Step 3: Pitching the right offers to the right people

Hey, congratulations!

Your website is now fully synchronized with your email marketing database / CRM.

There’s no one “right” way to use RightMessage (wouldn’t that be nice!)

But there are a few best practices that many of our customers use. In this Quick Start guide, I’m going to introduce a basic way of segmenting visitors on your website, and then either pitching them on your newsletter (if they’re not on your email list) or a product or service of yours.

What’s a CTA Funnel?

Most form software combines what the visuals of a form, the form content, and form trigger rules and actions in one thing – the “form”.

RightMessage does things differently.

Managing a bunch of forms, each with their own set of rules (which often conflict) is challenging. And this is why most marketers default to just having opt-in forms shown to everyone… even their loyal customers!

We’ve separated what someone is offered away from where someone sees this offer.

This means that you’ll be setting up the flow visitors go through on your website – which we call our funnel builder – and then deciding how and where the questions you ask and the offers you pitch will be shown. We call these widgets.

To get started, let’s create your first CTA Funnel.

Creating your first funnel

First, click on “CTAs” in the navigation menu.

(PIC: CLICK ON CTAS)

Now click “Create a new CTA Funnel” and give it a name. (Visitors to your website will never see what you name it – it’s for your eyes only.)

You’ll now be in the CTA Funnel editor.

On the left is the funnel builder. This is where we’ll start to map out the journey visitors go through on your site. And on the right is your list of widgets (which are currently empty) – we’ll set those up next.

First, we’re going to plan out your initial funnel.

Ensuring the right people get pitched on the right thing

The funnel you’re building will run on every page view.

This means that as someone moves through your website, the funnel you set up here will run every time they load a new page. Unlike the funnel builders you might be used to, visitors don’t get “stuck” in this funnel. This is important to remember.

The end goal of every funnel run is to come up with either an Offer or a Question to show to the visitor. If a visitor is meant for one, this will be shown in one of the widgets you’ve created. If no Offer or Question is to be served, nothing will be shown.

The first thing we’re going to do is check to see if the current visitor is already on your email list.

To do this, click on the plus (+) icon at the top of your funnel and select Split by a yes/no decision.

This is how you’ll look at what information you know about a visitor – the tags they have in your email database, the pages they’ve viewed on your website, and more – and then route them to one thing or another (like your newsletter opt-in vs. a promotion for one of your paid products.)

Select “Subscriber” in the condition dropdown. If you’ve correctly set up the integration with your ESP/CRM, it should be right near the top.

(PIC: DROPDOWN WITH SUBSCRIBER SELECTED)

Now click “Save”.

The green box you see at the top of your funnel is a decision node. It’s checking to see if someone’s a known contact. If they are, they go the left down the “Yes” branch. Otherwise, to the right down the “No” branch.

Add another Split by a yes/no decision on that “Yes” branch. Here we’ll check to see if they’re already a customer. If they are, we won’t pitch them on anything. If they aren’t, we’ll have them check out your sales page.

This time, we’ll look to see if they’re segmented as a customer in your ESP/CRM. This might mean we’re looking for a “Customer” tag, or we’re seeing if the “account_status” custom field on their contact record is set to “customer”.

(PIC: Dropdown with customer tag)

Once you’ve set this up, you’ll have another “Yes” and “No” branch created exclusively for returning known contacts or subscribers.

(PIC: Picture of final set up)

Creating your offer for anonymous visitors: a newsletter opt-in form

Next we’re going to create the opt-in offer that we’ll show for anonymous visitors.

Under the “No” path below the decision node for “Subscriber”, click the plus (+) icon. Select “Pitch an offer”.

Give a name, like “Newsletter Opt-in” (what you call it here doesn’t matter – only you see it.)

You’ll now see our Offer editor.

This is where you’ll define an offer’s:

• Headline
• Description
• Featured Image
• Form fields
• Actions

Creating your offer for known contacts who aren’t customers: a sales page pitch

Congratulations!

Your website is now linked with your email marketing database / CRM of choice.

There are a limitless number of ways RightMessage can be used. From segmenting and capturing new email list subscribers to personalizing landing pages based on ad campaigns, there’s a lot you can do – and there’s no one “right” way to use RightMessage.

However, this would be a pretty crappy Quick Start guide if we didn’t prescribe (at least to start) a pretty common way of using RightMessage.

Here’s what we’re going to set up now:

• Find out who a visitor is and what they’re looking for
• Personalize a lead generation form using what they tell you
• Sync all this segmentation / contact data to your contacts database
• And then change your home page using that same data (we’ll do this in the next step)

Setting up your first CTA Funnel

If you’ve set up lead forms in the past, you’re probably used to creating a form that contains everything about what it looks like, where it shows, what it says, and what happens when someone fills it out.

RightMessage does things differently. We’ve separated what someone gets offered (i.e. the thing the form wants someone to do) with where a visitor sees that offer.

What is a CTA Funnel?

A RightMessage CTA Funnel includes a funnel builder (to determine what someone should be offered) and a list of widgets that “expose” that funnel.

Let’s look at what we’ll be building now:

(PIC: DIAGRAM OF JOURNEY ON LEFT, WIDGETS ON RIGHT)

Your first CTA Funnel is going to be a simple email newsletter opt-in – with a twist.

Because of the two-way integration we have with your email marketing database / CRM, we’ll know when a visitor on your website is already a contact. So, rather than trying to convince an email list subscriber to… join your email list again, we’re going to check if they’re a customer. If they are a customer, we’ll ask them to become an affiliate. If they aren’t, we’ll ask them to buy.

We’re going to go one step further. We’re going to ask visitors to let us know what industry they’re in and what they’re looking for from us.

Let’s get started!

First, click on “CTAs” in the navigation menu.

(PIC: CLICK ON CTAS)

Now click “Create a new CTA Funnel” and give it a name. (Visitors to your website will never see what you name it – it’s for your eyes only.)

You’ll now be in the CTA Funnel editor.

On the left, you’ll see the funnel builder. This funnel runs on every page view. The funnel is trying to find either a question or an offer to show the visitor. And if it can’t find either, the end user won’t see a RightMessage widget.

On the right, you’ll see a list of the various widgets that will display a question or offer (if one’s available.)

For example, if a visitor is looking at your pricing page they won’t see a newsletter opt-in…

(PIC: VISUAL OF OPT-IN NOT SHOW ON /PRICING)

But once they’re on another page (say, your blog) the CTA Funnel will rerun and now they’ll be shown your opt-in form…

(PIC: VISUAL OF OPT-IN SHOWING OTHERWISE)

The widgets we’ve set up for this CTA Funnel determine how the newsletter opt-in get shown. In this example, we’re showing the newsletter opt-in as an exit-intent popup and an embed added below every blog post.

Ensuring only anonymous visitors (i.e. non contacts) see your newsletter opt-in offer

The first thing we’re going to add to your new CTA Funnel is a Split by a yes/no decision.

This presents a sophisticated way to route visitors through your funnel based on pretty much anything you know about them… data you have in your ESP/CRM, the page they’re currently on, pages they have been on, and more.

Select “Subscriber” in the condition dropdown. If you’ve correctly set up the integration with your ESP/CRM, it should be right near the top.

(PIC: DROPDOWN WITH SUBSCRIBER SELECTED)

Now click “Save”.

The green box you see at the top of your funnel is a decision node. It’s checking to see if someone’s a subscriber. If they are, they go the left down the “Yes” branch. Otherwise, to the right down the “No” branch.

Let’s now create our newsletter opt-in offer. Click the pink plus icon on the “No” branch (remember: we don’t want to show this to subscribers!) and select “Pitch an offer”.

(PIC: SELECTING PITCH AN OFFER)

You’ll now see the Offer editor.

Let’s write something compelling about why someone should join your newsletter:

(PIC: NEWSLETTER OPT-IN FORM)

To set this offer up as a form, you’re going to want to change the default Offer behavior from “Go to URL” to, instead, have it submit a form or segment the new contact in your ESP/CRM.

(PIC: SETTINGS ON FORM)

Then just select the form, tag, or list you want to add someone to.

Now you need to decide what you want to have happen after someone opts-in. You can either:

1. Show a confirmation message like “Thank you! Check your email”
2. Redirect to another page on your website

If you set up a redirect, you’re able to leverage our segmentation engine to send people to different pages depending on how they’re segmented. That’s a bit advanced for this quick start guide.

Prefacing your opt-in with two segmentation questions

You now have a newsletter opt-in form that’s just being shown to anonymous visitors to your website – excellent!

But

Personalizing your newsletter opt-in form

Asking returning subscribers to buy (or become an affiliate)

Synchronizing with your email database / CRM

Displaying a personalized lead generation form