Last Month in Marketing: Turning Agency Talent Into Superheroes & Our First-Ever Conference Resulted in a Record NTS Week

Inside Unbounce Marketing for September 2014

The marketing team got a hell of a lot done in September.

Here’s the gist of it (and the TL;DR of this post):

1. We launched our Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit via our Just Add Talent campaign.
2. We participated in our first-ever Call to Action Conference in Vancouver, where we got to mingle with our customers, peers and some of the smartest CRO experts out there.
3. We held two awesome Unwebinars and brutalized some landing pages with an episode of Page Fights.
4. We welcomed three (!) new Honey Badgers to the team.

With our team growing, we’ve also been planning for and executing some really exciting projects to come.

I’m not going to ruin any surprises, though.

Let’s jump into the numbers for September…

The Performance Recap

New Trial Starts (NTS)

Unbounce’s revenue is a little off from Summer, but still very close to targets. We’re attracting a bigger % of higher value customers, which is driving revenue up even while missing NTS targets. We saw an 8% growth in NTS in September vs. October, which is a great sign. Marketing will be turning up the heat to bring NTS back up to snuff. And when we do, Revenue will benefit greatly.

• September NTS: 1662, +8% (vs. August)

Monthly Blog Performance Stats

• Unique Visitors: 134,134, -3.4% (vs. August)
• New Email Subscribers: 1204, +8.8% (vs. August)

We saw a healthy number of email subscribers, likely in part because of the post-conversion magic that took place when we decided to host two webinars in September (more on that soon…)

Top 3 posts published in September

1. 7 A/B Tests You Should Be Running On Your Welcome Emails by Peter Tanham
2. 7 Landing Page Mistakes That Are Stopping Your Prospects Dead in Their Tracks by Amanda Durepos
3. 10 Conversion Psychology Resources That Will Make You a Smarter Marketer by Ritika Puri

Webinars

September was a month where we got all experimental and decided to hold two webinars.

Though attendance for the webinars was pretty average, we ultimately decided to go back to one webinar a month.

Why, you ask?

We now have an awesome Multimedia Content Producer on board (more on that later, too….) who is going to help us focus on delivering as much value as possible as we can with each of our webinars. We want to take the time we need to get each one right.

The focus on quality instead of quantity couldn’t have been displayed more clearly in September’s Webinar with Roger Dooley, author of the best-selling book Brainfluence. In an hour, he explained how to use Neuromarketing techniques to get prospects to convert more often.

Page Fights

September Page Fights with Ian Lurie:

Co-Founder of Portent, Ian Lurie brought a touch of class to this month’s Page Fights. He was the Danny Tanner to our Uncle Jessie and Uncle Joey (remember Full House?). Check out his trailer below to see exactly what I mean…

If you’d like to watch the full, uncensored episode, go to pagefights.com/with-ian. Make sure to sign up for the mailing list to get notified of future bouts!

• 171 peak concurrent live viewers
• 670 total video views
• 25 new YouTube channel subscribers
• 204 new Page Fights email list subscribers

A huge “thank you” to both Roger and Ian for pulling off great performances this month.

Just Add Talent Launch

In September, we partnered with some pretty sweet companies to launch a toolkit of marketing software which we called the Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit. You can read all about what went into the execution of the campaign here.

Campaign Results

• Our email was sent to 50,044 leads and 3,755 customers.
• There were 4,280 visitors to the campaign landing page.
• The landing page had a conversion rate of 3.25%.
• We also ran a contest promo. On its confirmation page, we saw a 0.4% conversion rate.

Campaign Takeaways

While landing page conversions were on the low side, this campaign left us with some really valuable takeaways:

• We’ve learned that the campaign could have been framed more clearly. For future (re)launches, we’re definitely going to address that and look for ways that we can be delightful without sacrificing clarity.
• We’ve established some awesome relationships with our partners, which we hope will lead to other comarketing opportunities.

The Call to Action Conference

CTAConf was a hit, and each one of us learned some really actionable things from the presentations. Psst. If you weren’t at CTAConf, you can find all the speaker decks here. Here were a few of our favourite shots from the event…

We didn’t see any NTS directly attributed to the conference in our analytics tools (how would you?) – but the goal of the conference wasn’t to drive NTS.

That said, we did see a record number of NTS (411) in the week following the conference. When asked “why did you sign up?”, there was a big spike in “word of mouth.” I’m going to go out on a limb and thank the attendees for spreading the good word :)

Community

The Numbers:

New Members: 1,725 +2% (vs. August)
Engagement: 6,692 -8% (vs. August)
Social Referral Traffic: 26,658 -19% (vs. August)

Top 10 Lovely September Mentions

1. Simple Growth Hacks for Entrepreneurs: 0-3 Months on Onboardly
2. Sales & Marketing Content that Doesn’t Suck on lead411
3. How Unbounce Team is Using RealtimeBoard for Collaboration on RealtimeBoard
4. The Top 25 Most Influential Conversion Rate Optimization Experts in 2014 on PPCHero (when Oli was robbed)
5. Four Words of Ecommerce Wisdom That Will Waste Your Time on KISSmetrics
6. 23 of the Best Social Media Articles and Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Read on Buffer
7. 14 Conversion Rate Optimization Tools Every Expert Needs on SEJournal
8. These 15 Amazing Company Blogs Are Rocking Content Marketing (And You Can Too) on AlltopStartups
9. How to Leverage Your About Page for More Conversions on JeremySaid
10. 4 Top Landing Page Builder Tools (along with Pros and Cons) on Freshest

Standout Community <3 in September:

+ Too many amazing shout outs before, during and after #CTAConf to list.

Team Updates

September was a great month for new Honey Badgers!

We’re welcoming three new marketing team members this month: two new badgers for Vancouver and one for Montreal:

Derek, Content Marketing Fellow

Derek is Unbounce’s very first Content Marketing Fellow! If you’re wondering, “What’s a Content Marketing Fellow?”, revisit Dan’s classic Inside Unbounce post to find out. He’s going to help  the content team edit blog posts, research industry trends, execute campaigns and generally help make our content as awesome as possible.

Hayley, Community Manager

Joining Tia to officially form our first-ever social team, please welcome Hayley Mullen, our new Community Manager. She’s gonna help manage the social distribution of our owned and curated content and interact with our awesome audience of marketers while Tia starts on the path towards Unbounce World Domination…

Stephanie, Multimedia Content Producer

Stephanie (aka Beansie) joins our #TeamMTL as our first-ever Multimedia Content Producer. That means she’ll be heading up our Unwebinars, Page Fights and any other audiovisual content marketing madness she dreams up.

Welcome to the team, badgers! We’re so happy to have you here.

Hiring

We’ve got a lot of plans before this year wraps up, and we could use some help. Do you know any excellent Marketing Analysts in Montreal or Vancouver? If you do, please direct them to the job posting and explain why Unbounce is the coolest company to work for, ever.

Amanda Durepos
Content Coordinator
@amandadurepos