How to Use Sumo To Squeeze Existing Traffic Into Leads

Look around and you’ll see most folks – business owners, agencies, individuals, bloggers, whoever – worry incessantly about possibly everything that holds no significance (as true for digital marketing as it is for life in general).

“How to get more traffic to my website?”
“How do I speed up my WordPress site?”
“What plugins should I use?”
“What do I build my website on?”

All of those are important.

Just not as important as you “making money off your business” – sooner or later.

If you are like most people, you are sweating the small stuff.

The way you run your business changes when you start focusing on gaining email subscribers.

I mean, like, radically.

What you thought was important doesn’t reign supremacy in your head anymore.

When is every subscriber equivalent to, say $5, and you manage to get subscribers on a daily or weekly basis, the way you look at your online business transforms – it’s easy to see why right?

Week 1: 52 email subscribers
Week 2: 74 email subscribers
Week 3: 56 email subscribers
Week 4: 78 email subscribers

Total: 260 email subscribers in a month.

If you assume that this is your average (and it won’t ever get better, which is impossible unless you screw up), you are looking at 3120 subscribers in a year minimum.

But wait, what’s the value of an email subscriber?

Before you get there, you’d have to understand your customers’ Lifetime Value (LTV).

According to Clay Collins of LeadPages, you’ll have to figure out the Customer LTV (Lifetime Value) for your own business.

Samuel Hulick of Drip offers a great explanation here:

“Of course, we’re going to need the dollar amount of the purchase you’re ultimately wanting people to make. If you anticipate recurring purchases (like a SaaS subscription model, for example), then you will want to multiply that number by the amount of times you think they will recur.”

He then points to a specific example:

“Since it’s unwise to assume that your customers will remain your customers forever, you need to figure out how long an average account will remain your customer. To do that, look at “churn”, which is the percentage of your subscribers who cancel their accounts over a period of time.”

For example, if 4% of your subscribers cancel their accounts each month, then the average account is likely to stick around for 25 months (1/.04). If you charge $80/mo, then over the span of 25 months your customer will have paid you $2,000. That is your LTV – the value you can expect to get over time once an initial purchase has been made.”

Your customer LTV depends on your business.

Let’s just assume each subscriber is worth $5 for you. Now, if you have 3120 subscribers, they are now worth $3120 x 5 = $15,600.

With email subscribers, however, you’d need to think of it as pending transactions since

•  All transactions won’t happen at once, but rather, they happen sequentially.
• You’ll have unsubscribes and new subscriptions happening all the time
• Transactions happen only when your subscribers are ready, sitting with their wallets open. You just don’t know when.
• The actual value of your email user base only compounds over time.

But that’s amazing, isn’t it?

Also note that:

• I won’t get into absolute basics of Sumo (like downloading & uploading plugins or how to set up forms).
• We’ll focus on what you’d need to do with forms and the other tools to squeeze more from your current situation.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s dig in and find out how to use Sumo for best results:

Setup Welcome Mat with A/B Testing

This thing, right here, is top priority

Of all the things you get with Sumo, it’s the welcome mat that has the potential to turn your business around big time. But guess what? It’s not the only thing that Sumo gives you. Crazy, isn’t it?

For the last 15 days that it went live, I collected 52 total subscribers. Out of these 32 were from the Welcome Mat. Go figure.

But I won’t stop there. With the limited traffic I get, I need to make the mat work really hard. So, I’ll do A/B tests on the Welcome Mat to choose a winner of the two variants A and B.

For the welcome Mat I created, these were the two variants (A & B):

Variant A:

Variant B:

Can you guess which one performed better?

C’mon, guess.

The version that performed better with a statistical significance of 51.2% was the one with the man lifting weights.

Who’d have guessed?

Now, this experiment won’t end here. I’ll create a new variant to battle with the previous winner.

A few ideas could be:

• A different background Vs black
• No image Vs use an image
• Female athlete Vs the big bad male athlete?

Come back here another day and we’ll talk results.

Provide content Upgrades or Other Offers

I have a rather generic offer to invite visitors to signup for my entire library of guides, checklists, etc. I call it the resource library. This is a sitewide offer

Here’s the actual inline pop up I use:

Right off the bat, one of the best converting offers on my site has been content upgrades. If visitors are reading a blog post on WordPress, I provide them with a WordPress checklist ( Unavailable now, but sign up for my marketing insights digest and you’ll eventually get access to it).

If my readers read blog posts related to sales funnels, lead funnels, or email marketing automation, they get my funnel checklist and other emails to help them with quick guides on how to build their funnels quickly.

Here’s the actual in-inline form and also a bar that you’d see on the top of the site:

Now, because visitors tend to be interested in specific aspects of digital marketing (like Facebook ads, WordPress, or Funnels) they are segmented into different workflows that I build with Drip.

After they signup, they get relevant emails written to cater to their specific interests. Later, they are given an option to choose to signup for other workflows (on other aspects of digital marketing) if they are interested.

Create Inline Click Triggers or Inline forms For Blog Posts

Sumo provides you with Click-trigger pop ups. Now, these aren’t your regular pop-ups. The pop-ups are activated only when visitors “click” – on either a link or a button – and this signals intent, interest, and willingness. Although these click trigger pop ups might not be shown as frequently as the welcome mat, they certainly convert even better (because of the intent).

For example, here’s how a click trigger pop-up compares (and converts at a juicy 15.3% compared to 2.93% that the welcome mat converts at).

Compared to click triggers, in-line forms more or less just like regular pop ups, except that they are “in-line” with your blog content. They are nested in between paragraphs. These forms also black out the background as you scroll past them. Like this:

Both click triggers and in-line forms make for great tools to help grow your list while you make relevant offers depending on what your users are reading or browsing on your website.

Use Page-specific Mats & Pop-Ups

Most sumo users tend to stop with the first two opportunities (in addition to Heatmaps, content analytics, and other tools within the Sumo Suite).

But you are not “most”. You are here because you want to make the best use of Sumo and spike up the conversions from all of your forms.

For that, you’d create page specific triggers. Find out the best performing (most frequented web pages) on your site and create very specific welcome mats or forms for those pages.

For instance, my click funnels post is a good performer.

Since I am offering landing pages as services, I’d want to create a welcome mat just for this page and have people signup for an offer. This is how it’d be like:

See what I am doing there?

Put Image Sharing, Highlighter, Content Analytics & HeatMaps To Work

Sumo has other tools in its kitty. While they don’t help you get email subscribers, they are built to get you more traffic. The Image sharer and the highlighter make it easy for your readers to share, well, images and your blog posts (or parts of your blog posts or individual images) on social media.

Heat maps show you where your visitors are looking on a page while they are there. It starts to make sense when one of your forms keeps popping up to the right (while visitors scroll) but your heat map tells you that no one is looking.

Finally, think of content analytics tool as your Google Analytics, but in real time, as you (the admin) look at your own blogs or pages. You’d get real-time stats on how many visitors you got to that page, and more.

Integrations with Email Marketing providers

You can only integrate with your favorite email services provider like MailChimp or Drip or GetResponse with a paid account. When you do, it’s just a matter of creating specific forms and integrating with your email provider with a few clicks.

In my case, I have multiple offers (content upgrades) and they’d need to be sent to the right workflow on Drip (my email automation tool and ESP).

When you integrate with Drip, for instance, my various workflows are listed automatically prompting me to connect the forms to one of them, as below.

As it stands, all of this has been setup and automated. That’s how kickass Sumo is.

Sumo is free for you to start with and with that, I don’t see why you should “not” start building your subscriber base now.