Last Week in Marketing : Content Wins, Blog Traffic +52% and Chuck Norris Eats It

[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.]

Take a Peak Into February 3rd to 9th, 2014

Being picked up by Buffer’s Content Suggestion tool, Reddit and sites like The Hipper Element and GrowthHackers has been driving some awesome growth for website, blog and social traffic. What’s the common thread? Awesome new blog content, thanks to the keen eye (and pen! ..ok, keyboard) of our Content Strategist, nice work Dan!

Trial Starts hold steady as we near our way to the middle of the month. But remember all that exciting ThemeForest news I’ve been hinting at? It’s coming this week. We also have what’s looking like could become a record breaking Unwebinar on the 18th… All to say, the next few weeks have some ‘needle moving’ events in store.

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

New Trial Starts (NTS)

• Weekly Total NTS: 305, +2% (week over week)
• Daily Average NTS: 43, +23% (vs. 6 week average)
• Month-to-Date: 351 (Target: 1,298)

NTS by Plan & Free

• Pro99 Trials: 112, -4% (w/w)
• Starter Trials: 177, +4% (w/w)
• Signups for Free: 387, +1% (w/w)

Website

• Unique Visitors: 52,282, +27% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Pricing Page Visits: 7,066, +25% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Website Visit to NTS: 2.24, -3% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)

Top 5 Visitor Referral Sources: Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Feedly, Growthackers

Community

• Community New Members: 310, +10% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Engagement: 1489, +43% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)
• Social Traffic: 5056, +28% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)

Nice community engagement again this week. We’re mostly thanking the additional Twitter activity that came from the customer meetup on Wednesday and being picked up yet again by Buffer’s in app Content Suggestion tool!

Blog

• Unique Visitors: 34,81, +52% (vs 6 wk. avg.)
• New Email Subscribers: 621, +172% (vs. 6 wk. avg.)

Think 172% growth in email subscribers is good? Uh yeah, so do we. Which is why we’re going to continue including it in our webinar registration post-conversion strategy. I go into detail about how to do this in no. 5 of my webinar marketing post.

The 52% lift in blog visitors was thanks in large part to Liesl’s must watch documentaries post getting picked up by both Reddit and Buffer’s Content Suggestion tool. Tommy Walker’s letter to content marketers post also got syndicated on The Hipper Element. Lesson: Forums and niche web communities are powerful places to both source and distribute content (which, incidentally, is one of the lessons in Tommy’s previous content strategy post).

Marketing Happenings

February Webinar

This month’s webinar campaign is off to an awesome start.

On February 5th the initial webinar invitation to our Conversion Learning list (non-customers) was sent. 2 hours prior to the send, we tested the email subject on 20% of our list, as we often do. “[Webinar] Some call him ‘The Scottish Chuck Norris of LPO’…” vs. [“Webinar” The 3 Landing Page Mistakes 98% of Marketers are Making”. Once again we see “clear” winning out over “clever” with a +3% open rate and +34% click/open rate. Sorry, Chuck. Take a look at the test results below:

The email with the winning subject was then sent to the rest of our subscribers. Results were great, a 27.7% open rate (+24$ above the list average) and 2010 clicks (and counting) to the registration landing page, which, converting at 70% garnered over 1400 registrants with just one email. In more news, webinar registration is now nearly 2300 thanks to the email invitation to customers sent since. With a week and another email campaign yet to go, we think we’ll see some awesome engagement with this webinar.

If you’re not registered, get it done: The 3 Landing Page Mistakes That 98% of Marketers are Making on Tuesday February 18th at 11am PT / 2pm ET.

New on the Blog

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

Some Lovely Mentions

• 10 Twitter Feeds That Will Make You Better at Sales and Marketing on The Wise Guys Blog
• Top 10 Copywriting A/B Tests to Boost Conversions on Business 2 Community
• How to Write a Professional Bio For Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & Google+ on The Buffer Blog
• This is how we keep our clients’ leads (and our own) rolling in... on TimeForCake’s blog
• The Complete Guide to Creating a Landing Page That Converts on Content with a Mission
• Best Practices: Make your Features Page Rock with Contextual Testimonials on CustomerRivet’s blog
• How to Grow a Blog to 100,000 Visitors in Less than a Year  on OkDork Peep Laja talks about his Unwebinar registration record — Challenge accepted, Oli? :)

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 and our awesome meetup last Wednesday:

Team Updates

Partner meetup! Remember the Unbounce + Shutterstock partnership we launched recently? Check out Unbounce & Shutterstock at the top of the Empire State Building on a beautiful clear winter day during Liesl‘s visit to NYC last week.

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

~Georgiana Laudi, Director of Marketing

 

[Chuck Norris image courtesy of PMSL]