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The Podcraft™ Podcast

Creating an Attention Grabbing Email Optin Box in WordPress | PodCraft S3E13

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The PodCraft Podcast: Series 3, Episode 13

In this episode, we’re expanding on the email list work we’ve done over the past few days. We’ve already looked at the basics, now lets see how we can get our optin rates skyrocketing with an attention grabbing optin box. I’ve got a tool for you today which will allow just that – let’s have a look!

Note: I mentioned the wrong episode link in this show I’m afraid – If you’re looking for episode 14 on utilizing affiliate marketing, then visit the right post here.

Resources Mentioned on This Show

Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box

The plugin displays a pop-up box with customizable content. It’s designed to get the attention of the visitors who have engaged with your site. The box triggers at a certain point on the page, which you can specify. An example is the percentage of scroll, reaching the end of a post or reaching the comments.

If you need some help with installing plugins, go to Website Course.

Today’s Tasks

  1. Download Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box
  2. Install it in your website and use it with the techniques mentioned on this show

Let Me Know What You Think

Tell me what you think of Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box plugin. Tell me how you use it and if it increases your conversion rate as well. I’d love to hear from you!

Finally, if you’re enjoying the series, I’d really appreciate it if you’d give me a review on iTunes. It really helps to get the show out to more people and grow the PodCraft community. Just pop over to PodCraft on the iTunes website to do that.

Thanks for listening and I’ll see you on the next episode.

Transcription for This Show

Hey folks! I’m Colin Gray and this is PodCraft.

Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Series 3 of PodCraft, this is the series on creating a great home for your podcast on the web. And yesterday, we were talking about mailing lists, so the reasons for setting up a mailing list, the uses for a mailing list, why mailing lists are so vital for any website. And today, I promised I was going to talk you through another tool which will help to improve your opt-in rates for your mailing lists.

Now, the plugin is called Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box. Now, I’ve just had to record that about three times because it’s a bit of a tongue twister, Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box. Now, I put a link in so that you don’t have to search for that directly, so just go for podcraft.net/dream and that will take you to the WordPress plugin page for it. So, you can find it there, have a look at it and download it from there if you like or you can least find out how to spell the name so you can put into the WordPress plugin directory to find it and install it automatically.

Now, what does this do? So, the name may give you a clue, Scroll Triggered Box. Essentially it’s a tool for drawing attention to your opt-in boxes. So, we talked a little bit already this week about calls to action, so the call to action would be to encourage people to take some actions. So, in this case our action is to click a button to go to our opt-in form or even just to view our opt-in form, so the call to action could be to fill in your e-mail address and click the submit button, so, that’s the call to action we want people to do. Now, you can put that in a post, so you can put in straight into any post, have the button here or the opt-in form there. You can also put in the sidebar, that’s a pretty common thing to do, put it in the sidebar, make it as prominent as possible. But all these things tend to blend in a little bit. People these days do have a big element of ad blindness, so we can, we’re very good at blocking out adverts, we’re very good at blocking out sidebars and really concentrating just on the content. So, it’s quite easy for your opt-in rate, your conversion rate for your opt-ins to be quite low just because even if you make it as prominent as possible, people just don’t really think they’ll click it, they ignore those things in the sidebar and just concentrate on the content.

Now, the Scroll Triggered Box is designed to get around that problem by making something a lot more obvious. What happens is you create your call to action or your opt-in form as normal, you just code it, you get a code from MailChimp, you used a short code, you use the call to action plugin we talked about a few episodes ago to create that call to action and then you put that into this plugin, the Scroll Triggered Box plugin as the content of the box. And then, when people scroll down your page, so they’re reading down the page, reading down the article, they get to a certain point in that article and then suddenly a box pops up and appears in the corner of the screen. So, they’ll appear either at the left or the right or in the centre of the screen. And it really draws attention to that box, it really makes it stand out, draws the eye, it forces a person to look at it rather than something that blends into the background, in the widget sidebar, it’s something that really pops out and it really draws attention to itself. And of course, when it draws attention to itself, it makes that user much more likely to click the button or to fill in the form that’s present in that box. Now, you’ve probably a little familiar with traditional pop-ups like actual pop ups that pop-up over the centre of the screen, obscure your view, basically take over the entire screen and do nothing but generally annoy you. Now, it’s pretty well-known that while they are quite irritating and a lot of people hate them, they are quite effective. So, the whole pop-up principle, the fact that it pops up and drag your attention away from the content is a good thing but most people don’t really want to take the full steps towards creating those pop ups because they know how annoying they are themselves. So, I think the scroll triggered box is a really good balance because it happens at certain point so that the big benefit here of this product, this plugin, is it that you can set it to happen at the certain point of the page. I have it set on my website to pop-up when people reach the comments. So, they go down the article, they reach the bottom of the article, as soon as the comment’s header appears at the bottom of the page, the Scroll Triggered Box pops up. So, the person has finished the content , they’ve read the article, they have got some value out of it, they’ve enjoyed it, you hope, and they’re ready to do something else. So, you’re hoping that if they’ve got a lot of value out of it. If they have enjoyed it then they’ll be more than willing to sign up for your list, they’re ready for this commitment, they really, they’ve bought in to your stuff, so they’re willing to hand over their e-mail address in exchange for more of the same great stuff. So, that’s what I think the real benefit of this is it really draws their attention to that call to action, to that opt-in at the point where I think they’re most likely to actually take action on it. You can set it, so you can set it in a couple of ways, I set it like that, so I set it to pop-up at a certain point on the page at the top of the comments. You can also do it on a percentage, so you can say that when a person scrolled halfway down an article then pop-up the box then, so you can say that if you think that people generally only reach to the thirds of the way down your articles, they’ve got enough out of it and leave at that point, you can set it so that the pop-up will appear at that point as well, so there’s different options in terms of how it pops up.

Now, there’s also the option to make it disappear, so when it pops up, a person can say, “I’m going to action it, I’m going to click the button or I’m going to just get rid it of it”, there’s a big cross on the top right hand side so they can just close it down. You can set a cookie up so that that box will then not appear for a certain amount of time to that same person again, so it gets rid of again that problem with pop ups which are that they’re really annoying. So if somebody doesn’t want to sign up, you don’t want to be badgering them, you don’t want to put them off reading your content because it maybe at some point in the future that they will buy in, so once they’ve read twenty articles, once they’ve read ten articles, they might buy in to your content then and actually sign up willingly. So you can set it so that a pop up doesn’t appear for say the next thirty days or the next sixty days or even just a couple of weeks, whatever you think is useful. So, that’s the principle behind it, that is essentially how the plugin works.

You can use this with a couple of the things we’ve discussed earlier in the week. So, within that box, within the box that pops up you can put whatever you like. There are a few templates that the plugin offers so you don’t have to program things yourself, you don’t have to create them yourself, you use their templates and just write the header and the text and that will give you a default form and that will essentially e-mail something to you or you can take your MailChimp or your AWeber sign-up form code and place that straight into it. So, you could make it so that it just has the sign-up form directly within that box and people just fill in their details there and then. Or, of course, you could place the call to action box within your Dreamgrow pop-up box and that will start that two stage process which is a bit more effective or it increases your conversion rates on opt-ins. So, you could put that a bit of text, a header and a button and that’ll take them to a landing page which then encourages them to sign-up for your opt-in box, sorry, sign-up for your mailing list. Now, of course, mailing lists aren’t the only use for this plugin, it might be that you could direct people to products or to resources or to prize giveaways or something like that, so, there’s plenty of different uses for this box as well. The final little benefit that you get with this is that you can also include social buttons within that box. It does include the option to put in Facebook, Twitter, that type of stuff so that people can share your content as well. And if that pops up at the end of a post, they’re much more likely obviously to share a post if they’ve already read it and enjoyed it, so again, that’s a good place for that to pop-up.

So, again, if you want to install this, go to podcraft.net/dream, completely free to try, in fact it’s completely free to use entirely, I don’t think they charge for it at all so it’s a great wee tool for that purpose. And again, if you need some help with installing plugins, just go to my courses over at podcraft.net/websitecourse and that’ll take you through a WordPress tutorial, a bunch of videos on how to do each of these things.

So, that just takes us to the task for today. So, the task is simple, download Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box from podcraft.net/dream, install it on your blog and use it with any of the techniques I’ve talked about today. So, either just stick the MailChimp sign-up form straight into the box or put it a call to action, put in a header, text and a button and take them to a landing page and see how that affects your conversion rates.

So, I hope that proves useful to you. I’ve really found that to really work for me, it really help with my conversation rates, with my opt-ins, without being too obtrusive, without being too annoying to the point where I’ve got proper pop-ups in, so I hope you like it.

So, thanks again for listening to another episode of Series 3 of PodCraft. I hope you’re enjoying the series and I’d love to hear what you think. Pop over to podcraft.net/314, you’ll find the show notes for this and tell me how you found installing the Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box. Tell me how easy it was, tell me how you did it, so tell me whether you did just put the sign-up forms straight in there or whether you’re using it for something else entirely. And I’d love to hear if it increases your conversation rates as well.

Alright! Thanks very much and I’ll see you on to our next episode where we’re finishing up the week and then we’re talking about affiliate links, we’re talking about how to get affiliate links into your website, make them more automatically, at least it’ll take a whole lot for your effort out of it for you. So I hope you come back for that. I’ll see you then!

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