Challenge
Gays With Kids is a popular lifestyle blog that was looking to build their email list. The challenges for the website were as follows:
- Great traffic but no obvious ways for people to sign up
- A lot of great content but it was only being used as “one and done” blog posts
- The community of gay men needed resources to help them become fathers
- No compelling reasons for people to provide email address
Solutions and Results
No obvious ways for people to sign up
After speaking with Brian Rosenberg, one of the founders of the website, we decided to employ the following list building strategies on the website:
Given that the homepage was the page getting the most traffic (as is the case with most websites), we decided to build what is called an “upside down homepage”.
This kind of homepage is designed the opposite of a regular homepage: the menu is moved from the top of the page to the bottom of the page.
And above the fold, there is a call to action to join the email list with a clear and beneficial offer to the website visitor.
We also implemented some Welcome Mats from Sumo that pushed the page down and forces the visitor to take action or keep scrolling.
After the homepage was launched, the average conversion rate across the board was just above 5%.
For a website that averages around 40K visits a month, 5% homepage conversion is a big boost to the email list.
Below are a couple of examples of the Welcome Mats we installed.
Repurposing “one and done” blog posts
Instead of just publishing great content that is only consumed once by the readers who happened to be aware of the new post, we looked at the highest viewed articles and decided to take advantage of the pageviews.
We came up with related and created “content upgrades” that we could embed throughout the popular posts.
These lead magnets complimented the posts and acted as a “bonus download” for the reader.
After installing on the most popular posts, we continued to do so for the rest of the posts that were in the top 10 for traffic on the site.
Content upgrades typically convert well and this was no exception.
Across all content upgrades, the average conversion rate was 32%.
The community of gay men needed resources to help them become fathers
Gays With Kids is a popular website for a reason: they are helping gay men become fathers. However, there wasn’t a single resource page where they could go to get the information they needed.
Our goal was to create a “one-stop shop” of resources for gay men who wanted to learn more about the various ways they could become a father.
A resource page was created with a total of 12 opt-ins and was broken down by category: creating families, raising families, and inspiring families.
We covered everything from adoption to young fathers and inspiring dad posts.
Overall, the resources page converted at a modest 7% which is good considering the number of opt-ins available on the page.
In Conclusion
When the project wrapped up, we ended up increasing the subscriber list by more than 50% and added an average of 2,000 subscribers every month.