Generating growth through content

Constant optimization through targeted testing was a cornerstone of the Sage Advice content strategy from the outset.

There was a clear requirement to increase visitors’ propensity to subscribe and download content but this needed to be achieved without being unnecessarily intrusive.

There were multiple calls-to-action to subscribe that were visibly dominant in green, but the interaction rates with them were worryingly low.

This method of lead generation relied heavily on visitors to actively break their reading patterns to engage with those CTAs. With content pages often littered with advertising around their margins, modern online readers have become adept at ignoring elements outside of the main reading page & skipping over inline content that is not solely text-based.

In addition, the post content of the Sage Advice platform was critical to establishing its value to a potential subscriber and therefore it needed to remain front and center for visitors.

So the problem was twofold; how to ensure that readers were consuming the content whilst offering Sage Advice the best possible opportunity to generate subscribers in the process?

Introducing the prompted push

First we established the right types of visitors to receive the prompt.

These visitors needed to have consumed enough content to have seen the value of subscribing & therefore we set a scroll depth trigger, based on a variety of percentage depths of post content.

These were measured from the opening line of the first paragraph to the closing line of the final paragraph to measure the content itself, not just the depth of the page itself.

On reaching that depth, visitors were shown the subscription overlay which required them to make a binary choice - to subscribe or to close. This ensured that Sage were no longer reliant on proactive visitor decisions to subscribe.

We controlled how often the overlay appeared to minimize interruptions for the visitor. No subscribed visitor was asked to subscribe again, nor any single visitor asked more than twice.

TEST HYPOTHESIS:

By
prompting subscriptions based on scroll depth

Visitors will
have consumed enough content to see the value in a longer-term subscription

Thereby
increasing the Visit to Subscribe conversion rate

Subscriptions skyrocketed...

+361% subscribers

+17% direct leads

117:1 annual ROI

Content quality = draw of subscription

Visitors needed a chance to read & value the content before they could reasonably be expected to hand over their details

The power of contextual signposting

The in-page Subscribe CTAs required proactivity on behalf of the visitor.
The prompted overlay was more overt, demanding of immediate attention.
Visitors were significantly more likely to act when the choice to do so is presented clearly to them.

Changing behavior is more challenging than reflecting existing behavior

Fundamental behavioral change requires bold action.
A softly-softly approach is highly unlikely to deliver the desired result.