Our Guest:
Jason Swenk helps marketing and advertising agency owners scale and get to the next level of their business. He educates through his stories, mistakes, and successes of his ventures. He runs a media company and has been in the digital marketing space for over a decade.
A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- How to speak to prospects effectively
- How to set up a survey question sequence after prospects subscribe to your list
- How to find information about your audience without being obtrusive
Tim: Getting data about who your customers are and what they’re looking for seems like it would be easy. But anyone who’s ever tried surveys and things like that, knows that very few folks will actually respond. And I’ve heard lots of ways to incentivize folks to complete the survey. Free gifts, lead magnets, contests, etc.
But Jason Swenk applied a simple bit of psychology to get people to completely fill out his surveys which then allowed him to tailor his marketing messaging directly to them at the right time. He’s sharing the tactic in our talk today so let’s jump on in.
I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast. Alright man, so I would love to hear the results from this new… You know you’ve done this a few times but I want to hear the results from this new case study you’ve got to share.
Jason: You know, how we all struggle with getting our survey’s and just figuring out who our opt-ins are?
Tim: Yeah.
Jason: And we get basically 5% kind of a response rate of like, hey, I’m at this income level and I’m this type of person?
Tim: Yup.
Jason: Well I got a 94% response rate.
Tim: Whoa. That’s amazing.
Jason: Yeah and so now, I can serve up better content and really make everything a lot more relevant based on what I know about the person coming in.
Tim: Oh, I love it. Well, this is your 3rd time on the show now but just in case anybody’s new to the podcast or whatever, tell them who you are and what you do.
Jason: Yeah, Jason Swenk and I help agency owners like marketing agencies or ad agencies scale and get to the next level. And so I just share stories of my horror stories and my successes and just help them out.
Tim: Isn’t it funny even no matter how good you are there’s always a few more horror stories than success stories?
Jason: There always is. I mean you have to be. I mean it’s like were not born perfect so.
Tim: Right, yeah, that’s it. Cool, so why don’t you tell us how did you get so many people to actually respond?
Jason: Yeah. So you know how like most people they’ll opt in, they’ll get on your list and what do we do? We send out an email after they’ve digested some of the content and saying, you know, “Hey just pick the particular topic that interests you the most” or “tell me a little bit more so I can serve you up better content”
Tim: Yeah.
Jason: And I was pissed off. I was getting 5% so I was like… And I didn’t want to put more information on the front end like in the actual opt-in right? So a lot of people now they’ll go in name, email address, and then like a drop down.
Tim: Yeah.
Jason: Marketing professionals that kind of stuff, because I knew It would just decrease my conversion. So what I did is that I created this concept called progressive profiling thank you pages. So on the thank you page, I immediately pass.
So like I pass the hidden email address to the thank you page and I ask him one question. And it’s a radio button. And it says are you a digital agency owner? Are you a marketing professional? Are you an agency employee or an entrepreneur? And they select it. And then it takes them to one more progressive profile thank you page. And I ask them their income range.
Tim: Nice.
Jason: And then it takes them to the regular thank you page based on what they’ve told me. So now, I can send them to a thank you page based on what they selected as well as. And what I found is like Tim, I thought I was like, well if I could get like 25%, I’d be happy.
I started measuring it. I was getting 94% response rate and I started thinking. I was like how or why? People are already committed to saying yes and they think they physically have to do it because in order to get the stuff that they wanted which is not the case.
Tim: Right. It works, part of it is similar to the LeadBoxes work, right? Like where everybody’s say well that’s not going to work because you are asking them to take an extra step. But in reality it’s getting them to commit to something that’s easier like clicking a link and then going a little bit more of a commitment in opting in.
This is kind of the same way where they’ve already committed to the opt-in. Why not continue on and just finish out the process, right?
Jason: Exactly. And you don’t have to end, and if you don’t want to base them on income or type of whatever it is, you can ask them on your challenges. But what I wanted, what I was finding is a lot of my list was not at a certain income level in order to put them into certain campaigns.
So I didn’t want to waste an email or a campaign going to them and I wanted to serve up relevant content to them. So now 94% and when I was measuring the 94%, this is before Infusionsoft did the responsive landing pages.
So most of my opt-ins come from mobile. So now with the responsive, you know I bet if I started measuring, I bet I’m close to 98%.
Tim: That’s crazy.
Jason: And the cool thing is my open rates of have increased from 20% to 43%. And my revenue for passive income for people buying my stuff went up 74%.
Tim: Wow, those are big… I mean the thing is that doesn’t necessarily surprise me. When people start responding and realizing that you care that much about the specifics of their situation. And you can use the right campaigns with them, of course those other things are going to go up. But those are pretty big increases.
[00:05:06]
Jason: Huge numbers. I mean the thing is no one’s doing this. I mean literally there’s no one doing it and so as people are opting in like cold traffic… And think about I haven’t even started measuring it on what people call kind of the liquidator offer or trip wire like I call on the foot in the door offer on thankyou page.
That’s probably increased because I’m serving up a thank you page based on what they’ve told me in the opt in.
Tim: Right. So depending on them and who they are and what they’re interested in and where they are that kind of thing?
Jason: Exactly.
Tim: And you know just for anybody who’s listening who’s not a marketing agency because I know we’ve got a lot of people from all different industries. This is not to say that this works just for marketing. I mean this would apply just for just about every industry.
Imagine if somebody was… You know if somebody opted in for some kind of a health guide, or whatever. And you know they went through a couple of quick questions to find out that they specifically are looking… Maybe you know they’re already really fit and they are looking to kind of go to the next level.
Well now you can serve up the right offers for them as opposed to the person who comes to you who has you know who hasn’t gotten off the couch in 20 years. You could market to them the right way and of course this is nothing new. It’s not like people have never done surveys before.
But this is a way to actually get people to respond to the darn survey in the first place.
Jason: Oh yeah and using your weight for example you can say do you feel like you’re really overweight? Or do you feel like you’re just on the border or do you feel like really good shape? Because then you’re going to speak to them differently.
Tim: Right.
Jason: When you speak to them like you actually know them, the effectiveness you know it just sky rockets.
Tim: I love it man. This is awesome, this is a great case study. And I think the only other thing I have is you know when you’re creating these follow-up thank-you pages, how do you determine which questions are more important for you to know? Like what do you, how do you figure out what’s most important for you to ask?
Jason: Well it’s based on the criteria that you’re going after like think of that perfect client. And so what I started doing is going look, my perfect client is digital agency owners. But I know I have freelancers and I know I have entrepreneurs trying to figure out my marketing. I know I have agency employees.
So I want to speak to them differently. Like I want to speak to the agency employee differently because maybe one day they’re going to start an agency and then also the other part was income, right?
I wanted to base them on hey, you got to be over a certain income in order to go into a certain campaign or you could base it on the challenges. So if you know your audience and this is the key Tim, you’ve got to know your audience right?
Tim: Yeah.
Jason: You got to know who you’re going after, that’s kind of the step 1 and then you can do all the rest.
Tim: Yeah. I love it man. This is awesome and if somebody wants to find out more and maybe opt in and check out what you got going on, where should they go?
Jason: Go to JasonSwenk.com/wahoo. I got something special there. Swenk is spelled S-W-E-N-K and Wahoo is spelled W-A-H-O-O. I wanted to do something different so you guys remember it.
Tim: I love it man. Thanks again for coming back.
Jason: Thanks, man.
