For professional services firms, content is an important marketing tool. Articles, white papers, e-books, powerpoint decks, podcasts, etc. can convey expertise. At Mercer Capital, my firm, we have four e-mail newsletters that contain very useful content for their target markets. They are free, or complimentary, as we say. Two of those newsletters have fewer subscribers than we would like. Add to that the marketing engine which is our website - one of the most visited, if not the most visited, sites in our profession. The question was and is how to use our website to convert visitors into newsletter subscribers? While we have "subscribe to our newsletters" on every page of the site, that isn't getting the job done.
We are experimenting with a pop-up. The pop-up asks the visiter if they have subscribed to our newsletters. To keep the pop-up from being absolutely annoying, it does not pop on the home page (only on the interior pages) and only appears once as you navigate throughout the site. While nirvana would be different pop-ups for different sections of the website (a BankWatch newsletter pop-up that appears when visiting our financial services valuation section, a Financial Reporting Valuation Flash newsletter pop-up when visiting our financial reporting valuation section, etc.), that isn't feasible for our site and our budget. Therefore, the pop-up is general in nature and takes the visitor to a landing page which lists all our newsletters.
We launched the pop-up three weeks ago. So far, we're seeing an uptick in our newsletter subscriptions. How much of an up-tick is yet to be determined. I'll report back.
If this works for us and if your site can support it, it might be something to consider. It might also be a way to differentiate you from your competition. As far as I can tell, we're the only firm in our profession with this type of functionality on our website. Visit our site (www.mercercapital.com) and click to one of the interior pages and tell me what you think.
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