1. Single CTA for All Pages
Like so many blogs out there, my blog – baeldung – had a single sidebar optin form for a long time. It is a form that I experimented with quite a lot, but alas a single form can only do so much.
Makes sense if you think about it – there’s no such thing as a one size fits all Call to Action – yet, for the last 6 months, mine basically said:
Free eBook REST Services with Spring
I can do better!
Now – my blog has a simple structure with a handful of main categories – and it would make perfect sense to have a different CTA for each of these. What I’d like to see is – for example – for my Persistence category, a CTA such as:
Free eBook Persistence with Spring
True – that means having a new eBook – nobody said it was going to be easy – but it would make a lot more sense that the generic CTA I have now.
And so – with this goal in mind (and with the help of an editor) – I launched my second eBook, out of an already existing blog series I published on the blog. This eBook became the lead magnet for my second, now contextual Call To Action.
2. Contextual CTA depending on the page
OK, so let’s look at this – my new Optin Form uses the second eBook similarly:
Free eBook Persistence with Spring
As you can clearly see – the Optins are pretty much the same, except they use different lead magnets.
This second Optin is shown on the pages of my blog that have something to do with Persistence – shocking, I know. I’m showing the widget with the Persistence Optin on pages that have the Category Persistence and the other widget on everything else.
Technically, I’m using the Widget Logic wordpress plugin, but any plugin that will allow you to conditionally show widgets based on the category of the article will do just fine.
So there you have it – a simple execution of this concept, but one that a heap of sense.
3. The Results
It’s the numbers – specifically the conversion rate of each of these Optin Forms – that will make or break the experiment. Luckily the numbers are good:
- the Original Optin (Rest Services with Spring eBook) => 0.75% CTA
- the New Optin (Persistence with Spring eBook) => 0.93% CTA
That is a 24% increase in my conversion rate – which is a pretty significant jump considering that the Control – the original Optin – was pretty strong to begin with.
4. Next Steps
My next step is to do the same with the other major categories of my blog – work through 4-5 new eBooks and customize each Optin to be relevant to the article the reader is actually reading. If I see a 25% bump for each of these category – and I’m sure I will based on these initial results – I’ll be very happy with the results.
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