banishment winded: How We Used Content and Email to Increase Sales by 100 ...

Thursday, November 8, 2012

How We Used Content and Email to Increase Sales by 100 ...

Anyone that has been observing CopyPress over the last few months can tell that we have put an expanded effort into our blog as a marketing tool. Some basic numbers from this 3 month duration are pretty telling about the power of the product we sell to customers:

140% increase in organic search traffic
382% increase in overall traffic
Over 400% increase in referring domains linking to our website

An increase of 1,000 email subscribers to our newsletter
100% increase in closed sales
Increased our Facebook traffic by over 300%

These last two numbers feed off of each other.

Since our building out of the?Content Lifecycle, we have looked for strong partners for the conversion portion of the cycle. The timing was perfect because a good friend of mine,Jeremy ?Shoemoney? Schoemaker?was creating a product called the?PAR Program.? PAR enables you to build acquisition and retention sequences from your user list, and based on amazing demographic information the product has, cut your list into very targeted micro-lists for laser precise acquisition funnels.

As soon as we relaunched our blog in August we began using PAR. From the outset of the new blog, the concept has been to use our own services to scale revenue, essentially putting our money where our mouth is.

Until October we simply used PAR to harvest emails and collect demographic data. During this time period our VP of Operations, Stefan Winkler, started to get a bit nervous because he didn?t see the value in the service. I let him know that it would all be worth it come October.

In October, we built and launched our first acquisition sequence. The sales letters for the sequence were written by me using what I had recently learned from Dan Kennedy?s book,The Ultimate Sales Letter.

The sales letters revolved around our new and growing digital media offerings, especially?infographics. I actually used a very honest approach to these letters and expressed my general distaste for infographics as a content type (which is true), but based on how awesome our illustration staff is, and our copy-backed process for data and information creation, I wanted people to try the offering at a 25% discount.

The first email went well, and was followed by a series of emails introducing a new package product involving our?sharebait?product.

We saw our inbound lead rate for that week soar off the charts, leading to our strongest web lead-to-sale month ever at CopyPress. People responded in different ways to the letters, but money talks. We closed 100% more sales in October than we did in August, and increased monthly revenue by over 5%.

This case study is a great example of how the entire Content Lifecycle works.

We created awesome copy and content for a 90-day span of time that led to large increases in traffic.
We?connected?this content with other websites which led to even more traffic.
We?curated the content?and grew our Facebook audience allowing for ?. you get it.
Then we used?PAR?and our?webinar series?to capture passive traffic and turn it into customers.

The core was understanding the value our content had, and how to mold it into a conversion. Based on this write-up you can see we spent between 60 to 90 days to yield the benefit of the sales increase, but now it should grow incrementally month over month.

Reflection

For me, this is what we are trying to build at CopyPress. A high quality crowd-sourcing solution that allows every single business online to achieve these kinds of results. That is why our core value of Quality over Profits is so important to us, because it would be easy to outsource content for pennies, and phone in the rest, however that isn?t going to get the job done. We look for the best writers, and now through the opening of CopyPress Community we train them on how to increase their skills. Crowd-sourcing doesn?t have to be synonymous with, ?cheap?, it should mean, ?scalable quality.?

Challenge

I would offer a challenge to anyone that wants to test this concept. We have a special package we are soon to launch that you can?email us about today?for more information. If you sign up for this monthly package and you don?t see results in?90 days, we will refund your money. ?Just contact us and ask about the?ContentSphere.

About the author...

David Snyder ? who has written 1 posts on ShoeMoney.com.

Dave Snyder is the founder and CEO of SteelCast. A fast growing, fast-paced business incubator. Located in Tampa Bay, FL. SteelCast serves as a breeding ground for startups and newly-formed companies. We take great pride in assisting these developing companies in many different areas; from strategy development to social content promotion. We assist with auditing, general consulting and training. Our team focus is on platform development, link production and application development, as well as content production and social networking.