When new subscribers opt-in to your email list… what do you show them?
Many newsletters keep it simple: “You’re on the list! Check your email to confirm”
Some marketers use confirmation pages as a way to sell something that’s relatively low friction, commonly referred to as a “trip wire product”, that’s designed to be too good to pass up.
At RightMessage, we’ve been using the confirmation page for our free email course to discover more about who just signed up for our email course and what they’re looking for from us.
Most of the recipes that we feature in our CTA Funnel gallery are designed to ask a series of questions and then display a personalized offer (using the information collected.)
Today’s strategy is quite a bit different.
Rather than collecting a lot of segmentation data upfront, we’re waiting until someone opts-in. In fact, the only question we really ask is about what kind of business someone runs – and then we display a personalized opt-in for our email course around that.
Here’s what that looks like (for a software company that uses ConvertKit):
Our data shows that if you can get someone to answer a question in a survey funnel, the likelihood that they’ll answer subsequent questions is higher than 90%.
And if they answer a second question, the retention rate is upwards of 97%!
So if asking a bunch of questions upfront isn’t that off putting, what’s wrong with just doing all your segmentation before someone opt-ins?
Why risk segmenting on your confirmation page, when you can use the data you collect to deliver a highly personalized lead magnet?
We decided to ask the bulk of our survey questions on the confirmation page because we could clearly explain why we’re asking these questions.
The value proposition is pretty clear:
In 5 minutes, you’re going to get the first lesson of our email course. If we can find out a few details about you and your needs, this lesson (and the subsequent lessons) will be even better.
For someone excited about what we can teach them in the course, it’s a strong offer. Who doesn’t want something more specific to their needs?
And over 80% of people who opt-in and see that thank you page are segmenting themselves.
Almost all of our time was spent writing content that everyone who takes it will get – it’s a pretty standard 7-lesson course. But we spent about two hours using the segment data we collected on the thank you page to personalize bits and pieces of the content:
Here’s what we’re doing to personalize our email course:
All of this was done using Liquid templating, and the result is an email course that is about as niche as it gets.
How niche? There are currently 98,304 possible variations – and pulling that off took about two hours of our time, or about 10% of the total time it took to create the email course.
To do this, we ended up using two CTA Funnels.
One is our sitewide funnel, where we’re asking a single question about their business type and then pitching the email course:
(We’re also behaviorally segmenting people into an email marketing segment based on referring domains, original landing pages, and specific affiliate referrers.)
When someone opts-in, we have RightMessage then redirect them to a specialized thank you page we’ve created.
On the thank you page, we’ve embedded an inline RightMessage widget and tailored it to match out brand. The countdown timer adds some nice urgency, especially since there’s a delay timer in our email backend that’s set up to wait 5 minutes before sending the first lesson.
RightMessage’s default functionality provides a huge advantage over other quiz or survey tools:
