WAKE UP EVERYONE!! Oh, who are we kidding – no one’s sleeping that much these days, amiright??
Covid-19 has caused us to shift gears slightly – especially here on The 4 AM Report. This week we continue the trend – to help you cut through the clutter of information on what you should be doing with your marketing during this time of crisis.
Here’s one tiny tip you can put into play immediately - especially if you are pushing out content to “help” businesses get through these crazy-turbulent times.
DITCH THE DREADED OPT-IN BUTTON
We get it. It’s lead generation. List building. BUT if you’re promoting and sharing your wealth of information – no matter your industry – as a “good deed” – then requiring an email address to access it?
Guess what? That’s not a good deed. In fact, it’s more than a little tone deaf.
And if for some reason you can’t un-gate something (which I guess happens) – at the very least DO NOT bombard people with follow-up emails.
I get it. We’re all adjusting to this thing that’s turned the business world upside down. And that’s why it’s never been more important to get it right.
Listen in for more on opting OUT of opt-ins in times of crisis. No email required.
Or, scroll down and keep reading for some snippets from the podcast.
To Opt-In, Or Not To Opt-In – That is the Question
“Great, I got the free guide. In a normal world, I'd be hit with another email from that person's funnel a few days later, saying, ‘Hey, did you really enjoy the guide? Well, if you enjoyed that, then you should try this and this…’ you know, it's that funnel to make the sale. So, it goes to the automation doesn't it? It's like not everyone like two or three weeks into this pandemic has modified their automated funnel. If you sign up to get these free things, you're instantly going to get hit with what might be potentially off color, automated sequences, pushing for the sale. And here's the thing if you want to keep your gated opt-in going, then give it some context, maybe the landing page it lives on, you need to acknowledge why this opt-in is relevant and why you think this audience should have it now, AND why you're not able to remove the email wall to get it and just have it as a free download. Or adjust the follow-up email - write some little copy to go like ‘Listen, this was a no strings attached thing. I’m not going to be harassing you for the sale!’ So, there's ways to still have the opt in especially if you can't turn it off. Tweak the materials around it, tweak the email landing page, tweak the email that delivers the opt-in, there's lots of stuff you can be doing to be a little less tone deaf around all this.”
“Right! The easy changes are the text changes. You can even put a banner just across the top of the landing page - we did one of ours - just a little block at the top explaining why we thought this was relevant now and why we were ungating this. The landing page and all the information stays the same because that's the good information that explains what the download is about. But I just put like a little update bar at the top of one of our pages and I think that suffices. Also you might want to be reassuring people if they do still have to give their email that, perhaps by giving their email, they're just going on to a list where you send out only things that are helpful for your business right now, you know, via that email, it could be like, ‘if you sign up for this, we're going to be sending you one resource a week to help you keep your business on track or something, feel free to opt out.’”
How to Track the Love Without an Opt-In Button
“We've been trying for a while to figure out what can be a compelling case for how to track things if you don't have people's email. How do you know who's consuming ads? You know? And that's the hard part. Do we have a compelling answer? Well, possibly not. But there's some things you can be looking at like, how long was someone on a page? If you did send an email out about it? Did they go to that page? So, you know, there's going to be ways for you to track and see if it is still something that people are interested in.”
“Okay, look at clicks, for example, like, often we find that if you send out a thing, people will read the thing. They may not click through on your call to action. If people are clicking on a free call to action, then that's a good thing. Like Will said, time on page clicks, as well. Where does the traffic coming from? If all of your traffic is coming in from Facebook, you don't actually know who those people are because you don't have their emails. But that's an opportunity to step up your outreach on Facebook. So yeah, essentially, as far as we're concerned, experiment with the option in this moment, if there's information out there that you can provide, which you're already providing it for free one thing that we would say is explore the word free, like, make something completely free and see how that works for you. If the traffic spikes on the back end, you know, we're not playing!!”
Now get yourself over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe to us – you won't regret it!
Plus, if you're losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at C+P Digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
