Update: We're excited to announce that early bird registration for Converted 2016—our second annual conference built to grow your business—is officially open. Click here to get all the details and find out what makes this year's Converted even better than before. If you didn't attend last year, don't worry: we've put together a 15-page guide to the most interesting marketing and business-growth insights shared by the speakers at Converted 2015. Download it here, then read on to get all caught up.
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If I had to sum up the lessons of LeadPages’ first annual conference into three words, it would go like this: It’s all marketing. Setting up your website is marketing. Creating content is marketing. Pricing is marketing. Onboarding is marketing. Even creating your core products and services at the outset is marketing. Keynote speaker Ryan Holiday summed it up like this: “Anything that gets (and keeps) customers is marketing.” And he wasn’t alone in that view. Every one of the speakers at Converted 2015 evinced a deep understanding of how their area of expertise fits into a company’s wider marketing strategy. They also brought some very interesting—even startling—statistics to bear on the state of digital marketing in 2015. After poring over our speakers’ presentations, I’ve pulled out 10 especially illuminating stats. They might change the way you approach your marketing, and even expand the scope of your marketing plan. You’ll find those and more than 40 other figures, pithy insights, and immediately actionable tips in our new report from the conference. It’s called “14 Top Marketers Reveal How to Grow Your Business: Insights from Converted 2015,” and you can download it free to save and flip through at your leisure. Get it below: [cta-box]
Now, let’s take a look at some arresting numbers, and what they mean for how we should be marketing now. 1. The stat: Only 22% of companies are satisfied with their conversion rate, yet 61% of companies run 5 or fewer landing page tests per month. – quoted by LeadPages CEO Clay Collins from research by eConsultancy What it means for marketers: Almost nobody is A/B testing enough—which probably means that most of that 78% of dissatisfied companies is likely to stay that way. The solution: find an A/B testing platform for your landing pages that’s so easy to use, it feels natural to incorporate testing into every campaign. (If you’re a LeadPages member, of course, you already have this.) 2. The stat: “81% of sales happen after 7 or more contacts. But 85% of the time we stop after 1 or 2 contacts.” – Infusionsoft Delight Training and Development Specialist Nick Francis What it means for marketers: Many of us need to start sending longer, stronger email follow-up sequences after we make an initial contact with a lead. But the principle doesn’t stop with email. This stat also brings home the importance of content marketing. If each of those 7 contacts contains the same sales pitch, you’re likely to lose people very early on. Instead, you’ll need to think carefully about what kind of content you can serve them to draw them closer to a sale. Speaking of kinds of content . . . 3. The stat: “9 of LeadPages’ top 12 highest-converting templates are webinar registration pages. A webinar is, hands down, the best one-to-many sales mechanism—the only thing better is getting someone one-on-one.” – LeadPages Conversion Educator Tim Paige What it means for marketers: If you think you’re “not a webinar person,” consider testing that belief and trying at least one. It may be worth it for the list-building power alone: when you use LeadPages’ webinar registration templates, you can sign people up for your webinar and add them to your email list with the same opt-in form. What this statistic doesn’t reflect is that webinars aren’t just good for lead-gen—they’re also a reliable source of new sales. Check out this interview with Tim for 6 webinar best practices to make those sales. 4. The stat: “According to SinglePoint, 99% of text messages are read, and 90% are opened within 3 minutes. Compare that to email!” – LeadPages Conversion Educator Tim Paige What it means for marketers: Be on the lookout for ways to reach your audience via text. There’s one very easy place to start if you use LeadPages®: LeadDigits®, which lets leads opt in for information or a lead magnet just by sending a text. It’s now available with Pro and Advanced memberships, and if you were in the audience at Converted, you probably saw it in action: many speakers used it to let people opt in to get their presentation slides. 5. The stat: When ContentVerve.com added 3 short bullets explaining the kinds of content subscribers would be receiving to its subscription form, the opt-in rate rose 83.75%. – discussed by AWeber founder and CEO Tom Kulzer What it means for marketers: “Give me a reason to opt in,” says Tom. If you’re still asking people to give you their information via a bare-bones “Subscribe” form embedded on your site, you’re missing out on lots of leads. But even if you’re already using carefully presented two-step opt-in forms (such as LeadBoxes), you may have room to grow. Is the image and message on your opt-in form designed to communicate the benefits of what you’re offering? 6. The stats: Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than text-only posts—though for shares, nothing beats video. According to a BuzzSumo study, links to long-form content get 40% more interactions than an average post, and ending any post with a question can boost your interactions 162%. – from Mari Smith’s presentation What it means for marketers: Facebook is ideal for visual media, no doubt. But words are still powerful. Rather than chasing one social trend after another, most companies will get the best results from consistently posting a rich mix of content. That means photos, images, questions for readers, and links to engaging content that’s too long for the feed. 7. The stat: Videos in the top 250 pixels of your page get played 56% of the time—twice as often as videos placed halfway down the page. – research from Wistia What it means for marketers: When it comes to video, the idea of the “fold” still seems to matter, so push your video to the top of your landing page. However, it’s also worth noting that even videos in the highest-converting slot didn’t get played 46% of the time—so you’d better not rely on your video alone to produce conversions. Make sure your message is represented in other formats as well. 8. The stat: Make your video 400–600 pixels wide and 300–450 pixels tall. Videos this size get played more often than smaller and larger videos. – research from Wistia What it means for marketers: Of course, the best video format will depend a little on your landing-page layout. But this suggests that even if you have a wonderful video, it shouldn’t take up your entire page. Likewise, a petite video player hiding in a sidebar is unlikely to do much for you. It seems that there may be a standard size range that communicates “legit video” to viewers (perhaps influenced by the layout of popular video sites like YouTube), and they’re more likely to click if your video reflects their expectations. 9. The stat: A 1% improvement in monetization boosted a company’s bottom line an average of 12.7% (compared to 6.71% for the same improvement in retention and 3.32% for acquisition). – Price Intelligently study of 512 companies What it means for marketers: As Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently sees it, most companies go about monetizing their products exactly wrong. They take a look at their competitors and use them as a benchmark to set their prices. But this simple approach is probably too simple. Unless you spend some serious time assessing your pricing structure based on the value you bring to customers, you’re likely undercutting your own potential revenue. 10. The stat: Nearly 75% of business-growth blog posts published in 2014 and 2015 were about customer acquisition, while less than 25% were about monetization and retention. – Price Intelligently study of 10,432 blog posts What it means for marketers: In tandem with the statistic above, we’re spending a little too much time plotting how to get customers and too little time thinking about how to price our products and keep them once they buy. There are great rewards in expending some more of our strategic smarts in these post-click areas. And after all, it’s all marketing. To get the rest of our Converted 2015 speakers’ top insights—in highly browsable form—grab our just-released report below: [cta-box] What would you like to see at this year's Converted conference? Tell us in the comments!
