Improving Social & Subscription Calls to Action - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

howdy seomoz fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard friday this week we're talking about how to make your social and email calls to action more effective uh and i i've drawn out a page here that i think represents what a lot of us see on the web what a lot of us do particularly when it comes to blogs but also when it comes to a lot of uh e-commerce types of pages pages on the web that we use for uh b2b types of content really any any pages that you find where there's social calls to action calls action that want you to take some uh you know subscribe to me follow me on twitter subscribe to my email uh become our fan on facebook follow us on google plus post to our pinterest board whatever it is all of those types of actions that are generated on the web often follow this format where you see okay here's a site right and here's the here's the menu there's a page title and then they'll be just littered literally littered with calls to action here look i'm gonna highlight in red all of the places where i see social calls to action oftentimes simultaneously oh here over here on the sidebar we'll use this you know left hand uh uh nav that kind of pops out then we'll have we'll have some areas up here that have got a few oh yeah and let's put up make sure to put our uh face mash you know on the on the right hand side to show off all our facebook oh and let's yeah let's have our tweets then we'll have the subscribe to email oh at the bottom of the post we gotta have it there too are you kidding me i know you really really really want people to follow you on these social services and subscribe to email but is this the right way to go about it imagine if it was an e-commerce page and there it was just littered with buy buttons everything always said bye bye bye add to cart add a card to cart kind of crazy right there should be one place where there's that one call to action but instead we've overwhelmed we've let the social web overtake our normal logic our best you our better uh knowledge of ui and ux practices and we're delivering an experience that is essentially where's the content man i if i subscribe to you it's because i want to follow your content and all you're telling me with your page is follow me all right so this is this is a little overwhelming and so i wanted to provide some best practices some ways some tips to help streamline this process and make it a little bit better let's walk through those first off as you can imagine one of my top tips one of the best ones is limit the choices don't overwhelm so this means two i mean there's two ways i mean number one uh limit the choices in terms of decide where you're getting your your best uh you know usage your best customers and limit your network to those places so if twitter and facebook are the place for you great if it's facebook and email great if it's pinterest and it's uh linkedin fine just don't you can you can provide if you want you know and a lot of people do this where they'll put one section up in the top right hand corner and that's got you know the little icons for each network so that all of those are findable sort of like the contact us page and the about us page or the terms of service and legal use and privacy policy those things are findable great that's fine so that way someone doesn't have to they can go to any page on your website and hey what's these guys's twitter i wanted to tweet something at them great there it is right there but in terms of calls to action things where you're actually trying to get the subscription where you're saying hey here's our twitter box and subscribe to us follow us on twitter subscribe to our email in terms of those calls to action limit those choices i would highly recommend max max max one to two really seriously you should only be trying to drive one or two social email actions on a single page and that should probably be relatively consistent uh you also probably don't want to overwhelm meaning there's no there's no reason to have this many right if if you've got one box that's got them all somewhere on the page in the footer near the header at the top great and then you want to have your one call to action in the place this is tip number two promote where the action is most likely to happen i'll give you a great example of this if you follow okcupid's blog which is called ok trends i urge you to check it out they have lots of phenomenal interesting content there what ok trends has done is a ton of testing to see what's most effective they found facebook to be their most effective channel so what happens is as you scroll down and are reading the page in fact you'll see something like this i've reached the the bottom of the content right so all the contents up here and they have great graphics and images and then here's the comments starting down on the bottom of the page what you're going to see that's fascinating is as i've scrolled down as soon as i reach the bottom here where i essentially said you know they can detect via the browser via javascript hey this person just reached the bottom of our content the end of the blog post now is the time now is exactly the moment where we're going to drop down this little you know blue thing up here and it's going to have a message uh sort of written in here that's like you know subscribe to us on facebook or or like us on facebook brilliant timing they know which the right call to action is to make and they're making it at the time when you finish consuming that blog post and you are most likely because clearly you've been engaged throughout reading the post think of asking asking for this at a time in normal conversation before you've even given the the value proposition right it's not like i tell you hey i want you to share what i'm about to tell you with all your friends what is it why why do i need to share it before i know shouldn't you ask me that after you tell me what it is and that's exactly what okay trends is doing here and that's what i would urge you to do as well make it happen in the call to action time so i really like if there's content that makes someone scroll down a page i really like having it at the bottom at the same time you're asking for the you know add a comment or or make a purchase on a page that's the time to ask for that sharing activity prior to that it's just a little odd it's a little out of place uh customize don't just use the the standard uh calls to action right so standard call to action would be like the the tweet meme button or the face mesh face pile embed or those kinds of things those can be fine those can work you can certainly test them but i really like customizing because the problem with the standard ones especially those you know face pile and tweet meme and that kind of stuff is that those buttons and those uh images those graphics those embeds they start to look the same across page and site all over the web and when that happens ad blindness happens banner blindness happens this is the same sort of thing that advertisers talk about with brand advertising that the ads just don't stand out anymore people stop noticing them if you can customize if you can make it unique you can add your color scheme you can add your brand you can add clever messaging you can make it unique and and different from what everyone else is doing on the web with their social that's when you'll stand out that's when you'll have a much different uh experience that makes people stand up and take it attention uh pay attention to what you're showing them number four create an expectation and then please fulfill it immediately this this is most important with things like uh email but it's also important with tweets and facebook etc what i mean by this is if you have a call to action that says like us on facebook and get updates like this or be notified when we do these kinds of things your facebook feed right the facebook page should be a list of a lot of those things with not a whole lot else right it should be doing exactly what you say if you tell them hey we're subscribed to our you know moz top 10 email we have a mousetop10 email one of the things that we should probably do is as soon as you subscribe we send you the last one we don't do that right now but we should we we're working on it uh that way you get this sense of oh look it's just what i asked for it's as promised here here we go this is this is great now they're delivering on the expectation they've created and that creates a sense of trust immediately excellent way to go about this uh use relevant social proof number five so a lot of times people will say oh great i'll put the face pile in or i'll show them who who else from their network is following me sometimes that's good sometimes it's not so social proof is very case specific for example if i am uh going to be going out and buying a consumer product maybe i am interested in what my friends are doing but if i'm going out and i'm buying a product for my business i might actually be interested in what people like me who are relevant who are at companies i know and like and trust who are influencers and authority figures their opinions may be much more interesting and important to me than hey your friend on facebook or hey your linkedin connection bought this that's kind of less interesting and so i would urge you to figure out what the social proof is that's case specific to you and then apply that on these pages so if it's people like you you know follow we're followed on twitter by uh you know i don't know if we are but but danny sullivan or or avinash kaushik or um richard baxter or will chris whoever these these people are that you sort of go oh i know those guys i really respect what they say i i will also follow seomoz where whatever your business is this is ux101 make the process dead simple so i have started to see these more complex social subscription particularly email ones where it pops up in a box and it asks you for more information wants you to confirm before you do this if you can make it dead dead simple meaning if you have an email box i want it to look like this your email subscribe and when you click subscribe right here you get a little pop-up that says thank you we've just sent you an email to confirm your address as soon as you click on the confirmation you'll receive your first email from us amazing dead simple took me literally my email a click and a confirm done sold easy that dead simple process that's the kind of thing you want to create not just here but anytime you have calls to action because simplicity will promote higher conversion rate better funnel mechanics number seven eliminate the noise from your social and email feed so if you're sending a lot of email blasts to your subscribers if you're sending a lot of tweets you're doing a lot of facebook status updates and you're looking and seeing that click-through rate and conversion rate and engagement rates are low on a number of them and then occasionally high gets a little spiky try to focus on the spikes get rid of the noise and focus on curating that content better so that you have essentially fewer messages but more high quality messages this this works extremely well as people who subscribe to these services start subscribing to more and more in the early days very early days of facebook early days of twitter early days of email way back in the day people didn't get as overwhelmed and therefore more messages were more welcome now signal to noise ratio matters a lot more and finally number eight so so important if you can at all measure the channel roi that you're getting what i mean by this is measure the difference between the value of someone coming from facebook or twitter or linkedin or google plus or email or whatever it is your rss feed look at those different channels and say to yourself all right i see that when i get someone subscribing to our rss feed that is just a huge value add because they come back to us on average five times in a month and within three months they become a buyer and you know sixty percent of people who've touched rss feed within six months uh will you know essentially buy something from fantastic figure out what those different numbers are and then focus on the channels that matter most to you it might seem weird sometimes but i've seen a lot of b2b case studies where linkedin is the highest referring i've seen a lot of case studies where uh email is a much higher converting source than facebook or twitter or any of the other social networks so pay attention to this and make sure you focus on the ones that matter most don't be persuaded by you know popular media social media technology media that says oh pinterest is the next hot thing and you think oh no i don't have a pinterest board i got to get people uh you know signing up for my pinterest board and following me on pinterest whoa whoa whoa hold your horses is that actually a valuable channel for you if you don't know you should test you should spend some time there if you do know and it's low well don't bother maybe that's not your demographic maybe it's not your psychographic maybe your customers just aren't there maybe for some reason the medium and your media don't connect well and that's okay if you focus this then you can do a great job on limiting the choices promoting the right actions and all of these other tips all right everyone i hope to see some fantastic calls to action for your social and email campaigns in the future and i'll see you again next week for another edition of whiteboard friday take care