How Weather.gov Got a 73.4% Mobile Opt-In Rate Using CallLoop

Tim:Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

What’s up fellow marketer? I so look forward to Mondays now because I get the opportunity to share another killer marketing case study with you and what could be more fun than that? So today, we’re going to discuss how to get an incredible 73.4% conversion rate without a real landing page, awesome. So before we get into that, I’d beat myself up if I didn’t invite you to this week’s webinar. I’ll be there live answering questions and sharing with you the three web pages in your business that can help you quickly grow your list and allow you to spend more of your time focusing on the parts of your business that you’re really passionate about. It’s happening this Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time. To join me on this free live webinar, just text the word LeadPages to 38470. Again that’s one word LeadPages to 38470 and I’ll see you Thursday.

So today’s case study includes my new friend Chris Brisson from Call Loop. Call Loop is a really cool service that focuses on mobile marketing , which I really, really believe is an underutilized marketing vehicle that if you actually focus on it, you can drive tremendous results. Chris and I are about to talk about one way that he sent web traffic to mobile , which most people would say is insane but his results speak for themselves. To get a sneak peak at how Chris got it to happen and get registered to join my free webinar this Thursday at 3:00 pm Eastern Time, again text LeadPages to 38470 and then let’s get started. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages. This is ConversionCast and here is Chris Brisson from Call Loop.

Hey Chris, how is it going man?

Chris: Awesome. Awesome. Glad to be here.

Tim:Yeah. Dude thanks for coming on the show. It’s a lot of fun to have you on and we’ve been implementing some cool stuff here at ConversionCast , which I talked with Greg Hickman about a couple of weeks ago using Call Loop and so I’m excited to dig into what’s been working kind of for you and that kind of thing. So the first thing that I think is important is can you kind of share with us just the results that you were able to get from what we’re going to talk about today?

Chris:Yeah. You know of the campaigns we set up, we were able to get a 73.4% conversion rate from a mobile phone. So we’ll dive into what that looks like but it’s a pretty high opt-in rate from simple text messages.

Tim:Yeah that’s fantastic so it’s a conversion rate to opt-in or to sell? What was the kind of point there?

Chris:From a landing page or actually not even a landing page but from a page to collecting a phone number and yeah so from —

Tim:Oh nice.

Chris:– a webpage to text opt-in and people opting in from that page. You know the last thing we think about is how do you get someone to join a list when they’re already on the web.

Tim:[Laughs] right.

Chris:You know, you would assume that people would fill out a web form or something like that but text join works regardless of whether it’s offline or online and we’ll dive into that.

Tim:Yeah I love it. This is – I’m excited about this kind of – this kind of I guess attack that a lot of people are not taking and I think we’re seeing more and more of this. So before we do that, tell everybody a little bit about what Call Loop is and kind of what your role is at the company.

Chris:Yeah so Call Loop is kind of like MailChimp for mobile right? So we focus on SMS, text messages, voice messages and we’re a platform that integrates with like AWeber and Infusion Soft and IContact and a lot of those platforms so as you’re building an email list you can build your text message list. You can send them text messages and voice messages. Or if somebody buys a product let’s say from Infusion Soft you can build your customer text message list. So we’re just a platform that allows you to send text and voice messages to contacts, customer subscribers to help you drive more traffic, generate more leads and make more sales.

Tim:Awesome and you are the founder is that correct?

Chris:Yeah, yeah I’m one of the cofounders and I focus on really along different things. SO the marketing, biz dev and yeah. That the growth of the business.

Tim:Perfect, Scrappy and I love it. So —

Chris:Yeah.

Tim:And it’s really cool because you know we are going to talk about one particular case study but there are almost an unlimited number of uses for mobile marketing and you know, if you talked to Greg Hickman, you know, he’ll share a bunch of this stuff he’s doing. I know you guys are doing some really interesting stuff as well as many of your customers and we just implemented the people can text into, register for a webinar. We just implemented that and we implemented the text message reminders for webinars and we’ve got some interesting results not conclusive enough yet to share but I’m excited to share that.

[0:05:10]

So that’s why I wanted to have you on it and talk with you about may be a different kind of thing that people are doing. So can you kind of set the stage? What was the setup for this and you know, specifically how did this particular experiment work?

Chris:Yeah. So we have a partnership with Weather.gov and Weather.gov provides weather alerts, you know, localized weather alerts, global national weather alerts. So what they do is they basically send people over to a webpage we have dedicated for that partnership and people can simply just text in the word weather to our short code 38470 and opt in. So you know every day we get 5, 15, 20, 30 opt-ins from a text to join. So it drives them to a webpage and there’s nothing for them to fill out. All it says is text in this word, enter in the short code and join the list.

You know, we tracked, we did a whole kind of case study on this but of the people that visited the page, we’re able to capture 73% of the traffic that went there, unique visitors to a lead.

Tim:wow.

Chris:So it was powerful. You know, because I think a lot of people our early assumption is well if I’m online you know, then I should have them fill out a web form or I should have them do this but people have their cell phone on their desk in their pocket. So it’s literally within arm’s reach. So you know, assuming that people won’t text in the keyword was wrong because I believe that and you know this is going back a while now but it worked. You know 73% opt-in from a webpage.

Tim:Yeah.

Chris:To a mobile lead.

Tim:That’s so interesting and so basically what you did was you took the unique visitors to that page and just compared that to the number of people who texted to opt in?

Chris:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Tim:Awesome. Yeah I think we all – we typically will think that we need all these crazy tools to be able to you know, measure this kind of stuff but really I mean that’s as simple as it gets. How many people came to the page, how many people have opted. In  73% is absolutely unbelievable and it’s fun because it is kind of cross platform and this is I really see this as being something that more and more people are going to focus on are these cross platform things. So I screw this stat up every time but Greg shared a stat with me that was like people typically opened a text message what is it within three seconds of receiving a text message?

Chris:That would be great. No it’s actually 85% of people will open a text message or read the text message within 15 minutes.

Tim:Okay

Chris:So.

Tim:And that’s still amazing. I mean that’s – it’s not the same with email although I do love email marketing more than just about anything in this world But I mean that’s really that’s a pretty fantastic stat within 15 minutes. So it doesn’t get much more immediate than that. So in this case we’re talking about a 73% opt-in rate from going to a page to texting that. So what I’m curious about is what would it be like if instead of and I don’t know if they tested this or not but what would it be like instead of asking them to text to opt in if they could just opt-in by entering their phone number? Is that something that they had tested on the website?

Chris:Are you saying from like a web form?

Tim:Yeah, exactly.

Chris:No. We I mean we didn’t test it. We just have you know, basically the screen shot that shows them how to text it in and that’s it. But we didn’t split test it you know, so.

Tim:Yeah. I’d be really interested in you know, 73% is pretty darn good and I’d just be curious to see if one would get better results by doing that and then you know because that’s how we’re doing the webinar reminders is people will – if people opt in on our website somewhere to register for the webinar, they’ll get taken to a thank you page where they can choose to enter their phone number and and get text message reminders for that webinar. You know, so far like I mentioned we’re getting pretty good results with that and I’d just be curious if more people would do that then would actually text in but still 73% is fantastic. So what would you say are some of the keys that have made this successful for Weather.gov?

Chris:You know number one it’s the lead source right? So you know, the people are going there to get one thing and coming from Weather.gov they’re going to our page to get that information. So obviously the call to action is to do that. It’s just again it’s the intent of why they’re going to the site. You know we get a lot of different leads from a lot of different lead sources and you know, Google Chrome all these different lead sources that just don’t convert. So you know, the intention of why they’re visiting that page is the reason why they want to opt in.

[0:10:06]

So if we were sending leads from all sorts of different places it will be a completely different conversation rate. So you know, straight off the bat it’s the intent why they’re going there.

Tim:Yeah. So make sure that if you’re driving people to that page in order to get a good conversation rate and this is with anything but you know just make sure that you’re driving the kind of traffic that would most likely want to do that and clearly if we could just simply do that for everything, everybody would be as successful as possible. But

Chris:Yeah.

Tim:I guess what I’d really like to know is you know I think chances are if somebody’s listening to this, they’re sold. They want to try this because text message you know, SMS and MMS even is pretty powerful and we can connect with people almost instantly like you mentioned within 15 minutes. So I guess my question is how – from a technical standpoint, how does somebody implement this in their business?

Chris:It’s really simple. So you know obviously Call Loop is US Based and so you would essentially get a keyword and the word is word that’s specific to you so you can have you know, I think you guys at LeadPages so if you text LeadPages to 38470 people would join your list. So everyone have  their own kind of unique keyword and they can text it in and do that. It’s fairly simple. I mean literally it takes me may be two minutes, sixty seconds, ninety seconds to set this up. Really just you set up and auto response. Actually a new feature that we just released is the ability to collect an email or a name, an email address even custom information from a text and then push it to you know, InfusionSoft and AWeber. So you think of lead gen from text messages.

Tim:Right.

Chris:So it’s simple. You know it’s not difficult and I think the interesting thing is writing email copy is hard. You got to come up with the subject line, you got to come up with you know, copy. You got to get them to open it and you got to get them to click and then you got taken to a page. A text message is 144 characters, 160 characters. It’s not rocket science right? So the quickness is I think the best part about texting is anybody can do it and you don’t have to be a copywriter or a genius to make it work for you.

Tim:Right and so if you want to see an example of this you know, you heard Chris mention it, text LeadPages to 38470 and that is actually a webinar registration. So the first text you’ll get will say awesome, just reply with your email address and we will get you registered for the webinar. That’s something that we use Call Loop to do and we’re really enjoying that. It’s a unique feature especially for podcasters. I mean you know, if people are podcasting they’re not going to get in there while they’re driving or whatever. They’re not just going to go to a landing page and then find the thing and you know do all that kind of stuff. Even if it’s a mobile responsive landing pages like if you’re using LeadPages clearly it’s mobile responsive, looks great on a phone but we’re hoping that people are aren’t just going to go and just do that. But shooting a quick text to 38470 is pretty easy and that’s why we love it.

Chris:Yeah.

Tim:So yeah it’s simple, I love it. I think this is something that people should implement really quickly and they can just go to CallLoop.com to try it out, is that right?

Chris:Yeah. Yeah exactly, either 2Ls or 3Ls so CallLoop.com.

Tim:Love it. Awesome Chris. Well thanks so much for coming on and sharing this with us. It’s been a lot of fun too.

Chris:Thanks so much and we’ll talk soon man, thanks a lot.

Tim:That will do it for this week’s episode of ConversionCast but before we go, I’d love to hear from you if you’ve got a killer case study that you’d love to share on the podcast. All you need to do is tweet at us @ConversionCast, that’s @ConversionCast on Twitter and let us know that you’d love to share your case study with us and we’ll be in touch. Thanks for listening and we’ll see next week on ConversionCast.