Last Month in Marketing: Pro Plans +29%, ‘Page Fights’ Hilarity & Baby Badgers

Inside Unbounce Marketing for May 2014

Even though May wasn’t our strongest month ever in Marketing, we definitely had fun. Oh and with plenty of lessons learned. All hands were on deck for an experiment we call “Page Fights” (seen right), that kept the marketing team very busy this past month.

And despite our total New Trial Start numbers not growing as intensely as they were in February and March, Pro plans are steadily climbing!

Here’s the TL;DR

1. I’ll show you our numbers
2. We’ll look at Page Fights
3. May’s Unwebinar is worth your attention
4. We take a look at 1 year of “Did we mess up?” emails
5. Welcome a new face and say “see you soon!” to this one

Here are the numbers…

The Performance Recap

New Trial Starts (NTS)

As you can see NTS is staying pretty steady compared to April. But THAT’S OK, you know why? All the right numbers are increasing… Take a look…

New Trial Starts by Plan

While Starters are down 5% (which were in large part inflated following our ThemeForest partnership in Feb & March), Pro99s are up 12% and Pro199s are up 29%! That’s movement in all the right places.

And that makes missing our targets by 1.6584766584766584% ok.

…But who’s counting.

 

Blog Performance

Thankfully it looks like traffic numbers on the blog are making a bit of a recovery in May (weeks 19 to 22 above). We’re obviously nowhere near mid-March numbers (when for example this social post went, well, social) but things are looking up, particularly because we now know the drop was not the result of any crazy algorithm change.

The Numbers:

Unique Visitors: 123,537 +23% (vs. April)
New Email Subscribers: 1112 +2% (vs. April)

Top 3 Posts in May:

1. 17 Words to Stop Using on Your Landing Pages by Henneke Duistermaat
2. 5 Embarrassing Habits That Keep Your Emails From Getting Clicked by Lance Cummins
3. 10 Conversion Killers and the Hacks to Fix Them by Sean Ellis

Community

The Numbers:

New Members: 1792 +10% (vs. April)
Engagement: 7,122, 5754 -19% (vs. April)
Social Referral Traffic: 19,149 -1% (vs. April)
Social Direct Traffic: 1,905 +29% (vs. April)

Top 10 Lovely May Mentions:

1. 25 Top-Tier Conversion Rate Experts to Follow in 2014 by Rejoiner
2. 15 Growth Hacking Tools Every Growth Hacker Must Have by ShoutMeLoud
3. 54 Essential Email Marketing Resources by Vero Email
4. SAAS Marketing – The Complete Guide for B2B Companies by Positionly
5. Unbounce Markets the Old-Fashioned Way: By Sponsoring Fights by CanTechLetter
6. Unbounce Ensures Smooth Landing for Conversions (plus bonus comment shoutout) by Max Bounty
7. How Your Business is Missing Out on Free Money, And How You Can Get it Back by Sean Smith
8. 598 Landing Page Examples: The Ultimate Collection by LPcopywriter
9. The Essential List of Startup Marketing Resources by Ryan Gum
10. Our Six Step Process to Hiring a “Kick Ass Marketer” by Rival IQ
11. BONUS! 31 People/Places Everyone in Conversion Rate Optimization Should Follow by Optimizely (feat. Oli and I)

Standout Community <3 in May:

And for the best part… Some of our favorite social love from the month. And there was A LOT! You likely missed them…

Marketing Happenings

Unbounce & ConversionXL Launch the first ever “Page Fights”

600 registrants, 200 landing page submissions, 38 reviews, 3 episodes, 116 minutes, 10 finalists, 5 prize winners, and 1 landing page champion. Phew.

We certainly didn’t get everything right, but in the end, we learnt a ton and have a really solid plan for moving forward with Page Fights that marketers are going to *love*. If you’re looking to have your landing pages reviewed by CRO experts Peep Laja from ConversionXL and Oli Gardner from Unbounce, be sure to signup at PageFights.com to be the first to know when the next round of Page Fights will be.

And yes, that’s me facepalming on the right… Awkward landing pages will do that to a person…

Some of my favorite quotes:

“I mean I don’t have an issue with this being online but it looks like puke”

“It says ‘we only make a few, it’s that good’, if it’s that good, make a lot of them!”

“The Call-to-Action, ‘do I qualify?’ For what, this butt cream?”

“This guy’s just ‘Danny from Florida’, he doesn’t even have any doctors accreditation”

“Does this page do anything right?” “It has text on it, it’s good to have text on the page”

“Any claim that uses superlatives, ‘the most awesome…’ makes my bullshit detector go off immediately”

“‘Need help?” Yeah I need help, I have no idea what you’re offering!”

“It says experience 5-Star luxury, but it looks like you’ve got 1-Star design”

Did you miss the hilarity of Round 1 of Page Fights? Watch the recordings here.

For the love of #PageFights:

May Unwebinar Holds Marketer’s Attention

On May 20th, Hunter Boyle from AWeber presented the Beyond Lead Generation: From Landing Page Forms to Email Follow-Ups Unwebinar. Though the registration or attendance wasn’t record breaking, engagement definitely was. Hunter did an excellent job, included tons of meaty insights and techniques, a plethora of examples (and who doesn’t love those?) and kept webinar attendees attentiveness at an all time high.

Check out just some of the praise we saw on Twitter:

A Little Nurturing Goes a Long Way

It’s been one year since we implemented our “Signup Abandonment” Nurture Campaign and since then we’ve reclaimed 34% of signup abandons, simply by asking “Did we mess up?”.

Since June 15th, 2013, 14,287 people have abandoned our New Trial signup process — 3823 (27%) are now on a free account, and 983 (7%) went on to a paid plan. That’s 4806 people who just needed a little more help making their decision. Huzzah!

One of the nice things about this is that once the campaign was built, we’ve needed to do very little. Unlike most things in marketing, this has for the most part been ‘set it and forget it’.

Here’s how we do it:

1. When someone abandons the signup process (after completing their email), they are added to a list in our ESP.
2. Within the hour they receive a plain text email #1 (seen right) that asks, “Did we mess up?”
3. The next day, they receive email #2, this time directly from Ryan our Director of Customer Success
4. 2 days later, they receive email #3 (and nothing else after this, ever.)

It’s amazing that despite the nature of this nurture campaign, not that many people unsubscribe. In fact, open rates average 30% and click rates are a respectable 4%. Is this the perfect formula? Doubtful. Am I looking forward to testing a different sequence? You betcha.

Team Updates

New Honey Badger

Welcome to the newest Honey Badger, Chelsea Scholz! Chelsea joins our team as our much anticipated and needed project manager. She’ll be helping our marketing campaigns moving along both smoothly and quickly. Happy to have you join the team, Chelsea! 

New Baby Badger’s a Comin’

I’m expecting a “Baby Badger”! Most of you know me as pretty career-driven, so these past 8 months have been a roller coaster (and no, not just because of the hormones!). I’m super excited to become a mom, don’t get me wrong, but ‘Marketing at Unbounce’ is also my baby. I’ll be missing my team, and everyone at Unbounce during my time away, but, at the same time, I have a ton of pride and confidence that the next 6 months are going to be our best yet.

I’ll be taking some downtime vacation for much of July, followed by some maternity leave after that (I’m due July 26th). While I’m away, these updates will be brought to you by none other than our Marketing Manager, Corey Dilley. Corey’s going to help hold down the fort in my absence, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Thanks C-Dilley.

Looking forward to any feedback or questions — See you in the comments!

Georgiana Laudi
Director of Marketing
@ggiiaa