Last Week in Marketing: Pro99 Trials +93%, Community Growth +115% & New Blog Subscribers +200%
[About this post: Every Wednesday, the Unbounce Marketing team takes a look at the previous week’s performance and reports back to everyone in the company (and now you!) on the metrics, highlights, and takeaways. Questions? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.]
Say hello to January 6th to 12th, 2014
Seeing as the week of Jan 6th was everyone’s first full week back at work, numbers are looking a little more inline with what we were seeing before the holidays. Not surprisingly, the week-over-week increases are high as a result — but even outside of that, we saw some awesome and notable big wins: 460 new members of our social community (way to kill it, Tia), 713 new blog subscribers (we dig in to this below, but webinars FTW) and Pro99 New Trial Starts are up 93%, yay for the holidays being over! Err…
Let’s take a closer look at how we did last week:
New Trial Starts (NTS)
- Weekly Total NTS: 298, +58.5% (week over week)
- Daily Average NTS: 43, +19% (vs. 6 week average)
- Month-to-Date: 439 (36% of January Target 1228)
New Trial Starts (or NTS) are those who have signed up to receive a 30-day trial of a paid plan and does not include people who have opted for a free “kick-the-tires” account.
NTS by Plan & Free Signups
- Pro99 Trials: 118, +93% (w/w)
- Starter Trials: 178, +46% (w/w)
- Signups for Free: 342, +61% (w/w)
Pro199, Pro499 and Pro999 plans aren’t included here since numbers are too low to be meaningful on a week by week basis at this stage.
Website
- Unique Visitors: 46,369, +51% (w/w)
- Pricing Page Visits: 6029 +44% (w/w)
- Website Visit to NTS: 2.54%, +6.8% (w/w)
Community
- New Members: 460, +115% (w/w)
- Engagement: 1115, +39% (w/w)
- Social Traffic: 3775, +50% (w/w)
Blog
- New Email Subscribers: 713, +200% (vs. 6 wk. avg.) >> 643 (90%) from webinar post-conversion
- Unique Visitors: 28,613, +48% (w/w)
Big Content
- New Conversion Learning Subscribers: 326, -38% (vs. 6 wk. avg.) >> Webinar registrants are added after the event
- New Ecourse Students: 145, +11% (vs. 6 week average)
Marketing Happenings
January’s Unwebinar & Kick-Ass Post-Conversion
January’s Unwebinar with Wistia is gearing up to be awesome. There are over 1700 registered so far (1 of 2 invitation emails sent) and the landing page is converting at 55-60%.
Where’d all those blog subscribers come from?
BONUS! One of our best performing post-conversion tactics (our webinar registration confirmation box, seen on the right) is making itself felt again this month; of the 713 new email blog subscribers last week, 643 (90%) came from this landing page. This was why we saw a 200% increase in subscriber growth this week over our 6 week average.
Want to read more about the process? Check out the blog post (scroll to no. 5 for post-conversion).
New on the Blog
Thanks to content extraordinaire Dan, the Unbounce blog’s editorial calendar is going to get a makeover over the next few weeks. What this means is a stronger author vetting process, more consistent publishing schedule, and more clearly defined editorial guidelines. As those are being fine tuned, check out the 2 posts that were published last week:
- Don’t Learn to Code: 10 Essential Tools That Help Marketers Focus on Marketing by 1st time Unbounce author Danny Schreiber (from our good friends, Zapier)
- Are Excessively Positive Customer Reviews Hurting Your Conversion Rates? by Pratik Dholakiya
Drinking Our Own Champagne: Don’t Create, Build.
Hypothesis: After a long time of using “Build” as the verb in our headlines, we wanted to see if “Create” would illicit more click-throughs.
A/B Test: On one of our highly-trafficked landing pages, we added a new variant with the headline “Create High Converting Landing Pages in Hours, Not Weeks.” and ran a test against our control “Build High Converting Landing Pages in Hours, Not Weeks.”
Result: The test ran for a month and achieved 94% confidence. As it turns out, marketers prefer…. (drumroll)… BUILD! The “Create” page saw a 17% lower click-through rate. If we had just made the change without A/B testing, we’d be seeing 75 less pricing page visits per month. Curiosity satisfied, now let’s never speak of “Create” again.
Good to know! Thanks for testing this, Corey.
Lovely Mentions
- 5 New Year Resolutions to Make You a Better Online Entrepreneur on Tweaky
- Daily UX Crash Course # 8 on The Hipper Element
- 5 Must-Read Optimization Posts for the Week on Brooks Bell
- 7 Crucial Tactics To Improve Your Landing Page Conversions on Get Busy Media
Standout Community <3
And for the real “feel-good” piece of the week, check out (because chances are, you missed) what our awesome community members were saying about our Customer Success team, product and upcoming meetup:
Already extremely happy with @unbounce customer service. Answered my (probably dumb) question about mobile redirect coding. Love them!
— Jessica Williams (@Jessica_J) January 7, 2014
@unbounce I just saw it and thought I’d SS it. I love you guys! Never annoying. Always informative. Best on the net IMO.
— Tradies Get Online (@TradiesGO) January 7, 2014
Totally in the zone writing copy using @Unbounce – the world’s best tool for building high converting landing pages. It’s a joy to use!
— Dan Hodgins (@danhodgins) January 8, 2014
just registered for the #unmeetup, can’t believe this event is free! more companies should organize #meetup events. @unbounce :D
— Eva Yin (@eva_yin) January 9, 2014
@oligardner Thanks for Unbounce. Pretty landing pages – dev costs = moar profit #seohustle
— SEO Intern Says (@Intern_Says) January 10, 2014
Coming Up…
As you probably noticed there wasn’t a ton that launched last week, the team has been seriously gearing up for our next 2 upcoming campaigns;
- Later this month watch for new templates & image library photos (+ Shutterstock giving our customers a super exclusive deal) — Props to Liesl and Corey for wrangling, and of course, the Creative team for pumping out sexy new templates.
- The page upload/download feature opens the doors to more opportunity than we can handle in 1 month alone (only the largest and coolest theme marketplace there is, no big deal). Much more on what we have slated in February and March in the coming weeks.
Team Updates
As a newly remotely functioning team, we’re learning new ways of staying aligned (this post and this talk were highly inspirational this week). Things like more intentioned (and often hilarious) use of HipChat, frequent and spontaneous Skype calls, and more diligent updating of project tasks are all becoming part of our daily routine. We’re well on the way to being more organized than evar.
Here’s what our first remotely-virtual-cybertech weekly team meeting looked like >>
As usual, hit me up with any feedback or questions — See you in the comments!
Georgiana Laudi
Director of Marketing