​How Jonathan Friedman Increased Lead Flow by 289%

Tim: Many marketers have a tendency to only respond to information they’ve received posthumously. That is once a visitor has already come and gone then we get their data about what happened. We make changes, wait for the next visitor to come and go and adjust as necessary.

But is there a way to be able to respond while that person is still on the page and get meaningful results? That’s what today’s guest Jonathan Friedman is an expert on. His company Peaceful focuses on reacting to visitor’s actions in real time while they’re doing it. And in today’s episode he is sharing with us one way he reacted to a visitor’s action that resulted in a 289% increase in leads generated for his client.

I’m really excited about it because it’s a cool tactic and it’s not difficult to implement. I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Jonathan, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jonathan: Hey, thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim: Absolutely. So I’m excited can you start us off by sharing with us the results you were able to get with the tactic we’ll be discussing today?

Jonathan: Sure. So we had a project with Inside View, a company that’s based in San Francisco, a B2B company and we managed to increase their lead generation by almost 300%. So 289% if I’m not mistaken. Yeah and that was fantastic. A really good result. They even submitted it to a Marketo competition for best case study of the year and we’re very happy with it.

Tim: Yeah that’s awesome. Well congratulations on that. Before we get into what you did to get them such a fantastic result, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jonathan: Sure. So I’m the CEO and co-founder of a company called Peaceful. What we do is that we helped marketers convert more of the maybes on their site. Maybes as every conversion optimization kind of person knows you have people that will convert no matter what you do because they’re excited and they want to buy. There are people that will never buy no matter what you do. There’s a lot of maybes in the middle.

We actually know  how to identify these maybes by looking at what we call the digital body language so how they move through the site, you know, where they click, scroll, their mouth movements and we interpreted that into digital body language so we can tell if someone is interested or confused or about to leave or stopped the video in the middle all kind of things like that and we let marketers  react to the behavior.

Tim: I love it. Okay. Good. So that gives us a good foundation as to kind of where your knowledge base comes from and why you were able to get these results. But tell us what you did specifically for your client that got these great results.

Jonathan: So Inside View had a really clever tactic first of all for drawing traffic. So it actually works on your site. So you first need to get the traffic in there we help you convert  more of it. So that really clever kind of tactic where they took in their vast database and created a whole kind of mini pages from it. So anytime someone would search for any kind of company in their database, they had a chance of landing on an Inside View page. So it generated a lot of traffic and their goal was to kind of get more yield out of that so get more people to actually engage. So you find your result but then you get to go away.

So this is Peaceful and this [indiscernible [0:03:27]] found a couple of things. First of all it found that people were being idle on all these pages. When they say idle it means that someone is on the page meaning the page is open on the browser but they’re not actively on there. And that happens when either someone goes to the bathroom or it talks to someone and it’s not actively engaged in a computer or if they are usually on another tab. So they went somewhere else and they’re just have this tab open but they’re not there.

So the assistant found that there’ a lot of idle time from a lot of visitors on these directory pages. So the first thing one of the reactions I recommended based on learning patterns was highlighting the form when people come back. So they had a sign-up form on the page and so the thing is with idle is once someone goes away to kind of disconnect from their usual slope. They see it. They see a page, they say okay nice I wanted to do X. They go away. When they come back they’re like oh what was I doing? A lot of times, they just never mind and they close it or they quickly get out of it.

And so the reaction, the actual reaction, the actual visual change that Peaceful implemented was what we call spotlight which means highlighting a certain element and dimming the rest of the screen. So those visitors that were idle came back and found the screen to be a little bit dim and the signup form highlighted. So it seems like almost like a silly way of kind of focusing attention but it really works. So that alone almost doubled the conversions. So that alone was probably the most helpful reaction in the mix.

[0:05:07]

So that alone kind of got all these items, not all of them but a lot of these idles [indiscernible [0:05:11]] they just leave their detail because it refocused them when they came back.

Tim: Wow that’s pretty amazing. If you think about it you know, all that happened was just a small little emphasis of the call to action that you wanted them to take and that alone was enough to get their attention once they came back to the page.

Jonathan: Exactly. We humans have a belief that we control our attention and then we can you know, control our emotions, know what we want to do and it’s actually- we actually affected by a lot of things and since we’re bombarded with information these little subtleties of kind of conversation can have a big impact and big effect. Since in the digital world what we’re talking about huge amounts of people these things that add up eventually and add to your bottom line if you kind of have these conversations correctly and you manage attention of people on your site.

Tim: So technically how does somebody actually make that happen? Is that using Peaceful?

Jonathan: Yeah so obviously Peaceful what you can do is you have triggers that are based on this digital body language that we’re discussing before so we can say okay if someone is idle that’s a trigger that you can use. You can use a trigger or to say someone is confused or we have triggers when someone stopped the video or if they’re about to exit or if they stopped filling out a form. So all these are triggers and you have a bunch of reactions so visual changes that you can react with. It can be a message, it can be shaking your button, it can be highlighting, spot lighting a form. It can be having a message come up or an element fold, it can be anything.

So you can Peaceful to see but you can also do it yourselves. I mean you can program an idle so you can see with analytics or different tools if you have any analytics installed, you can see if these are idle on your pages. You can think how you want to react. So Peaceful is just easy and dynamic to do it and it’s just a couple – almost like a PowerPoint kind of interface where you point and click. But I mean if you have some knowledge skills and you know it’s programmed, you could put something like this yourself.

For me the interesting thing is that there’s so much information of in real time and a lot of us focus on AB testing. So we tried that picture or the other, that tittle or the other, that color or the other. But we don’t really take into account a lot of the real time information that visitors are showing or expressing while they’re on their site. That’s a shame. There’s a lot of information in there and there’s a lot as this example shows  that you can do to kind of leverage that and get results.

Tim: Yeah that’s really fascinating. It’s just a great way to be taking advantage of the information that we really can get access to pretty easily and using it to not only –you know, in that case to only did you get a signup but you also helped them get – you helped your visitors get something that they were you know, hoping to get in the first place. So that’s really it. It’s a great way to provide value while also kind of growing your list and increasing revenue. So thanks so much for sharing this with us Jonathan. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Jonathan: My pleasure. Thank you, Tim.