3 Advanced List-Building Strategies You Should Start Using

over the past seven days we released a new set of opt-in form templates for thrive leads every single day what you have now is this huge collection of fresh modern designs and all kinds of different opt-in form types and styles and in today's video let's see what you can do to really get the most out of all these new goodies hello I'm Shane black from thrive themes and today I want to go into some advanced list building features and strategies like I said you have all these cool new templates to choose from but what you do with them is just as important as which ones you choose and really I want to help you go beyond just the basic list building strategy that you find on most websites so let me show you what I mean so this is a demo website that I set up a photography website and if we go into a post here we'll see that there's some list building stuff going on so first of all we've got this slide in here that is a two-step opt-in with an offer we can dismiss that here and at the bottom of the post we also have this same offer again and again it's a two-step we invite people to join our newsletter and offer them something in return this is what I would call the basic set up you have you have your opt-in offer you have your opt-in forms you show them on your blog posts maybe in the sidebar maybe as a slide in maybe a slide box but you just have that offer and you show it to everyone this is the bare minimum of what you need to do to build your mailing list at all but with thrive leads if this is all your doing then you're really only scratching the surface thrive leads goes much much further than this so let me show you three advanced things to do with thrive leads to build your list much faster than with this basic set up and I'm gonna start with the most advanced and most interesting one let's go to the Thrive leads dashboard I'm going just go through this very quickly to show you what it does and then explain how to do it in a bit so advanced features smart links let's pick a post such as and I'm just going to search for that latest post that we were looking at and let's change this to already subscribed copy this link and now I'm going to go into incognito so that I'm not logged in and this thing won't remember me and I'll choose I'll paste this link that I just copied now we have the same blog post but as you can see this is a different opt-in offer and this is a different offer right here so I've replaced my opt-in forms with something new and in fact these are not opt-in offers these are advertisements for a premium course this is advanced feature number one smart links and it helps solve the old school email marketing problem and to be clear this is the same post it's just a slightly different link so let's see how that works I'll go back to my dashboard right here and let's go into our post footer for example I'll edit this and edit is to open thrive architect where I actually design the forum now if you've watched our opt-in upgrade week then I'm sure you've noticed that this is one of the templates that we released in that week just slightly modified with different pictures and a different color now this here is one of the states of this opt-in form in fact it's the second one so we have the default state that will load right now that's the one with the button and once people click on this button on this button we have an action right here in animation action that switches to the second state and the second state is the one where we have the same layout but an opt-in form and some different text so that's our two-step opt-in so far so good now we have a third state which is the already subscribed state and if I click on this this is where I advertise a different offer and this is the idea here is that the already subscribed state is what you show to people who are already subscribers if you're working on a new opt-in form here's how this works so this is an opt-in form where we also have two steps but we don't have an already subscribed state yet what you do is you click on this plus you click on add new state and you choose already subscribed so here you can create a new state which will just be a new state that you can switch to by button click or whatever that's for multi step opt-ins you have the lightbox where you can open a lightbox when someone clicks on a button on one of your states and you have already subscribed and already subscribed so if you create this it will create a clone of the current state and here you can change the content of this to be your new offer that you make for existing subscribers once you have this state created then comes this smart link setup that I showed before and what you do is you choose any post or page on your website you can also enter a URL but it has to be on your website because this hooks into thrive leads so here I just searched for was it colors just search for the post title and it brings up search results I choose the post then you can have this smart link effect all the forms on your site all the league groups or only specific ones here you can choose to either hide the forms or show the already subscribed state now let's do both of these right if I hide the forms it always updates this link down here so if I copy this will go back here into our incognito mode and try this now it loads this post and as you can see it's just a clean clear post no opt-in offers showing and this makes a lot of sense this is solution to the old school email marketing problem number one first problem is you do all this work to get people to subscribe on your website and when they come back to your website you ask them to subscribe again and that makes no sense and it also uses up you know screen real estate especially if you have like overlays screen fillers things like that's pretty annoying to be interrupted saying hey sign up for this thing that you've already signed up for so that's solution number one but as you saw here we can also show an alternative instead of showing nothing and the way we do that is we choose display they already subscribe to state and here we choose how long this should be for now if you choose only once or until the visitor closes the browser tab that means that if someone visits your website through this link and then they come back later they will see the original state again this is great for like special offers where you say hey look here I have this offer you know click on this link to get this offer and it's limited time or something like that so you can kind of make it once only or you can cookie your visitors where you can say either for a custom period of time for you know 30 days or whatever or just for as long as possible but the idea is you can tag visitors that come from your mailing list so that your website thrive leads on your website knows oh this person is a subscriber and so even if they come back later not through an email link they will still be recognized as a subscriber and still get either the hidden forms or they already subscribe to state so the way this works is that whenever you send an email where you link to your content on your website you create a smart link instead of just linking to your site directly from your email marketing service you go in here you go into thrive leads into the Advanced Options you create your smart link and you paste that link into your email and this is the second way in which it solves the old-school email marketing problem so by old-school email marketing I mean this on your website all you do is try to get leads and then the idea was and used to be you know once you get the lead great that's money right once you get the lead then you just send them affiliate links and promotions and whatever you just send them you know sell sell sell sell sell make as much money as possible now in the early days of email this used to work email was a novelty you know in boxes weren't crowded like they are now and you could make money this way of course modern email marketing does not work like that we now have to be aware of the fact that you know everybody's inbox is crammed everything is automatically sorted out into promotions and stuff by AI if we you know if we don't if we just send promotional stuff basically it won't even reach people's main inbox anymore and we have to be aware the job we have now is to build an actual relationship with a subscriber we can't just ask ask ask right we have to build a real relationship offer something useful and one of the best ways to do that is to get people to come back to your website again and again because as has been known in sales forever it takes multiple exposures multiple like encounters with a thing before most people make a buying decision so you can't really expect that most people will buy something from you the first time they land on your website but maybe the fifth time or the tenth time or the fifteenth time and email marketing is great for that if you can continually send people useful valuable content ideally on your own website you know as blog post content marketing tutorial pages online courses whatever you have to offer it brings your visitors and email subscribers back to your website again and again and again and when you set it up with a smart link to have something like this here this is like a passive promotion so instead of having to try and hit people over the head with promotions in your email all the time you can simply send out emails with useful good content and this is kind of in the background every time they come here every time they finish reading a post they see this offer and like only have this course here also notice how I've set this up the idea here is that you know the first step is someone's interested in photography they come to this website this little guide where I show them how to increase their Instagram followers and then the next step when they've gone there is like hey you want to go pro have you ever thought about getting paid for this but I've got a course for that as well so it's like the next step in the fun advanced strategy number two is about a/b testing thrive leads comes with the most powerful AV testing engine for any opt-in software you can find and you absolutely can and should be testing your opt-in forms because it can make a huge difference let me show you some things you can do let's say I have this screen filler lightbox here and I'm going to go and edit this and right here I can simply duplicate my existing form so I have an opt-in form that's shown somewhere I simply duplicate it and now I can change something for example this first one here displays immediately on page load and I can change that to let's say after a certain period of time maybe after 15 seconds and save that and then I can duplicate this one as well and maybe try something else so maybe the idea is that you know when someone Scrolls let's say 50% of the way down my content maybe then they're more engaged if I've already won them over a little bit with my content now maybe they're ready to subscribe right so those are some things I can test and I would give these some names so I would say time delay and this one so that's when I look at an a/b test report so I know what's going on and this would be scroll and then I once I have more than one form that's ready to publish ready for display I can simply click on start a be test give it a title so this would be you know timing and I would have some notes what I'm testing that's again for future reference when I come back to this test and they go what was I doing here this will help me and very importantly I'll definitely enable automatic winner settings here I'd probably set it to like 200 conversions as many of a minimum 14 days and 95% likely basically this means that thrive leads will automatically determine when do I have enough data to make a decision about which form is winning and basically first it will look is there a clear loser if there's a clear loser disqualify that and automatically keep testing the others and if there's a clear winner automatically own show the winner that's what automatic testing is about or the automatic winner settings are about that means that you run this test and then you just walk away from it and eventually the best-performing version will show now also note that you can run tests here where you don't even have to do any copywriting or design or anything so once you have your form set up you can test different triggers you can test different animations and we've seen that even that can make a difference and I'll link to a post with more details on that so this is a very lazy test to do right just test some different triggers test some different animations see what works best and at the very least you should be doing that but let's get rid of these forms here again I want to show you another version and the reason I'm getting rid of these is you should never test two things two different factors right I shouldn't have a form with a different design and a different trigger because if it performs better I don't know why so here I've cleared this again I'm gonna create another clone and I can also edit the design and I can test different designs against each other to do that I simply open this clone this duplicated form in thrive architect and now let's say I could test a different headline right here I could try a different image try different button text stuff like that and in general you want to test things like the main image the headline the button text these are the things that are most likely to make a difference you know if I change the background color here it's not likely to make a big difference to my conversion rates but you can also do by the way is when this is loaded you can simply choose a different template so you can test totally different designs against each other and that's one of the things you can use all these new templates for I mean you can just test two totally different designs against each other in all likelihood one of them is gonna do better than the other but that's not all let's go back to the thrive leads dashboard because another thing is in all these opt-in form sets you have all these different opt-in form types you've got scroll bats and screen fillers and light boxes and all kinds of stuff and if you're wondering well which one should I use which one works best the answer is nobody knows because it's highly context dependent what works in someone else's website might not work on yours so you have to test to find out for sure and you can so if you've set up multiple d-generation forms and farm types within a lead group you can test them against each other you'll see this button here as soon as you have at least two different opt-in form types in your lead group so when you click this you can now choose what to test against each other so you can go okay screen filler lightbox against sliding let's see which one does better and all the other settings here are the same as we saw before in the a/b test setup now before I go to advanced tip number three there's one more thing I mean some of these form types are useful for a specific scenario more than others for example I like to use the ribbon here as a mobile only form so as you can see I have my post footer set to show on desktop and on mobile devices I have my slide and set to only show on desktop and I have a ribbon showing only on mobile because the sliding takes up most of the screen or all of the screen on a mobile and the ribbon I can design to not do that if we go in here and we pretend to be on a mobile phone and we reload this you will see what I mean so here is you can see the slide and does not load and instead I've created this ribbon right here which doesn't use up much of the screen that makes it Google friendly Google doesn't like mobile sites with things that overlaid all of the screen or most of the screen so this doesn't overlay too much for the screen it's pretty simple when you tap on the button it opens a lightbox or you can sign up and you can dismiss it like this and that is something that ribbon templates are especially useful for another example is with our screen filler if I go and preview this you'll see here this is a multiple-choice opt-in so I'm basically asking the visitor what you want and they can either get the gear guide which goes to an opt-in form with specific tag or sending people to specific mailing lists or if we reload it if they say I want to do my Instagram following then it takes them to a different opt-in form with a different offer and this is very useful and of course this is the right kind of form to use if you have two different opt-in offers however maybe there's something else you can do advance tip number three is to increase your lead quality so on the one hand we're always chasing more leads right we want to get a large mailing list we want to build our audience and more is often better but not always because you can also have high quality leads and low quality leads in terms of you can have high quality leads people who are really engaged with what you do they open your emails they click your links they engage with you on social media or wherever you want that engagement and they buy stuff from you that would be a high-quality lead you can also have people who you know sign up and you never hear from them again and one of the ways in which you can have higher quality leads is with multiple opt-in offers because right here if we're back here in the multiple choice forum if someone signs up for the camera gear thing I know that that's what they're interested in I know that they're not just interested in photography in general but right now they're looking for camera gear and if they sign up for the Instagram thing then right now they care about Instagram so I can use this to make a more targeted and more relevant series of follow-up content I can use this to be more interesting and more relevant for my subscribers and that makes it more likely that will actually engage in that I can build a good relationship with these subscribers and there's more we can do because yes you can use multiple choice forms to leave the choice up to the visitor but especially if you have a lot of different offers that's not always the best approaches you don't really want to have a multiple choice from it like a dozen different choices right so there's another thing we can do which is targeting so right here in this lead group right here in my display settings I have set this to show on all blog posts and what I can do now is they can take my camera gear lead group and place it on top of it and I can give my camera gear lead group a more specific targeting so if I set this to all posts then this lead group will show instead of the other one because it's higher up in the list so that makes no sense but if I go into categories for example and I say on product reviews I want to show my camera gear related offer then the way it will work is that it will treat this one with so whenever someone is on a product review categorized post they will see the opt-in forms from this group and everywhere else they will see the opt-in forms from my general group at the bottom we can see an example of this on my marketing blog active growth where I've been using this for a long time on a general blog post and most blog posts you will see this offer just an offer for how the course on how I built my first product and this works well in most cases but if you're looking at a post that is specifically related to video then you see a different offer so anything that's about video marketing you see this offer for my video tools guide and this offer performs best on content related to video marketing or as the other offer performs better on other content so that's a practical example of how you can use this targeting to get more leads and get higher quality leads at the same time so those are three advanced things you can do and thrive leads to make use of all these new and awesome opt-in form templates that we've released over the last seven days you can use smart links to help thrive leads tell the difference between new visitors and visitors who've already subscribed and show your subscribers different offers you can use a be testing to test different triggers different animations different form types different designs whatever you want against each other and use the automatic winner settings to increase your conversion rates over time without doing anything yourself and you can use targeting to get higher quality leads on your website all right now it's up to you go make use of these super advanced features and the awesome templates you now have in thrive leads and let us know what you think let us know how it goes for you thank you for watching let's see in the next one you

Channel: Thrive Themes

Views: 13,380

Keywords: email marketing, list building, lead generation, email, inbox, sales, marketing, online business, Thrive Leads, Thrive Themes, Shane Melaugh, plugin, WordPress, blog, blogging, content marketing, opt-in, opt-in form, split testing, conversion optimization, CRO, a/b testing, optimization, lead quality

Id: iwVFnPM1R7Q

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 16 2018