most successful forms which has generated more than 15,000 trials in its lifetime. He shares why he thinks it’s been successful and why more SaaS brands need to experiment with the form type.

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Watch the full webinar

Check out Nick's slides from the webinar especially the form examples towards the end with why Nick believes they work.

About Nick Dimitriou:

Nick is the Head of Growth at Moosend helping SMBs scale how they engage with their audience through email marketing and marketing automation. Also, I lead strategy, growth, and innovation across all user acquisition channels(SEO, Affiliate, Paid, Social, Content) for Moosend (acquired by Sitecore, May 2021).

Read the transcript

Travis:

Today we have Nick the head of growth at Moosend joining us. He leads strategy, growth, and innovation across all user acquisition channels, including SEO, affiliate, and paid. Moosend is a powerful email marketing platform for automation software with world-class features, state-of-the-art automation flows, and lead generation tools that help you grow your business. Nick, welcome again. And the floor is yours, please share your screen.

Nick:

Hi guys. Thank you for having me.

Nick:

Awesome. Yeah, let me go to the big key wing. Oops, just give me a sec. Okay, perfect. Hi everyone, thank you guys for having me here. In this webinar, we're going to talk about forms that you place in your SEO optimized content. You guys put a lot of effort into creating a ton of content and you get traffic to your website, then you need some sort of lead capture mechanism to convert these visitors to your desired outcome. Either they sign up for your newsletter, or they sign up for your product, or you offer an incentive and they download an ebook or something like that. And then you can nurture them down the funnel either, convert them to a paid account, if you're selling like software, or try to give them a more personalized overview of your product.

Nick:

And then they convert through lead nurture, nurturing sequence. Yeah, Travis mentioned everything about me, so I'm just going to skip that, but I'm Nick I'll lead the growth actions for Moosend and Moosend is an email automation tool. It's very similar to other big players out there, like MailTeam where we compete with them head to head in a lot of keywords, but yeah, I'm just going to kind of skip that, so yeah. The first thing first is what encompasses lead generation. The 4Ls of Lead Generations are pretty much Lead Capture, Lead Magnets, Landing Pages, Conversion Rates, and Lead Scoring. In this webinar, we're going to focus on the lead capture part and these kinds of strategies you need to kind of implement to convert your visitors to pretty much give you, your contact details.

Nick:

And then there's also Lead Magnets, which pretty much all of us have heard about, which is kind of gated content that you kind of give to your visitors through a pop-up form or a dedicated landing page. And you provide additional materials for them to give to you in your email. And the other two ones, which we will not be talking about are the Conversion Rates for Landing Pages and Lead Scoring. But these are also super important, especially the lead scoring aspect of lead generation is really important because that's where you distinguish whether your demand generation studies work. But yeah, we're going to focus on Lead Capture and some things around the Lead Magnets, primarily examples and stuff like that. The first thing is to look at the Lead Capture Types, so I'm going to solve five types of Lead Capture. There are a ton more out there, and I think all of the tools that allow you to create forms are coming up with a ton of other types as well, but obviously, you have the traditional Modal Pop-up as we call it at Moosend.

Nick:

So I'm going to use my terminology, but it's pretty much the standard pop-up that you see on many websites that you visit. It can either be triggered through a next intent action when people leave the browser, or it can be a time-based pop-up that pops up after like 15 seconds, so it's a standard pop-up. Then we have the Inline Form pop-ups, not pop-ups actually, but it's an embedded form. That's part of either your content or your landing page, and you can embed that and capture people as they scroll through and read your page, so you don't interrupt their journey, but you have this form as you can see here on the landing page, for example, or in a blog post that you've created. Besides that, we have the Floating Bar or Hello Bar, which is at the top bar here. Most people use this bar to share some exciting news about their company. In my case, at least personally, also an example, as well as we progress through the webinar, this bar is crazy for conversions, at least in our case and how we implement it.

Nick:

But yeah, most I think this is one of the most underused forms out there at the moment, especially for the SaaS industry, because in the SaaS space, people use this form to either, they've just published a post and they use a Hello Bar to distribute it for a week and then they just closed this form, so I'm just going to show that as we go through this. And then we have the Floating Box, which is on the right or left side of your pages, it's a pretty standard, it can be triggered through a scroll depth kind of thing, depending on the software you use and the capabilities it gives you. But it's pretty standard as the users scroll, let's say this pop-up comes through either in a slide format or something like that. And then it kind of interrupts the journey of the user.

Nick:

But if it gets properly placed, it can give additional options to the user, especially if it's personalized. For example, you scroll through a page and you add a certain copy here, that's aligned with the page that the user reads, and then you provide a more personalized experience rather than a more intrusive experience with these pop-ups. And the last one is the classic Full Page, which is not my favorite one. It's the most intrusive one, in my opinion. I think you need to be careful when you use this pop-up. You need to be aware of the things that it can cause either people just leave your website immediately, or they just close this and they just continue with their day. But I've never implemented something like this in the projects that I've worked with, but I think it's powerful in the blogging industry if done correctly.

Nick:

Yeah, as I said, most of those pop-ups are being triggered by specific rules, these are six common rules. The most common one is the URL rules, so if for example, you want to display a dedicated pop-up on one of your high converting pages, then you use the URL trigger. And when the URL matches that criteria, the pop-up gets triggered. This is pretty common. Also, a quick tip here, this, depending on the software you use, it can also obviously identifies the UTM parameters, so if you run, let's say a campaign besides getting organic traffic, you can trigger personalized pop-ups based on a social media campaign, let's say that you use, so it's pretty handy. Then we have other kinds of triggers like Mobile versus Desktop. On mobiles, sometimes you want to completely disable the forms, so it's good to have this as an option to disable forms on mobiles, especially if the software you use doesn't have mobile responsive forms. And then other kinds of important ones are the Cookie ones.

Nick:

If you want to do something in your store with first-party data cookies, that's something that we do at Moosend, we use first-party cookies to kind of attribute the conversion, the first touch conversion, so we might use these cookies to trigger specific pop-ups, to give people a more personalized experience. For example, someone is searching for email newsletter software, so we know that this person is trying to find a newsletter software, like only newsletters, so we might display pop-ups that showcase our email marketing capabilities rather than our lead generation or marketing automation capabilities, so we use these cookies that we use for attribution to also display pop-ups. And also Operating Systems, Country, and City, most of the form builders kind of have this capability, depending on your audience you might want to display a pop-up in a different language, but depending on whether you've localized your website as well, it would make more sense for the website and the pop-up to be localized rather than the website being English and the pop-up being in a different language.

Nick:

But yeah, these are just some examples of the triggers. They depend on the software you use, so make sure to kind of check the software that you will choose, has the capabilities that you want to create the forms that will resonate best with your audience. These are some of the reasons, at least it depends on each case, but for me, obviously why you use this form is to capture visitor contact details, and spread straightforward. That's one of the biggest reasons why someone would use forms. For me, other reasons are to guide visitors to other pages, so in my case, I might use a pop-up on a specific page to guide them to a different page, so I'll use them as navigation as well, which is not a lot of people are doing actually, you can do that.

Nick:

They do it with the Hello Bar, which is not my favorite, but it's mostly like an announcement that they do. But I use pop-ups to guide people through different pages, so if a person visits a bottom-of-the-funnel blog article we've created, we might want to prompt them when they try to leave the page for example, for our next intent to check our pricing. If for example, we have a listicle about the best newsletter software out there. We might want them to check our pricing page. And then obviously with exit intent, you want to reduce bounce rate, which is important for SEO purposes as well. I won't then say that it's the most important thing when it comes to SEO, but definitely pop-ups help you kind of the bounce rate and hopefully get some people to continue interacting with your website.

Nick:

It's a pretty good kind of strategic action to implement when you're using forms, so exit intents are important for reducing the bounce rate. I don't know if you can see the top of the screen, but because I have this bar here I'm just going to move it. Let's go to a different monitor, perfect. Oops, sorry. The next section is on how you're going to create forms to drive bottom-line results. The first one is for the people watching, if you are just starting or you've already picked the software, that's good. But if you are evaluating your software or you are just starting here are some things you want to kind of check when you're evaluating form builders because as we can see on the right side there are a ton of them and that's just a fraction of the tools out there, so you want to check a couple of things. Make sure that it's easy to use, they have a visual editor, and it's also aligned with your broader stock so that you can use it pretty much immediately.

Nick:

If you run on WordPress, there are a ton of websites out there that tools that allow you to integrate with WordPress, so some other things are the customer's ability options. You want to make sure that the software that you've chosen allows you to customize the forms the way you want. And also it offers you a range as we said of triggering and timing settings, besides that other things you want to check are the analytics capabilities that the tool offers, so if it's a form that also has an email submit that you're able to capture that, but hopefully you are also capturing these on your analytics software as well. Besides these four key factors. Another thing that I haven't included actually is obviously make sure that the tool you choose has AB testing capabilities.

Nick:

This will come in handy the more you use the software, but it's definitely something you want to have in mind. But these are the four basic things that make an online form builder good for you, pretty much. Especially when you're just starting out. The next thing is to obviously you've chosen your software now it's time to make your forms, so the first thing you want to have in mind is that you want to make your forms as simple as possible. Depending on the industry you are. For example, if you're in the eCommerce industry, you might use, as you can see on the example here, you might use some product images, but then the layout is pretty clean. And you obviously, in most of the cases, like 90% of the cases, you would offer some sort of discount to get people to subscribe to your email list and also make a purchase down the line.

Nick:

Try to make your forms as simple as possible when you're especially starting out. But even if you've done a lot of things, making them simple is always a good way to kind of evaluate your whole strategy with forms. Also, another thing you want to have in mind is to kind of align your forms with your branding, so use the same font, the same colors, and stuff like that. Yeah, so simplicity is key here, you don't want to go too overboard. But it depends on your industry, some industries you might want to go overboard with the colors or the creatives, but yeah, simple is better every time for me, at least. The third thing here is to add the Clever CTAs.

Nick:

As I mentioned before, you don't always need to go full of having a ton of visuals and colors and everything, so sometimes you want to go simple. And obviously for your CTAs, the copy is really important and you want to make sure in terms of design, I've included two examples here. On the above example, you can see that the call to action here actually blends with the background color, which makes it really hard to actually see this I would imagine is either an inline kind of form or a sidebar form, so if it blends like that, it's not going to kind of capture the eyes of your visitors, so you just want to make sure that there's contrast between the color of the button and your background. And in the example, here, we can see that there's definitely contrast, obviously there's the blue background here, but it's pretty straightforward.

Nick:

Also, you have the headline here with the bright white on the blue background, which captures the attention, so it's really easy for people to see here and they can also immediately read the value proposition of you that you are going to give to them after they submit this form, so it's really important to kind of take into consideration the design of your call-to-action, as well as the copy. As we go through this presentation, we're going to see some copy examples and some button examples. But yeah, try to-

Travis:

Quick question on that, Nick.

Nick:

Yeah.

Travis:

I've seen some people recommend that the call-to-action buttons be colored, something that stands out beyond just a branded color as like a bright red or yellow. Is there like a color pattern that you would recommend for like higher conversion rates?

Nick:

Yeah, if you want to kind of catch the attention of the reader using like a bright color, like red it's preferable, but it might also trigger some different emotional responses, so go for a more calm color, like the blue one or like a different shade of red let's say, not pure like red that... You understand, it prompts like an error message kind of thing, so people might think, oh, I'm not in the right place and they just leave. But in my experience, avoided using red oriented colors. Fortunately enough, one of our brand colors is actually a light red kind of, so in some cases I use it if I want to boost conversions in some articles.

Nick:

But yeah, overall I would go for the more calm colors let's say, so light blue, light green, that kind of stuff. Obviously you don't want your pop-up to be too much in your visitor's face. It's acts as a complimentary thing that you bring value to them, so I wouldn't obsess about it. Just add something calm, give it time, it's going to work eventually. Most likely I would recommend people to test the copy rather than the design elements immediately, so just go with something straightforward initially. Yeah, hopefully that answers kind of your question.

Travis:

Yeah. Perfect.

Nick:

Awesome, so the next thing, let me actually go here is the Timing. Timing is really important, especially when someone lands on your website for the first time, you don't want to load the pop up on the first three seconds, let's say. In some cases you might want to, but from a standard visitor's perspective, I think that would be really intrusive and it will ruin their experience. And you kind of have to ask yourself a question. Why did you build this page to only ruin it by running a pop-up in the first three seconds? It doesn't make much sense, so just let the page work first and then use pop-ups in a manner that's complimenting the user experience rather than being intrusive to those visitors. One interesting thing that I'm mentioning here is that it's good to kind of check the average time that your visitors are spending on the pages you run your pop-ups.

Nick:

This will give you an indication of how long they spend on these pages. And then you can tweak your pop-ups to appear around that timeframe, so the moment they let's say a minute before they leave, so if the average time on page is let's say 60 seconds, add your pop-up to 30 seconds, so it gets triggered while they've already digested some of your content, so it's always good to kind of check the data and make sure that your pop-ups are aligned with the overall experience the users are receiving on your website. Here, you can see an example, so this combo here, they're using a time-based pop-up, so it's pretty standard for eCommerce to use the time-based pop-up to give kind of first purchase discounts and stuff like that.

Nick:

It's important to choose the right timing. I think you should look into data rather than your gut feeling initially, so make sure to check on your analytics, and see what's the average time a user spends on this page. You want to run a pop-up and cut that time in half. And that's your time, your trigger time for your pop-up if you want to run time-based pop-ups. Yeah, it's pretty good. And another thing that is important is, especially for eCommerce stores is to offer incentives as you probably visit the dawn of eCommerce stores, especially during the lockdown period, myself have visited a ton of them. I've seen a ton of pop-ups actually, and they offer and every single one of them actually offered the same thing, which is a percentage discount. The only different kind of pop-up that I've seen in terms of offering is that you give your email and you get a code where you get two plus one kind of offer, so that was pretty interesting for me.

Nick:

I haven't seen one of those actually it's mostly the X amount, X percentage discount, so obviously incentives work wonders, especially in the eCommerce industry, but also in the blogging industry and also the SaaS industry, the incentives you will use most likely, for example, in the SaaS industry, you will probably use some sort of e-book for them to download, some sort of cheat sheet. We've obviously seen those go around, but there's a shift in this strategy where people give everything for free right now, rather than gate keeping everything. The offer incentivization is mostly tied to the eCommerce space, but obviously from at least the strategies that I've run, obviously promoting software is that we prefer to give the content for free rather than gatekeep it behind a landing page or a pop-up.

Nick:

And in our case, also some pretty interesting examples of how we use exit intent pop-ups and stuff like that down the line. But obviously it's good to offer incentives. The incentives you need to offer will be derived from your industry. As I said, SaaS is mostly some sort of content based incentive that helps your users and educates them on either your industry or your product. For eCommerce it's mostly discounts or different other offers let's say, like two plus one as I mentioned. In the blogging industry, it's pretty similar to the SaaS industry, it's probably going to be either a step by step playbook or something like that. Yeah, incentives do work, you should definitely run them. Obviously, if you're in the eCommerce industry, it depends on your margins, how aggressive you want to go and sacrifice your margins, but yeah, they do kind of work.

Nick:

The next thing is obviously you need to kind of run A/B tests, not immediately when you start, obviously when you start you want to collect as much data as you want, as you need actually, and then start iterating those pop-ups you've created. As you can see in the examples here, you can test the copy of the call-to-action or the [inaudible 00:26:27], and obviously give it some time don't immediately change or stop your experiment because the conversions went down. You need to reach something which is called the statistical significance. This is something that most form builders actually offer, so when you reach that point, then you're good to go to get your decision, whether your B variation work better, just use that and then start iterating on your B variation. Yeah, it's really important to run tests, but if you're just starting out, don't obsess about it, you are going to figure it out in the end.

Nick:

Just start with simple things like the copy of the call-to-action or the copy of your heading, if you have a heading on your pop-up, just start with these simple things. And if the software you currently use, doesn't have A/B testing capabilities, just write things down, go in a more unconventional way, just create a spreadsheet. Hopefully you can export some stuff and just run ad hoc experiments. Just change it for a week, two weeks, three weeks, especially if you're just starting out, you can do that. It's nothing wrong with that, I've done it in the past. But obviously it's good to have a software that allows you to do this on a more robust way, so yeah, A/B tests are pretty important. People really neglect them, especially in the SaaS industry and the blogging industry, I would say. In the eCommerce space, people are going crazy.

Nick:

They run hundreds of experiments at every single time, especially if they have a high volume eCommerce store, they kind of have to because even 0.5% increase might mean thousands of dollars in revenue for them. Yeah, it's good to kind of check what, for example, if you're in the software as a service kind of industry, it's good to look into the eCommerce space to draw inspiration when it comes to forms, these guys know what they're doing. They've seen so many things, they've tested so many things, so you're going to draw some pretty interesting stuff for them that might work for your industry as well, so it's good to always look at other industries to get ideas. But yeah, it's always good to run A/B tests. Another thing to have in mind in terms of copy and layout is to use Social Proofs and kind of showcase the value that they will get by signing up.

Nick:

Even if it's a for example, a newsletter, you can have a testimonial of what the users most enjoy. Obviously make sure to use testimonials that are accurate and not actually kind of fake ones, let's say. It's always good to pull your audience and make sure that you're doing something that provides value to them. And then if they agree, then use a testimonial to boost your conversion rates. But yeah, other things that you might want to consider is like star ratings, different awards that you, if you have a product let's say, if you have a software and you got some awards or some pretty good reviews on the various review websites out there, you can use those on your pop-ups to kind of validate to the visitor that you are actually up to their standards. Yeah, social proof always good for not only landing pages, but pop-ups.

Nick:

I haven't seen many pop-ups in the SaaS industry, at least that use social proof. We've tried doing some for Moosend, but we've never actually deployed them. They always looked kind of weird to do them in a pop-up layout, so we kind of never run them, but I have them somewhere in my computer stored in the closet, let's say. But yeah, it's always good to try some stuff, but in my case, always, even if you do something and spend some time, make sure to give it a shot, even if it seems weird to you, your visitors and your users will quote unquote judge, whether it works or not. To you, it might seem unnatural but to them it might be the best thing that they've seen and they might convert, so even if you are unsure, just take this small leap of faith, nothing will go wrong and just test stuff out.

Nick:

Yeah, that's at least my kind of philosophy around testing stuff, even if it doesn't seem good to you just go with it. I didn't go with this particular one, but I've gone with so many other ones that have actually worked the wonders for us. To put things into perspective, we've actually implemented the pop-up. I've implemented this pop-up about three years ago. The first time that I've started tinkering with pop-ups. And so far, it has generated about 15,000 trials for Moosend, so I'm going to show that pop-up as well, as we go through that. I don't have it in the presentation, but I'll jump outside the presentation. I'm going to see how it works in real time actually. Another thing you want to have in mind is that you want to understand your visitors intent, so if you as I said before, if you are in the eCommerce industry and people visit your website, these people are ready to buy a product.

Nick:

So offering to them a discount or free shipping, which counts as a discount actually, it will resonate much better with this visitor than just prompt them and send them to a different page to check your product catalog, for example. You need to understand the visitor intent here, why they've come to your website, so you need to have a pretty good understanding of your buyer personas. This is something that I'm struggling a lot because we as Moosend cater towards different personas out there, so what I do actually here is I try to mix the search intent because we rely heavily for our lead generation through SEO actually, so I match the search intent with the pop-ups. I create pop-ups that are matching the visitors search intent, actually. And then we classify them based on our topic clusters.

Nick:

And then we run a pop-up on a set of pages that have a similar intent, and then we just monitor the performance, so it's always good to have an idea of the visitor intent. This will be derived from your buyer persona, mostly. Yeah, visitor intent, pretty important. If you don't know your visitor's intent, you can as I said, kind of look where you are acquiring traffic from through SEO and then figure this out that way, so yep. The last thing which is doesn't have to do with pop-ups that much, but it's what happens after the person has submitted their contact details. Let's say, so it's the first thing that they're going to receive. It's probably going to be some sort of welcoming mail, hopefully. So you need to kind of break the ice with them. In our case, in the example you see here, it's part of the welcome series we have for Moosend.

Nick:

When someone subscribes, registers for our product, for our trial, they receive this email, which welcomes them to the platform and also provides them with some jump links to start getting them acquainted with the product, pretty much. But it's always good to kind of break the ice after they submit to your newsletter. They're either going to confirm your subscription, if you do confirmation or you want to kind of explain to them and welcome them to your communications through email, so it's really important to set something up if you haven't. Even a casual, hi, thank you for signing up to my newsletter is good enough, so in order to start kind of nurture them and you start to build trust with them and obviously welcome emails, they tend to have the highest open rate.

Nick:

It's always good to kind of get their attention immediately, and that's why on our end at least, we've kind of created this newsletter, which it has some nice visuals, some jump links to help them out. This instills a sense of trust, and also that will help them down the line. And hopefully they become attached to our brand first and then to our product. But yeah, it's always good to have that in mind, so this concludes this section in terms of creating forms, whether you're just starting out or you are already starting out, hopefully that this tips will help you either explore something different or enhance your current strategies, so I don't know if we have any questions, I don't seem to see any in the chat, unless?

Travis:

Yes, we have a couple questions.

Nick:

Yeah, we can take a small break here and answer some.

Travis:

Perfect, so do you prefer an embedded inline form, a click trigger pop-up form, or a link out to a hosted form when optimizing for conversion rate on a blog post?

Nick:

Yeah, I would prefer the inline form. The click trigger one we've tested, we've used it a lot in the past, especially for lead magnets, so we would have like a section where people would click on the side of the post and then a pop-up will open up, and then they would kind of fill this form and get the lead magnet. I would prefer the inline form because it flows naturally when the reader reads your post, so I would go for inline forms, but I would not overdo it. And I would place them strategically after specific sections that are not that invasive to the reader, let's say, so after like the end of a specific section, just add this inline form.

Nick:

I would go with inline forms, but at least from my experience and what I've seen work best in our blog posts is exit intent pop-ups, which is... No, for blog posts. Obviously everyone runs them in most cases to reduce bounce rates. But also you guys, as we go through the presentation, how we use exit intent for motion to also lower the bounce rate, but acquire users as well. Yeah, to answer the question briefly, inline forms, I'll choose them every day. For me, it's the most natural ones when it comes to blog posts at least.

Travis:

Awesome. We can do one more question, and I think I would like to see that Moosend form that has generated 15,000 trials.

Nick:

Yeah.

Travis:

The next one is in most cases, do images on forms, increase conversions. And if so, does the image need to be contextual with what they offer or can it be like eye catching, kind of an emotional image like that? A kitten example?

Nick:

Yeah, it would definitely depend on the product you're trying to promote, so if you, for example, you have a jewelry store let's say, and you're running a pop-up like that, and you're offering 50% on rings, for example. I would make sure to add a picture of the rings rather than an kind of emotionally triggering image let's say. But if for example, you're not in the eCommerce space and you want to create a fun and interesting form, then you can go out of your way and experiment with different cat images or dog images. You can go pretty crazy in the SaaS space, I've seen cats, dogs, everything in pop-ups. But on the eCommerce, I would go product specific images. In the SaaS industry, I would go with plain text, no images in your pop-ups. I would go as simple as it can be, so I wouldn't even use images in at least this in the SaaS industry.

Nick:

But in the blogging industry, for example, then some images would make sense to use. For example, if you want people to download your seven days challenge, for example, you might want to add an image that showcases the results of this seven days challenge from your audience, for example. I would make sure to use images, but not fun ones, just to trigger an emotion based on that. You'll definitely make your form memorable, but if you make it too memorable, they're going to forget what you are about. And they're going to be thinking about a pop-up and not what you are actually bringing to the table as a website, a, a service, as a product and stuff like that, so I wouldn't go too overboard with the images, just to trigger an emotional kind of response, let's say.

Travis:

Awesome, that's super helpful. Let's go ahead and take a look at that form you're talking about.

Nick:

Awesome. Yeah, I'll jump outside of here. Let me go to a new, you can see my screen still, right?

Travis:

Yes.

Nick:

Perfect, so I'll just really quickly go here, so this form runs on our homepage as well, it's going to take some time to load because as I said, we don't want to interfere a lot with the people visiting our website, so they load after certain threshold that we have. The form is actually this one here, so it's the Hello Bar form that I said that people don't really use that form for lead generation, let's say, and they use it mostly for announcements. That's what I've seen people use it the most. Now I'm starting seeing some people use it that way that we use it. But this form over three years has generated around 15,000 leads, I would say.

Nick:

And we are doing some pretty simple stuff here, we're taking an industry statistic here. And then we're like try Moosend today, and we A/B test this copy, and we've also A/B tested the color palette over here. If you see here, actually this resembles a lot, the Instagram color palette. This is by design actually, because we've figured.... I've tested a lot of palettes from different social media platforms. A lot of people are spending a lot of time on TikTok, on Instagram, on all those platforms out there, so when people visit our website and they see a pallet that's familiar to them outside their working hours, it works much better in my opinion. It also looks kind of cool this palette here, but yeah, obviously the call-to-action here is pretty straightforward, get started for free. We also have the no credit card required.

Nick:

If you are in the software service industry and you do not require a credit card, make sure to always kind of point this out, it increases the conversions by a lot. And also in our case, we've adopted this methodology across the board with other kind of forms here, where if you add your email here, we will not actually add you in an email list, obviously. We will redirect you and post this email, the data they mail to the second screen of our registration page, so we're redirecting people to the second step of our registration process here. This works fairly well for us, and it's not the standard, just click. If for example, I click on this button here, then I add my email and I create my account. But by leveraging these forms, I can skip that step, so I'm cutting down on one step.

Nick:

You might ask, why not do like a single page sign up page? We're kind of evaluating our options, but because we have a two step registration process, we're leveraging this, so we're redirecting people through these forms to the second step of the registration. And we only kind of have to worry about the second step drop off because that's where they create the account. But yeah, for our industry, the SaaS industry, I think this pop-up here is one of the most underused ones actually.

Travis:

Nice. And so-

Nick:

Yeah.

Travis:

Do you run that across all pages?

Nick:

Yeah, we don't run it on mobile.

Travis:

Yeah. Cool.

Nick:

And we don't run it on some pages that we want people for example, if we send paid traffic to a specific page, we might not want this pop up to display, so we have this as a catch all, but we've disabled it on some pages that we don't want to interfere that much with the overall experience, because obviously this pushes the content down, so there is a cumulative layout shift, so some SEOs might be like, okay, this is going to mess up with my core web vitals. And that's one of the reasons why we allowed the pop-up to load for quite some time when it first loaded. But yeah, this pop-up in my opinion is really underused. And in our industry at least, it works fairly well. I would advise people to give this a shot either just add the button or add an email here to capture people, or redirect them to your second step, or populate their email address on your first step.

Travis:

Yeah.

Nick:

Just pull this data, store them in the first party cookie and retrieve them and use them, ask your developers to do it. I'm not that technical, but it can definitely be done, and it's going to look cool. People add their email here, they get redirected to your signup page, and they only have to add their password, so they just add the password. And if you want to go extra fancy, you can add, generate strong password button, so they just click this button here, they add the email here, and then on the second page, they just click a generate strong password, they copy to clipboard and then they create the account. For the SaaS industry, there are a lot of creative things you could try, but yeah, we can go back to the presentation. We have some more slides, but I'll be conscious of time and I'll run through them as quick as possible.

Travis:

Perfect.

Nick:

Awesome, so the next thing is kind of the copy that you will write either for your CTA or the overall copy of your form. I will focus mostly on the call-to-action which is one of, if not the most important aspect of your pop-up. You want to make sure that you use powerful words there. Obviously this is kind of a marketing thing here. Use powerful words. Yeah, they kind of work, but you want to be as clear as possible. You don't want to use really fancy words because you've read that this word generates a ton of leads, so just be really simple here, and you can search for different words and find different words that kind of trigger different responses. For exclusivity, be the first to join. For community, like become a member. Urgency, get it before it's out of stock. Grid, which sounds bad.

Nick:

But you, as a marketer, you kind of have to explore all your options here, so words like free, save, get more, and stuff like that. And obviously FOMO, fear of missing out, don't miss, ending soon. This is similar to urgency, but yeah. And as well as curiosity, find out, discover, learn, learn more, and stuff like that. It's always good to kind of have an idea of the words you use, what kind of emotional response they trigger and then start to experiment with this. In the example here, you can see it's pretty straight forward. We use the word to join, which instills a sense of community and also the word today to kind of start creating a sense of urgency, so it's a double kind of emotional trigger here. Yeah, make sure to evaluate the words you use and use ones that are simple yet powerful, like join the webinar today, for example.

Nick:

The second thing is you need to focus on value, different words like free, obviously will catch your visitor's attention the most, so you should definitely try them. I'm not too happy when I see free. Free, in some cases I'm like, it's probably going to be free, but it's really going to be bad quality and it's not going to actually solve my problem, so I don't really submit my email to get this lead magnet. But you can, if you want to go for a more intense, heavy strategy, you can use those words. And it's pretty simple, you just need to focus on the value and obviously showcase to the user through your pop-up, what they will get. Make sure that your headline and your byline here actually showcases what they get by giving their email address. In this example, it's pretty straightforward.

Nick:

You will get weekly growth insights to your inbox once a week, so here I know exactly what I will get and hopefully that's what I will get because you never know actually until you start getting those communications. But make sure to be as clear as possible and also showcase the value that you will bring to them. And then after they start receiving your communication in this specific example, let's say, then they will be able to distinguish themselves whether this is of value to them. They're either going to unsubscribe or continue reading your communications, so focus on value. And another thing is that you need to foster curiosity and anticipation. This is specific to the eCommerce industry, I would say, but I have a travel industry kind of, but it's eCommerce at the end of the day. From booking.com, so curiosity. For curiosity, you can use gamification, so one of the most used pop-ups that I've seen a lot in the commerce stores is the wheel of fortune.

Nick:

I don't know how it's called actually, to be honest with you probably wheel of fortune or spin the will, so you have the curiosity element here. People are curious what they're going to win, and also they have kind of the anticipation stuff behind this strategy as well. And yeah, it's straightforward, it works wonders for the eCommerce store. It would be interesting to run some sort of case study here to see how often. And obviously you kind of, if you're have like a 50% off and it's charting your margins, you probably tweak that to not happen that often. But yeah, it's always interesting to test these strategies. I've never seen this kind of pop-up in the SaaS industry, so you might want to take kind of some ideas from the eCommerce industry and run this on the SaaS industry as well.

Nick:

Even if it looks a bit weird, but yeah. Curiosity and anticipation through gamification is always good because you don't have a lot of options with gamifications through pop-ups. Mostly it'll be this kind of thing or a different format of the same strategy. It's going to be like a rolling machine or like a slot machine kind of thing. But yeah, not a big fan of those, but they tend to provide something that other pop-ups do not, which is the gamification element. And you want to make sure that you write a copy that is conversational, so it doesn't pretty much be like robotic in a sense, let's say, so the pop-up needs to have its own kind of life form, so when the user reads it should translate to their brain like someone is telling them what to do. Here's a nice example. I'm not going to stay here for long, but yeah, it's pretty standard stuff. Make sure that you use language that on the conversational note.

Nick:

Yeah, another thing is that design kind of matters, it doesn't have to do much with the copy of the form, but in some cases, design dictates copy. And in some cases copy dictates design, so some tips for designing your forms is to use the white space to your advantage, pick vibrant colors, but not the aggressive ones like bright red, for example as you can see here. You can use that green one, which is more calm. And also you need to be conscious of the size of your buttons here, you don't want them to take over too much space. And also optimize your call-to-actions and your pop-ups for mobile devices. Yes, and last thing, which is pretty similar to the other things we mentioned is obviously you want to test your copy, so make sure that you kind of run some basic tests here.

Nick:

You can check a pretty interesting example here, download my ebook, download my cheat sheet, make sure that you kind of use different words to see whether a different word might resonate better with your persona. Yeah, here are some examples. I'm not going to spend too much time on them. I know we're going to share the presentation after so people can read through why this pop-ups work, so this is one from the beverage company, AriZona. Pretty standard stuff, 10% of your first order, clean design, minimalistic yet overboard for me. But yeah, it does work. They've used the white thing here and they've added the creatives on the sides, so it doesn't interfere that much with the intent of the pop-up. This is the Moosend pop-up, so if you visit this specific article here, which is one of our most popular resources out there, this is a next intent pop-up.

Nick:

And this pop-up actually, as you can see, it's pretty straightforward. It also has the light red color I mentioned about, so we're calling out here a pain point that most users of this platform have, based on the search intent because they're search searching for Mailchimp alternatives, so this exit intent prompts them, and showcases to them that we are a simple alternative to Mailchimp by X amount. And this pop-up acts as a bridge, so when as we've shown in the example before of the Hello Bar, it's the same methodology here. People add their email and they get redirected to sign up for our free trial, so this pop-up runs on this page alone. If you go and visit that page and go try to leave the browser, this pop-up will be triggered and it will remind you of your pain point pretty much.

Nick:

And hopefully it will trigger people's response to submit and try Moosend and see whether this software is good for them compared to the other software. It's another kind of company in the eCommerce space, they've tried to match their branding with the pop-up, so they've used their mascot and they've also used some pretty interesting layouts here. The only thing here is the only problem in this pop-up is that the button doesn't have a color that makes it pop out, so people might try to figure out where the button is, so I would use a different color here rather than the black one. And an example from Copyhackers, this is an embedded form on a landing page for people to sign up to their newsletter, to get the new articles they publish and all their event info. Here is the social proof element, which is really important.

Nick:

It showcases here that 42,000 people have already signed up, might as well you sign up and check for yourself what these 42,000 people are getting out of this. And also they're like, stay as long as you like, unsubscribe any time. That shows how confident they are that people will not unsubscribe. For me, at least from a marketing standpoint, it shows that they're pretty confident on what they do and they actually provide the real value, so I would definitely sign up for their newsletter. When it comes to more skeptical people, when they see forms, they've sold me here let's say, so I'll probably sign up. But yeah, it's always good to showcase that there is a community behind this.

Nick:

It's not that they're signing up to receive communications from you, and just from you. This communication is being received by another 40,000 human beings out there that they're probably like minded with you and you can kind of how to say it potentially interact with them and stuff like that and share your ideas as well, so it instills a sense of community and it makes you more attached to their brand. Yeah, I don't know if we have any other kind of questions, I know I've rushed through this, hopefully we're not over time, but yeah.

Travis:

Awesome. Yeah. I think we only have like one additional question. Basically, what are your thoughts on delivering the content upgrades? It's more of like a user experience question, but should you deliver the content upgrade via email or immediately after the content form's been submitted, in like a thank you page or just take them straight to the asset. It looks like you're muted, Nick.

Nick:

Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. I would obviously test this. I think it will depend on the content upgrade you offer. If it's for example, let's say copy this template and it's like a Google sheet template, you can immediately redirect them to the copy URL and they immediately copy the template and they don't have to go to their inbox, so I would go to the easier route, which would be to immediately download the file to their computer, if that's possible through your form. Otherwise, you can go through the email, we've done both at Moosend. Initially we were sending everything via email, and then we started going towards click here, and you would immediately click the copy to your drive kind of URL.

Nick:

I would go with the more immediate reaction, because there are certain things... People might not receive your email because of deliverability reasons, depending on the software you use, so there is a caveat there as well. People might forget about it. Might as well immediately showcase it to them and they can immediately see what the content upgrade is, so I would go for the immediate, I think the email thing is a bit more on the outdated strategy style for content upgrades, so I would go with immediate. That's what I would prefer as a user as well.

Travis:

Fantastic. Awesome. Well, thanks for your time and thanks for the great presentation today, Nick. Before we sign off, make sure to give Nick a follow on Twitter and let him know how much you appreciate today's webinar. Also, we'll send out the recording plus Nick's slide deck and all the resources discussed in today's webinar in a recap email tomorrow. But Nick, anything else you'd like to share before we sign off?

Nick:

Thank you guys for obviously listening and thank you guys for the questions and yeah, it was an amazing time.

Travis:

Awesome. Thanks again, Nick. Everybody have a great rest of your day.

Nick:

Thank you, bye guys.