Last Week in Marketing: +35% Free Signups, Designers Wanted & Please Sir, Cut the Crap

[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.]

Oh Hello, February 10th to 16th, 2014

Last week was a ton of fun here at Unbounce, mostly because we were finally able to get the gears moving on what will be one of the biggest partnerships in Unbounce history. We’ll dig into that below, but first: New Trial Starts (our primary KPI here in Marketing) are up 8% over last week, but he big winner was signups for free, up 35%. The reason for the lift? Designers wanted, of course! (read more below).

Loving too, the growth we’re seeing across the board >> +19% website visitors , +27% pricing page visits, +33% unique blog visitors and +73% social engagement. Lots at play here, big thanks to the best marketing team in the land, Corey, Liesl, Dan & Tia.

Let’s dig in to last week’s performance:

New Trial Starts (NTS)

• Weekly Total NTS: 325, +8% (week over week)
• Daily Average NTS: 46, +18% (vs. 6 week average)
• Month-to-Date: 680 (52% of monthly target 1,298)

NTS by Plan & Free

• Pro99 Trials: 110, -2% (w/w)
• Starter Trials: 197, +11% (w/w)
• Signups for Free: 521, +35% (w/w)

Website

• Unique Visitors: 52,282, +19% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Pricing Page Visits: 7,922, +27% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Website Visit to NTS: 2.21, -6% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)

Top 5 Visitor Referral Sources: Twitter, Facebook, Feedly, Tuts+, Entrepreneur.com

Community

• Community New Members: 252, +18% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Engagement: 2040, +73% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Social Traffic: 5406, +20% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)

The 73% increase in engagement are largely because of the recent post by Michael Aagaard being picked up by Buffer’s in app Suggested Content (sensing a trend here? I love it!). Also, our recent partnership with GrooveHQ meant the recent release of their Software Stack with our Twitter handle included in the social sharing, meaning a lot of tweets mentioning @unbounce. Pratik’s testimonial post on the blog also did well so lots of shares = mentions. Content & Partners FTW. 

Blog

• Unique Visitors: 34,787, +33% (vs. 6 wk. avg)
• New Email Subscribers: 552, +109% (vs. 6 wk. avg)

The Buffer recommendation tool once again positively impacted Twitter referrals to the blog. We also saw a 165% increase in G+ referral traffic, primarily due to the popularity of Pratik’s blog post. And, another win for in our webinar registration post-conversion strategy driving 109% increase in new blog subscribers (want to know what that is? Check out no. 5 in my webinar marketing post).

Marketing Happenings

Themeforest, Envato and The EMW… What the what?

Our biggest news in this week is the launch of an exciting new partnership with Themeforest and their umbrella company Envato. Since we went live with our shiny new upload/download feature (huge props to our killer devs) we can now leverage the ThemeForest marketplace as a new source of landing templates for marketers hungry to try new designs in our builder. While we have over 80 free templates in our app, we know our customers are always on the lookout for more, so this is huge for all of us!

Our work with them is in two phases:

Phase 1 – Launch to Designers & Developers 

This is where we’re at right now, and the cornerstone of this launch has been an outreach program which connects with our power users and ThemeForest power authors to participate in a landing page template contest. It’s called “Envato’s Most Wanted,” and the best templates can earn prizes from a total of $12,000. If you’re up to the challenge you should get in there (and if you’re not already a customer, you can use free account, no purchase required), and if you know great designers, please spread the word!

We’ve been having fun connecting with amazing practitioners, our CS team have contacted people through email, and on Social Media Tia’s upping our game with the Unbounty Hunter series of Wanted posters.

Phase 2 – Public Launch

STAY TUNED – In a couple of weeks, once we’ve populated landing page template submissions, we’ll be sharing the link to a brand new category on ThemeForest, aptly called “Unbounce Landing Pages”. We can’t wait! 

Spearheaded by Unbounce’s partnerships whisperer, Liesl and continuously stickhandled by MVP Corey, it also goes without saying that it helps to work with awesome people at Envato like Will & Josh.

Capterra Webinar feat. Ryan, Feb 20 at 2 PM EST

Our friends at Capterra, a listings platform that helps businesses find the right software (from Marketing Automation to Hospitality Management) are hosting a webinar and invited our own Director of Customer Success, Ryan Engley, as the guest speaker this month. The goal is to help software vendors understand how to use landing pages to increase conversions & connect with customers through Capterra’s platform. Ryan & the Capterra team will go through a case study which shows how RightSignature improved their marketing. So if you’re free tomorrow at 2 PM EST, check it out!

Groove Small Business Stack

In an effort  to help SMBs discover the new software they need to simplify their lives and improve how they do business, Groove (who provides simple customer support tools) created Small Business Stack and Unbounce is proud to be among the list of awesome products. Groove . Their goal is to help 5,000 SMBs discover new SaaS tools, and with over 1,000 already signed up, looks like Alex and his team are well on their way!

New PPC Partner: Disruptive Advertising

This week we welcome another new partner in PPC superstars (and last week’s #UnStockable Champions), Disruptive Advertising. We know & [heart] them well from the Klientboost side of their business, so we’re excited to have both of them in our PPC & Display listing!

February Webinar  & Why We’ll be Cutting the Crap

It’s official, yesterday’s webinar officially holds the new record with 3316 registrants signing up on our registration page. This means that Peep Laja no longer holds the title… Guess you’re going to have to join us for another Unwebinar, Peep!

And since we had so much fun with last week‘s email subject test, Corey conducted another for our “last chance” webinar invite. This time, rather than pitting “clever” vs. “clarity”, we tested “clarity” vs. “urgency”. Here’s how it went:

The results? Clarity destroyed urgency with a +38% open rate and +42% click/unique open rate. The learnings from this webinar – Cut the crap. Just clearly and accurately tell people what they need to know in the subject heading.

New on the Blog

Here’s what happened on the Unbounce Blog last week:

Some Lovely Mentions

• How I Increased My User-Registration Rate 2,800% in 4 Days on Entrepreneur.com << Top 5 referrers this week!
• The Story of Lucy and Unbounce: How a Landing Page Tool Can Change Your Life on Capterra << lead up to upcoming co-hosted webinar
• Failing Your Way to Not Failing on Melvin’s Blog
• Employee Culture in the Vancouver Tech Sector on Vancity Buzz << Awesome local love!
• 30 Techniques to Capture More Leads From Your Website on Interact
• How to Use Quora to Establish Authority, Drive Traffic, and Increase ROI on Rivalfox Competitor Intelligence
• Why the Best Marketing Teams Embrace Process on HubSpot
  
• The Free High Quality Non-Stock Photo Sources You’ve Always Wanted on Caddis
• The Top 7 Tools For Conversion Rate Optimization on Growth Devil

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 Unbounce:

 

As usual, hit me up with any feedback or questions — See you in the comments!

~Georgiana Laudi, Director of Marketing