Last Month in Marketing: A Record Number of Pro199 Signups, Process Improvements & World Domination

Inside Unbounce Marketing for June 2014

June was a transitional month. There was a big focus on planning for the second half of 2014, locking down the projects we’d like to move forward with and the hires we think we’ll need. There’s also been a huge focus on process. As the team grows, ownership for projects needs to be disseminated. Process improvements will been critical this month as we prepare for growth in the number of employees and projects.

The Performance Recap

New Trial Starts (NTS)

With June being the second month in a row where we’ve dipped below targets, I thought I’d take a step back and put everything into perspective.

What this graph suggests to me is that aside from the big bump in March from the partnership with ThemeForest, our routine marketing tasks (one webinar a month, three blog posts a week, an ebook every quarter or so) aren’t providing the rate of growth that we want. We need to ensure the projects we’re working on have a lasting effect, where we can either continue to see results over the long term, or we can scale them up and continue to see a high return on investment over time.

We’re setting ourselves up to do just that.

We recently asked everyone on the marketing team,

“If resources were infinite, what would you do to reach your KPI’s in the second half of the year?”

We got some outstanding responses, including (but not limited to) “world domination.” Seriously. I don’t want to say more and spoil the surprise though.

I’m damn excited to provide everyone the resources they’ll need to turn their dreams for Unbounce’s marketing into reality. While these monumental campaigns may not launch in time to help July targets, they’ll provide lasting benefits and will scale up to help us secure targets for future months and years to come.

New Trial Starts by Plan

June’s composition of NTS is decent, but we saw a slight dip in the share of Pro99 New Trial Starts after our surge last month. The encouraging piece is a record number of Pro199 signups (105).

Quarterly Blog Performance Stats

Overall traffic on the blog last month was up slightly. Again, I expect to see these numbers climb during Q3 with the new mandate of “think big, we’ll find you the resources.”

When we dig a little deeper into the changes in the traffic sources between Q1 vs. Q2, we see some important swings. The most significant of which are:

Increases from:

• Direct traffic: up 11%
• Traffic from our marketing emails: up 37%

Decreases from:

• Organic search traffic: down 5%
• Twitter traffic: down 9%
• Facebook: down 44%

The drop in Twitter and Facebook traffic isn’t too concerning. It was a matter of there being a couple huge spikes in the first quarter and only one spike in the second quarter. The organic search traffic worries me a bit though. That shouldn’t be going anywhere but up, so we’ll be sure to keep an eye on it.

Monthly Blog Performance Stats

See anything that looks out of place with the stats below?

• Unique Visitors: 134,458 (+9% vs. May)
• New Email Subscribers: 467 (-58% vs. May)

If you said, “Holy crap, what happened to New Email Subscribers?”, good eye, reader!

That drop in New Email Subscribers to the blog perfectly illustrates the power of the post-conversion. Our June webinar was closely related to our May Ebook about PPC landing pages. Because of the connection, we used our the post-conversion page on the webinar to encourage people to check out the ebook, rather than the usual “sign up for the blog” CTA.

To really drill the point home, check out the chart below illustrating the number of blog subscriptions over time starting in April. Every big spike represents a day we actively pushed people to a webinar landing page.

Top 3 Posts in June:

1. 17 Battle-Tested Resources for Marketers Who Stink at Design by Ritika Puri
2. 22 Brutally Honest Landing Page Critiques by Oli Gardner
3. Why Your Unique Value Proposition is Killing Your Landing Page Conversions and How To Fix It by Rich Page

Community

The Numbers:
New Members: 1690 -6% (vs. May)
Engagement: 5405 +6% (vs. May)
Social Referral Traffic: 25,581 +34% (vs. May)

Top 10 Lovely June Mentions

1. 10 Tools I Recommend for eCommerce Websites by Kaivan Dave
2. 25 Business Marketing Blogs You Should Be Reading by Marketing Eye
3. The 5 Things I Learned From Failing With My First App by Dillon Carter
4. 35 Growth Hacking Tools for Marketers Who Don’t Code by Chloe Mason Gray on KISSmetrics
5. 8 Must-Have Customer Acquisition Apps for Your Business by Platypus
6. 35 Enviable Brands That Blow Content Marketers Away by Danny Wong on Shareaholic
7. 25 Tools for Building Customer Loyalty by Joanna Lord on BigDoor
8. The 8 Types of Images That Increase the Psychological Impact of Your Content by Alex Turnbull on Copyblogger
9. 6 Best Software Programs For Hassle-Free A/B Testing by Jacob McMillen on CrazyEgg
10. 14 CRO Gurus Share Favorite Optimization Tools on Moblized

Interviews, Recordings & Recaps

1. The Rise of Unbounce: A Conversation with CEO Rick Perreault
2. Oli Gardner on the Method to High-Converting Landing Pages an HOA interview with Oli by Ryan Hanley
3. Page Fights: Google+ Hangouts without the Google+ part an HOA interview with Georgiana, Tommy Walker & Tia by Google+ Business Spotlight
4. [Webinar Recording] Make Them All Click! Fail-Safe Ways To Convert Your Leads Oli on Hanapin webinar
5. Landing Page Optimization: Keeping Marketing Fun at the Brendans on SnipCart
6. 15 Snippets of Digital Marketing Advice from #MNSummit on TopRank Blog

Standout Community <3 in June

These folks kept us smiling all month…

Marketing Happenings

Dan Levy Makes His Debut on the Moz Blog

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Unbounce Content Strategist tells the world What Content Marketers and Journalists Need to Learn from Each Other; everyone pretty much agrees with him.

June’s Unwebinar Tests A New Format

In June, Matt Hessler, author of The Ultimate Guide to PPC Landing Pages, joined us to expand on the book content and answer any questions that readers might have. People on our list who read the ebook were invited to ask Matt questions, which he incorporated into his presentation. Sort of like a book club!

In general, we received glowing reviews from attendees. People seemed to learn a lot and really appreciated Matt’s depth of knowledge on the subject. It was one of the most engaging webinars this year (according to the engagement metrics that GoToWebinar provides).

However, we found that holding a webinar with a narrow focus limited the number of registrants. We saw about a 20% drop in registrants for this webinar vs. the year’s average. July’s webinar invites Portent’s CEO, Ian Lurie to discuss landing page copywriting, a topic which should be much more inclusive. (SPOILER ALERT: July’s registration numbers already look very promising.)

The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Webinar Marketing

Webinars have grown to Unbounce’s #1 acquisition channel over the past couple years. We want to share our process with our audience, in hopes that we can all benefit from the mystical powers of Webinar Marketing. In June, we released The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Webinar Marketing. We were able to draw from existing pieces we’d created on the topic, which made it our fastest ebook production to date.

Our audience found our previous resources about webinar marketing helpful, so it was quite a surprise when the launch of The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Webinar Marketing produced disappointing results.

Comparing the first week of data from this ebook launch to past launches…

Ebook	Downloads	New Trial Starts
Webinar Marketing	1,204	1
PPC Landing Pages	3,800	13
Conversion Centered Design	4,112	5
Lead Generation	2,713	13

Unfortunately, there was no data that obviously explained why so few people downloaded the book. We suspect that webinar marketing is a channel that only a fraction of our audience is trying, so it’s not relevant to as many people.

Hanapin Guest Webinar

Oli joined PPC agency Hanapin Marketing (authors of the world famous PPC Hero blog) to spread the gospel about creating delightful marketing experience. Why? Because 98% of landing page experiences suck and it’s hurting PPC marketing results. Oli won’t stand for it.

Of the 260 webinar registrants, 153 were new leads. Thanks for the opportunity, Hanapin!

CTA Conference

Stefanie Grieser has been working her ass off to make our Call To Action Conference a huge success. She’s locked down the agenda and it looks awesome. Every attendee is going to walk away a marketing genius. Check it out.

Hiring

Along with the big projects we have coming up, we’ll need amazing people to help execute the big projects we have coming up. Do you know any excellent Performance Marketers or Marketing Analysts in Montreal or Vancouver? If so, please point them to our job postings and explain that Unbounce would be the coolest company to work for, ever.

Also on the horizon are a part-time Writer in Montreal and a Social Strategist in Vancouver. Keep your eyes peeled!

Corey Dilley
Marketing Manager
@CoreyDilley